by Dale Shumaker
Spirit Savvy Network
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
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