Amen – Priscilla Shirer

You have an enemy…and he’s dead set on destroying all you hold dear and keeping you from experiencing abundant life in Christ. What’s more, his approach to disrupting your life and discrediting your faith isn’t general or generic, not a one-size-fits-all. It’s specific. Personalized. Targeted.

So this audiobook is your chance to strike back. With prayer. With a weapon that really works. Each chapter will guide you in crafting prayer strategies that hit the enemy where it hurts, letting him know you’re on to him and that you won’t back down. Because with every new strategy you build, you’re turning the fiercest battles of life into precise strikes against him and his handiwork, each one infused with the power of God’s spirit.

New York Times best-selling author Priscilla Shirer, widely known for her international speaking, teaching, and writing ministries, brings her new role from the 2015 film War Room into the real lives of today’s women, addressing the topics that affect them most: renewing their passion, refocusing their identity, negotiating family strife, dealing with relentless regrets, navigating impossible schedules, succeeding against temptation, weathering their worst fears, uprooting bitterness, and more. Each chapter exposes the enemy’s cruel, crafty intentions in all kinds of these areas then equips and encourages you to write out your own personalized prayer strategies on tear-out sheets you can post and pray over yourself and your loved ones on a regular basis. Fervent is a hands-on, knees-down, don’t-give-up action guide to practical, purposeful praying.

