15

FORTY DAYS TO PRAYING FOR YOUR

ELEPHANTS

Praying for your elephants is not a perfect science. Rather it is an exercise in creating a strategic and specific prayer list. Below are some ideas on how to do just that. The key is that for forty days you do your best to pray over and develop your prayer list. This should be a work in progress. The chart on pages 17 and 18 is provided as an example. Create your own on a separate sheet of paper or in your prayer journal. Remember, you are not aiming for perfection but rather joining God on a forty-day adventure of prayer.

1. Create a list of ten prayer categories. For example: family, work, school, ministry, friends, finance, or even a category for fun bucket-list prayers.

© 2014 Adam Stadtmiller. Published by David C Cook. All rights reserved.

16 PRAYING FOR YOUR ELEPHANT

2. Pray over each of your categories daily. Each day try to add more specific requests under each category. For instance, paying off your debt within three years could go under the finance category. The goal is to have ten individual prayer requests under each of the ten category headings by the end of this forty-day exercise. That would be a total of one hundred prayers.

3. Make sure to note the date each time you add a request to your list.

4. After a prayer request has been on your list for a few days, spend some time with God imagining deeper into that request. Rewrite the request with any new insights you might have discovered.

5. As you pray over your prayer items each day, continue to add more specific and strategic elements to the request. Err on the side of specificity rather than being vague.

6. As much as possible, try to record the date when prayers are answered. You will be encouraged by how God answers your prayers during these forty days.

© 2014 Adam Stadtmiller. Published by David C Cook. All rights reserved.

FORTY DAYS TO PRAYING FOR YOUR ELEPHANTS 17

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

© 2014 Adam Stadtmiller. Published by David C Cook. All rights reserved.

18 PRAYING FOR YOUR ELEPHANT

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© 2014 Adam Stadtmiller. Published by David C Cook. All rights reserved.

Printed in USA

US $15.99

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RELIGIONChristian LifePrayer

ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-0-7814-1145-5

130834

WHAT IF YOUR BIGGEST PRAYERS ARE TOO SMALL?

Get ready to reignite, reimagine, and repurpose your prayer life while experiencing greater intimacy with God. This is an invitation to identify your elephants—to name, through specific and strategic prayers, the 100 most important and audacious petitions you can imagine. These are the prayers that—if answered by God—would be game changers in your life and perhaps the world.

By supersizing your prayers and daring to ask for the big things—your elephants—you will come to know God in a way you never have, even if His answers aren’t what you expect. Dive deep into the adventure that is the prayer-filled life!

“A hopeful and compelling look at what talking to God might look like if we’d have the audacity to believe He has hope for us beyond anything we can imagine.”

BRIAN HARDIN, founder of The Daily Audio Bible

“Adam Stadtmiller … allows us to see God’s desire for us to express our longings clearly and consistently to the One who loves us most.”

MARSHALL SHELLEY, vice president of Christianity Today

ADAM STADTMILLER is lead pastor at one of San Diego’s most historic churches, La Jolla Christian Fellowship. A regular contributor to Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal, he is also the author of Give Your Kids the Keys and Discover Your Kid’s Spiritual Gifts. Adam lives in Carlsbad, California, with his wife and two daughters.

Praying for Your Elephant cover transmit.indd 1 8/1/14 9:32 AM

An excerpt from...

ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK

WHAT IF YOUR BIGGEST PRAYERS ARE TOO SMALL?

Get ready to reignite, reimagine, and repurpose your prayer life while experiencing greater intimacy with God. This is an invitation to identify your elephants—to name, through specific and strategic prayers, the 100 most important and audacious petitions you can imagine. These are the prayers that—if answered by God—would be game changers in your life and perhaps the world.

By supersizing your prayers and daring to ask for the big things—your elephants—you will come to know God in a way you never have, even if His answers aren’t what you expect. Dive deep into the adventure that is the prayer-filled life!

“A hopeful and compelling look at what talking to God might look like if we’d have the audacity to believe He has hope for us beyond anything we can imagine.”

BRIAN HARDIN, founder of The Daily Audio Bible

“Adam Stadtmiller … allows us to see God’s desire for us to express our longings clearly and consistently to the One who loves us most.”

MARSHALL SHELLEY, vice president of Christianity Today

ADAM STADTMILLER is lead pastor at one of San Diego’s most historic churches, La Jolla Christian Fellowship. A regular contributor to Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal, he is also the author of Give Your Kids the Keys and Discover Your Kid’s Spiritual Gifts. Adam lives in Carlsbad, California, with his wife and two daughters.

Praying for Your Elephant cover transmit.indd 1 8/1/14 9:32 AM