The Complete Works of E. M. Bounds on Prayer: Experience the Wonders of God through Prayer

by E.M. Bounds

If pain afflict or wrongs oppress, If cares distract, or fears dismay; If guilt deject, or sin distress, In every case still watch and pray.

“In everything, by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known unto God.” This is the divinely prescribed remedy for all anxious cares, for all worry, for all inward fretting.

Only prayer in everything can drive dull care away, relieve unnecessary heart burdens, and save from the besetting sin of worrying over things which we cannot help. Only prayer can bring into the heart and mind the “peace which passeth all understanding,” and keep mind and heart at ease, free from burdensome care.

The one place where the Lord’s presence and power will be more fully realized than any other place is the closet of prayer.

As there are no small things in prayer, so there are no small things with God. He who counts the hairs of our head, and who is not too lofty and high to notice the little sparrow which falls to the ground, is not too great and high to note everything which concerns the happiness, the needs and the safety of his children.

The request is for the giver—not alone his gifts but himself. The requests of the praying one are to be made known unto God. The requests are to be brought to the knowledge of God. It is then that cares fly away, anxieties disappear, worries depart, and the soul gets at ease. Then there steals into the heart “the peace of God that passeth all understanding.”

Answers to prayer are the only surety that we have prayed aright. What marvelous power there is in prayer!

Child of God, can you pray? Are your prayers answered? If not, why not? Answered prayer is the proof of your real praying.

The act of praying may be a real dead performance. It may be the routine of habit. But to pray and receive clear answers, not once or twice, but daily, this is the sure test, and is the gracious point of our vital connection with Jesus Christ.

The selfish character cannot exist when the prayer conditions are fulfilled.

Answered prayer is the mark of God in our praying.

All holy affections are affected by answered prayers.

The Word of God is the basis and the inspiration and the heart of prayer.

Just as God has commanded us to pray always, to pray everywhere, and to pray in everything, so he will answer always, everywhere and in everything.

There are no limitations, no adverse conditions, no weakness, no inability, which can or will hinder the answer to prayer.

God explicitly says, “Call unto me, and I will answer.” There are no limitations, no hedges, no hindrances in the way of God fulfilling the promise. His word is at stake. His word is involved. God solemnly engages to answer prayer. Man is to look for the answer, be inspired by the expectation of the answer, and may with humble boldness demand the answer. God, who cannot lie, is bound to answer. He has voluntarily placed himself under obligation to answer the prayer of him who truly prays.

To answer prayer is God’s universal rule. It is his unchangeable and irrepealable law to answer prayer. It is his invariable, specific and inviolate promise to answer prayer. The few denials to prayer in the Scriptures are the exceptions to the general rule, suggestive and startling by their fewness, exception and emphasis.

Just as the asking is specific, so also is the answer specific.

Christ demands specific asking. He responds to specific praying by specific giving.

Christianity needs today, above all things else, men and women who can in prayer put God to the test and who can prove his promises.

Our gospel when truly presented is the power of God.

Better not to pray at all than to go through a dead form, which secures no answer, brings no glory to God, and supplies no good to man. Nothing so hardens the heart and nothing so blinds us to the unseen and the eternal, as this kind of prayerless praying.

“The Christian’s trade is praying.”

God can as easily today work miracles by praying as he did in the days of old. “I am the Lord; I change not.” “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

The wonders of God’s power are to be kept alive, made real and present, and repeated only by prayer.

The man who prays can pray for anything and for everything, and God will give everything and anything. If we limit God in the asking, he will be limited in the giving.

The greatest thing in God’s worship by his own estimate is praying.

The church more than ever needs profound convictions of the vast importance of prayer in prosecuting the work committed to it.

Prayer brings the Holy Spirit upon men today in answer to importunate, continued prayer just as it did before Pentecost. The wonders of prayer have not ceased.

The providence of God goes before his saints, opens the way, removes difficulties, solves problems and brings deliverances when escape seems hopeless.

Praying men and God’s providence go together. This was thoroughly understood by the praying ones of the Scripture. They prayed over everything because God had to do with everything.

Asking of God and receiving from the Lord—direct application to God, immediate connection with God—that is prayer.

He, through the eternal Spirit, by the grace of God, “tasted death for every man.” We, through the eternal Spirit, by the grace of God, pray for every man.

Every true attempt to pray is in response to the will of God. Bungling it may be and untutored by human teachers, but it is acceptable to God, because it is in obedience to his will. If I will give myself up to the inspiration of the Spirit of God, who commands me to pray, the details and the petitions of that praying will all fall into harmony with the will of him who wills that I should pray.

God is so concerned that men pray that he has promised to answer prayer. He has not promised to do something general if we pray, but he has promised to do the very thing for which we pray.

Reconciliation with men is the forerunner of reconciliation with God.

Nonpraying is lawlessness, discord, anarchy. Prayer, in the moral government of God, is as strong and far-reaching as the law of gravitation in the material world, and it is as necessary as gravitation to hold things in their proper sphere and in life.

Prayer belongs to the spirit, and at times it possesses the spirit and stirs the spirit with high and holy purposes and resolves.

The clear and oft repeated language of the Bible is that prayer is to be answered by God; that God occupies the relation of a father to us, and that as Father he gives to us when we ask the things for which we ask. The best praying, therefore, is the praying that gets an answer.

Prayer is the condition by which all foes are to be overcome and all the inheritance is to be possessed.

the tendency of these times is to an ostentatious parade of doing, which enfeebles the life and dissipates the spirit of praying. There may be kneeling, and there may be standing in prayerful attitude. There may be much bowing of the head, and yet there may be no serious, real praying. Prayer is real work. Praying is vital work. Prayer has in its keeping the very heart of worship. There may be the exhibit, the circumstance, and the pomp of praying, and yet no real praying. There may be much attitude, gesture, and verbiage, but no praying.

Men are never nearer heaven, nearer God, never more Godlike, never in deeper sympathy and truer partnership with Jesus Christ, than when praying.

The prayer life is knowledge without and within. All vigilance without, all vigilance within. There can be no intelligent prayer without knowledge within.

Away with dry forms, with dead, cold habits of prayer! Away with sterile routine, with senseless performances, and petty playthings in prayer! Let us get at the serious work, the chief business of men, that of prayer. Let us work at it skillfully. Let us seek to be adepts in this great work of praying. Let us be master-workmen, in this high art of praying. Let us be so in the habit of prayer, so devoted to prayer, so filled with its rich spices, so ardent by its holy flame, that all heaven and earth will be perfumed by its aroma, and nations yet in the womb will be blest by our prayers.

There is not only a sad and ruinous neglect of any attempt to pray, but there is an immense waste in the seeming praying which is done, as official praying, state praying, mere habit praying. Men cleave to the form and semblance of a thing after the heart and reality have gone out of it.

Prayer is loyalty to God. Non-praying is to reject Christ and to abandon heaven. A life of prayer is the only life which heaven counts.

God is vitally concerned that men should pray. Men are bettered by prayer, and the world is bettered by praying. God does his best work for the world through prayer. God’s greatest glory and man’s highest good are secured by prayer. Prayer forms the godliest men and makes the godliest world.

He knows not God who knows not how to pray. He has never seen God whose eye has not been couched for God in the closet.

God encourages us to pray, not only by the certainty of the answer, but by the munificence of the promise, and the bounty of the giver.

Jesus Christ in heaven is ever praying. Prayer is his law and his life. The Holy Spirit teaches us how to pray. He prays for us with “groanings which cannot be uttered.”