A Woman’s Battle Plan for Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer

By Priscilla Shirer

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I’m willing to admit, right up front, there’s an undeniable, unknowable, invisible mystery to prayer. That’s why our first reaction to it often leans toward dismissing it, downplaying it, devaluing its critical importance. Prayer, we think, is a good idea in theory, if only it actually did anything or made a difference. But here’s the deal. Despite what we may or may not understand about prayer, God has deliberately chosen this particular vehicle as the one that drives His activity in people’s lives. It’s what He allows us to use to cooperate and partner with Him in the fulfilling of His will. He’s created prayer as a primary way of putting us into personal contact with Him and with His eternal realities, any hour of the day or night.

(Shirer 2015, This Means War)

He comes at you to . . . well, don’t just listen to me; hear it from the loud voices who responded when I polled a large cross section of women, asking them to tell me the primary ways the enemy attacks them. After boiling down all their answers into the most common categories of responses, I ended up with what I believe to be a top ten of his favorite strategies. Here’s where he seems to direct them against you the hardest:

Strategy 1—Against Your Passion 

He seeks to dim your whole desire for prayer, dull your interest in spiritual things, and downplay the potency of your most strategic weapons (Eph. 6:10–20). 

Strategy 2—Against Your Focus 

He disguises himself and manipulates your perspective so you end up focusing on the wrong culprit, directing your weapons at the wrong enemy (2 Cor. 11:14). 

Strategy 3—Against Your Identity 

He magnifies your insecurities, leading you to doubt what God says about you and to disregard what He’s given you (Eph. 1:17–19). 

Strategy 4—Against Your Family 

He wants to disintegrate your family, dividing your home, rendering it chaotic, restless, and unfruitful (Gen. 3:1–7). 

Strategy 5—Against Your Confidence 

He constantly reminds you of your past mistakes and bad choices, hoping to convince you that you’re under God’s judgment rather than under the blood (Rev. 12:10). 

Strategy 6—Against Your Calling 

He amplifies fear, worry, and anxiety until they’re the loudest voices in your head, causing you to deem the adventure of following God too risky to attempt (Josh. 14:8). 

Strategy 7—Against Your Purity 

He tries to tempt you toward certain sins, convincing you that you can tolerate them without risking consequence, knowing they’ll only wedge distance between you and God (Isa. 59:1–2). 

Strategy 8—Against Your Rest and Contentment 

He hopes to overload your life and schedule, pressuring you to constantly push beyond your limits, never feeling permission to say no (Deut. 5:15). 

Strategy 9—Against Your Heart 

He uses every opportunity to keep old wounds fresh in mind, knowing that anger and hurt and bitterness and unforgiveness will continue to roll the damage forward (Heb. 12:15). 

Strategy 10—Against Your Relationships 

He creates disruption and disunity within your circle of friends and within the shared community of the body of Christ (1 Tim. 2:8).

(Shirer 2015, Opening in Prayer)

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 redhot. And goes on driving. And grows even larger, the larger the obstacles become.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 1: Your Passion)

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)

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 1: Your Passion)

The devil’s deeds, however, are so unlike this. They’re almost always accompanied by darkness and deception. Cloak and dagger. Smoke and mirrors. He “disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). Success, to him, means stirring up discord in your home, your church, your workplace, your neighborhood, and doing it in such a way that no one’s even aware he’s been in the building. He knows our natural, physical response is to start coming after each other instead of him—attacking, counterattacking, pointing fingers, assigning blame—while he sits out in the driveway monitoring the clamor inside, fiendishly rubbing his hands together, admiring just how adept he is . . . and what easy targets we are.

The false ideologies of the culture (obsession with appearance, perceptions of worth, the redefinition of the family, all of it) have not been developed by chance. Don’t believe it for a second. The temptations that appeal to your specific desires (and the fact that they appear at your weakest, most vulnerable moments) are not accidental. The disharmony and dysfunction that either blow up or simmer beneath your most valuable relationships are not coincidental. None of these things is a matter of happenstance. They are his deceptive tactics (and that of his evil entourage), being stirred up in the heavenly realm and then manifesting themselves in the spiritual realm.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 2: Your Focus)

Truth is God’s standard—the unchanging, objective benchmark of the Bible by which we govern and align our lives. 

Righteousness means right living—the process by which we apply this truth to our lives and, by His Spirit, produce conduct honoring and pleasing to God. 

Peace is the deep, inner, eternal stability the believer possesses by virtue of relationship with Jesus, a sense of balance that’s not subject to external circumstance. It’s also the quality that enables us to live harmoniously with others. 

