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

by E.M. Bounds

Moreover: when faith ceases to pray, it ceases to live.

Only God can move mountains, but faith and prayer move God.

Is faith growing or declining as the years go by? Does faith stand strong and foursquare, these days, as iniquity abounds and the love of many grows cold?

Faith in Christ’s ability to do and to do greatly, is the faith which prays greatly.

There is bound to be much delay and long days of waiting for true faith, but faith accepts the conditions—knows there will be delays in answering prayer, and regards such delays as times of testing, in the which, it is privileged to show its mettle, and the stern stuff of which it is made.

Fear not, O tempted and tried believer, Jesus will come, if patience is exercised, and faith holds fast. His delay will serve to make his coming the more richly blessed. Pray on. Wait on. You cannot fail. If Christ delay, wait for him. In his own good time, he will come, and will not tarry.

Patience has its perfect work in the school of delay.

If Jesus dwells at the fountain of my life; if the currents of his life have displaced and superseded all self-currents; if implicit obedience to him is the inspiration and force of every movement of my life, then he can safely commit the praying to my will, and pledge himself, by an obligation as profound as his own nature, that whatsoever is asked shall be granted. Nothing can be clearer,

When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are, in a measure, shutting tomorrow out of our prayer. We do not live in tomorrow but in today.

We do not seek tomorrow’s grace or tomorrow’s bread. They thrive best, and get most out of life, who live in the living present.

True prayers are born of present trials and present needs.

There is no storing tomorrow’s grace or tomorrow’s praying; neither is there any laying-up of today’s grace, to meet tomorrow’s necessities. We cannot have tomorrow’s grace, we cannot eat tomorrow’s bread, we cannot do tomorrow’s praying.

GENUINE, authentic faith must be definite and free of doubt.

something more than an abstract belief in God’s willingness and ability to do for us. It is to be a definite, specific, asking for, and expecting the things for which we ask. Note

Faith is not an abstract belief in the Word of God, nor a mere mental credence, nor a simple assent of the understanding and will; nor is it a passive acceptance of facts, however sacred or thorough.

praying! It is not the intellectually great that the church needs; nor is it men of wealth that the times demand. It is not people of great social influence that this day requires. Above everybody and everything else, it is men of faith, men of mighty prayer, men and women after the fashion of the saints and heroes enumerated in Hebrews, who “obtained a good report through faith,” that the church and the whole wide world of humanity needs. Many men, of this day, obtain a good report because of their money-giving, their great mental gifts and talents, but few there be who obtain a “good report” because of their great faith in

Our eyes should be taken off self, removed from our own weakness and allowed to rest implicitly upon God’s strength.

Faith grows by reading and meditating upon the Word of God. Most, and best of all, faith thrives in an atmosphere of

The pastor who succeeds in changing his people from a prayerless to a prayerful people, has

Primarily, he is dealing with prayerless people—with people of whom it is said, “God is not in all their thoughts.” Such people he meets everywhere, and all the time. His main business is to turn them from being forgetful of God, from being devoid of faith, from being prayerless, so that they become people who habitually pray, who believe in God, remember him, and do his will. The preacher is not sent to merely induce men to join the church, nor merely to get them to do better. It is to get them to pray, to trust God, and to keep God ever before their eyes, that they may not sin against him. The work of the ministry is to change unbelieving

We need constantly to be reminded that faith is the one inseparable condition of successful praying.

Great incentives to pray are furnished in Holy Scriptures, and our Lord closes his teaching about prayer, with the assurance and promise of heaven. The presence of Jesus Christ in heaven, the preparation for his saints which he is making there, and the assurance that he will come again to receive them—how all this helps the weariness of praying, strengthens its conflicts, sweetens its arduous toil! These things are the star of hope to prayer, the wiping away of its tears, the putting of the odor of heaven into the bitterness of its cry. The spirit of a pilgrim

greatly facilitates praying. An earthbound, earth-satisfied spirit cannot pray. In such a heart, the flame of spiritual desire is either gone out or smoldering in faintest glow. The wings of its faith are clipped, its eyes are filmed, its tongue silenced. But they, who in unswerving faith and unceasing prayer, wait continually upon the Lord, do renew their strength, do mount up with wings as eagles, do run, and are not weary, do walk, and not faint.

There is, when all is said and done, a sort of venture in faith and its exercise. But trust is firm belief, it is faith in full flower.

Trust sees God doing things here and now. Yea, more. It rises to a lofty eminence, and looking into the invisible and the eternal, realizes that God has done things, and regards them as being already done. Trust brings eternity into the annals and happenings of time, transmutes the substance of hope into the reality of fruition, and changes promise into present possession. We know when we trust just as we know when we see, just as we are conscious of our sense of touch. Trust sees, receives, holds. Trust is its own witness. Yet, quite often, faith is too weak to obtain God’s greatest good, immediately; so it has to wait in loving, strong, prayerful,

pressing obedience, until it grows in strength, and is able to bring down the eternal, into the realms of experience and time. To this point, trust masses all its forces. Here it holds. And in the struggle, trust’s grasp becomes mightier, and grasps, for itself, all that God has done for it in his eternal wisdom and plenitude of grace.

It becomes the blessed disposition and expression of the soul which is secured by a constant communicating with, and unwearied application to God.

Bounds on Prayer

May our faith so increase until we realize and receive all the fulness there is in that name which guarantees to do so much.

When trust is perfect and without doubt, prayer is simply the outstretched hand, ready to receive.

DESIRE is not merely a simple wish; it is a deep seated craving; an intense longing, for attainment. In the realm of spiritual affairs, it is an important adjunct to prayer.

The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words.

Our judgment tells us we ought to pray—to pray whether we feel like it or not—and not to allow our feelings to determine our habits of prayer. In such circumstance, we ought to pray for the desire to pray; for such a desire is God-given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire; then, when desire has been given, we should pray according to its dictates.

Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to lament its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should

be an expression of “the soul’s sin...

These heaven-given appetites are the proof of a renewed heart, the evidence of a stirring spiritual life. Physical appetites are the attributes of a living body, not of a corpse, and spiritual desires belong to a soul made alive to God. And as the renewed soul hungers and thirsts after righteousness, these holy inward desires break out into earnest, supplicating prayer.

A lack of ardor in prayer, is the sure sign of a lack of depth and of intensity of desire; and the absence of intense desire is a sure sign of God’s absence from the heart! To abate fervor is to retire from God.

Religious principles which do not emerge in flame, have neither force nor effect.

True prayer must be aflame. Christian life and character need to be all on fire. Lack of spiritual heat creates more infidelity than lack of faith. Not to be consumingly interested about the things of heaven, is not to be interested in them at all.

Nothing short of being red hot for God, can keep the glow of heaven in our hearts, these chilly days.

It is divine fire in the soul, intense, dross-consuming—the very essence of the Spirit of God.