Strategy 1

Your Passion

Getting It Back When It’s Gone

If I were your enemy, I’d seek to dim your passion, dull your interest in spiritual things, dampen your belief in God’s ability and His personal concern for you, and convince you that the hope you’ve lost is never coming back—and was probably just a lie to begin with.

Fervent prayer is fueled by passion.

By faith. By fire.

When everything else inside you is pulling you in twenty million different directions—off to the next busy thing in your busy day, if not off to bed and off the clock—passion is what plasters your knees to that floor. And digs in for dear life. It’s your oomph. Your hutzpah. Your cutting edge.

Passion is what pushes the athlete to run one more lap, to crunch through one more set of reps. It’s what silences those screaming thigh and stomach muscles, making them do what their owner demands of them, no matter how loudly they complain. Passion is what keeps a piano player anchored to the practice bench when no one else is around to notice the effort or give a pat on the back for approval. Passion is what inspires the eager young employee to outperform expectations, instead of just punching the clock to earn a paycheck like everybody else. Passion is what burns up the road between a child in danger and a parent in pursuit. It glows red-hot. And goes on driving. And grows even larger, the larger the obstacles become.

Passion is the fuel in the engine of your purpose. It’s your “want-to.” It’s what keeps you going when mundane tasks bore you or difficult ones dissuade you. Passion is what keeps you moving in the direction your best intentions want you to go.

That’s why, if I were your enemy, I’d make stealing your passion one of my primary goals. Because I know if I could dim your passion, I could significantly lower your resistance to temptation and discouragement. I could make you walk with a spiritual limp and lengthen how long it takes you to recover from the injury. If I could chip away at your zeal, at your hope, at your belief in God and what He can do, I could chisel down your faith to a whimper. Make you want to quit. And never try again. I’d cup an ear in your direction, hear nothing in your voice that sounds like anything but token prayer, and snicker at my success. Chalk another one up to my “Passion Elimination Plan”—the one with your name on it.

That’s what I’d do. If I were your enemy.

I’d weaken your passion, your cutting edge—knowing full well that weak, impotent prayers (or better yet, prayerlessness) would follow right behind.

So take a long, hard, deep look at yourself and answer this question: Have you lost your passion? Has your get-up-and-go simply gotten-up-and-gone?

Maybe you’ve prayed and prayed for the same thing, over and over. . . . Maybe you’ve wanted God’s will so bad, and wanted life to look different for so long. . . . Maybe you’re feeling utterly discouraged or disappointed right now and not sure why you keep being surprised every time the same ol’ thing keeps happening again and again. . . . Maybe other demands and distractions have leaked into your heart over time, crowding out space where older, nobler priorities once ruled. I get all of that. I’ve felt a lot of that.

But what makes you think it’s somehow all God’s fault? Or your fault? Or everybody else’s fault? But never the enemy’s fault? Why aren’t we equally as quick to recognize the telltale marks of his darkened ideas and initiative?

When you can’t seem to respond to spiritual stimuli with the same optimism and obedience as you once did, why do you think it could only be attributable to your bad character? To a drop in your hormone levels? To the normal deterioration that comes from age and accumulated adversity?

Maybe another less noticeable but equally probable reason is that you’ve been a victim of satanic sabotage. It’s a strategy. Against you. On purpose. An assault launched with pinpoint planning and detail.

I mean, think about it. Doesn’t it fit the profile?

Satan is a full-time accuser. He does it “day and night,” the Bible says (Rev. 12:10). Instead of convicting you for the purpose of restoration, as God’s Spirit does, he condemns you for the purpose of destroying, humiliating.

This pattern, by the way, is classic proof of the enemy’s influence. Watch for it, and note his fingerprints. Condemnation always leads to guilt-laden discouragement, while conviction—though often painful in pointing out our wrongdoing—still somehow encourages and lifts us, giving us hope to rebuild on. The first makes you focus on yourself; the other points you to the grace and empowering mercy of Christ. To hear the devil tell it, these weaknesses of yours are reason for nothing but wretched despair; yet God says those same weaknesses are reason for your purest worship and gratitude. Your need for God’s grace is supposed to be a passion enhancer. That’s the opposite of what takes place, however, as soon as you start believing the enemy’s accusations. He’ll make you think God doesn’t hear your prayers or respond to them—why?—because of you.

How typical. Because Satan, in addition to being an accuser, is also a confirmed liar. No . . . worse. He’s the “father of lies” (John 8:44). The granddaddy of all untruth. Deception is the overarching umbrella that encompasses all His plans and programs.

