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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:15:08 GMT -5
POWER THROUGH PRAYER
EDWARD M. BOUNDS
Power through Prayer has been called "one of the truly great
masterpieces on the theme of prayer." The term classic can
appropriately be applied to this outstanding book.
In twenty provocative and inspiring chapters, each prefaced with
quotations from spiritual giants, Edward M. Bounds stresses the
imperative of vital prayer in the life of a pastor. He says, ". . .
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."
Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with the mower--that
is, to be used only so far as is necessary for his work. May a
physician in plague-time take any more relaxation or recreation than is
necessary for his life, when so many are expecting his help in a case
of life and death? Will you stand by and see sinners gasping under the
pangs of death, and say: "God doth not require me to make myself a
drudge to save them?" Is this the voice of ministerial or Christian
compassion or rather of sensual laziness and diabolical
cruelty.--Richard Baxter
Misemployment of time is injurious to the mind. In illness I have
looked back with self-reproach on days spent in my study; I was wading
through history and poetry and monthly journals, but I was in my study!
Another man's trifling is notorious to all observers, but what am I
doing? Nothing, perhaps, that has reference to the spiritual good of my
congregation. Be much in retirement and prayer. Study the honor and
glory of your Master.--Richard Cecil
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:15:54 GMT -5
1 Men of Prayer Needed
Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on
this, for your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches all
the week. If Satan can only make a covetous minister a lover of praise,
of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself
to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God.
Luther spent his best three hours in prayer.--Robert Murray McCheyne
WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new
methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure
enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a
tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or
organization. God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him
than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for
better methods; God is looking for better men. "There was a man sent
from God whose name was John." The dispensation that heralded and
prepared the way for Christ was bound up in that man John. "Unto us a
child is born, unto us a son is given." The world's salvation comes out
of that cradled Son. When Paul appeals to the personal character of the
men who rooted the gospel in the world, he solves the mystery of their
success. The glory and efficiency of the gospel is staked on the men
who proclaim it. When God declares that "the eyes of the Lord run to
and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the
behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him," he declares the
necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which
to exert his power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that
this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as
baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his
sphere. Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new
organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost
can use--men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not
flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery,
but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men--men of prayer.
An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character
have more to do with the revolutions of nations than either philosophic
historians or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its
application in full to the gospel of Christ, the character and conduct
of the followers of Christ--Christianize the world, transfigure nations
and individuals. Of the preachers of the gospel it is eminently true.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 5
The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the
preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is
the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not
only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full,
unhindered, unwasted flow.
The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if
possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon.
The preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the
mother's bosom is but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is
tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher is. The treasure is in
earthen vessels, and the taste of the vessel impregnates and may
discolor. The man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is
not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes
twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make
the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because
the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The
sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the
divine unction because the man is full of the divine unction.
Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his personal
eccentricities or diverted it by selfish appropriation, but the gospel
was put into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal
trust to be executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and
empowered by the fiery energy of his fiery soul. Paul's sermons--what
were they? Where are they? Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on
the sea of inspiration! But the man Paul, greater than his sermons,
lives forever, in full form, feature and stature, with his molding hand
on the Church. The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies,
the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; the preacher
lives.
The sermon cannot rise in its life-giving forces above the man. Dead
men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill. Everything depends on
the spiritual character of the preacher. Under the Jewish dispensation
the high priest had inscribed in jeweled letters on a golden frontlet:
"Holiness to the Lord." So every preacher in Christ's ministry must be
molded into and mastered by this same holy motto. It is a crying shame
for the Christian ministry to fall lower in holiness of character and
holiness of aim than the Jewish priesthood. Jonathan Edwards said: "I
went on with my eager pursuit after more holiness and conformity to
Christ. The heaven I desired was a heaven of holiness." The gospel of
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 6
Christ does not move by popular waves. It has no self-propagating
power. It moves as the men who have charge of it move. The preacher
must impersonate the gospel. Its divine, most distinctive features must
be embodied in him. The constraining power of love must be in the
preacher as a projecting, eccentric, an all-commanding, self-oblivious
force. The energy of self-denial must be his being, his heart and blood
and bones. He must go forth as a man among men, clothed with humility,
abiding in meekness, wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove; the bonds
of a servant with the spirit of a king, a king in high, royal, in
dependent bearing, with the simplicity and sweetness of a child. The
preacher must throw himself, with all the abandon of a perfect,
self-emptying faith and a self-consuming zeal, into his work for the
salvation of men. Hearty, heroic, compassionate, fearless martyrs must
the men be who take hold of and shape a generation for God. If they be
timid time servers, place seekers, if they be men pleasers or men
fearers, if their faith has a weak hold on God or his Word, if their
denial be broken by any phase of self or the world, they cannot take
hold of the Church nor the world for God.
The preacher's sharpest and strongest preaching should be to himself.
His most difficult, delicate, laborious, and thorough work must be with
himself. The training of the twelve was the great, difficult, and
enduring work of Christ. Preachers are not sermon makers, but men
makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business
who has made himself a man and a saint. It is not great talents nor
great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in
holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for
God--men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives
out of it. These can mold a generation for God.
After this order, the early Christians were formed. Men they were of
solid mold, preachers after the heavenly type--heroic, stalwart,
soldierly, saintly. Preaching with them meant self-denying,
self-crucifying, serious, toilsome, martyr business. They applied
themselves to it in a way that told on their generation, and formed in
its womb a generation yet unborn for God. The preaching man is to be
the praying man. Prayer is the preacher's mightiest weapon. An almighty
force in itself, it gives life and force to all.
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man--God's man--is made in
the closet. His life and his profoundest convictions were born in his
secret communion with God. The burdened and tearful agony of his
spirit, his weightiest and sweetest messages were got when alone with
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 7
God. Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the
pastor.
The pulpit of this day is weak in praying. The pride of learning is
against the dependent humility of prayer. Prayer is with the pulpit too
often only official--a performance for the routine of service. Prayer
is not to the modern pulpit the mighty force it was in Paul's life or
Paul's ministry. 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.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:16:45 GMT -5
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 8
2 Our Sufficiency Is of God
But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his
spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behavior, and
the fewness and fullness of his words have often struck even strangers
with admiration as they used to reach others with consolation. The most
awful, living, reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was
his prayer. And truly it was a testimony. He knew and lived nearer to
the Lord than other men, for they that know him most will see most
reason to approach him with reverence and fear.--William Penn of George
Fox
THE sweetest graces by a slight perversion may bear the bitterest
fruit. The sun gives life, but sunstrokes are death. Preaching is to
give life; it may kill. The preacher holds the keys; he may lock as
well as unlock. Preaching is God's great institution for the planting
and maturing of spiritual life. When properly executed, its benefits
are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can exceed its damaging
results. It is an easy matter to destroy the flock if the shepherd be
unwary or the pasture be destroyed, easy to capture the citadel if the
watchmen be asleep or the food and water be poisoned. Invested with
such gracious prerogatives, exposed to so great evils, involving so
many grave responsibilities, it would be a parody on the shrewdness of
the devil and a libel on his character and reputation if he did not
bring his master influences to adulterate the preacher and the
preaching. In face of all this, the exclamatory interrogatory of Paul,
"Who is sufficient for these things?" is never out of order.
Paul says: "Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able
ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit:
for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life." The true ministry
is God-touched, God-enabled, and God-made. The Spirit of God is on the
preacher in anointing power, the fruit of the Spirit is in his heart,
the Spirit of God has vitalized the man and the word; his preaching
gives life, gives life as the spring gives life; gives life as the
resurrection gives life; gives ardent life as the summer gives ardent
life; gives fruitful life as the autumn gives fruitful life. 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.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 9
The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the
preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it
energy and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his
preaching. Many kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by
preaching that kills, but they are not spiritual forces. They may
resemble spiritual forces, but are only the shadow, the counterfeit;
life they may seem to have, but the life is magnetized. The preaching
that kills is the letter; shapely and orderly it may be, but it is the
letter still, the dry, husky letter, the empty, bald shell. The letter
may have the germ of life in it, but it has no breath of spring to
evoke it; winter seeds they are, as hard as the winter's soil, as icy
as the winter's air, no thawing nor germinating by them. This
letter-preaching has the truth. But even divine truth has no
life-giving energy alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with all
God's forces at its back. Truth unquickened by God's Spirit deadens as
much as, or more than, error. It may be the truth without admixture;
but without the Spirit its shade and touch are deadly, its truth error,
its light darkness. The letter-preaching is unctionless, neither
mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit. There may be tears, but tears cannot
run God's machinery; tears may be but summer's breath on a snow-covered
iceberg, nothing but surface slush. Feelings and earnestness there may
be, but it is the emotion of the actor and the earnestness of the
attorney. The preacher may feel from the kindling of his own sparks, be
eloquent over his own exegesis, earnest in delivering the product of
his own brain; the professor may usurp the place and imitate the fire
of the apostle; brains and nerves may serve the place and feign the
work of God's Spirit, and by these forces the letter may glow and
sparkle like an illumined text, but the glow and sparkle will be as
barren of life as the field sown with pearls. The death-dealing element
lies back of the words, back of the sermon, back of the occasion, back
of the manner, back of the action. The great hindrance is in the
preacher himself. He has not in himself the mighty life-creating
forces. There may be no discount on his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness,
or earnestness; but somehow the man, the inner man, in its secret
places has never broken down and surrendered to God, his inner life is
not a great highway for the transmission of God's message, God's power.
