Power Through Prayer (20) ... a praying person stirs others to pray

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 20, a praying person stirs others to pray: “God works in my behalf. If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal of the fire of faith.”—Martin Luther 

The call now of prayer to every saint is the Spirit’s loudest and most exigent call. Sainthood’s piety is made, refined, perfected, by prayer. The gospel moves with slow and timid pace when the saints are not at their prayers early and late and long. 

Where are the Christly leaders who can teach the modern saints how to pray and put them at it? Do we know we are raising up a prayerless set of saints? Where are the apostolic leaders who can put God’s people to praying? Let them come to the front and do the work, and it will be the greatest work which can be done. 

The chief ones must lead in the apostolic effort to radicate the vital importance and fact of prayer in the heart and life of the Church. None but praying leaders can have praying followers. Praying apostles will beget praying saints. 

We are not a generation of praying saints. Non-praying saints are a beggarly gang of saints who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the power of saints. Who will restore this breach? The greatest will he be of reformers and apostles, who can set the Church to praying. 

Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter; but capacity for faith, the ability to pray, the power of thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one’s self in God’s glory, and an ever-present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God—men who can set the Church ablaze for God; not in a noisy, showy way, but with an intense and quiet heat that melts and moves everything for God. 

God can work wonders if he can get a suitable man... who prays.  Men who can stir things mightily for God, whose spiritual revolutions change the whole aspect of things, are the universal need of the Church. 

The past has not exhausted the possibilities nor the demands for doing great things for God. The Church that is dependent on its past history for its miracles of power and grace is a fallen Church. 

Let us pray ardently that God’s promise to prayer may be more than realized.

The complete chapter on praying people stir others to pray:

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XX.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 (19) ... deliberation necessary for great results in prayer

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 19, deliberation necessary for great results in prayer: 

Our devotions are not measured by the clock, but time is of their essence. The ability to wait and stay and press belongs essentially to our intercourse with God. Calmness, grasp, strength, are never the companions of hurry. 

Short devotions deplete spiritual vigor, arrest spiritual progress, sap spiritual foundations. They are the prolific source of backsliding, the sure indication of a superficial piety; they deceive, blight, rot the seed, and impoverish the soil. 

It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting. The prayers Moses records may be short, but Moses prayed to God with fastings and mighty cryings forty days and nights. 

The statement of Elijah’s praying may be condensed to a few brief paragraphs, but doubtless Elijah, who when “praying he prayed,” spent many hours of fiery struggle and lofty intercourse with God before he could, with assured boldness. The verbal brief of Paul’s prayers is short, but Paul “prayed night and day exceedingly.” The “Lord’s Prayer” is a divine epitome for infant lips, but the man Christ Jesus prayed many an all-night ere his work was done; and his all-night and long-sustained devotions gave to his work its finish and perfection, and to his character the fullness and glory of its divinity. 

Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in the market. We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until it looks well to us. We can slight our praying, and not realize the peril till the foundations are gone. 

Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying makes the whole religious character short, scrimp, and slovenly. 

It takes good time for the full flow of God into the spirit. Short devotions cut the pipe of God’s full flow. It takes time in the secret places to get the full revelation of God. Little time and hurry mar the picture. 

Our ability to stay with God in our closet measures our ability to stay with God out of the closet. Hasty closet visits are deceptive, defaulting. We are not only deluded by them, but we are losers by them in many ways and in many rich legacies. Tarrying in the closet instructs and wins. We are taught by it, and the greatest victories are often the results of great waiting—waiting till words and plans are exhausted, and silent and patient waiting gains the crown. Jesus Christ asks with an affronted emphasis, “Shall not God avenge his own elect which cry day and night unto him?” 

To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the littlest and meanest of things. True praying has the largest results for good; and poor praying, the least. We cannot do too much of real praying.

We must learn anew the worth of prayer, enter anew the school of prayer.

The complete chapter on deliberation necessary for great results in prayer.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.XIX.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.