Power Through Prayer (18) ... ministers need the prayer of the people

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

personal contact: 4spirit@gmail.com

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer. 

Power Through Prayer, chapter 18, ministers need the prayer of the people.

(One note is we all are called to be ministers. We all have a place in minister. So we all need the prayers of each other.) 

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. 

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. 

The more the minister’s eyes are opened to the nature, responsibility, and difficulties in his work, the more will he see, and if he be a true minister the more will he feel, the necessity of prayer; not only the increasing demand to pray himself, but to call on others to help him by their prayers. 

Paul did not feel that this urgent plea for prayer was to lower his dignity, lessen his influence, or depreciate his piety.  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 others who minister? Do you pray for them in secret? Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.

The plea and purpose of the apostles were to put the Church to praying. 

“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 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 spoke a parable to them to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint.”

The complete chapter on ministers need the prayers of the people

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XVIII.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many great classic works on Christian Growth by the best of the Saints of Old whose Inspired insights have endured through the ages.

Power Through Prayer (17) ... prayer marks Spiritual leadership

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer. 

Power Through Prayer, chapter 17, prayer marks Spiritual leadership.

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.

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. 

Prayer is one of the eminent characteristics of strong spiritual leadership. Men of mighty prayer are men of might and mold things. Their power with God has the conquering tread.

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 complete chapter on prayer marks Spiritual leadership:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XVII.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old whose works have been passed down through the ages.

Power Through Prayer (16) ... much prayer the price of the anointing, the unction

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer. 

Power Through Prayer, chapter 16, much prayer is the price of the anointing, the unction:

In the Christian system unction is the anointing of the Holy Spirit, separating unto God’s work and qualifying for it. This unction is the one divine enablement by which accomplishes the peculiar and saving ends of all efforts for Christ. Without this unction there are no true spiritual results accomplished; the results and forces do not rise above the results of unsanctified speech. Without unction the former is as potent as any human speaker. 

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 speech 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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, speaking, the presenter, unction; prayer, much prayer, is the one, sole condition of keeping this unction. Without unceasing prayer the unction never comes to the person sharing Christ’s message. Without perseverance in prayer, the unction, like the manna overkept, breeds worms.

The complete chapter on much prayer is the price of the anointing, the unction.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XVI.html 

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old whose works have been passed down through the ages.

Power Through Prayer (15) ... Unction, Penetrating Power

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,

Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace

Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer.

Power Through Prayer, chapter 15, Unction ... Penetrating Power:

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,  or from where it comes, but with a sweet violence it pierces into the heart and affections and comes immediately from the Word.”

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 such point, sharpness, and power, and which creates such friction and stir in many.

A baptism of this unction, makes the letter of the Word become embellished and fired by a mysterious power, in that a throbbing of life begins—life which receives or life which resists. The unction pervades and convicts the conscience and breaks the heart.

Unction is simply putting God in his own word. By mighty and great prayerfulness and by continual prayerfulness, it is all potential and personal to the speaker; it inspires and clarifies his intellect, gives insight and grasp and projecting power; it gives to the person 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 simplicity of utterance are the fruits of this unction.

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.

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.

The complete chapter on unction ... penetrating power:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XV.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library and many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old whose works have been passed down through the ages.

Power Through Prayer (14) ... Unction is the difference

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,

Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace

Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer.

Power Through Prayer, chapter 14, unction is the difference:

(Bounds uses the word “unction” in this discourse; whereas, being passionate about what you share is a modern expression. Better yet, it is only by the Anointing of the Holy Spirit that produces this unction, conviction, a pointed-power in speaking.)

“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 communicating. The person who never had this unction never had the art of speaking. The person who has lost this unction has lost the art of influence.

Whatever other arts he may have and retain? ...the art of speak-making, the art of eloquence, the art of great, clear thinking, the art of pleasing an audience? He has lost the divine art of speaking. 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. 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.”

The complete chapter on unction is the difference:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XIV.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library and many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old whose works have been passed down through the ages.

Power Through Prayer (13) ... the heart not the head changes lives

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,

Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace

Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer.

Power Through Prayer, chapter 13, the heart not the head changes lives:

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.  Great hearts make great characters; great hearts make divine characters. God is love. Hearts make heaven; heaven is love.

It is the heart and not the head which makes God’s great people of God. 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.

A theological school to enlarge and cultivate the heart is the golden desideratum of the gospel.

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 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.

The closet is the heart’s study. We will learn more about how to speak and what to say it 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 speaking great speeches), bearing precious seed, who shall come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

The complete chapter on the heart not the head changes lives:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XIII.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library and many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old whose works have been passed down through the ages.

Power Through Prayer (12) ... Heart Preparation is Necessary

by Dale Shumaker

Spirit Savvy Network

www.spiritsavvy.net

Finding your mission, Empowering your life through prayer,

Becoming a Missionary in the Marketplace

Leading others to be Missionaries in the Marketplace

Power through Prayer by E. M. Bounds is becoming a book on prayer that is being highly recommended. Many great people of faith have said Bounds has been a major influence in having a dedicated prayer life. Here are summaries of the chapters in Power through Prayer.

Power Through Prayer, chapter 12, Heart Preparation is Necessary:

Praying makes the presenter a heart presenter. Prayer puts the presenter’s heart into the presenter’s message; prayer puts the presenter’s message into the presenter’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 preparation until we have lost sight of the important thing to be prepared—the heart. A prepared heart is much better than a prepared message. A prepared heart will make a prepared presentation.

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.

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, our presenting, our sharing. Words pregnant with divine truth find in our hearts nonconductors; arrested, they fall shorn and powerless.

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.

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 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 person in the esteem of his Lord.

The complete chapter on heart preparation is necessary:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XII.html

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library and many great classic works on Christian Growth, by the best of the Saints of Old whose works have been passed down through the ages.