Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan for Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer by Priscilla Shirer
A battle plan for defeating the enemy through prayer.
Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan for Serious, Specific and Strategic Prayer is an impassioned guide to praying with heart and purpose. The book’s underlying theme is that the enemy fights us in specific areas of our lives, and that prayer will unify us with the Lord to overcome the monstrous attacks. She discusses 10 strategies he uses to attack each one of us personally:
- Passion
- Focus
- Identity
- Family
- Past
- Fears
- Purity
- Pressures
- Hurts
- Relationships
She provides details and real-life examples about how the enemy attacks us using these specific strategies and how, with prayer, we can defeat him in each area. She includes related scripture and encourages us to write our own prayers over each topic. She even provides prayer “cards” in the back of the book for you to write those prayers while it is all fresh.
She starts with a paragraph about how tattered this book will be when you are finished. She mentions that pages will be dog-eared and marked up. She wasn’t wrong. I don’t think I’ve highlighted a book this much since college. The information and delivery are so impactful that I wanted to remember it all forever. I wrote the prayers and filled the note pages (I had to condense my notes so they would all fit). I truly feel that my approach to prayer has changed. As someone who has often felt uneasy with getting on my knees in prayer because I really didn’t know what to say, it makes more sense now. I can appreciate the value in an honest, raw, meaningful prayer. That doesn’t mean that every prayer I’ve said since absorbing this book has been prophetic and life-changing. What it does mean is that I understand that my prayers can be life-changing if I really open myself up to the Lord and know exactly what’s at stake.
I give this book 5 stars and then some. If you don’t have time to work through the whole book, I suggest borrowing it from the library and just reading the first paragraph of each section, which outlines what she would do if she were the enemy. That information alone is enough to get you thinking about the incessant but often subtle attacks of the devil. That said, the entire book is worth the money, the time, and the work you’ll put into it.
