I lost the argument, and God won the day. We wrote a $50 check to missions and what happened next doesn’t add up. The next month, our monthly giving tripled from $2,000 to $6,000 and we never looked back. My only explanation is that Luke 6:38 is true. And when we circled this promise by writing that check, God multiplied His provision.
“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
I believe in the law of measures. If you give big, God will bless big. That certainly doesn’t mean that you can play God like a slot machine, but if you give for the right reasons, I’m convinced of this: You’ll never outgive God. It’s not possible because God has promised that in the grand scheme of eternity, He will always give back more than you gave up.
This year we’re projecting a mission budget of more than a million dollars, but that $50 check still ranks as the hardest and largest gift we’ve ever given to missions. It didn’t add up, but God made it multiply. And He’ll do the same for you. If you respond to His promptings, “this is crazy” will turn into “this is awesome.” When you live in obedience, you position yourself for blessing. And you never know how or when or where God is going to show up. He might just send winds out of the west at fifty miles per hour with a 100 percent chance of quail.
Quailmageddon
Now a wind went out from the LORD and drove quail in from the sea. It scattered them up to two cubits deep all around the camp, as far as a day’s walk in any direction. All that day and night and all the next day the people went out and gathered quail. No one gathered less than ten homers.
The Israelites were parked in the Desert of Paran, a region about fifty miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea and fifty miles southwest of the Dead Sea. The significance is this: Quail tend to live by the water, and they don’t fly long distances. If it hadn’t been for a supernatural west wind, they would have never made it this far inland. So this is a meteorological miracle. And it’s not just a miraculous west wind. The clouds burst and rained quail from the sky.
When quail get tired, they dive-bomb. We’re not talking about a perfectly angled duck that makes a smooth landing on a watery runway; quail were falling from the sky like huge pieces of hail. There had to be more than one bruised noggin on the day it rained quail. They were popping Advil in Israel that day. Scripture also says that some of the quail flew into the camp about three feet off the ground, so there may have been some below-the-belt bruises as well.
Based on the Hebrew system of measurement, “a day’s walk” was approximately fifteen miles in any direction. So if you square the radius and multiply by pi, we’re talking about an area that was almost 700 square miles. To put that into perspective, Washington, DC, is 68.3 square miles. Not only was this an area ten times larger than the nation’s capital, but the quail were piled three feet deep as well.
Can you imagine seeing that many birds fly into the camp? It was like a bird blizzard. Quailmageddon. The cloud of birds was so massive that it seemed like a solar eclipse. For the rest of their lives, when the eyewitnesses who were there that day closed their eyes at night, they counted quail.
Once the quail stopped falling, the Israelites started gathering. Each Israelite gathered no less than ten homers. Ten homers multiplied by 600,000 men equals 6 million homers at a minimum. A homer equated to roughly 200 liters, and assuming that the quail were of an average size, it rained somewhere in the neighborhood of 105 million quail. You read that right: 105 million quail. God doesn’t just provide in dramatic fashion; God provides in dramatic proportion.
One of the reasons I love this miracle is because it is a miracle pun. This miracle is recorded in the book of Numbers, and the Greek name for Numbers is arithmoi. That’s where we get our word arithmetic. Recorded in the book of arithmetic is a miracle that doesn’t even begin to add up.
Moses could have never anticipated this answer to prayer. It was unpredictable and unprecedented, but Moses had the guts to circle the promise anyway! And when you circle the promise, you never know how God will provide, but it’s always cloudy with a chance of quail.
Do you think that perhaps you need to quit doing arithmetic and start doing geometry? Your job is not to crunch numbers and make sure the will of God adds up. After all, the will of God is not a zero-sum game. When God enters the equation, His output always exceeds your input. Your only job is to draw circles in the sand. And if you do the geometry, God will multiply the miracles in your life.
Multiplication Tables
I was recently helping our youngest son, Josiah, with his multiplication tables. We pulled out the flash cards, and I quizzed him on his fives. Once he gets his fives down, we’ll move on to sixes. And once he get his sixes down, we’ll move on to sevens. That’s the way it works in the world of multiplication. You learn to multiply bigger and bigger numbers. That’s also the way it should work spiritually, but many of us never graduate beyond addition and subtraction.
Jesus taught multiplication. He promised that He would multiply His blessings if we work like it depends on us and pray like it depends on God. And he used one hundred, sixty, and thirty as multipliers.
“Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”
A few years ago, Lora and I circled this promise contained within the parable of the sower by making the largest faith promise of our lives. A faith promise is an amount of money pledged to missions above and beyond the tithe. It’s not based on a budget; it’s based on faith. Honestly, we had no idea how we’d be able to give the amount of money we pledged, but God had specifically spelled out the number we knew we were to give. We knew it would take some supernatural provision, but we believed that God was going to honor our pledge because our pledge honored God.
