by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
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.
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