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by
E.M. Bounds
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January 4 - February 22, 2018
The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God's Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.
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Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much--death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits.
A school to teach preachers how to pray, as God counts praying, would be more beneficial to true piety, true worship, and true preaching than all theological schools.
Prayer--secret fervent believing prayer--lies at the root of all personal godliness.
No man gets God who does not follow hard after him, and no soul follows hard after God who is not after him in early morn.
The preacher must be surrendered to God in the holiest devotion. He is not a professional man, his ministry is not a profession; it is a divine institution, a divine devotion. He is devoted to God. His aim, aspirations, ambition are for God and to God, and to such prayer is as essential as food is to life.
We do not say that men are not to think and use their intellects; but he will use his intellect best who cultivates his heart most.
This is a busy age, bustling and active, and this bustling spirit has invaded the Church of God. Its religious performances are many. The Church works at religion with the order, precision and force of real machinery. But too often it works with the heartlessness of the machine. There is much of the treadmill
movement in our ceaseless round and routine of religious doings. We pray without praying. We sing without singing with the Spirit and the understanding. We have music without the praise of God being in it, or near it. We go to Church by habit, and come home all too gladly when the benediction is pronounced. We read our accustomed chapter in the Bible, and feel quite relieved when the task is done. We say our prayers by rote, as a schoolboy recites his lesson, and are not sorry when the Amen is uttered.
Religion has to do with everything but our hearts. It engages our hands and feet, it takes hold of our voices, it lays its hands on our money, it affects even the postures of our bodies, but it does not take hold of our affections, our desires, our zeal, and make us serious, desperately in earnest, and cause us to be quiet and worshipful in the presence of God. Social affinities attract us to the house of God, not the spirit of the occasion. Church membership keeps us after a...
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The great lack of modern religion is the spirit of devotion. We hear sermons in the same spirit with which we listen to a lecture or hear a speech. We visit the house of God just as if it were a common place, on a level with the theatre, the lecture-room or the forum. We look upon the minister of God not as the divinely-called man of God, but merely as a sort of public speaker, on a plane with the politician, the lawyer, or the average speech maker, or the lecturer. Oh, how the spirit of true and genuine devotion would radically change all this for the better!
2 Cor. 11:23-33.
Would you pray with mighty results? Seek the mighty workings of the Holy Spirit in your own spirit.
How complex, confusing and involved is many a human direction about obtaining the gift of the Holy Spirit as the abiding Comforter, our Sanctifier and the one who empowers us! How simple and direct is our Lord's direction--ASK! This is plain and direct. Ask with urgency, ask without fainting. Ask, seek, knock, till He comes. Your Heavenly Father will surely send Him if you ask for Him. Wait in the Lord for the Holy Spirit.
This is what we are taught to do and enabled to do by the Holy Spirit. If no man can say that Jesus is the Christ but by the Spirit's help; for the much greater reason can no man pray save by the aid of God's Spirit.
To pray by the Holy Spirit we must have Him always. He does not, like earthly teachers, teach us the lesson and then withdraw. He stays to help us practise the lesson He has taught. We pray, not by the precepts and lessons He has taught, but we pray by Him. He is both teacher and lesson. We can only know the lesson because He is ever with us to inspire, to illumine, to explain, to help us to do. We pray not by the truth the Holy Spirit reveals to us, but we pray by the actual presence of the Holy Spirit. He puts the desire in our hearts; kindles that desire by His own flame. We simply give lip
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All men do not go to heaven. All men might go to heaven, but all men will not go to heaven. This we learn from the rich man, who in hell lifted up his eyes being in torments. Heaven is not subjected to the financial and social influences of this world.
No one goes to heaven whose heart is not already there.
We are to do this - put others before ourselves. This is the complete conquest of self, and requires a great victory. He who has gained this is worthy a triumph through the gates into the City! Have we learned this lesson and gained this height? Have we received the crown of this grace? Can we in
honour prefer another? Has the reign of ambition ceased, the love of the world been destroyed, and self crucified? The death of all these must enrich the soil ere it can produce this Divine fruit.
Death is the best thing that can come to the Christian. It puts him in possession of his great fortune.
Patience is a cardinal virtue in Christian character. Its importance can not be overrated. It is strong and sweet, the pillar of strength, the adornment of beauty. It does not succumb under suffering. It is self-restrained. It does not retaliate wrongs.
Brave it is, opposed to cowardice or despondency, and has nothing in common with wrath and revenge, a gentle grace of serenity and sweetness.
The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God’s work and is powerless to project God’s cause in this world.
Our being with God is of use only as we expend its priceless benefits on men.
preach nothing down but the devil and nothing up but Jesus Christ.
If some Christians that have been complaining of their ministers had said and acted less before men and had applied themselves with all their might to cry to God for their ministers — had, as it were, risen and stormed heaven with their humble, fervent, and incessant prayers for them — they would have been much more in the way of success. — JONATHAN EDWARDS
It is an absolute necessity that the preacher be prayed for. These two propositions are wedded into a union which ought never to know any divorce: the preacher must pray; the preacher must be prayed for.
God has no promise of pardon for a prayerless sinner just as He has no promise for the prayerless professor of religion.
Prayer and faith are Siamese twins.
Faith is always praying. Prayer is always believing. Faith must have a tongue by which it can speak. Prayer is the tongue of faith. Faith must receive. Prayer is the hand of faith stretched out to receive. Prayer must rise and soar. Faith must give prayer the wings to fly and soar. Prayer must have an audience with God. Faith opens the door, and access and audience are given. Prayer asks. Faith lays its hand on the thing asked for.
Apostasy begins in the closet. No man ever backslid from the life and power of Christianity who continued constant and fervent in private prayer. He who prays without ceasing is likely to rejoice evermore.
Nothing is too hard for God.
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.
answer. The plea and the answer compose the prayer. God is more ready, more willing and more anxious to give the answer than man is to give the asking. 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’s only condition and limitation of prayer is found in the character of the one who prays.