Somehow self and not God rules in the holy of holiest. Somewhere, all
unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his
inner being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner being
has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter
powerlessness; he has never learned to cry out with an ineffable cry of
self-despair and self-helplessness till God's power and God's fire
comes in and fills, purifies, empowers. Self-esteem, self-ability in
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 10
some pernicious shape has defamed and violated the temple which should
be held sacred for God. 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.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:17:30 GMT -5
3 The Letter Kills
During this affliction I was brought to examine my life in relation to
eternity closer than I had done when in the enjoyment of health. In
this examination relative to the discharge of my duties toward my
fellow creatures as a man, a Christian minister, and an officer of the
Church, I stood approved by my own conscience; but in relation to my
Redeemer and Saviour the result was different. My returns of gratitude
and loving obedience bear no proportion to my obligations for
redeeming, preserving, and supporting me through the vicissitudes of
life from infancy to old age. The coldness of my love to Him who first
loved me and has done so much for me overwhelmed and confused me; and
to complete my unworthy character, I had not only neglected to improve
the grace given to the extent of my duty and privilege, but for want of
improvement had, while abounding in perplexing care and labor, declined
from first zeal and love. I was confounded, humbled myself, implored
mercy, and renewed my covenant to strive and devote myself unreservedly
to the Lord.--Bishop McKendree
THE preaching that kills may be, and often is, orthodox--dogmatically,
inviolably orthodox. We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It
is the clean, clear-cut teaching of God's Word, the trophies won by
truth in its conflict with error, the levees which faith has raised
against the desolating floods of honest or reckless misbelief or
unbelief; but orthodoxy, clear and hard as crystal, suspicious and
militant, may be but the letter well-shaped, well-named, and
well-learned, the letter which kills. Nothing is so dead as a dead
orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to
pray.
The preaching that kills may have insight and grasp of principles, may
be scholarly and critical in taste, may have every minutia of the
derivation and grammar of the letter, may be able to trim the letter
into its perfect pattern, and illume it as Plato and Cicero may be
illumined, may study it as a lawyer studies his text-books to form his
brief or to defend his case, and yet be like a frost, a killing frost.
Letter-preaching may be eloquent, enameled with poetry and rhetoric,
sprinkled with prayer spiced with sensation, illumined by genius and
yet these be but the massive or chaste, costly mountings, the rare and
beautiful flowers which coffin the corpse. The preaching which kills
may be without scholarship, unmarked by any freshness of thought or
feeling, clothed in tasteless generalities or vapid specialties, with
style irregular, slovenly, savoring neither of closet nor of study,
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 12
graced neither by thought, expression, or prayer. Under such preaching
how wide and utter the desolation! how profound the spiritual death!
This letter-preaching deals with the surface and shadow of things, and
not the things themselves. It does not penetrate the inner part. It has
no deep insight into, no strong grasp of, the hidden life of God's
Word. It is true to the outside, but the outside is the hull which must
be broken and penetrated for the kernel. The letter may be dressed so
as to attract and be fashionable, but the attraction is not toward God
nor is the fashion for heaven. The failure is in the preacher. God has
not made him. He has never been in the hands of God like clay in the
hands of the potter. He has been busy about the sermon, its thought and
finish, its drawing and impressive forces; but the deep things of God
have never been sought, studied, fathomed, experienced by him. He has
never stood before "the throne high and lifted up," never heard the
seraphim song, never seen the vision nor felt the rush of that awful
holiness, and cried out in utter abandon and despair under the sense of
weakness and guilt, and had his life renewed, his heart touched,
purged, inflamed by the live coal from God's altar. His ministry may
draw people to him, to the Church, to the form and ceremony; but no
true drawings to God, no sweet, holy, divine communion induced. The
Church has been frescoed but not edified, pleased but not sanctified.
Life is suppressed; a chill is on the summer air; the soil is baked.
The city of our God becomes the city of the dead; the Church a
graveyard, not an embattled army. Praise and prayer are stifled;
worship is dead. The preacher and the preaching have helped sin, not
holiness; peopled hell, not heaven.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the
preacher creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in
prayer is feeble in life-giving forces. The preacher who has retired
prayer as a conspicuous and largely prevailing element in his own
character has shorn his preaching of its distinctive life-giving power.
Professional praying there is and will be, but professional praying
helps the preaching to its deadly work. Professional praying chills and
kills both preaching and praying. Much of the lax devotion and lazy,
irreverent attitudes in congregational praying are attributable to
professional praying in the pulpit. Long, discursive, dry, and inane
are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall
like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing
prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their
breath. The deader they are the longer they grow. A plea for short
praying, live praying, real heart praying, praying by the Holy
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 13
Spirit--direct, specific, ardent, simple, unctuous in the pulpit--is in
order. 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.
Stop! Pause! Consider! Where are we? What are we doing? Preaching to
kill? Praying to kill? Praying to God! the great God, the Maker of all
worlds, the Judge of all men! What reverence! what simplicity! what
sincerity! what truth in the inward parts is demanded! How real we must
be! How hearty! Prayer to God the noblest exercise, the loftiest effort
of man, the most real thing! Shall we not discard forever accursed
preaching that kills and prayer that kills, and do the real thing, the
mightiest thing--prayerful praying, life-creating preaching, bring the
mightiest force to bear on heaven and earth and draw on God's
exhaustless and open treasure for the need and beggary of man?
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:18:57 GMT -5
5 Prayer, the Great Essential
You know the value of prayer: it is precious beyond all price. Never,
never neglect it--Sir Thomas Buxton
Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing necessary
to a minister. Pray, then, my dear brother: pray, pray, pray--Edward
Payson
PRAYER, in the preacher's life, in the preacher's study, in the
preacher's pulpit, must be a conspicuous and an all-impregnating force
and an all-coloring ingredient. It must play no secondary part, be no
mere coating. To him it is given to be with his Lord "all night in
prayer." The preacher, to train himself in self-denying prayer, is
charged to look to his Master, who, "rising up a great while before
day, went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed."
The preacher's study ought to be a closet, a Bethel, an altar, a
vision, and a ladder, that every thought might ascend heavenward ere it
went manward; that every part of the sermon might be scented by the air
of heaven and made serious, because God was in the study.
As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled, so preaching, with
all its machinery, perfection, and polish, is at a dead standstill, as
far as spiritual results are concerned, till prayer has kindled and
created the steam. The texture, fineness, and strength of the sermon is
as so much rubbish unless the mighty impulse of prayer is in it,
through it, and behind it. The preacher must, by prayer, put God in the
sermon. The preacher must, by prayer, move God toward the people before
he can move the people to God by his words. The preacher must have had
audience and ready access to God before he can have access to the
people. An open way to God for the preacher is the surest pledge of an
open way to the people.
It is necessary to iterate and reiterate that prayer, as a mere habit,
as a performance gone through by routine or in a professional way, is a
dead and rotten thing. Such praying has no connection with the praying
for which we plead. We are stressing true praying, which engages and
sets on fire every high element of the preacher's being--prayer which
is born of vital oneness with Christ and the fullness of the Holy
Ghost, which springs from the deep, overflowing fountains of tender
compassion, deathless solicitude for man's eternal good; a consuming
zeal for the glory of God; a thorough conviction of the preacher's
difficult and delicate work and of the imperative need of God's
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 18
mightiest help. Praying grounded on these solemn and profound
convictions is the only true praying. Preaching backed by such praying
is the only preaching which sows the seeds of eternal life in human
hearts and builds men up for heaven.
It is true that there may be popular preaching, pleasant preaching,
taking preaching, preaching of much intellectual, literary, and brainy
force, with its measure and form of good, with little or no praying;
but the preaching which secures God's end in preaching must be born of
prayer from text to exordium, delivered with the energy and spirit of
prayer, followed and made to germinate, and kept in vital force in the
hearts of the hearers by the preacher's prayers, long after the
occasion has past.
We may excuse the spiritual poverty of our preaching in many ways, but
the true secret will be found in the lack of urgent prayer for God's
presence in the power of the Holy Spirit. There are preachers
innumerable who can deliver masterful sermons after their order; but
the effects are short-lived and do not enter as a factor at all into
the regions of the spirit where the fearful war between God and Satan,
heaven and hell, is being waged because they are not made powerfully
militant and spiritually victorious by prayer.
The preachers who gain mighty results for God are the men who have
prevailed in their pleadings with God ere venturing to plead with men.
The preachers who are the mightiest in their closets with God are the
mightiest in their pulpits with men.
Preachers are human folks, and are exposed to and often caught by the
strong driftings of human currents. Praying is spiritual work; and
human nature does not like taxing, spiritual work. Human nature wants
to sail to heaven under a favoring breeze, a full, smooth sea. Prayer
is humbling work. It abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory,
and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh
and blood to bear. It is easier not to pray than to bear them. So we
come to one of the crying evils of these times, maybe of all
times--little or no praying. Of these two evils, perhaps little praying
is worse than no praying. Little praying is a kind of make-believe, a
salvo for the conscience, a farce and a delusion.
The little estimate we put on prayer is evident from the little time we
give to it. The time given to prayer by the average preacher scarcely
counts in the sum of the daily aggregate. Not infrequently the
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 19
preacher's only praying is by his bedside in his nightdress, ready for
bed and soon in it, with, perchance the addition of a few hasty
snatches of prayer ere he is dressed in the morning. How feeble, vain,
and little is such praying compared with the time and energy devoted to
praying by holy men in and out of the Bible! How poor and mean our
petty, childish praying is beside the habits of the true men of God in
all ages! To men who think praying their main business and devote time
to it according to this high estimate of its importance does God commit
the keys of his kingdom, and by them does he work his spiritual wonders
in this world. Great praying is the sign and seal of God's great
leaders and the earnest of the conquering forces with which God will
crown their labors.