On the day we made the pledge, July 31, 2005, I blogged what I believed: “I have a holy anticipation that I can’t even put into words. I can’t wait to see how God provides what we promised.” Two months later, on October 4, 2005, I landed my first book contract. The advance on that four-book deal was thirty times greater than the pledge we had made. Coincidence? I think not. It was like quail that came out of nowhere! I was thrilled about getting the book contract, but I was even more thrilled about writing the largest check we had ever written for a kingdom cause. I believe that contract was a direct result of having circled this promise.
In December 2010, I signed another book contract with my new publisher, and Lora and I felt led to give a significant percentage of the advance to National Community Church. It wasn’t until tax time the next year that it dawned on me that this gift was exactly thirty times larger than the original faith promise we had made five years before. Coincidence? I think not.
I have no idea what your financial situation is, but I do know this. If you give beyond your ability, God will bless you beyond your ability. God wants to bless you thirty-, sixty-, hundredfold. And if you are willing to subtract what you are spending on yourself and add it to what you are investing in the kingdom, God will do the multiplication. If you believe that, you’ll circle the promises of God and reap the reward. If you don’t, you won’t.
If you’re still living in the world of addition and subtraction, the tithe is difficult to give because it feels like you’re subtracting 10 percent from your income. But once you graduate to multiplication, you realize that God can do more with 90 percent than you can do with 100 percent. Why? Because when you add God into the equation of your finances, it changes the game. If you give generously and sacrificially, the day may come when you’re giving more than you’re currently making. If you believe that, that promise might be worth circling!
Multiplication Anointing
God isn’t offended by big dreams; He’s offended by anything less. Your dreams may start out small, and God will honor those humble dreams, but as your faith grows so do your dreams until you dar
e to dream thirty-, sixty-, hundredfold dreams. And when you draw those God-sized circles, it gives the Omnipresent One room to work.
In the fall of 2006, I was speaking at a men’s conference in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the week before my first book, In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day, was set to release. I spoke in a morning session to about twelve hundred men and then I sat back and listened to a circle maker named Tommy Barnett. Tommy shared the footnotes to the story of how he and his son, Matthew Barnett, started the L.A. Dream Center more than a decade ago. They circled the fifteen-story Queen of Angels Hospital, and God gave it to them for $60,000. Only in God’s economy!
After sharing the story of God’s miraculous provision, Tommy invited anyone who wanted a multiplication anointing to come to the altar. I wasn’t sure if the idea of a multiplication anointing was even in the Bible at the time, but if Tommy was offering it, I was taking it. It felt a little awkward going to the altar, and it always does, but I was desperate for God’s blessing on my first book. I was painfully aware of the fact that 95 percent of books don’t sell five thousand copies, but I prayed a circle around the book and asked God to put a multiplication anointing on it. I mustered as much faith as I could and asked God to help it sell twenty-five thousand copies. Of course, I threw in the obligatory “if it be Your will” at the end. That tagline may sound spiritual, but it was less a submission to God’s will and more a profession of doubt. If you aren’t careful, the will of God can become a cop-out if things don’t turn out the way you want. The truth is that my whisper number was one hundred thousand copies. In the deep recesses of my heart, that was my big dream. I just didn’t have enough faith to verbalize that number. I felt foolish enough verbalizing twenty-five thousand.
In typical God fashion, He exceeded my highest expectations. He has a way of making our wildest dreams seem tame, our biggest dreams seem small. I believe that God’s blessing on In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day traces back to the prayer circle that I drew around it. I don’t just write books; I circle them in prayer. To me, writing is praying with a keyboard. I also recruited a team of circle makers to pray for me while I wrote the book. Then we prayed circles around the people who would buy the book. We specifically prayed that God would get the book into the right hands at the right time. On one level, I’m surprised by the way God has used paragraphs within the book to save marriages and prompt decisions and birth visions. On another level, I’m not surprised at all. It’s no coincidence when people tell me that God brought the book into their lives at the perfect time. It’s providence. To me, a book sold is not a book sold; it’s a prayer answered.
I was a frustrated writer for thirteen years. I dreamed of writing a book, but I could never seem to finish a manuscript. The turning point was when I drew a circle around the dream during forty days of prayer and fasting. I fasted from all forms of entertainment to stay focused on my goal. Then I stepped into a writing circle with a Honi-like determination that I wasn’t coming out until I had a manuscript in my hand. Forty days later, the dream became a reality. I didn’t write that book; I prayed that book.
As an author, I’ve learned to pray circles around my books. As a pastor, I’ve learned to pray circles around our church. As a parent, I’ve learned to pray circles around our children. It doesn’t matter what you do, you need to circle it in prayer. If you’re a teacher, pray circles around your class by laying hands on the desks and asking God to bless the students who sit there. If you’re a doctor, pray circles around your patients and ask God to give you X-ray insight. If you’re a politician, pray circles around the constituents you serve and the legislation you draft. If you’re an entrepreneur, pray circles around your product.
