by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
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.
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:
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.
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