Study Guides
Prayer & Spiritual Warfare
Strengthen your prayer life and learn to stand firm. These guides help groups go deeper in prayer — from daily rhythms to intercession to understanding the spiritual battles we face.
War Room
by Chris Fabry
War Room by Chris Fabry is the novelization of the 2015 Kendrick Brothers film of the same name. It follows the Jordan family — Tony and Elizabeth, whose marriage is quietly unraveling — and Miss Clara, an elderly widow who becomes Elizabeth's unlikely mentor. At the heart of the story is a simple but radical idea: the most powerful thing a person can do for their family, their marriage, and their own soul is to fight for them on their knees. Miss Clara's famous "war room" — a small prayer closet filled with handwritten requests, Scripture verses, and decades of faithful intercession — becomes the central image of the book. The novel argues that the real battle in marriage and family life is not against flesh and blood (a spouse, a boss, a circumstance), but against spiritual forces that can only be defeated through intentional, fervent, believing prayer. The story is not a how-to manual but a narrative journey: readers watch Tony and Elizabeth move from pride, distance, and near-destruction to genuine repentance and restoration, and they are invited to examine their own prayer lives in the process.
View Discussion GuideThe Circle Maker
by Mark Batterson
The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson is built around a simple but audacious premise: most of us pray too small. Drawing on the ancient legend of Honi the circle maker — a first-century Jewish sage who, during a catastrophic drought, drew a circle in the dirt, stood inside it, and refused to move until God sent rain — Batterson argues that God honors bold, persistent, specific prayer. The book's central thesis is that "God is not honored by timid prayers." Instead, Batterson calls readers to draw "prayer circles" around their biggest dreams, their deepest needs, and their God-given impossibilities, trusting that the God who answered Honi's prayer is the same God who hears ours today.
View Discussion GuideA Praying Life
by Paul Miller
A Praying Life by Paul E. Miller begins with a disarmingly honest confession: prayer is hard, and most of us don't do it very well. Rather than offering another set of techniques or disciplines to master, Miller diagnoses the deeper problem — we have stopped being needy. We have learned to live as "functional atheists," managing our lives with skill and self-sufficiency while leaving God largely out of the picture. The book's central argument is that the solution is not more willpower but a recovery of childlike dependence — learning to bring our real selves, with all our mess and confusion and longing, into honest conversation with a Father who loves us.
View Discussion GuideThe Practice of the Presence of God
by Brother Lawrence
The Practice of the Presence of God is one of the most beloved spiritual classics in Christian history. Written by a seventeenth-century French Carmelite lay brother named Nicholas Herman — known in the monastery as Brother Lawrence — it is a slim but inexhaustible book about a single, revolutionary idea: that any person, in any circumstance, can walk in continuous, conscious communion with God. Brother Lawrence did not develop this practice in a quiet study or a peaceful garden. He discovered it in the noise and clutter of a busy monastic kitchen, while rolling over wine casks on lame legs and repairing the worn sandals of over a hundred brothers. His testimony is that God is not reserved for the chapel or the prayer closet, but is available — and eager — in every moment of every ordinary day.
View Discussion GuideFervent
by Priscilla Shirer
Fervent by Priscilla Shirer is a bold, strategic call to prayer — not the polite, routine kind, but the fierce, intentional, targeted kind that treats prayer as the primary weapon in a real spiritual war. Drawing on Ephesians 6 and the image of the full armor of God, Priscilla argues that the enemy of our souls has a specific, customized strategy against each of us — targeting our mind, our marriage, our identity, our past, our purpose, and our relationships — and that the only adequate response is an equally specific, customized prayer strategy. The book is organized around ten "strategies" the enemy uses against us, and for each one Priscilla offers a corresponding prayer strategy we can deploy. The thesis is simple but urgent: you are not just invited to pray — you are called to pray fervently, because the stakes are that high.
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