If you do the geometry and draw prayer circles around your Jericho, God will take care of the multiplication. And the bigger the prayer circle the more God can multiply. If you claim the promise, who knows: God might just send 105 million quail into your camp.
Chapter 6
You Can’t Never Always
Sometimes Tell
I almost said no to a miracle.
A couple who had just started attending National Community Church requested a meeting, and I almost denied the request because they said they wanted to talk about church government. I love talking about the mission and vision of the church. Church government? Not as much! Plus, I was fighting a book deadline, so I didn’t have much margin in my schedule. So I almost said no, and if I had, I would have missed out on a miracle.
As we sat in my office above Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse, they peppered me with questions about bylaws, financial checks and balances, and decision-making protocols. And while I felt a little defensive at the time, I realize now that they were simply doing their due diligence. Like investors who research a company before purchasing stock, they wanted to make sure it would be a good return on investment. After answering nearly ninety minutes worth of questions, they ended by asking me about our vision. I had so much pent-up passion after talking about policies and protocols that I just let it rip. I shared our vision of starting a Dream Center in Ward 8, the poorest part of our city and the primary reason the nation’s capital is always in the running for murder capital of the country. I talked about turning our coffeehouse on Capitol Hill into a chain of coffeehouses, with all the net profits reinvested in missions. I talked about launching our first international campus in Berlin, Germany. And I shared our vision of launching multisite campuses in movie theaters at metro stops throughout the greater Washington area. Then the meeting came to a rather abrupt and awkward ending. They said they wanted to invest in National Community Church, but they didn’t say how or how much. They left, and I was left scratching my head.
I wasn’t sure anything would come of that meeting, but a few weeks later, they asked my assistant for a phone appointment. On an otherwise uneventful Wednesday afternoon, right around 3:00 p.m. EST, I received one of the most unforgettable phone calls of my life.
“Pastor Mark, we wanted to follow up on our meeting and let you know that we want to give a gift to National Community Church.”
My mind immediately started racing.
Our congregation is amazingly generous, but our median age is twenty-eight and nearly two-thirds of our congregation are single, which means that most of our attendees are nowhere near their peak earning potential. They are faithfully tithing on their income as Hill staffers or inner-city schoolteachers or coffeehouse baristas, but they don’t have the income or savings to give large financial gifts. They are focused on paying off school loans or saving for a wedding.
The largest single gift we had ever received up to that point was a $42,000 tithe on the sale of a home, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this gift might exceed that gift. After all, you don’t announce a gift if it isn’t a gift worth announcing, right?
“We want to give a gift, and there are no strings attached. But before I tell you how much we’re going to give, I want you to know why we’re giving it. We’re giving this gift because you have vision beyond your resources.”
I’ll never forget that phrase: “vision beyond your resources.”
The rationale behind the gift was just as meaningful as the gift itself. And that rationale has inspired us to keep dreaming irrational dreams. Those four words, vision beyond your resources, have become a mantra for the ministry of National Community Church. We refuse to let our budget determine our vision. That left-brained approach is a wrong-brained approach because it’s based on our limited resources rather than on God’s unlimited provision. Faith is allowing your God-given vision to determine your budget. That certainly does not mean you practice poor financial stewardship, spend beyond your means, and accumulate a huge debt load. It does mean that you take a step of faith when God gives you a vision because you trust that the One who gave you the vision is going to make provision. And for the record, if the vision is from God, it will most definitely be beyond your means.
Having vision beyond your resources is synonymous with dre
aming big. And it may feel like you’re setting yourself up for failure, but you’re actually setting God up for a miracle. How God performs the miracle is His job. Your job is drawing a circle around the God-given dream. And if you do your job, you might just find yourself standing waist-deep in three feet of quail.
“We want to give the church $3 million dollars.”
I was speechless. And I’m a preacher.
It was one of those holy moments when time stands still. I heard it, but I could hardly believe it. I was blindsided by the blessing. Like the wind that brought 105 million quail into the camp, God’s provision came out of nowhere. We weren’t even in a capital campaign!
It’s not our man-made plans that move the Almighty; the Almighty is moved by big dreams and bold prayers. In the awkward silence of my speechlessness, I heard the still small voice of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit hit the rewind button and reminded me of a prayer circle that I had drawn four years before.
Let me retrace the circle.
Prayer Promise
On March 15, 2006, we opened the doors to our coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. The total cost of building Ebenezer’s Coffeehouse was over $3 million, and our mortgage was $2 million. One day, I was praying for God’s provision when I felt a prompting to pray for a $2 million miracle. The first thing I had to do was decipher whether this prompting was just my own desire to be debt free or whether it was the Holy Spirit who dropped that promise into my heart. It’s tough to discern between natural desires and holy desires, but I was about 90 percent sure it was the Holy Spirit who put that promise in my heart. I had no idea how God would do it, but I knew I needed to circle that promise in prayer.
The Circle Maker_Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears Page 5