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by
E.M. Bounds
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June 8, 2020 - March 2, 2021
God’s doing for us when we pray has no limitations, is not hedged about, by provisos in Himself, or in the peculiar circumstances of any particular case. If we really pray, God masters and defies all things and is above all conditions.
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.
The cure for fear in the face of threatenings of the enemies of the Lord is being filled with the Spirit. This gives power to speak the word of the Lord with boldness. This gives courage and drives away fear.
The possibilities of prayer, then, lie in the great truth, illimitable in its broadness, fathomless in its depths, exhaustless in its fullness, that God answers every prayer from every true soul who truly prays.
Answered prayer is the spring of love, and is the direct encouragement to pray.
The certainty of the Father’s giving is assured by the Father’s relation, and by the ability and goodness of the Father.
Just as the asking is specific, so also is the answer specific. The child does not ask for one thing and get another. He does not cry for bread, and get a stone. He does not ask for an egg, and receive a scorpion. He does not ask for a fish, and get a serpent. Christ demands specific asking. He responds to specific praying by specific giving.
It was in the school of answered prayer our Lord disciplined and perfected her faith, and it was by giving her a specific answer to her prayer.
We tread altogether too gingerly upon the great and precious promises of God, and too often we ignore them wholly. The promise is the ground on which faith stands in asking of God. This is the one basis of prayer. We limit God’s ability. We measure God’s ability and willingness to answer by prayer by the standard of men. We limit the Holy One of Israel.
God is waiting to be put to the test by His people in prayer. He delights in being put to the test on His promises. It is His highest pleasure to answer prayer, to prove the reliability of His promises. Nothing worthy of God nor of great value to men will be accomplished till this is done.
Take the supernatural out of our holy religion, and its life and power are gone, and it degenerates into a mere mode of morals.
Prayer brings this Divine power into the ranks of men and puts it to work.
Our Gospel when truly presented is the power of God. Never was the Church more in need of those who can and will test Almighty God. Never did the Church need more than now those who can raise up everywhere memorials of God’s supernatural power, memorials of answers to prayer, memorials of promises fulfilled. These would do more to silence the enemy of souls, the foe of God and the adversary of the Church than any modern scheme or present-day plan for the success of the Gospel. Such memorials r...
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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 indurates the heart and nothing so blinds us to the unseen and the eternal, as this kind of prayerless praying.
Really the Old Testament is the record of God hearing and answering prayer.
The absence of faith, however much of performance may be seen, restrains the exercise of God’s power, paralyzes the arm of Christ, and turns to death all signs of life. Unbelief is the one thing which seriously hinders Almighty God in doing mighty works.
Prayer to Christ must always be based, backed and impregnated with faith.
Answered prayers are sometimes the most convincing and faith-creating forces. Unanswered prayers chill the atmosphere and freeze the soil of faith. If Christians knew how to pray so as to have answers to their prayers, evident, immediate, and demonstrative answers from God, faith would be more widely diffused, would become more general, would be more profound, and would be a much more mighty force in the world.
This man’s prayer was the expression of his strong faith, and such faith brought the answer promptly.
God can and will work a miracle in answer to prayer in order to deliver His friends, sooner than He will work one to destroy His enemies. He does both, however, in answer to prayer.
Natural laws are simply God’s laws, by which He governs and regulates all things in nature. Nature is nothing but God’s servant. God is above nature, God is not the slave of nature. This being true, God can and will suspend the working of nature’s laws, can hold them in abeyance by His almighty hand, can for the time being set them aside, to fulfill His higher purposes in redemption. It is no violation of nature’s laws when, in answer to prayer, He who is above nature makes nature His servant, and causes nature to tarry out His plans and purposes.
Is God tied hand and foot? Has He so circumscribed Himself that He cannot operate the law of prayer? Is the law of nature superior to the law of prayer? Not by any means. He is the God of prayer as well as the God of nature. Both prayer and nature have God as their Maker, their Ruler and their Executor. And prayer is God’s servant, just as nature is His servant.
The character and energy of God’s movements lie in prayer. Victory is to come at the end of praying.
God is not now so evident in the world, so almighty in manifestation as of old, not because miracles have passed away, nor because God has ceased to work, but because prayer has been shorn of its simplicity, its majesty, and its power.
When faith has a telescopic, far-off vision of God, prayer works no miracles, and brings no marvels of deliverance. But when God is seen by faith’s closest, fullest eye, prayer makes a history of wonders.