The preacher is commissioned to pray as well as to preach. His mission
is incomplete if he does not do both well. The preacher may speak with
all the eloquence of men and of angels; but unless he can pray with a
faith which draws all heaven to his aid, his preaching will be "as
sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal" for permanent God-honoring,
soul-saving uses.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:20:05 GMT -5
6 A Praying Ministry Successful
The principal cause of my leanness and unfruitfulness is owing to an
unaccountable backwardness to pray. I can write or read or converse or
hear with a ready heart; but prayer is more spiritual and inward than
any of these, and the more spiritual any duty is the more my carnal
heart is apt to start from it. Prayer and patience and faith are never
disappointed. I have long since learned that if ever I was to be a
minister faith and prayer must make me one. When I can find my heart in
frame and liberty for prayer, everything else is comparatively
easy.--Richard Newton
IT may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in every truly successful
ministry prayer is an evident and controlling force--evident and
controlling in the life of the preacher, evident and controlling in the
deep spirituality of his work. A ministry may be a very thoughtful
ministry without prayer; the preacher may secure fame and popularity
without prayer; the whole machinery of the preacher's life and work may
be run without the oil of prayer or with scarcely enough to grease one
cog; but no ministry can be a spiritual one, securing holiness in the
preacher and in his people, without prayer being made an evident and
controlling force.
The preacher that prays indeed puts God into the work. God does not
come into the preacher's work as a matter of course or on general
principles, but he comes by prayer and special urgency. That God will
be found of us in the day that we seek him with the whole heart is as
true of the preacher as of the penitent. A prayerful ministry is the
only ministry that brings the preacher into sympathy with the people.
Prayer as essentially unites to the human as it does to the divine. A
prayerful ministry is the only ministry qualified for the high offices
and responsibilities of the preacher. Colleges, learning, books,
theology, preaching cannot make a preacher, but praying does. The
apostles' commission to preach was a blank till filled up by the
Pentecost which praying brought. A prayerful minister has passed beyond
the regions of the popular, beyond the man of mere affairs, of
secularities, of pulpit attractiveness; passed beyond the
ecclesiastical organizer or general into a sublimer and mightier
region, the region of the spiritual. Holiness is the product of his
work; transfigured hearts and lives emblazon the reality of his work,
its trueness and substantial nature. God is with him. His ministry is
not projected on worldly or surface principles. He is deeply stored
with and deeply schooled in the things of God. His long, deep
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 21
communings with God about his people and the agony of his wrestling
spirit have crowned him as a prince in the things of God. The iciness
of the mere professional has long since melted under the intensity of
his praying.
The superficial results of many a ministry, the deadness of others, are
to be found in the lack of praying. No ministry can succeed without
much praying, and this praying must be fundamental, ever-abiding,
ever-increasing. The text, the sermon, should be the result of prayer.
The study should be bathed in prayer, all its duties so impregnated
with prayer, its whole spirit the spirit of prayer. "I am sorry that I
have prayed so little," was the deathbed regret of one of God's chosen
ones, a sad and remorseful regret for a preacher. "I want a life of
greater, deeper, truer prayer," said the late Archbishop Tait. So may
we all say, and this may we all secure.
God's true preachers have been distinguished by one great feature: they
were men of prayer. Differing often in many things, they have always
had a common center. They may have started from different points, and
traveled by different roads, but they converged to one point: they were
one in prayer. God to them was the center of attraction, and prayer was
the path that led to God. These men prayed not occasionally, not a
little at regular or at odd times; but they so prayed that their
prayers entered into and shaped their characters; they so prayed as to
affect their own lives and the lives of others; they so prayed as to
make the history of the Church and influence the current of the times.
They spent much time in prayer, not because they marked the shadow on
the dial or the hands on the clock, but because it was to them so
momentous and engaging a business that they could scarcely give over.
Prayer was to them what it was to Paul, a striving with earnest effort
of soul; what it was to Jacob, a wrestling and prevailing; what it was
to Christ, "strong crying and tears." They "prayed always with all
prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all
perseverance." "The effectual, fervent prayer" has been the mightiest
weapon of God's mightiest soldiers. The statement in regard to
Elijah--that he "was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he
prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth
by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and
the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her
fruit"--comprehends all prophets and preachers who have moved their
generation for God, and shows the instrument by which they worked their
wonders.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 22
7 Much Time Should Be Given to Prayer
The great masters and teachers in Christian doctrine have always found
in prayer their highest source of illumination. Not to go beyond the
limits of the English Church, it is recorded of Bishop Andrews that he
spent five hours daily on his knees. The greatest practical resolves
that have enriched and beautified human life in Christian times have
been arrived at in prayer.--Canon Liddon
WHILE many private prayers, in the nature of things, must be short;
while public prayers, as a rule, ought to be short and condensed; while
there is ample room for and value put on ejaculatory prayer--yet in our
private communions with God time is a feature essential to its value.
Much time spent with God is the secret of all successful praying.
Prayer which is felt as a mighty force is the mediate or immediate
product of much time spent with God. Our short prayers owe their point
and efficiency to the long ones that have preceded them. The short
prevailing prayer cannot be prayed by one who has not prevailed with
God in a mightier struggle of long continuance. Jacob's victory of
faith could not have been gained without that all-night wrestling.
God's acquaintance is not made by pop calls. God does not bestow his
gifts on the casual or hasty comers and goers. Much with God alone is
the secret of knowing him and of influence with him. He yields to the
persistency of a faith that knows him. He bestows his richest gifts
upon those who declare their desire for and appreciation of those gifts
by the constancy as well as earnestness of their importunity. Christ,
who in this as well as other things is our Example, spent many whole
nights in prayer. His custom was to pray much. He had his habitual
place to pray. Many long seasons of praying make up his history and
character. Paul prayed day and night. It took time from very important
interests for Daniel to pray three times a day. David's morning, noon,
and night praying were doubtless on many occasions very protracted.
While we have no specific account of the time these Bible saints spent
in prayer, yet the indications are that they consumed much time in
prayer, and on some occasions long seasons of praying was their custom.
We would not have any think that the value of their prayers is to be
measured by the clock, but our purpose is to impress on our minds the
necessity of being much alone with God; and that if this feature has
not been produced by our faith, then our faith is of a feeble and
surface type.
The men who have most fully illustrated Christ in their character, and
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 23
have most powerfully affected the world for him, have been men who
spent so much time with God as to make it a notable feature of their
lives. Charles Simeon devoted the hours from four till eight in the
morning to God. Mr. Wesley spent two hours daily in prayer. He began at
four in the morning. Of him, one who knew him well wrote: "He thought
prayer to be more his business than anything else, and I have seen him
come out of his closet with a serenity of face next to shining." John
Fletcher stained the walls of his room by the breath of his prayers.
Sometimes he would pray all night; always, frequently, and with great
earnestness. His whole life was a life of prayer. "I would not rise
from my seat," he said, "without lifting my heart to God." His greeting
to a friend was always: "Do I meet you praying?" Luther said: "If I
fail to spend two hours in prayer each morning, the devil gets the
victory through the day. I have so much business I cannot get on
without spending three hours daily in prayer." He had a motto: "He that
has prayed well has studied well."
Archbishop Leighton was so much alone with God that he seemed to be in
a perpetual meditation. "Prayer and praise were his business and his
pleasure," says his biographer. Bishop Ken was so much with God that
his soul was said to be God-enamored. He was with God before the clock
struck three every morning. Bishop Asbury said: "I propose to rise at
four o'clock as often as I can and spend two hours in prayer and
meditation." Samuel Rutherford, the fragrance of whose piety is still
rich, rose at three in the morning to meet God in prayer. Joseph
Alleine arose at four o'clock for his business of praying till eight.
If he heard other tradesmen plying their business before he was up, he
would exclaim: "O how this shames me! Doth not my Master deserve more
than theirs?" He who has learned this trade well draws at will, on
sight, and with acceptance of heaven's unfailing bank.
One of the holiest and among the most gifted of Scotch preachers says:
"I ought to spend the best hours in communion with God. It is my
noblest and most fruitful employment, and is not to be thrust into a
corner. The morning hours, from six to eight, are the most
uninterrupted and should be thus employed. After tea is my best hour,
and that should be solemnly dedicated to God. I ought not to give up
the good old habit of prayer before going to bed; but guard must be
kept against sleep. When I awake in the night, I ought to rise and
pray. A little time after breakfast might be given to intercession."
This was the praying plan of Robert McCheyne. The memorable Methodist
band in their praying shame us. "From four to five in the morning,
private prayer; from five to six in the evening, private prayer."
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 24
John Welch, the holy and wonderful Scotch preacher, thought the day ill
spent if he did not spend eight or ten hours in prayer. He kept a plaid
that he might wrap himself when he arose to pray at night. His wife
would complain when she found him lying on the ground weeping. He would
reply: "O woman, I have the souls of three thousand to answer for, and
I know not how it is with many of them!"
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:20:53 GMT -5
8 Examples of Praying Men
The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind
is capable; praying, that is, with the total concentration of the
faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are
absolutely incapable of prayer.--Samuel Taylor Coleridge
BISHOP WILSON says: "In H. Martyn's journal the spirit of prayer, the
time he devoted to the duty, and his fervor in it are the first things
which strike me."