He warps your perspective on the current events in your life until reality appears much worse and more desperate than it truly is. I’m not saying your situation is not legitimately bad; perhaps it is painful beyond description. But through his lying eyes, any passion for perseverance seems like a silly, sentimental waste of time. And yet he has the gall to insinuate that God is the one who lies to you, that any delay in the Lord’s visible response to your prayer is open-and-shut evidence that He doesn’t really hear you like He says. Or if He does, He apparently doesn’t mind seeing you writhe in discomfort while you wait on His own sweet timing.

Such biting accusations against you, against God.

Such bitter lies about what’s really taking place.

Those are just some of the ways he tries to eat away at your passion. Not overtly and conspicuously. He’s much too crafty for that. But cunningly. Slowly. Incrementally. Over time.

And sometimes he gets us. We don’t recognize it’s him at first, working behind the scenes. We think the reason we’ve stopped praying is because—oh, “we just don’t feel like it anymore.” And sure—maybe, maybe, that’s the way it really is. But possibly, possibly, this lack of feeling is a clue that the enemy’s strategy has begun to take effect. He’s worked you down enough until you can’t seem to muster up the will to fight back, to keep believing for and praying about . . .

Your marriage . . . still hopelessly tense and broken.

Your child . . . still rebelling against all sound logic.

Your money . . . still not enough to feel like enough.

Your health . . . still as chronic or scary as ever.

Your addictions . . . still defeating you way too often.

You just can’t seem to bring these up to God anymore because there doesn’t seem to be any spiritual fire burning inside. Maybe even right now—even while reading a book that’s inviting you back where you once walked, back to fervent, believing prayer—you honestly just don’t see the point in going there again.

So here’s what I’d say to you. Let’s start here. Praying for this. To recover and maintain your passion. To regain and sustain your cutting edge.

In order to do it, I want to take you back to a real-life story that God placed in Scripture (2 Kings 6:1–7) for just such a moment as this. And I want to use it and the principles it teaches to encourage your heart and then help you begin stirring up a strategy to get your passion back. Because if you’re not at a low-passion point right now, the time will likely come when you’ll feel yourself being tugged there. And when that season comes, make a note to put this story on your must-read list.

As it happened, the prophet Elisha was standing near one of his protégés, who was chopping down a tree at the banks of the Jordan River, laboring to gather the raw materials needed for building a larger meeting place. But at one point in either an upswing or a downswing, the iron head of that man’s ax wiggled loose from its wooden handle and sailed into the water, plopping to the bottom.

[Splash.] [Gasp.]

And just like that, he’d lost his cutting edge.

The young prophet was horrified. Not only had he lost the one tool on hand—the most important tool in the toolbox for moving him toward the outcome he desired—but the ax he’d been using had been borrowed from a friend. The ker-plunk of that dead weight in the water was a double whammy of disappointment and disgust. He couldn’t go forward with his building project, and now he’d need to go to the person who’d loaned him the ax and tell what happened to it, that he’d broken it, lost it, that there was no getting it back.

Notice, though, these encouraging details from the story:

Number 1: Despite the lost ax head, the presence of God was still near. In ancient Israel, Yahweh’s prophets were representations of His presence and power with His people. So when the man in this story lost the ax head, the fact that the prophet Elisha was right there alongside him (v. 3) wasn’t just a simple comfort. It mattered that Elisha had seen how hard this man had worked, all the trees he’d chopped down, and how his cutting edge had been lost. It mattered that God’s presence and the man’s loss occurred within close proximity to the other. Satan would like to convince you that your lack of passion is an indication that God was either never there at all or has gotten disgusted with you and left. He wants you to believe that God has not seen your struggle and is unaware or disinterested in the details of your life. But just because you’re feeling at a loss for words and “want-to”—just because your “cutting edge” in prayer seems misplaced for now—does not mean that God isn’t close by.

Number 2: The servant was doing something good when he lost his cutting edge. He was being productive, building a new dwelling for himself and for those others involved in the school of the prophets (v. 2). In fact, if he hadn’t been working so hard—if he’d just been sitting around doing nothing—there’s little chance the ax would’ve ever become gradually loosened and ultimately dislodged. This tells me that being engaged in good, even godly, productive things is not an automatic guard against losing your cutting edge. In fact, one of Satan’s dirtiest little tactics is to sneak in and steal it while you’re square in the middle of investing yourself in worthwhile activities. That’s why when you’re sensing a drag in your faith, in your spiritual fire, it can sometimes simply mean you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing . . . and doing it well, at that.

Number 3: The ax was borrowed (v. 5). The presence of passion, faith, and belief in our hearts is a gift. It’s on loan to our souls. Like the man’s ax, our passion and spiritual fervor come from Someone else as a gift to us. If you’ve ever cried out passionately to God in faith, fully believing that He is able to do more than you ask or think or imagine, it’s only because He first stirred up that passion within you. So instead of always feeling guilty—personally responsible—whenever your passion in prayer is weak or missing, realize instead that it is God’s work both to give it and then to fan it into flame inside you. Which means you cannot manufacture it on your own. Your enemy, however—coy as he is—wants to burden you with blame for not having something that didn’t originate with you in the first place. Don’t fall for that.