Think about God. Make much of Him, till He broadens and fills the horizon of faith. Then prayer will come into its marvellous inheritance of wonders. The marvels of prayer are seen when we remember that God’s purposes are changed by prayer, God’s vengeance is stayed by prayer, and God’s penalty is remitted by prayer.
Prayer is asking God for something, and for something which He has promised. Prayer is using the divinely appointed means for obtaining what we need and for accomplishing what God proposes to do on earth.
This service of prayer is not a mere rite, a ceremony through which we go, a sort of performance. Prayer is going to God for something needed and desired. Prayer is simply asking God to do for us what He has promised us He will do if we ask Him. The answer is a part of prayer, and is God’s part of it. God’s doing the thing asked for is as much a part of the prayer as the asking of the thing is prayer. Asking is man’s part. Giving is God’s part. The praying belongs to us. The answer belongs to God.
The possibilities of prayer lie in the ability of man to ask large things and in the ability of God to give large things.
God measures the answer according to the prayer. He is limited by the law of prayer in the measure of the answers He gives to prayer. As is the measure of prayer, so will be the answer.
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.
Prayer has no talismanic influence. It is no mere fetish. It has no so-called powers of magic. It is simply making known our requests to God for things agreeable to His will in the name of Christ. It is just yielding our requests to a Father, who knows all things, who has control of all things, and who is able to do all things. Prayer is infinite ignorance trusting to the wisdom of God. Prayer is the voice of need crying out to Him who is inexhaustible in resources. Prayer is helplessness reposing with childlike confidence on the word of its Father in heaven. Prayer is but the verbal
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Fasting and prayer must play an important part as conditions of receiving such large blessings.
That successful praying glorified God was the condition upon which labourers of first quality and sufficient in numbers were to be secured in order to press forward God’s work in the world.
Daily bread is obtained and sanctified by prayer. Reverence, forgiveness of sins, and deliverance from the evil one, and salvation from temptation, are in the hands of prayer.
The evidences of prayer’s accomplishments almost stagger us. They challenge our faith. They encourage our expectations when we pray.
The Church more than ever needs profound convictions of the vast importance of prayer in prosecuting the work committed to it. More praying must be done and better praying if the Church shall be able to perform the difficult, delicate and responsible task given to it by her Lord and Master. Defeat awaits a non-praying Church. Success is sure to follow a Church given to much prayer.
Prayer brings the Holy Spirit upon men to-day in answer to importunate, continued prayer just as it did before Pentecost. The wonders of prayer have not ceased.
All answers to prayer are but the intervention of the providence of God in the affairs of men.
Prayer is but the request of man for God through the Holy Spirit to interfere in behalf of him who prays.
What is called Divine providence is simply Almighty God governing the world for its best interests, and overseeing everything for the good of mankind.
Nothing occurs by accident under the superintendence of an all-wise and perfectly just God. Nothing happens by chance in God’s moral or natural government. God is a God of order, a God of law, but none the less a superintendent in the interest of His intelligent and redeemed creatures. Nothing can take place without the knowledge of God.
God cannot be ruled out of the world. The doctrine of prayer brings Him directly into the world, and moves Him to a direct interference with all of this world’s affairs.
We can lay it down as a proposition, borne out by Scripture, which has a sure foundation, that nothing ever comes into the life of God’s saints without His consent. God is always there when it occurs. He is not far away. He whose eye is on the sparrow is also upon His saints. His presence which fills immensity is always where His saints are. “Certainly I will be with thee,” is the word of God to every child of His.
Not that the saint who trusts the God of providence, and who takes all things to God in prayer, can explain the mysteries of Divine providence, but the praying ones recognize God in everything, see Him in all that comes to them, and are ready to say as John said to Peter at the Sea of Galilee, “It is the Lord.”
Praying saints do not presume to interpret God’s dealings with them nor undertake to explain God’s providences, but they have learned to trust God in the dark as well as in the light, to have faith in God even when “cares like a wild deluge come, and storms of sorrow fall.”
Prayer brings God’s providence into action. Prayer puts God to work in overseeing and directing earth’s affairs for the good of men. Prayer opens the way when it is shut up or straitened.
The God of providence, the God to whom the Christians pray, and the God who interposes in behalf of the children of men for their good, is above nature, in perfect and absolute control of all that belongs to nature. And no law of nature can crush the life out of even a child without God giving His consent, and without such a sad event occurring directly under His all-seeing eye, and without His being immediately present.
Praying men and God’s providence go together.
God is a God of law and order, and all His laws in nature, in providence and in grace work together in perfect accord, with no clash nor disharmony.