Payson wore the hard-wood boards into grooves where his knees pressed
so often and so long. His biographer says: "His continuing instant in
prayer, be his circumstances what they might, is the most noticeable
fact in his history, and points out the duty of all who would rival his
eminency. To his ardent and persevering prayers must no doubt be
ascribed in a great measure his distinguished and almost uninterrupted
success."
The Marquis DeRenty, to whom Christ was most precious, ordered his
servant to call him from his devotions at the end of half an hour. The
servant at the time saw his face through an aperture. It was marked
with such holiness that he hated to arouse him. His lips were moving,
but he was perfectly silent. He waited until three half hours had
passed; then he called to him, when he arose from his knees, saying
that the half hour was so short when he was communing with Christ.
Brainerd said: "I love to be alone in my cottage, where I can spend
much time in prayer."
William Bramwell is famous in Methodist annals for personal holiness
and for his wonderful success in preaching and for the marvelous
answers to his prayers. For hours at a time he would pray. He almost
lived on his knees. He went over his circuits like a flame of fire. The
fire was kindled by the time he spent in prayer. He often spent as much
as four hours in a single season of prayer in retirement.
Bishop Andrewes spent the greatest part of five hours every day in
prayer and devotion.
Sir Henry Havelock always spent the first two hours of each day alone
with God. If the encampment was struck at 6 A.M., he would rise at
four.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 26
Earl Cairns rose daily at six o'clock to secure an hour and a half for
the study of the Bible and for prayer, before conducting family worship
at a quarter to eight.
Dr. Judson's success in prayer is attributable to the fact that he gave
much time to prayer. He says on this point: "Arrange thy affairs, if
possible, so that thou canst leisurely devote two or three hours every
day not merely to devotional exercises but to the very act of secret
prayer and communion with God. Endeavor seven times a day to withdraw
from business and company and lift up thy soul to God in private
retirement. Begin the day by rising after midnight and devoting some
time amid the silence and darkness of the night to this sacred work.
Let the hour of opening dawn find thee at the same work. Let the hours
of nine, twelve, three, six, and nine at night witness the same. Be
resolute in his cause. Make all practicable sacrifices to maintain it.
Consider that thy time is short, and that business and company must not
be allowed to rob thee of thy God." Impossible, say we, fanatical
directions! Dr. Judson impressed an empire for Christ and laid the
foundations of God's kingdom with imperishable granite in the heart of
Burmah. He was successful, one of the few men who mightily impressed
the world for Christ. Many men of greater gifts and genius and learning
than he have made no such impression; their religious work is like
footsteps in the sands, but he has engraven his work on the adamant.
The secret of its profundity and endurance is found in the fact that he
gave time to prayer. He kept the iron red-hot with prayer, and God's
skill fashioned it with enduring power. No man can do a great and
enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a
man of prayer who does not give much time to praying.
Is it true that prayer is simply the compliance with habit, dull and
mechanical? A petty performance into which we are trained till
tameness, shortness, superficiality are its chief elements? "Is it true
that prayer is, as is assumed, little else than the half-passive play
of sentiment which flows languidly on through the minutes or hours of
easy reverie?" Canon Liddon continues: "Let those who have really
prayed give the answer. They sometimes describe prayer with the
patriarch Jacob as a wrestling together with an Unseen Power which may
last, not unfrequently in an earnest life, late into the night hours,
or even to the break of day. Sometimes they refer to common
intercession with St. Paul as a concerted struggle. They have, when
praying, their eyes fixed on the Great Intercessor in Gethsemane, upon
the drops of blood which fall to the ground in that agony of
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 27
resignation and sacrifice. Importunity is of the essence of successful
prayer. Importunity means not dreaminess but sustained work. It is
through prayer especially that the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence
and the violent take it by force. It was a saying of the late Bishop
Hamilton that "No man is likely to do much good in prayer who does not
begin by looking upon it in the light of a work to be prepared for and
persevered in with all the earnestness which we bring to bear upon
subjects which are in our opinion at once most interesting and most
necessary."
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:21:41 GMT -5
9 Begin the Day with Prayer
I ought to pray before seeing any one. Often when I sleep long, or meet
with others early, it is eleven or twelve o'clock before I begin secret
prayer. This is a wretched system. It is unscriptural. Christ arose
before day and went into a solitary place. David says: "Early will I
seek thee"; "Thou shalt early hear my voice." Family prayer loses much
of its power and sweetness, and I can do no good to those who come to
seek from me. The conscience feels guilty, the soul unfed, the lamp not
trimmed. Then when in secret prayer the soul is often out of tune, I
feel it is far better to begin with God--to see his face first, to get
my soul near him before it is near another.--Robert Murray McCheyne
THE men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on
their knees. He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity
and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor
headway seeking him the rest of the day. If God is not first in our
thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last place the
remainder of the day.
Behind this early rising and early praying is the ardent desire which
presses us into this pursuit after God. Morning listlessness is the
index to a listless heart. The heart which is behindhand in seeking God
in the morning has lost its relish for God. David's heart was ardent
after God. He hungered and thirsted after God, and so he sought God
early, before daylight. The bed and sleep could not chain his soul in
its eagerness after God. Christ longed for communion with God; and so,
rising a great while before day, he would go out into the mountain to
pray. The disciples, when fully awake and ashamed of their indulgence,
would know where to find him. We might go through the list of men who
have mightily impressed the world for God, and we would find them early
after God.
A desire for God which cannot break the chains of sleep is a weak thing
and will do but little good for God after it has indulged itself fully.
The desire for God that keeps so far behind the devil and the world at
the beginning of the day will never catch up.
It is not simply the getting up that puts men to the front and makes
them captain generals in God's hosts, but it is the ardent desire which
stirs and breaks all self-indulgent chains. But the getting up gives
vent, increase, and strength to the desire. If they had lain in bed and
indulged themselves, the desire would have been quenched. The desire
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 29
aroused them and put them on the stretch for God, and this heeding and
acting on the call gave their faith its grasp on God and gave to their
hearts the sweetest and fullest revelation of God, and this strength of
faith and fullness of revelation made them saints by eminence, and the
halo of their sainthood has come down to us, and we have entered on the
enjoyment of their conquests. But we take our fill in enjoyment, and
not in productions. We build their tombs and write their epitaphs, but
are careful not to follow their examples.
We need a generation of preachers who seek God and seek him early, who
give the freshness and dew of effort to God, and secure in return the
freshness and fullness of his power that he may be as the dew to them,
full of gladness and strength, through all the heat and labor of the
day. Our laziness after God is our crying sin. The children of this
world are far wiser than we. They are at it early and late. We do not
seek God with ardor and diligence. 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.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:22:39 GMT -5
10 Prayer and Devotion United
There is a manifest want of spiritual influence on the ministry of the
present day. I feel it in my own case and I see it in that of others. I
am afraid there is too much of a low, managing, contriving, maneuvering
temper of mind among us. We are laying ourselves out more than is
expedient to meet one man's taste and another man's prejudices. The
ministry is a grand and holy affair, and it should find in us a simple
habit of spirit and a holy but humble indifference to all consequences.
The leading defect in Christian ministers is want of a devotional
habit.--Richard Cecil
NEVER was there greater need for saintly men and women; more imperative
still is the call for saintly, God-devoted preachers. The world moves
with gigantic strides. Satan has his hold and rule on the world, and
labors to make all its movements subserve his ends. Religion must do
its best work, present its most attractive and perfect models. By every
means, modern sainthood must be inspired by the loftiest ideals and by
the largest possibilities through the Spirit. Paul lived on his knees,
that the Ephesian Church might measure the heights, breadths, and
depths of an unmeasurable saintliness, and "be filled with all the
fullness of God." Epaphras laid himself out with the exhaustive toil
and strenuous conflict of fervent prayer, that the Colossian Church
might "stand perfect and complete in all the will of God." Everywhere,
everything in apostolic times was on the stretch that the people of God
might each and "all come in the unity of the faith, and of the
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of
the stature of the fullness of Christ." No premium was given to dwarfs;
no encouragement to an old babyhood. The babies were to grow; the old,
instead of feebleness and infirmities, were to bear fruit in old age,
and be fat and flourishing. The divinest thing in religion is holy men
and holy women.
No amount of money, genius, or culture can move things for God.
Holiness energizing the soul, the whole man aflame with love, with
desire for more faith, more prayer, more zeal, more consecration--this
is the secret of power. These we need and must have, and men must be
the incarnation of this God-inflamed devotedness. God's advance has
been stayed, his cause crippled: his name dishonored for their lack.
Genius (though the loftiest and most gifted), education (though the
most learned and refined), position, dignity, place, honored names,
high ecclesiastics cannot move this chariot of our God. It is a fiery
one, and fiery forces only can move it. The genius of a Milton fails.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 31
The imperial strength of a Leo fails. Brainerd's spirit can move it.
Brainerd's spirit was on fire for God, on fire for souls. Nothing
earthly, worldly, selfish came in to abate in the least the intensity
of this all-impelling and all-consuming force and flame.
Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of
devotion is the spirit of prayer. Prayer and devotion are united as
soul and body are united, as life and the heart are united. There is no
real prayer without devotion, no devotion without prayer. 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.
