Set Your Foot

“I’m giving you every square inch^a of the land you set your foot on.”

Joshua 1:3 MSG

Since the release of The Circle Maker, I’ve received a steady stream of e-mails and letters from readers who have started circling their dreams, homes, and workplaces in prayer. An inner-city teacher circles her classroom; a real estate agent prays circles around the properties she represents as a listing agent; a team of doctors and nurses have turned their patient rounds into prayer circles. A member of Congress is circling the Capitol, and an NFL chaplain is circling his team’s practice facility. One reader even circled his bank, praying for a financial miracle — until law enforcement intervened. They thought he was casing the joint!

There is nothing magical about physically circling something in prayer, but there is something biblical about it. The Israelites circled the city of Jericho until the wall came down. That’s what a forty-day prayer challenge is all about. Too often we quit circling almost as soon as we start. Drawing prayer circles is a metaphor that simply means “praying until God answers.” It’s a determination to pray as long as it takes, even if it takes longer than you ever imagined.

Drawing prayer circles isn’t some magic trick to get what you want from God. God is not a genie in a bottle, and your wish is not His command. His command better be your wish. If it’s not, you won’t be drawing prayer circles; you’ll end up walking in circles.

Drawing prayer circles starts with discerning what God wants, what God wills. And until His sovereign will becomes your sanctified wish, your prayer life will be unplugged from its power supply. And getting what you want isn’t the goal; the goal is glorifying God by drawing circles around the promises, miracles, and dreams He wants for you.

Pray a Perimeter

Over the years, I’ve drawn prayer circles around promises in Scripture and promises the Holy Spirit has conceived in my spirit. I’ve drawn prayer circles around impossible situations and impossible people. I’ve drawn prayer circles around everything from life goals to pieces of property. But let me go back to my first prayer circle and retrace my steps.

When I was a twenty-two-year-old seminary student, I tried to plant a church on the north shore of Chicago, but that plant never took root. Six months later, fresh off a failed church plant, Lora and I moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C. The opportunity to attempt another church plant presented itself, and my knee-jerk reaction was to say no, but God gave me the courage to face my fears, swallow my pride, and try again.

There was nothing easy about our first year of church planting. Our total church income was $2,000 a month, and $1,600 of that went to rent the D.C. public school cafetorium where we held Sunday services. On a good Sunday, twenty-five people showed up. That’s when I learned to close my eyes in worship because it was too depressing to open them. I felt underqualified and overwhelmed, which put me right where God wanted me. It is how we learn to live in raw dependence, and raw dependence is the raw material out of which God performs His greatest miracles.

One day as I was dreaming about the church God wanted to establish on Capitol Hill, I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to do a prayer walk. I often paced and prayed in the spare bedroom in our house that doubled as the church office, but this prompting was different. I was reading through the book of Joshua at the time, and one of the promises jumped off the page and into my spirit:

As I read this promise given to Joshua, I felt that God wanted me to stake claim to the land He had called us to and pray a perimeter all the way around Capitol Hill. I had a Honi-like confidence that just as this promise had been transferred from Moses to Joshua, God would transfer the promise to me if I had enough faith to circle it. So one hot and humid August morning, I drew my first prayer circle. It still ranks as the longest prayer walk I’ve ever done and the biggest prayer circle I’ve ever drawn.

Starting at the front door of our row house on Capitol Hill, I walked east on F Street and turned south on 8th Street. I crossed East Capitol, the street that bisects the NE and SE quadrants of the city, and turned west on M Street SE. I then completed the circle, which was actually more of a square, by heading north on South Capitol Street. I paused to pray in front of the Capitol for a few minutes. Then I completed the 4.7-mile circle by taking a right turn at Union Station and heading home.

The prayer circle had taken nearly three hours to complete because my prayer pace is slower than my normal pace, but God has been answering that three-hour prayer for the past fifteen years. Since the day I drew that prayer circle around Capitol Hill, National Community Church has grown into one church with seven locations around the metro D.C. area. And all of the properties we own — Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse, our theater on Barracks Row, and an $8 million piece of property that we own debt free — are right on that circle.

Coincidence?

More like providence!

When the Israelites circled Jericho, they had no idea how God would give them the city. But they didn’t let what they didn’t know keep them from obeying the command they had been given. So they circled the promise over and over and over again. They circled the promise thirteen times over seven days! Why? Because even though they didn’t know how God would deliver on the promise, they knew that God would come though somehow, someway!

And God didn’t just show up; God showed off His power. He toppled the wall of Jericho like it was a game of Jenga!

God is not a genie in a bottle, and your wish is not His command. His command better be your wish.