Faith is the application of what one believes—the process of putting feet to our beliefs and living in light of it . . . in practical terms. 

Salvation is both our eternal security with Christ, as well as the full inheritance we’ve been given because of our relationship with Him. It includes our blessings, status, and identity— everything we’ve received that enables us to live victoriously for Him. 

The Word of God is His present, relevant, personal Word to us for today. The Bible may be an old Book, but God’s Spirit makes it fresh, new, and alive for us.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 2: Your Focus)

Marriage stands for the creation of unity among two people who were once separated in every way before love reached out and found the other— the way God reached out and found us, and covenanted with us, and loved us, and despite who we are, despite what we’re like, still loves us. This image, more than almost anything, is exactly what the enemy wants to denigrate.

When Scripture counsels husbands to love and lead their wives, even when it counsels us wives to submit to our husbands—[gulp!]—the ultimate motivation for these lofty directives is not just so we’ll get along better on the weekends but that our homes will reflect on earth the order of God’s relationship with us. Husbands are to love their wives “just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). Wives are to submit to their husbands “as the church submits to Christ” (v. 24 NLT).

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 4: Your Family)

God doesn’t live in the past. Because God—your God—exists outside of time. To Him, the past that so haunts and hamstrings you, the past that so ruffles and frustrates you, is not in the past at all. In prayer, you are alone with a God who sees you only as you are and have always been since that beautiful moment when you placed faith in Him—holy, righteous, and blameless; past, present, and future. He forgives your guilt, removes your shame, and declares His work an established, all-the-time fact. Prayer does a complete end run around Satan’s pitiful accusations, ushering us into an eternal realm with God where “the past” doesn’t even compute.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 5: Your Past)

Praise: Thank Him for completely forgiving you, cleansing you, changing you. 

Repentance: See the foolishness of anything that perpetuates old sin patterns, and by His Spirit walk away. 

Asking: Ask for freedom, for release, for the ability to deflect lies and embrace truth. 

Yes: Because you, by His resurrection power, can now walk in a new way of life.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 5: Your Past)

What fruit was produced then from the things you are now ashamed of? For the end of those things is death. But now, since you have been liberated from sin and have become enslaved to God, you have your fruit, which results in sanctification—and the end is eternal life! For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 6:21–23 HCSB).

No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it. (1 Cor. 10:13)

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 7: Your Purity)

Let’s start here: “Having been justified by faith,” the Bible tells us, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). Peace with God. No more fear of condemnation. Unhindered access back and forth between Him and ourselves. So whatever lack of peace you or I might feel with God, and whenever we might feel it, it’s always coming from a source that is not God because He has already blown down every door that keeps us from experiencing total peace with Him.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 10: Your Relationships)

The magnet that draws other people out of darkness toward the light and hope of Jesus Christ is so often not the A-B-C evangelism presentation they hear but the one they see—the recognizable change and difference in people who claim to be at peace with God themselves. Friends who forgive, sisters in Christ whose relationship is an inspiration, husbands and wives who clearly love each other with a passionate sense of loyalty and unity, churches and denominations that are known for celebrating their commonalities more than arguing about their differences—those are the kind of people who best entice others out of their loneliness, pain, and despair to seek their own peace with God through Christ.

So we should not be surprised when Satan thwarts our unity as believers, in all kinds of different pairings and places where we interact with fellow Christians.

He’ll do it in your local church. He’ll stir up a faction who thinks the pastor is woefully deficient in his preaching or his time management or his leadership style or his bedside manner. He’ll create a stir over how loud they play the music in worship or how often someone’s wife or daughter is allowed to sing solos. He’ll divide old and young, traditionalists versus progressives, private school kids from the public schoolers. Instead of people being able to freely exercise and emphasize their various spiritual gifts for the good of the body, he’ll cause folks to see one person’s ministry as being a direct competitor of another’s. Division, disharmony, friendly fire. They’re breaks in the line of our peace.

He’ll do it in the global church too. He’ll augment the clashes of race and economics and doctrinal stances concerning issues of relatively minor importance, turning them into trench warfare among fellow believers in the body of Christ, further quieting the voice of the gospel behind loud debates over our firmly held positions.

(Shirer 2015, Strategy 10: Your Relationships)

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References

Shirer, Priscilla. 2015. Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan to Serious, Specific and Strategic Prayer. N.p.: B&H Publishing Group.

ISBN  978-1-4336-8867-6