Number 4: Only a work of God could retrieve the ax head. “‘Where did it fall?’ the man of God asked. When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it into the water at that spot. Then the ax head floated to the surface” (v. 6 nlt). Miraculously, by Elisha’s hand, the slab of iron rustled free from the murky riverbed and bobbed up to the surface as if it were nothing but a floating chunk of driftwood. There it was! His cutting edge was back! Divinely recovered. Elisha’s servant had understandably been convinced there was no hope of ever seeing it again. And there wouldn’t have been . . . except that he went to Elisha. God, through the prophet, stepped in and made it reappear. If the ax head had just dropped onto the ground, anybody who saw where it went—including the man himself—could’ve picked it up and salvaged it. Instead it was deep in the river. Only a miracle could get it back.

Just like you might need a miracle to get yours back, too, if it’s sunk to the bottom—like everyone’s passion for prayer has done at one time or another.

Listen to me. Nothing—nothing!—is too far gone that your God cannot resurrect it. Even your cutting edge. So go to Him to get it back. Don’t try to regain it yourself. Don’t set your hopes on other people or circumstances to fuse it back into the fiber of your being. Trust it into God’s care. Only His miraculous work can make it bubble back up to the surface where it belongs. And He is more than willing to do it.

Call to Prayer

So here we go. Before we tackle and craft prayer strategies for the nine other topics in this book, the seminal matter of getting and maintaining our cutting edge so that we even want to pray again is foundational.

But when we talk about passion in prayer, I sure don’t want to leave the impression that the only prayer God hears is the kind that’s spoken at high volume, with sweat and tears and shaking fists and extraordinary energy. Prayer can be silent and still seethe with passion. And on some days, at some times, prayer—for any of us—can start out as simply an obedient appointment, an act of discipline, showing up in that prayer closet because it’s the appointed time that we said we’d be there.

Because praying—reaching outward and upward to Him—is the way His passion comes down. Even prayers that begin with the blunt edge of willpower, dragging your heart along kicking and screaming, can soon begin to shine with the cutting edge of hope, faith, and passionate confidence in Christ. Once the wind of God’s Spirit starts blowing, you’re no longer praying rote, innocuous prayers. Instead, you’re praying deliberate prayers. Prayers that are as personalized and devastating as the enemy’s attacks against you. Strategic prayers. Powerful prayers. Prayers that tell the enemy his cover has been blown, his number has come up, and his game is done. Prayers built on the promises of God that entreat Him to give you back what He was responsible for giving you in the first place.

Infuse your first prayer strategy with passages and promises like these:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a steadfast spirit within me. (Ps. 51:10)

The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,

for His compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is Your faithfulness. (Lam. 3:22–23)

I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart. (Jer. 24:7)

Call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. (Jer. 29:12–13)

The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live. (Deut. 30:6)

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. (Mark 12:30)

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Luke 12:34)

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezek. 36:26 hcsb)

Don’t read that last one too quickly, OK? One more time. Slowly. Deliberately. Like how you’d sip a glass of sweet tea on a blazing hot summer day, wanting the refreshment to last.

Do you see the promise? “I will give you.” “I will remove your heart of stone” and “give you” a heart that’s alive and tender again, one that’s beating and responsive again. Engaged again. Able to believe again.

A prayer that’s seeking passion should not be about manufacturing a better feeling or jostling up a better mood. It’s simply about holding out your open hands—in thanksgiving first, in gratitude for God’s faithfulness and His goodness and His assured, accomplished victory over the enemy. Then asking. Asking for what He already wants to give you. Then waiting (expecting) to receive the promise of newness and freshness from His Spirit as you go along, more each day—praying until, as the prophet Hosea said . . .

He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth. (Hos. 6:3)

How does a person receive rain? Not by prying it loose from the sky but just by watching it fall, by standing in the downpour, by thanking Him for opening up the floodgates and sending what He knows we need and can’t get for ourselves, yet what He so faithfully, regularly, and graciously gives.

Let’s get going, then . . . with just these few little verses to get you started. Grab a pen, flip to the pages for prayer in the back of this book, and write your own prayer strategy for passion—a prayer for God to help you maintain it (if it’s good) or regain it (if it’s gone). Make it part Praise, part Repentance, part Asking, and a whole lot of Yes.

But don’t just read the words you’ve crafted. Pray them. No matter if your writing is short, long, or somewhere in between, pray it as the steady, fervent desire of your will, in anticipation of seeing it become the burning desire of your heart. Because it’s not just another do-better in your list of New Year’s resolutions. It’s a prayer strategy.

And that’s what makes it work.