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 2, Our Sufficiency, God’s Spirit not man’s spirit..
"The
speaker holds the keys... When properly executed, its benefits are
untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can exceed its damaging results.
Paul
says: “Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers
of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the
letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” The true ministry is
God-touched, God-enabled, and God-made. The Spirit of God is on the
speaker in anointing power.
The
life-giving speaker is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for
God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to
God, and in whom by the power of God’s Spirit the flesh and the world
have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a
life-giving river.
The
preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the
preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it
energy and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his
preaching. Many kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by
preaching that kills, but they are not spiritual forces. They may
resemble spiritual forces, but are only the shadow, the counterfeit;
life they may seem to have. The preaching that kills is the letter;
shapely and orderly it may be, but it is the letter still, the dry,
husky letter, the empty, bald shell.
Truth
unquickened by God’s Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error. It
may be the truth without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade
and touch are deadly, its truth error, its light darkness.
There
may be no discount on his orthodoxy, honesty, cleanness, or
earnestness; but somehow the man, the inner man, in its secret places
has never broken down and surrendered to God, his inner life is not a
great highway for the transmission of God’s message, God’s power.
Somehow self and not God rules in the holy of holiest.
Somewhere,
all unconscious to himself, some spiritual nonconductor has touched his
inner being, and the divine current has been arrested. His inner being
has never felt its thorough spiritual bankruptcy, its utter
powerlessness; he has never learned to cry out with an ineffable cry of
self-despair and self-helplessness till God’s power and God’s fire comes
in and fills, purifies, empowers.
Self-esteem,
self-ability in some pernicious shape has defamed and violated the
temple which should be held sacred for God.
Life-giving speaking costs
the presenter much—death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail
of his own soul.
Only a Crucified messenger can give life. Crucified speaking can come only from a crucified man.”
The complete chapter on Our Sufficiency:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.II.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.
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