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

by E.M. Bounds

Our paucity in results, the cause of all leanness, is solved by the apostle James—“Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may spend it on your pleasures.” That is the whole truth in a nutshell.

in every circumstance of life, prayer is the most natural outpouring of the soul, the unhindered turning to God for communion and direction. Whether in sorrow or in joy, in defeat or in victory, in health or in weakness, in calamity or in success, the heart leaps to meet with God just as a child runs to his mother’s arms, ever sure that with her is the sympathy that meets every need.

The explanation of our thoughtlessness or forgetfulness lies in the fact that prayer with so many of us is simply a form of selfishness; it means asking for something for ourselves—that and nothing more. And from such an attitude we need to pray to be delivered.

This is not a praying age; it is an age of great activity of great movements, but one in which the tendency is very strong to stress the seen and the material and to neglect and discount the unseen and the spiritual.

Many persons believe in the efficacy of prayer, but not many pray. Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublimest; the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of human possibilities—they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.

Prayer is our most formidable weapon, but the one in which we are the least skilled, the most averse to its use.

We do everything else for the heathen save the thing God wants us to do; the only thing which does any good—makes all else we do efficient.

The conditions of praying are the conditions of righteousness, holiness, and salvation.

Prayer and a holy life are one. They mutually act and react. Neither can survive alone. The absence of the one is the absence of the other.

A holy life does not live in the closet, but it cannot live without the closet.

The gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long.

Praying apostles will beget praying saints. A praying pulpit will beget praying pews. We do greatly need somebody who can set the saints to this business of praying. We are a generation of nonpraying saints. Nonpraying saints are a beggarly gang of saints, who have neither the ardor nor the beauty, nor the power of saints.

Prayer honors God; it dishonors self.

The lazy man does not, will not, cannot pray, for prayer demands energy. Paul calls it a striving, an agony. With Jacob it was a wrestling; with the Syrophenician woman it was a struggle which called into play all the higher qualities of the soul, and which demanded great force to meet.

Few, short, feeble prayers, always betoken a low spiritual condition. Men ought to pray much and apply themselves to it with energy and perseverance. Eminent Christians have been eminent in prayer. The deep things of God are learned nowhere else. Great things for God are done by great prayers. He who prays much, studies much, loves much, works much, does much for God and humanity. The execution of the gospel, the vigor of faith, the maturity and excellence of spiritual graces wait on prayer.

CHRIST puts importunity as a distinguishing characteristic of true praying.

Heaven is too busy to listen or respond to half-hearted prayers.

Our experience and revelations of God are born of our costly sacrifice, our costly conflicts, our costly praying.

Our seasons of importunate prayer cut themselves, like the print of a diamond, into our hardest places, and mark with ineffaceable traces our characters. They are the salient periods of our lives! The memorial stones which endure and to which we turn.

Perseverance counts much with God as well as with man. If Elijah had ceased at his first petition the heavens would have scarcely yielded their rain to his feeble praying. If Jacob had quit praying at decent bedtime he would scarcely have survived the next day’s meeting with Esau. If the Syrophenician woman had allowed her faith to faint by silence, humiliation, repulse, or stop midway its struggles, her grief-stricken home would never have been brightened by the healing of her daughter.

Moses taught the power of importunity when he interceded for Israel forty days and forty nights, by fasting and prayer. And he succeeded in his importunity.

There is not the least doubt that much of our praying fails for lack of persistency.

Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and irresistible will.

“MEN ought always to pray, and not to faint.” The words are the words of our Lord, who not only ever sought to impress upon his followers the urgency and the importance of prayer, but set them an example which they alas! have been far too slow to copy.

Prayer is not a meaningless function or duty to be crowded into the busy or the weary ends of the day, and we are not obeying our Lord’s command when we content ourselves with a few minutes on our knees in the morning rush or late at night when the faculties, tired with the tasks of the day, call out for rest.

God is always within call, it is true; his ear is ever attentive to the cry of his child, but we can never get to know him if we use the vehicle of prayer as we use the telephone—or a few words of hurried conversation. Intimacy requires development. We can never know God as it is our privilege to know him, by brief and fragmentary and unconsidered repetitions of intercessions that are requests for personal favors and nothing more.

presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.

Always does not mean that we are to neglect the ordinary duties of life; what it means is that the soul which has come into intimate contact with God in the silence of the prayer-chamber is never out of conscious touch with the Father, that the heart is always going out to him in loving communion, and that the moment the mind is released from the task on which it is engaged, it returns as naturally to God as the bird does to its nest.

The study of the Word and prayer go together, and where we find the one truly practiced, the other is sure to be seen in close alliance.