The preacher, above everything else, must be devoted to God. The
preacher's relations to God are the insignia and credentials of his
ministry. These must be clear, conclusive, unmistakable. No common,
surface type of piety must be his. If he does not excel in grace, he
does not excel at all. If he does not preach by life, character,
conduct, he does not preach at all. If his piety be light, his
preaching may be as soft and as sweet as music, as gifted as Apollo,
yet its weight will be a feather's weight, visionary, fleeting as the
morning cloud or the early dew. Devotion to God--there is no substitute
for this in the preacher's character and conduct. Devotion to a Church,
to opinions, to an organization, to orthodoxy--these are paltry,
misleading, and vain when they become the source of inspiration, the
animus of a call. God must be the mainspring of the preacher's effort,
the fountain and crown of all his toil. The name and honor of Jesus
Christ, the advance of his cause, must be all in all. The preacher must
have no inspiration but the name of Jesus Christ, no ambition but to
have him glorified, no toil but for him. Then prayer will be a source
of his illuminations, the means of perpetual advance, the gauge of his
success. The perpetual aim, the only ambition, the preacher can cherish
is to have God with him.
Never did the cause of God need perfect illustrations of the
possibilities of prayer more than in this age. No age, no person, will
be ensamples of the gospel power except the ages or persons of deep and
earnest prayer. A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine
power. Prayerless hearts will never rise to these Alpine heights. 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
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 32
civilization and its betterment by the increase of holiness and
Christlikeness by the energy of prayer. The Jews were much better when
Christ came than in the ages before. It was the golden age of their
Pharisaic religion. Their golden religious age crucified Christ. Never
more praying, never less praying; never more sacrifices, never less
sacrifice; never less idolatry, never more idolatry; never more of
temple worship, never less of God worship; never more of lip service,
never less of heart service (God worshiped by lips whose hearts and
hands crucified God's Son!); never more of churchgoers, never less of
saints.
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.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:23:36 GMT -5
11 An Example of Devotion
I urge upon you communion with Christ a growing communion. There are
curtains to be drawn aside in Christ that we never saw, and new
foldings of love in him. I despair that I shall ever win to the far end
of that love, there are so many plies in it. Therefore dig deep, and
sweat and labor and take pains for him, and set by as much time in the
day for him as you can. We will be won in the labor.--Samuel Rutherford
God has now, and has had, many of these devoted, prayerful
preachers--men in whose lives prayer has been a mighty, controlling,
conspicuous force. The world has felt their power, God has felt and
honored their power, God's cause has moved mightily and swiftly by
their prayers, holiness has shone out in their characters with a divine
effulgence.
God found one of the men he was looking for in David Brainerd, whose
work and name have gone into history. He was no ordinary man, but was
capable of shining in any company, the peer of the wise and gifted
ones, eminently suited to fill the most attractive pulpits and to labor
among the most refined and the cultured, who were so anxious to secure
him for their pastor. President Edwards bears testimony that he was "a
young man of distingushed talents, had extraordinary knowledge of men
and things, had rare conversational powers, excelled in his knowledge
of theology, and was truly, for one so young, an extraordinary divine,
and especially in all matters relating to experimental religion. I
never knew his equal of his age and standing for clear and accurate
notions of the nature and essence of true religion. His manner in
prayer was almost inimitable, such as I have very rarely known equaled.
His learning was very considerable, and he had extraordinary gifts for
the pulpit."
No sublimer story has been recorded in earthly annals than that of
David Brainerd; no miracle attests with diviner force the truth of
Christianity than the life and work of such a man. Alone in the savage
wilds of America, struggling day and night with a mortal disease,
unschooled in the care of souls, having access to the Indians for a
large portion of time only through the bungling medium of a pagan
interpreter, with the Word of God in his heart and in his hand, his
soul fired with the divine flame, a place and time to pour out his soul
to God in prayer, he fully established the worship of God and secured
all its gracious results. The Indians were changed with a great change
from the lowest besotments of an ignorant and debased heathenism to
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 34
pure, devout, intelligent Christians; all vice reformed, the external
duties of Christianity at once embraced and acted on; family prayer set
up; the Sabbath instituted and religiously observed; the internal
graces of religion exhibited with growing sweetness and strength. The
solution of these results is found in David Brainerd himself, not in
the conditions or accidents but in the man Brainerd. He was God's man,
for God first and last and all the time. God could flow unhindered
through him. The omnipotence of grace was neither arrested nor
straightened by the conditions of his heart; the whole channel was
broadened and cleaned out for God's fullest and most powerful passage,
so that God with all his mighty forces could come down on the hopeless,
savage wilderness, and transform it into his blooming and fruitful
garden; for nothing is too hard for God to do if he can get the right
kind of a man to do it with.
Brainerd lived the life of holiness and prayer. His diary is full and
monotonous with the record of his seasons of fasting, meditation, and
retirement. The time he spent in private prayer amounted to many hours
daily. "When I return home," he said, "and give myself to meditation,
prayer, and fasting, my soul longs for mortification, self-denial,
humility, and divorcement from all things of the world." "I have
nothing to do," he said, "with earth but only to labor in it honestly
for God. I do not desire to live one minute for anything which earth
can afford." After this high order did he pray: "Feeling somewhat of
the sweetness of communion with God and the constraining force of his
love, and how admirably it captivates the soul and makes all the
desires and affections to center in God, I set apart this day for
secret fasting and prayer, to entreat God to direct and bless me with
regard to the great work which I have in view of preaching the gospel,
and that the Lord would return to me and show me the light of his
countenance. I had little life and power in the forenoon. Near the
middle of the afternoon God enabled me to wrestle ardently in
intercession for my absent friends, but just at night the Lord visited
me marvelously in prayer. I think my soul was never in such agony
before. I felt no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were
opened to me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of
souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I thought were
the children of God, personally, in many distant places. I was in such
agony from sun half an hour high till near dark that I was all over wet
with sweat, but yet it seemed to me I had done nothing. O, my dear
Saviour did sweat blood for poor souls! I longed for more compassion
toward them. I felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine
love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 35
God." It was prayer which gave to his life and ministry their marvelous
power.
The men of mighty prayer are men of spiritual might. Prayers never die.
Brainerd's whole life was a life of prayer. By day and by night he
prayed. Before preaching and after preaching he prayed. Riding through
the interminable solitudes of the forests he prayed. On his bed of
straw he prayed. Retiring to the dense and lonely forests, he prayed.
Hour by hour, day after day, early morn and late at night, he was
praying and fasting, pouring out his soul, interceding, communing with
God. He was with God mightily in prayer, and God was with him mightily,
and by it he being dead yet speaketh and worketh, and will speak and
work till the end comes, and among the glorious ones of that glorious
day he will be with the first.
Jonathan Edwards says of him: "His life shows the right way to success
in the works of the ministry. He sought it as the soldier seeks victory
in a siege or battle; or as a man that runs a race for a great prize.
Animated with love to Christ and souls, how did he labor? Always
fervently. Not only in word and doctrine, in public and in private, but
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. Like a true
son of Jacob, he persevered in wrestling through all the darkness of
the night, until the breaking of the day!"
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:24:48 GMT -5
12 Heart Preparation Necessary
For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the heart or pierces the
conscience but what comes from a living conscience.--William Penn
In the morning was more engaged in preparing the head than the heart.
This has been frequently my error, and I have always felt the evil of
it especially in prayer. Reform it then, O Lord! Enlarge my heart and I
shall preach.--Robert Murray McCheyne
A sermon that has more head infused into it than heart will not borne
home with efficacy to the hearers.--Richard Cecil
PRAYER, with its manifold and many-sided forces, helps the mouth to
utter the truth in its fullness and freedom. The preacher is to be
prayed for, the preacher is made by prayer. The preacher's mouth is to
be prayed for; his mouth is to be opened and filled by prayer. A holy
mouth is made by praying, by much praying; a brave mouth is made by
praying, by much praying. The Church and the world, God and heaven, owe
much to Paul's mouth; Paul's mouth owed its power to prayer.
How manifold, illimitable, valuable, and helpful prayer is to the
preacher in so many ways, at so many points, in every way! One great
value is, it helps his heart.
Praying makes the preacher a heart preacher. Prayer puts the preacher's
heart into the preacher's sermon; prayer puts the preacher's sermon
into the preacher's heart.
The heart makes the preacher. Men of great hearts are great preachers.
Men of bad hearts may do a measure of good, but this is rare. The
hireling and the stranger may help the sheep at some points, but it is
the good shepherd with the good shepherd's heart who will bless the
sheep and answer the full measure of the shepherd's place.
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. A prepared heart will make a prepared
sermon.
Volumes have been written laying down the mechanics and taste of
sermon-making, until we have become possessed with the idea that this
scaffolding is the building. The young preacher has been taught to lay
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 37
out all his strength on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a
mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a
vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead
of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation,
reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness. By it we have lost the
true idea of preaching, lost preaching power, lost pungent conviction
for sin, lost the rich experience and elevated Christian character,
lost the authority over consciences and lives which always results from
genuine preaching.
It would not do to say that preachers study too much. Some of them do
not study at all; others do not study enough. Numbers do not study the
right way to show themselves workmen approved of God. 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 that
we know too much, but that we do not meditate on God and his word and
watch and fast and pray enough. The heart is the great hindrance to our
preaching. Words pregnant with divine truth find in our hearts
nonconductors; arrested, they fall shorn and powerless.