Amen. Hesitantly. That’s how I walked through the door.
That very first time an acquaintance had recommended a Bible study group that met in someone’s house in our local area.
It wasn’t affiliated with our church wasn’t even necessarily in the stream of our particular denominational vein.
But I’d been expressing to some close friends a new hunger.
I’d been feeling for going deeper with God, for experiencing him more, fully, more tangibly, wasn’t sure what all of that meant.
Exactly. Just feeling slightly stuck and restless in my spiritual journey.
They’d assured me that these people and this environment were exactly what I needed.
I wondered however, walking into this house for the first time, if I might have gotten myself into a bit more of a tangible experience than I bargained for.
These people were well, different, at least different from most of the people I was accustomed to sitting around doing Bible study with.
But the difference was unusual in a beautiful way.
I couldn’t exactly put my finger on what gave me this first impression. What made them so intriguing to me?
Neither could I be sure I’d made the right decision to show up here. At this stranger’s house.
I mean, these people didn’t know me and I didn’t know them, but somehow I felt comfortable.
And since I was there already, I figured the only right choice was to stay and see, see what made this gathering so unique.
I slipped into a seat on the side out of the way. A few people smiled, politely, nodded.
I took in my surroundings for a minute or two and then the meeting started.
Well, sort of because nothing really happened. Nothing official. That is no one was standing front and center.
No welcome, no announcements, no opening bible reading.
Just a holy hush, soft worship music, lightly pulsed in the background.
While a thick silence fell across everyone present, some of them slipped to their knees, eyes closed hands, either folded or lifted slightly above their upturned faces.
Others just sat in their chairs or on the sofas while a few actually found spaces throughout the room where they could lie prostrate on the floor for a solid hour.
These people did nothing but pray, passionate personal prayer like I’d rarely experienced in my life.
No one looked bored or hurried as if wanting to move on to something else to something more important or structured because this, this praying is what they come for.
And as I soon discovered, once I became acclimated to what was going on, this praying was what I’d unknowingly come for as well.
After about 20 minutes of sitting there, surrounded by this deep crescendo of worship, totally peaceful and yet totally electric.
All. At the same time, tears begin trailing down my face.
Waves of new freedom and confident faith surged through my spirit at the power of God’s presence.
I then understood what accounted for the beautiful difference.
I detected when I first entered the room, these people were committed fervently to prayer.
The reason I share this story, two reasons. Really.
The first is how contagious a commitment to serious prayer becomes. When you see it, you feed off of it.
You want it as I imagine the kind of praying you’ve been doing while we’ve shared this brief journey together as well as the prayers.
You’ll continue to be reading and rereading from your walls and cork boards and tablets.
The beauty of your praying wafts through my mind like the incense. It truly is before the Lord.
I love the thought of it. I love what we’ve shared and what we’re sharing.
I love knowing that a sister like you is uniting with me and with thousands of others and devoting ourselves to prayer.
But the second reason is one I couldn’t have known at the time those many years ago yet can see so clearly.
Now, as I read this final chapter and look back on that unique experience, you see at the end of that first meeting, which by the way I attended faithfully for the next seven years, the person who was teaching from the Bible that day, a man I’d never met beforehand, a man who didn’t know me or anything about me looked my direction and spoke directly to me from my vantage point.
He was framed between a couple of pairs of shoulders positioned between us, but he was obviously addressing me.
Yes, you, I held my breath while he told me in vivid terms that among other things, he sensed I would have the privilege of calling many people to prayer during my lifetime.
And not just to prayer, but to a refreshed, renewed focus and fervency of prayer that they’d never known before.
My heart burned within me as the stranger spoke, what I knew to be God’s very word for my life that morning, I knew then that in some way, he was right.
I wasn’t sure how or what all of it meant.
I just knew it would be part of my calling, my purpose, the gravity of what he said in fact, was so profound and confirming and laced with pinpointed scriptures and clarity that I went home and wrote down every word I could remember.
I still have the notes of that experience to this day.
And now as I look back on those notes, it’s all clear to me.
You were a part of that first meeting God had you in mind that day.
He knew that years later we’d be here together in this book. Our hearts stirred together for fervent prayer.
In fact, over the past decade or so, I’ve had the privilege of encouraging many women in their prayer lives.
Never dreaming. I’d write a book about it someday. I started first at my home church in Dallas.
And then as God gave me opportunity at our ministry conferences in different parts of the country.
To this day, we always set aside a part of our program for the women in attendance to write out their most heartfelt requests and prayers on a card we provide.
Then we asked them to bring their card during a moment of worship and lay it alongside all the others on the steps at the front of the platform.
Then I lead the entire group in corporate prayer for the hundreds and hundreds of needs that are so visibly expressed before us.
When the event is over, we collect all the cards.
Then each woman takes the written request of another woman home with her promising to post it in a place where she’ll be reminded of it and will commit to pray for it fervently for the next seven full days.
So while one woman is covering the request of another, likely a stranger, she may never see again this side of eternity.
Another woman is praying for her. After all of these years, all these events and all these requests.
I don’t know how many thousands of women have participated in this exercise.
All I know for sure is that since that meeting years ago, I’ve sent something highly important happening as a result of women vocalizing their prayers on paper, narrowing down their focus onto what truly mattered most to them and then becoming consistent and diligent in taking those prayers to the Father.
And I know without a doubt that God planned the chance for you and me to get together like this too, to unite through our passion for prayer.
In fact, he whispered to me about you at that very first bible study.
I didn’t know it then, but I can see it clearly now.
It’s you, you’re the one he had in mind.
So as we bring this book to a close, I simply want to leave you with the same words I’d share with you if I were sitting in your house on your sofa as we encourage each other about being devoted to our God and to prayer.
I ask you to wear this book out girl to make it pay for whatever you paid for it, make prayer.
Both your lifeline and your lifestyle.
Continue to write his word on your heart, on your hand, on those little pieces of paper that you have on whatever scrap of notepad, sticky note or stationary is your canvas of choice.
Something highly important and powerful happens when you put these prayers of yours and these promises of His into words and into action.
So stick them to the wall, post them to your bathroom.
Mirror, adhere them to the dashboard of your car, tape them inside your office cubicle, put them anywhere, any place where you’re likely to see them, speak them and have your heart transformed by them.
His word is truth. My friend and your enemy trembles before it because while he’ll never admit it until that great day when every niece shall bow even his in odd acknowledgement of God’s preeminent power, he knows it’s true as well.
This is the beginning of the end for his influence on your life, for his arrogant assumption that he can do anything he wants with you and you won’t have the power to fight back or resist.
Oh, is he ever in for a shock? And it all starts with those prayers. So pray them with Thanksgiving.
Philippians four says be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving.
You, let your request be made known to God approach God boldly with every single need, never with a hint of fear, guilt or shame, but always incubate those requests and gratitude.
You’ll know you’re trusting Him when you’re simultaneously being thankful to him, thankful for who he is for what he has already done and for what he is currently doing.
If you ever don’t know what to pray exactly.
Just start with gratitude, affirm out loud that you know He is there that he cares for you, no matter what difficulty may be pressing down on you at the moment because the fact is he is quietly working on your behalf without any fanfare, preparing, arranging and planning for your good.
He is all powerful. He is sovereign.
He is right and true and eternally glorious, impervious to the enemy’s intentions and whatever comes next in your life, it will undoubtedly be another opportunity for you to be swept up into the father’s arms and carried through it.
And that is where you want to be.
Because in His arms, you’ll know the beauty of His peace, the peace of God Philippians four says which surpasses all comprehension and which guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
So while I know this is a battle, I know it’s a daily fight.
Expect your fervency to lead you to a place of rest because God is the one who’s fighting for you and He will surely prevail now unto him that is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy to the only wise God, our savior, be glory and majesty, Dominion and power both now and forever.
Amen. Yes, a man.