Prayer fails when the desire and effort for personal holiness fail.

No person is a soulwinner who is not adept in the ministry of prayer.

We are obliged to pray if we be citizens of God’s kingdom.

Prayerlessness is expatriation, or worse, from God’s kingdom. It is outlawry, a high crime, a constitutional breach. The Christian who relegates prayer to a subordinate place in his life soon loses whatever spiritual zeal he may have once possessed, and the church that makes little of prayer cannot maintain vital piety, and is powerless to advance the Gospel. The gospel cannot live, fight, conquer without prayer—prayer unceasing, instant, and ardent.

Little prayer is the characteristic of a backslidden age and of a backslidden church. Whenever there is little praying in the pulpit or in the pew, spiri...

The cause of God has no commercial age, no cultured age, no age of education, no age of money. But it has one golden age, and that is the age of prayer. When its leaders are men of prayer, when prayer is the prevailing element of worship, like the incense giving contin...

Better praying and more of it, that is what we need. We need holier men, and more of them, holier women, and more of them, to pray—women like Hannah, who, out of their greatest grie...

secret praying is the test, the gauge, the conserver of man’s relation to God.

Be not afraid to pray; to pray is right; Pray if thou canst with hope, but ever pray, Though hope be weak or sick with long delay; Pray in the darkness if there be no light; And if for any wish thou dare not pray Then pray to God to cast that wish away.

Put the men to praying is Paul’s unfailing remedy for great evils in church, in state, in politics, in business, in home. Put the men to praying, then politics will be cleansed, business will be thriftier, the church will be holier, the home will be sweeter.

Praying men are God’s chosen leaders. The distinction between the leaders who God brings to the front to lead and bless his people, and those leaders who owe their position of leadership to a worldly, selfish, unsanctified selection, is this, God’s leaders are pre-eminently men of prayer. This distinguishes them as the simple, divine attestation of their call, the seal of their separation by God.

Praying men means much more than men who say prayers; much more than men who pray by habit. It means men with whom prayer is a mighty force, an energy that moves heaven, and pours untold treasures of good on earth.

Many church leaders seem to think if they can be prominent as men of business, of money, influence, of thought, of plans, of scholarly attainments, of eloquent gifts, of taking, conspicuous activities, that these are enough, and will atone for the absence of the higher spiritual power which only much praying can give. But how vain and paltry are these in the serious work of bringing glory to God, controlling the church for him, and bringing it into full accord with its divine mission.

The only protection and rescue from worldliness lie in our intense and radical spirituality; and our only hope for the existence and maintenance of this high, saving spirituality, under God, is in the purest and most aggressive leadership—a leadership that knows the secret power of prayer, the sign by which the church has conquered, and that has conscience, conviction, and courage to hold her true to her symbols, traditions, and power.

The world is coming into the church at many points and in many ways. It oozes in; it pours in; it comes in with brazen front or soft, insinuating disguise; it comes in at the top and comes in at the bottom; and percolates through many a hidden way. For praying men and holy men we are looking—men whose presence in the church will make it like a censer of holiest incense flaming up to God.

This truth that God regards the personal purity of the man is fundamental. This truth suffers when ordinances are made much of and forms of worship multiply. The man and his spiritual character depreciate as church ceremonials increase. The simplicity of worship is lost in religious esthetics, or in the gaudiness of religious forms.

This truth that the personal purity of the individual is the only thing God cares for is lost sight of when the church begins to estimate men for what they have. When the church eyes a man’s money, social standing, his belongings in any way, then spiritual values are at a fearful discount, and the tear of penitence, the heaviness of guilt are never seen at her portals. Worldly bribes have opened and stained its pearly gates by the entrance of the impure.

This truth that God is looking after personal purity is swallowed up when the church has a greed for numbers. “Not numbers, but personal purity is our aim,” said the fathers of Methodism. The parading of church statistics is mightily against the grain of spiritual religion. Eyeing numbers greatly hinders the looking after personal puri...

Holiness and all the spiritual graces of hardy culture and slow growth are discarded as too slow and too costly for the progress and rush of the age. By dint of machinery, new organizations, and spiritual weakness, results are vainly expected to be secured which can be secured only by faith, prayer, and waiting on God.

The man and his spiritual character is what God is looking after. If men, holy men, can be turned out by the easy processes of church machinery readier and better than by the old-time processes, we would gladly invest in every new and improved patent; but we do not believe it. We adhere to the old way—the way the holy prophets went, the king’s highway of holiness.

We can never expect to grow in the likeness of our Lord unless we follow his example and give more time to communion with the Father. A revival of real praying would produce a spiritual revolution.