Can ambition, that lusts after praise and place, preach the gospel of
Him who made himself of no reputation and took on Him the form of a
servant? Can the proud, the vain, the egotistical preach the gospel of
him who was meek and lowly? Can the bad-tempered, passionate, selfish,
hard, worldly man preach the system which teems with long-suffering,
self-denial, tenderness, which imperatively demands separation from
enmity and crucifixion to the world? Can the hireling official,
heartless, perfunctory, preach the gospel which demands the shepherd to
give his life for the sheep? Can the covetous man, who counts salary
and money, preach the gospel till he has gleaned his heart and can say
in the spirit of Christ and Paul in the words of Wesley: "I count it
dung and dross; I trample it under my feet; I (yet not I, but the grace
of God in me) esteem it just as the mire of the streets, I desire it
not, I seek it 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.
It was this surrender and subordination of intellect and genius to the
divine and spiritual forces which made Paul peerless among the
apostles. It was this which gave Wesley his power and radicated his
labors in the history of humanity. This gave to Loyola the strength to
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 38
arrest the retreating forces of Catholicism.
Our great need is heart-preparation. Luther held it as an axiom: "He
who has prayed well has studied well." 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 not say that preachers should not
be students; but we do say that their great study should be the Bible,
and he studies the Bible best who has kept his heart with diligence. We
do not say that the preacher should not know men, but he will be the
greater adept in human nature who has fathomed the depths and
intricacies of his own heart. We do say that while the channel of
preaching is the mind, its fountain is the heart; you may broaden and
deepen the channel, but if you do not look well to the purity and depth
of the fountain, you will have a dry or polluted channel. 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. We do say that he
who has struggled with his own heart and conquered it; who has taught
it humility, faith, love, truth, mercy, sympathy, courage; who can pour
the rich treasures of the heart thus trained, through a manly
intellect, all surcharged with the power of the gospel on the
consciences of his hearers--such a one will be the truest, most
successful preacher in the esteem of his Lord.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:26:08 GMT -5
13 Grace from the Heart Rather than the Head
Study not to be a fine preacher. Jerichos are blown down with rams'
horns. Look simply unto Jesus for preaching food; and what is wanted
will be given, and what is given will be blessed, whether it be a
barley grain or a wheaten loaf, a crust or a crumb. Your mouth will be
a flowing stream or a fountain sealed, according as your heart is.
Avoid all controversy in preaching, talking, or writing; preach nothing
down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ.--Berridge
THE heart is the Saviour of the world. Heads do not save. Genius,
brains, brilliancy, strength, natural gifts do not save. The gospel
flows through hearts. All the mightiest forces are heart forces. All
the sweetest and loveliest graces are heart graces. Great hearts make
great characters; great hearts make divine characters. God is love.
There is nothing greater than love, nothing greater than God. Hearts
make heaven; heaven is love. There is nothing higher, nothing sweeter,
than heaven. It is the heart and not the head which makes God's great
preachers. The heart counts much every way in religion. The heart must
speak from the pulpit. The heart must hear in the pew. In fact, we
serve God with our hearts. Head homage does not pass current in heaven.
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. Big hearts make big preachers; good
hearts make good preachers. A theological school to enlarge and
cultivate the heart is the golden desideratum of the gospel. The pastor
binds his people to him and rules his people by his heart. They may
admire his gifts, they may be proud of his ability, they may be
affected for the time by his sermons; but the stronghold of his power
is his heart. His scepter is love. The throne of his power is his
heart.
The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep. Heads never make
martyrs. It is the heart which surrenders the life to love and
fidelity. It takes great courage to be a faithful pastor, but the heart
alone can supply this courage. Gifts and genius may be brave, but it is
the gifts and genius of the heart and not of the head.
It is easier to fill the head than it is to prepare the heart. It is
easier to make a brain sermon than a heart sermon. It was heart that
drew the Son of God from heaven. It is heart that will draw men to
heaven. Men of heart is what the world needs to sympathize with its
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 40
woe, to kiss away its sorrows, to compassionate its misery, and to
alleviate its pain. Christ was eminently the man of sorrows, because he
was preeminently the man of heart.
"Give me thy heart," is God's requisition of men. "Give me thy heart!
is man's demand of man.
A professional ministry is a heartless ministry. When salary plays a
great part in the ministry, the heart plays little part. We may make
preaching our business, and not put our hearts in the business. He who
puts self to the front in his preaching puts heart to the rear. He who
does not sow with his heart in his study will never reap a harvest for
God. The closet is the heart's study. We will learn more about how to
preach and what to preach there than we can learn in our libraries.
"Jesus wept" is the shortest and biggest verse in the Bible. It is he
who goes forth weeping (not preaching great sermons), bearing precious
seed, who shall come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
Praying gives sense, brings wisdom, broadens and strengthens the mind.
The closet is a perfect school-teacher and schoolhouse for the
preacher. Thought is not only brightened and clarified in prayer, but
thought is born in prayer. We can learn more in an hour praying, when
praying indeed, than from many hours in the study. Books are in the
closet which can be found and read nowhere else. Revelations are made
in the closet which are made nowhere else.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:26:53 GMT -5
14 Unction a Necessity
One bright benison which private prayer brings down upon the ministry
is an indescribable and inimitable something--an unction from the Holy
One . . . . If the anointing which we bear come not from the Lord of
hosts, we are deceivers, since only in prayer can we obtain it. Let us
continue instant constant fervent in supplication. Let your fleece lie
on the thrashing floor of supplication till it is wet with the dew of
heaven.--Charles Haddon Spurgeon
ALEXANDER KNOX, a Christian philosopher of the days of Wesley, not an
adherent but a strong personal friend of Wesley, and with much
spiritual sympathy with the Wesleyan movement, writes: "It is strange
and lamentable, but I verily believe the fact to be that except among
Methodists and Methodistical clergyman, there is not much interesting
preaching in England. The clergy, too generally have absolutely lost
the art. There is, I conceive, in the great laws of the moral world a
kind of secret understanding like the affinities in chemistry, between
rightly promulgated religious truth and the deepest feelings of the
human mind. Where the one is duly exhibited, the other will respond.
Did not our hearts burn within us?--but to this devout feeling is
indispensable in the speaker. Now, I am obliged to state from my own
observation that this onction, as the French not unfitly term it, is
beyond all comparison more likely to be found in England in a Methodist
conventicle than in a parish Church. This, and this alone, seems really
to be that which fills the Methodist houses and thins the Churches. I
am, I verily think, no enthusiast; I am a most sincere and cordial
churchman, a humble disciple of the School of Hale and Boyle, of Burnet
and Leighton. Now I must aver that when I was in this country, two
years ago, I did not hear a single preacher who taught me like my own
great masters but such as are deemed Methodistical. And I now despair
of getting an atom of heart instruction from any other quarter. The
Methodist preachers (however I may not always approve of all their
expressions) do most assuredly diffuse this true religion and
undefiled. I felt real pleasure last Sunday. I can bear witness that
the preacher did at once speak the words of truth and soberness. There
was no eloquence--the honest man never dreamed of such a thing'but
there was far better: a cordial communication of vitalized truth. I say
vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible not to
feel he lived on himself."
This unction is the art of preaching. The preacher who never had this
unction never had the art of preaching. The preacher who has lost this
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 42
unction has lost the art of preaching. Whatever other arts he may have
and retain the art of sermon-making, the art of eloquence, the art of
great, clear thinking, the art of pleasing an audience he has lost the
divine 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 living and
life-giving. Even God's truth spoken without this unction is light,
dead, and deadening. Though abounding in truth, though weighty with
thought, though sparkling with rhetoric, though pointed by logic,
though powerful by earnestness, without this divine unction it issues
in death and not in life. Mr. Spurgeon says: "I wonder how long we
might beat our brains before we could plainly put into word what is
meant by preaching with unction. Yet he who preaches knows its
presence, and he who hears soon detects its absence. Samaria, in
famine, typifies a discourse without it. Jerusalem, with her feast of
fat things, full of marrow, may represent a sermon enriched with it.
Every one knows what the freshness of the morning is when orient pearls
abound on every blade of grass, but who can describe it, much less
produce it of itself? Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing. We
know, but we cannot tell to others what it is. It is as easy as it is
foolish, to counterfeit it. Unction is a thing which you cannot
manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than worthless. Yet it is,
in itself, priceless, and beyond measure needful if you would edify
believers and bring sinners to Christ."
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 43
15 Unction, the Mark of True Gospel Preaching
Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. 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.
Remember that God, and not man, must have the glory. If the veil of the
world's machinery were lifted off, how much we would find is done in
answer to the prayers of God's children.--Robert Murray McCheyne
UNCTION is that indefinable, indescribable something which an old,
renowned Scotch preacher describes thus: "There is sometimes somewhat
in preaching that cannot be ascribed either to matter or expression,
and cannot be described what it is, or from whence it cometh, but with
a sweet violence it pierceth into the heart and affections and comes
immediately from the Word; but if there be any way to obtain such a
thing, it is by the heavenly disposition of the speaker."
We call it unction. It is this unction which makes the word of God
"quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing
even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and
marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." It
is this unction which gives the words of the preacher such point,
sharpness, and power, and which creates such friction and stir in many
a dead congregation. The same truths have been told in the strictness
of the letter, smooth as human oil could make them; but no signs of
life, not a pulse throb; all as peaceful as the grave and as dead. The
same preacher in the meanwhile receives a baptism of this unction, the
divine inflatus is on him, the letter of the Word has been embellished
and fired by this mysterious power, and the throbbings of life
begin--life which receives or life which resists. The unction pervades
and convicts the conscience and breaks the heart.
