Power Through Prayer

by E.M. Bounds

Devotion to God—there is no substitute for this in the preacher’s character and conduct.

No age, no person, will be examples of the gospel power except the ages or persons of deep and earnest prayer.

The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of holiness and Christlikeness by the energy of prayer.

It is prayer-force which makes saints. Holy characters are formed by the power of real praying. The more of true saints, the more of praying; the more of praying, the more of true saints.

for nothing is too hard for God to do if he can get the right kind of a man to do it with.

The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might.

Prayers never die.

in prayers by day and night, wrestling with God in secret and travailing in birth with unutterable groans

and agonies, until Christ was formed in the hearts of the people to whom he was sent.

preacher. Prayer puts the preacher’s heart into the preacher’s sermon; prayer puts the preacher’s sermon into the preacher’s heart.

We have emphasized sermon-preparation until we have lost sight of the important thing to be prepared—the heart.

A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon.

But our great lack is not in head

culture, but in heart culture; not lack of knowledge but lack of holiness is our sad and telling defect—not

God’s revelation does not need the light of human genius, the polish and strength of human culture, the brilliancy of human thought, the force of human brains to adorn or enforce it; but it does demand the simplicity, the docility, humility, and faith of a child’s heart.

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.

We do say that while the channel of preaching is the mind, its fountain is the heart;

We do say that almost any man of common intelligence has sense enough to preach the gospel, but very few have grace enough to do so.

Your mouth will be a flowing stream or a fountain sealed, according as your heart is.

preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ.

We believe that one of the serious and most popular errors of the modern pulpit is the putting of more thought than prayer, of more head than of heart in its sermons.

It takes great courage to be a faithful pastor, but the heart alone can supply this courage.

It is easier to fill the head than it is to prepare the heart.

Christ was eminently the man of sorrows, because he was preeminently the man of heart.

He who puts self to the front in his preaching puts heart to the rear.

The closet is the heart’s study.

Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, broadens and strengthens the mind.

Thought is not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but thought is born in prayer.

If the anointing which we bear come not from the Lord of hosts, we are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain it.

This unction is the art of preaching.

This unction makes God’s truth powerful

and interesting, draws and attracts, edifies, convicts, saves.

This unction vitalizes God’s revealed truth, makes it livi...

Yet he who preaches knows its presence, and he who hears soon detects its absence.

A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear and your heart full of God’s Spirit is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.

Unction is simply putting God in his own word and on his own preachers.

he “grew very eloquent over his own exegesis.” So men grow exceeding earnest over their own plans or movements. Earnestness may be selfishness simulated.

This unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in the closet.

Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it takes a diviner endowment, a more powerful energy than earnestness or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win estranged and depraved hearts to God, to repair the breaches and restore the Church to her old ways of purity and power. Nothing but this holy unction can do this.