November 7, 2020 • Book
No Holds Barred: Wrestling with God in Prayer
by Mark D. Roberts
Executive Director of the De Pree Center
Does your relationship with God feel stale and predictable? Do you struggle to find the time and energy for prayer? Then perhaps you’re being too polite with God.
If your prayers lack passion and honesty, then God may be as bored as you are. Guarded and “religiously correct” prayers might sound nice, but to God they sound half-hearted. He wants you to pray with freedom, boldness, and raw honesty.
The prayers we find in the Psalms run the gamut from awed worship to stunned silence to doubt, desperation, and rage. David and others like him had no time for safe, sanitized prayers. They wrestled with God when they prayed–with no holds barred.
In his book No Holds Barred, Mark Roberts will help you plunge deeper into different types of prayer–asking, thanking, praising, and confessing. It also will lead you into new forms of praying–prayers of desperation and doubt, prayers that question God’s apparent slowness, prayers that demand answers.

Dr. Mark D. Roberts is a Senior Strategist for Fuller’s Max De Pree Center for Leadership, where he focuses on the spiritual development and thriving of leaders. He is the principal writer of the daily devotional, Life for Leaders, and the founder of the De Pree Center’s Flourishing in the Third Third of Life Initiative. Previously, Mark was the Executive Director of the De Pree Center, the lead pastor of a church in Southern California, and the Senior Director of Laity Lodge in Texas. He has written eight books, dozens of articles, and over 2,500 devotions that help people discover the difference God makes in their daily life and leadership. With a Ph.D. in New Testament from Harvard, Mark teaches at Fuller Seminary, most recently in his D.Min. cohort on “Faith, Work, Economics, and Vocation.” Mark is married to Linda, a marriage and family counselor, spiritual director, and executive coach. Their two grown children are educators on the high school and college level.