Book Review: Dangerous Prayers By Craig Groeschel
I listened to this audiobook over a couple of days. At four hours it is one of the shorter books I have come across, but I found myself stopping often — not because it was difficult to follow, but because it was difficult to sit with.
Dangerous Prayers is structured around three prayers: Search Me, Break Me, and Send Me. Groeschel’s central argument is simple — most Christians pray safe prayers. We ask God to bless our plans, confirm our decisions, and improve our circumstances. These are not wrong prayers, but they are comfortable ones. The three prayers in this book are dangerous precisely because they invite God to do something to you rather than for you. Each one is dangerous not because God might say no, but because He might say yes.
What struck me most was recognizing my own prayer life in what Groeschel is pushing against. I have spent considerable time in prayer questioning why God has not provided more, moved more, blessed more. I arrive with a list. Reading this book, I was convicted that what I had been calling intercession was closer to a complaint.
Prayer One — Search Me
“Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” — Psalm 139:23–24
This is David’s prayer at the close of Psalm 139 — one of the more vulnerable requests in all of Scripture. He is not asking God to expose his enemies. He is asking God to expose him. Specifically, the grievous things. The things buried deepest.
I do not pray this prayer honestly. When I do pray it, I say the words quickly and with little expectation that God will show me anything specific. It functions as religious language without any real risk attached to it.
The reason, I think, is that sin is genuinely difficult to become aware of. We are skilled at concealing it — not only from others but from ourselves. We justify what we know is wrong. We bury what we are most ashamed of until we have nearly convinced ourselves it is not there. We do what Adam did: we hear God in the garden and we hide. Not because we believe He cannot find us, but because being found means being seen, and being seen means reckoning with what we actually are.
“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” — 1 John 1:7
This is where the prayer stops being merely dangerous and becomes generous. Asking God to search you is not asking to be condemned — it is asking to be fully known by the One whose response to full knowledge of you was to give His Son. Praying search me is ultimately an act of trust in the character of God. You hand over your most prized possession only to someone you genuinely believe will handle it with care. Most of us hand God the presentable version and keep the rest for ourselves. This prayer asks you to hand over the rest.
Prayer Two — Break Me
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” — Psalm 51:17
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 5:3
This is the prayer I resist most, and I think I understand why.
There is a version of Christian faith that is, underneath, simply self-improvement with theological vocabulary. You learn the right things to believe. You construct systems around your spiritual life. You develop precise language and well-formed positions. And at some point — without quite noticing the transition — you have built a religion out of Jesus’ teaching while becoming precisely the kind of person Jesus was most consistently critical of.
The Pharisees were not careless men. They were disciplined, theologically serious, and deeply committed to the Word of God. Jesus called them whitewashed tombs.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.” — Matthew 23:25–26
I recognize this pattern in myself. I build frameworks and theologies around Christ and gradually become more committed to my own ideas about Him than to Christ himself. The system becomes the thing. And the zeal I had as a new believer — unpolished, hungry, genuinely dependent — gets quietly replaced by the self-assurance of someone who has it worked out.
Brokenness dismantles that. It costs you the carefully constructed identity, the spiritual competence, the sense that you have arrived. What it returns you to is the poverty of spirit Jesus calls blessed in the Beatitudes — not ignorance, but genuine dependence. The prayer break me is a prayer to return there.
Prayer Three — Send Me
“Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” — Isaiah 6:8
This is the prayer that feels the most exciting to pray — and that is worth examining carefully.
Send me, Lord — we say it with energy and vision, with a clear mental image of ourselves doing something significant for the kingdom. There is nothing inherently wrong with that desire. But when I am honest about my own motives, send me is often a proud prayer. It is a prayer for the platform, the stage, the work that will be seen and remembered. The me is carrying more weight in that sentence than I usually admit.
The version of send me that actually costs something is not the one aimed at the spotlight. It is the one prayed in the shadows — to serve the person no one is watching you serve, to do the unglamorous work with the same faithfulness you would bring to something significant, to be obedient in the places where no one will ever know.
Isaiah prays send me in Isaiah 6 after the seraphim have touched his lips with a coal and burned the unclean thing from him. He is not praying from confidence or readiness. He is on the floor, newly broken, newly cleansed.
“Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” — Isaiah 6:7
That sequence matters. Search me. Break me. Then send me. The man who gets sent without being searched and broken first goes in his own strength and calls it God’s work.
What This Book Did to Me
I am not fully where these prayers ask me to be. I still approach search me with caution. I still resist break me. I still find myself praying send me with my own significance closer to the center than God’s purposes.
But I am more honest about it now than I was before I listened. That, I think, is where these prayers begin — with honesty about the distance between where you are and where they would take you.
Dangerous Prayers: Because Following Jesus Was Never Meant to Be Safe Craig Groeschel · Zondervan · 2020
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