This divine unction is the feature which separates and distinguishes
true gospel preaching from all other methods of presenting the truth,
and which creates a wide spiritual chasm between the preacher who has
it and the one who has it not. It backs and impregns revealed truth
with all the energy of God. Unction is simply putting God in his own
word and on his own preachers. By mighty and great prayerfulness and by
continual prayerfulness, it is all potential and personal to the
preacher; it inspires and clarifies his intellect, gives insight and
grasp and projecting power; it gives to the preacher heart power, which
is greater than head power; and tenderness, purity, force flow from the
heart by it. Enlargement, freedom, fullness of thought, directness and
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 44
simplicity of utterance are the fruits of this unction.
Often earnestness is mistaken for this unction. He who has the divine
unction will be earnest in the very spiritual nature of things, but
there may be a vast deal of earnestness without the least mixture of
unction.
Earnestness and unction look alike from some points of view.
Earnestness may be readily and without detection substituted or
mistaken for unction. It requires a spiritual eye and a spiritual taste
to discriminate.
Earnestness may be sincere, serious, ardent, and persevering. It goes
at a thing with good will, pursues it with perseverance, and urges it
with ardor; puts force in it. But all these forces do not rise higher
than the mere human. The man is in it--the whole man, with all that he
has of will and heart, of brain and genius, of planning and working and
talking. He has set himself to some purpose which has mastered him, and
he pursues to master it. There may be none of God in it. There may be
little of God in it, because there is so much of the man in it. He may
present pleas in advocacy of his earnest purpose which please or touch
and move or overwhelm with conviction of their importance; and in all
this earnestness may move along earthly ways, being propelled by human
forces only, its altar made by earthly hands and its fire kindled by
earthly flames. It is said of a rather famous preacher of gifts, whose
construction of Scripture was to his fancy or purpose, that he "grew
very eloquent over his own exegesis." So men grow exceeding earnest
over their own plans or movements. Earnestness may be selfishness
simulated.
What of unction? It is the indefinable in preaching which makes it
preaching. It is that which distinguishes and separates preaching from
all mere human addresses. It is the divine in preaching. It makes the
preaching sharp to those who need sharpness. It distills as the dew to
those who need to he refreshed. It is well described as:
"a two-edged sword
Of heavenly temper keen,
And double were the wounds it made
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 45
Wherever it glanced between.
'Twas death to silt; 'twas life
To all who mourned for sin.
It kindled and it silenced strife,
Made war and peace within."
This unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in the closet.
It is heaven's distillation in answer to prayer. It is the sweetest
exhalation of the Holy Spirit. It impregnates, suffuses, softens,
percolates, cuts, and soothes. It carries the Word like dynamite, like
salt, like sugar; makes the Word a soother, an arranger, a revealer, a
searcher; makes the hearer a culprit or a saint, makes him weep like a
child and live like a giant; opens his heart and his purse as gently,
yet as strongly as the spring opens the leaves. This unction is not the
gift of genius. It is not found in the halls of learning. No eloquence
can woo it. No industry can win it. No prelatical hands can confer it.
It is the gift of God--the signet set to his own messengers. It is
heaven's knighthood given to the chosen true and brave ones who have
sought this anointed honor through many an hour of tearful, wrestling
prayer.
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.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:27:41 GMT -5
16 Much Prayer the Price of Unction
All the minister's efforts will be vanity or worse than vanity if he
have not unction. Unction must come down from heaven and spread a savor
and feeling and relish over his ministry; and among the other means of
qualifying himself for his office, the Bible must hold the first place,
and the last also must be given to the Word of God and prayer.--Richard
Cecil
IN the Christian system unction is the anointing of the Holy Ghost,
separating unto God's work and qualifying for it. This unction is the
one divine enablement by which the preacher accomplishes the peculiar
and saving ends of preaching. Without this unction there are no true
spiritual results accomplished; the results and forces in preaching do
not rise above the results of unsanctified speech. Without unction the
former is as potent as the pulpit.
This divine unction on the preacher generates through the Word of God
the spiritual results that flow from the gospel; and without this
unction, these results are not secured. Many pleasant impressions may
be made, but these all fall far below the ends of gospel preaching.
This unction may be simulated. There are many things that look like it,
there are many results that resemble its effects; but they are foreign
to its results and to its nature. The fervor or softness excited by a
pathetic or emotional sermon may look like the movements of the divine
unction, but they have no pungent, perpetrating heart-breaking force.
No heart-healing balm is there in these surface, sympathetic, emotional
movements; they are not radical, neither sin-searching nor sin-curing.
This divine unction is the one distinguishing feature that separates
true gospel preaching from all other methods of presenting truth. It
backs and interpenetrates the revealed truth with all the force of God.
It illumines the Word and broadens and enrichens the intellect and
empowers it to grasp and apprehend the Word. It qualifies the
preacher's heart, and brings it to that condition of tenderness, of
purity, of force and light that are necessary to secure the highest
results. This unction gives to the preacher liberty and enlargement of
thought and soul--a freedom, fullness, and directness of utterance that
can be secured by no other process.
Without this unction on the preacher the gospel has no more power to
propagate itself than any other system of truth. This is the seal of
its divinity. Unction in the preacher puts God in the gospel. Without
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 47
the unction, God is absent, and the gospel is left to the low and
unsatisfactory forces that the ingenuity, interest, or talents of men
can devise to enforce and project its doctrines.
It is in this element that the pulpit oftener fails than in any other
element. Just at this all-important point it lapses. Learning it may
have, brilliancy and eloquence may delight and charm, sensation or less
offensive methods may bring the populace in crowds, mental power may
impress and enforce truth with all its resources; but without this
unction, each and all these will be but as the fretful assault of the
waters on a Gibraltar. Spray and foam may cover and spangle; but the
rocks are there still, unimpressed and unimpressible. The human heart
can no more be swept of its hardness and sin by these human forces than
these rocks can be swept away by the ocean's ceaseless flow.
This unction is the consecration force, and its presence the continuous
test of that consecration. It is this divine anointing on the preacher
that secures his consecration to God and his work. Other forces and
motives may call him to the work, but this only is consecration. A
separation to God's work by the power of the Holy Spirit is the only
consecration recognized by God as legitimate.
The unction, the divine unction, this heavenly anointing, is what the
pulpit needs and must have. This divine and heavenly oil put on it by
the imposition of God's hand must soften and lubricate the whole
man--heart, head, spirit--until it separates him with a mighty
separation from all earthly, secular, worldly, selfish motives and
aims, separating him to everything that is pure and Godlike.
It is the presence of this unction on the preacher that creates the
stir and friction in many a congregation. The same truths have been
told in the strictness of the letter, but no ruffle has been seen, no
pain or pulsation felt. All is quiet as a graveyard. Another preacher
comes, and this mysterious influence is on him; the letter of the Word
has been fired by the Spirit, the throes of a mighty movement are felt,
it is the unction that pervades and stirs the conscience and breaks the
heart. Unctionless preaching makes everything hard, dry, acrid, dead.
This unction is not a memory or an era of the past only; it is a
present, realized, conscious fact. It belongs to the experience of the
man as well as to his preaching. It is that which transforms him into
the image of his divine Master, as well as that by which he declares
the truths of Christ with power. It is so much the power in the
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 48
ministry as to make all else seem feeble and vain without it, and by
its presence to atone for the absence of all other and feebler forces.
This unction is not an inalienable gift. It is a conditional gift, and
its presence is perpetuated and increased by the same process by which
it was at first secured; by unceasing prayer to God, by impassioned
desires after God, by estimating it, by seeking it with tireless ardor,
by deeming all else loss and failure without it.
How and whence comes this unction? Direct from God in answer to prayer.
Praying hearts only are the hearts filled with this holy oil; praying
lips only are anointed with this divine unction.
Prayer, much prayer, is the price of preaching unction; prayer, much
prayer, is the one, sole condition of keeping this unction. Without
unceasing prayer the unction never comes to the preacher. Without
perseverance in prayer, the unction, like the manna overkept, breeds
worms.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2024 13:29:03 GMT -5
17 Prayer Marks Spiritual Leadership
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire
nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or
laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom
of heaven on earth. God does nothing but in answer to prayer.--John
Wesley
THE apostles knew the necessity and worth of prayer to their ministry.
They knew that their high commission as apostles, instead of relieving
them from the necessity of prayer, committed them to it by a more
urgent need; so that they were exceedingly jealous else some other
important work should exhaust their time and prevent their praying as
they ought; so they appointed laymen to look after the delicate and
engrossing duties of ministering to the poor, that they (the apostles)
might, unhindered, "give themselves continually to prayer and to the
ministry of the word." Prayer is put first, and their relation to
prayer is put most strongly--"give themselves to it," making a business
of it, surrendering themselves to praying, putting fervor, urgency,
perseverance, and time in it.
How holy, apostolic men devoted themselves to this divine work of
prayer! "Night and day praying exceedingly," says Paul. "We will give
ourselves continually to prayer" is the consensus of apostolic
devotement. How these New Testament preachers laid themselves out in
prayer for God's people! How they put God in full force into their
Churches by their praying! These holy apostles did not vainly fancy
that they had met their high and solemn duties by delivering faithfully
God's word, but their preaching was made to stick and tell by the ardor
and insistence of their praying. Apostolic praying was as taxing,
toilsome, and imperative as apostolic preaching. They prayed mightily
day and night to bring their people to the highest regions of faith and
holiness. They prayed mightier still to hold them to this high
spiritual altitude. The preacher who has never learned in the school of
Christ the high and divine art of intercession for his people will
never learn the art of preaching, though homiletics be poured into him
by the ton, and though he be the most gifted genius in sermon-making
and sermon-delivery.
The prayers of apostolic, saintly leaders do much in making saints of
those who are not apostles. If the Church leaders in after years had
been as particular and fervent in praying for their people as the
apostles were, the sad, dark times of worldliness and apostasy had not
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 50
marred the history and eclipsed the glory and arrested the advance of
the Church. Apostolic praying makes apostolic saints and keeps
apostolic times of purity and power in the Church.
What loftiness of soul, what purity and elevation of motive, what
unselfishness, what self-sacrifice, what exhaustive toil, what ardor of
spirit, what divine tact are requisite to be an intercessor for men!
The preacher is to lay himself out in prayer for his people; not that
they might be saved, simply, but that they be mightily saved. The
apostles laid themselves out in prayer that their saints might be
perfect; not that they should have a little relish for the things of
God, but that they "might be filled with all the fullness of God." Paul
did not rely on his apostolic preaching to secure this end, but "for
this cause he bowed his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Paul's praying carried Paul's converts farther along the highway of
sainthood than Paul's preaching did. Epaphras did as much or more by
prayer for the Colossian saints than by his preaching. He labored
fervently always in prayer for them that "they might stand perfect and
complete in all the will of God."
Preachers are preeminently God's leaders. They are primarily
responsible for the condition of the Church. They shape its character,
give tone and direction to its life.
Much every way depends on these leaders. They shape the times and the
institutions. The Church is divine, the treasure it incases is
heavenly, but it bears the imprint of the human. The treasure is in
earthen vessels, and it smacks of the vessel. The Church of God makes,
or is made by, its leaders. Whether it makes them or is made by them,
it will be what its leaders are; spiritual if they are so, secular if
they are, conglomerate if its leaders are. Israel's kings gave
character to Israel's piety. A Church rarely revolts against or rises
above the religion of its leaders. Strongly spiritual leaders; men of
holy might, at the lead, are tokens of God's favor; disaster and
weakness follow the wake of feeble or worldly leaders. Israel had
fallen low when God gave children to be their princes and babes to rule
over them. No happy state is predicted by the prophets when children
oppress God's Israel and women rule over them. Times of spiritual
leadership are times of great spiritual prosperity to the Church.
Prayer is one of the eminent characteristics of strong spiritual
leadership. Men of mighty prayer are men of might and mold things.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 51
Their power with God has the conquering tread.
How can a man preach who does not get his message fresh from God in the
closet? How can he preach without having his faith quickened, his
vision cleared, and his heart warmed by his closeting with God? Alas,
for the pulpit lips which are untouched by this closet flame. Dry and
unctionless they will ever be, and truths divine will never come with
power from such lips. As far as the real interests of religion are
concerned, a pulpit without a closet will always be a barren thing.
A preacher may preach in an official, entertaining, or learned way
without prayer, but between this kind of preaching and sowing God's
precious seed with holy hands and prayerful, weeping hearts there is an
immeasurable distance.
A prayerless ministry is the undertaker for all God's truth and for
God's Church. He may have the most costly casket and the most beautiful
flowers, but it is a funeral, notwithstanding the charmful array. A
prayerless Christian will never learn God's truth; a prayerless
ministry will never be able to teach God's truth. Ages of millennial
glory have been lost by a prayerless Church. The coming of our Lord has
been postponed indefinitely by a prayerless Church. Hell has enlarged
herself and filled her dire caves in the presence of the dead service
of a prayerless Church.
The best, the greatest offering is an offering of prayer. If the
preachers of the twentieth century will learn well the lesson of
prayer, and use fully the power of prayer, the millennium will come to
its noon ere the century closes. "Pray without ceasing" is the trumpet
call to the preachers of the twentieth century. If the twentieth
century will get their texts, their thoughts, their words, their
sermons in their closets, the next century will find a new heaven and a
new earth. The old sin-stained and sin-eclipsed heaven and earth will
pass away under the power of a praying ministry.
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 52
18 Preachers Need the Prayers of the People
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
SOMEHOW the practice of praying in particular for the preacher has
fallen into disuse or become discounted. Occasionally have we heard the
practice arraigned as a disparagement of the ministry, being a public
declaration by those who do it of the inefficiency of the ministry. It
offends the pride of learning and self-sufficiency, perhaps, and these
ought to be offended and rebuked in a ministry that is so derelict as
to allow them to exist.
Prayer, to the preacher, is not simply the duty of his profession, a
privilege, but it is a necessity. Air is not more necessary to the
lungs than prayer is to the preacher. It is absolutely necessary for
the preacher to pray. 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. It will take all the praying he can do, and all the praying
he can get done, to meet the fearful responsibilities and gain the
largest, truest success in his great work. The true preacher, next to
the cultivation of the spirit and fact of prayer in himself, in their
intensest form, covets with a great covetousness the prayers of God's
people.
The holier a man is, the more does he estimate prayer; the clearer does
he see that God gives himself to the praying ones, and that the measure
of God's revelation to the soul is the measure of the soul's longing,
importunate prayer for God. Salvation never finds its way to a
prayerless heart. The Holy Spirit never abides in a prayerless spirit.
Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul. Christ knows nothing of
prayerless Christians. The gospel cannot be projected by a prayerless
preacher. Gifts, talents, education, eloquence, God's call, cannot
abate the demand of prayer, but only intensify the necessity for the
preacher to pray and to be prayed for. The more the preacher's eyes are
opened to the nature, responsibility, and difficulties in his work, the
more will he see, and if he be a true preacher the more will he feel,
the necessity of prayer; not only the increasing demand to pray
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 53
himself, but to call on others to help him by their prayers.
Paul is an illustration of this. If any man could project the gospel by
dint of personal force, by brain power, by culture, by personal grace,
by God's apostolic commission, God's extraordinary call, that man was
Paul. That the preacher must be a man given to prayer, Paul is an
eminent example. That the true apostolic preacher must have the prayers
of other good people to give to his ministry its full quota of success,
Paul is a preeminent example. He asks, he covets, he pleads in an
impassioned way for the help of all God's saints. He knew that in the
spiritual realm, as elsewhere, in union there is strength; that the
concentration and aggregation of faith, desire, and prayer increased
the volume of spiritual force until it became overwhelming and
irresistible in its power. Units of prayer combined, like drops of
water, make an ocean which defies resistance. So Paul, with his clear
and full apprehension of spiritual dynamics, determined to make his
ministry as impressive, as eternal, as irresistible as the ocean, by
gathering all the scattered units of prayer and precipitating them on
his ministry. May not the solution of Paul's preeminence in labors and
results, and impress on the Church and the world, be found in this fact
that he was able to center on himself and his ministry more of prayer
than others? To his brethren at Rome he wrote: "Now I beseech you,
brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the
Spirit, that ye strive together with me in prayers to God for me." To
the Ephesians he says: "Praying always with all prayer and supplication
in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and
supplication for all saints; and for me, that utterance may be given
unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of
the gospel." To the Colossians he emphasizes: "Withal praying also for
us, that God would open unto us a door of utterance, to speak the
mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds: that I may make it
manifest as I ought to speak." To the Thessalonians he says sharply,
strongly: "Brethren, pray for us." Paul calls on the Corinthian Church
to help him: "Ye also helping together by prayer for us." This was to
be part of their work. They were to lay to the helping hand of prayer.
He in an additional and closing charge to the Thessalonian Church about
the importance and necessity of their prayers says: "Finally, brethren,
pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be
glorified, even as it is with you: and that we may be delivered from
unreasonable and wicked men." He impresses the Philippians that all his
trials and opposition can be made subservient to the spread of the
gospel by the efficiency of their prayers for him. Philemon was to
prepare a lodging for him, for through Philemon's prayer Paul was to be
Power Through Prayer: E. M. Bounds 54
his guest.
Paul's attitude on this question illustrates his humility and his deep
insight into the spiritual forces which project the gospel. More than
this, it teaches a lesson for all times, that if Paul was so dependent
on the prayers of God's saints to give his ministry success, how much
greater the necessity that the prayers of God's saints be centered on
the ministry of to-day!
Paul did not feel that this urgent plea for prayer was to lower his
dignity, lessen his influence, or depreciate his piety. What if it did?
Let dignity go, let influence be destroyed, let his reputation be
marred--he must have their prayers. Called, commissioned, chief of the
Apostles as he was, all his equipment was imperfect without the prayers
of his people. He wrote letters everywhere, urging them to pray for
him. Do you pray for your preacher? Do you pray for him in secret?
Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or
followed up by private praying. The praying ones are to the preacher as
Aaron and Hur were to Moses. They hold up his hands and decide the
issue that is so fiercely raging around them.
The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the Church to praying.
They did not ignore the grace of cheerful giving. They were not
ignorant of the place which religious activity and work occupied an the
spiritual life; but not one nor all of these, in apostolic estimate or
urgency, could at all compare in necessity and importance with prayer.
The most sacred and urgent pleas were used, the most fervid
exhortations, the most comprehensive and arousing words were uttered to
enforce the all-important obligation and necessity of prayer.
"Put the saints everywhere to praying" is the burden of the apostolic
effort and the keynote of apostolic success. Jesus Christ had striven
to do this in the days of his personal ministry. As he was moved by
infinite compassion at the ripened fields of earth perishing for lack
of laborers and pausing in his own praying--he tries to awaken the
stupid sensibilities of his disciples to the duty of prayer as he
charges them, "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest that he will send forth
laborers into his harvest." "And he spake a parable unto them to this
end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint."
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