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 14, unction is the difference:
(Bounds
uses the word “unction” in this discourse; whereas, being passionate
about what you share is a modern expression. Better yet, it is only by
the Anointing of the Holy Spirit that produces this unction, conviction,
a pointed-power in speaking.)
“There
was no eloquence—the honest man never dreamed of such a thing, but
there was far better: a cordial communication of vitalized truth. I say
vitalized because what he declared to others it was impossible not to
feel he lived on himself.”
This
unction is the art of communicating. The person who never had this
unction never had the art of speaking. The person who has lost this
unction has lost the art of influence.
Whatever
other arts he may have and retain? ...the art of speak-making, the art
of eloquence, the art of great, clear thinking, the art of pleasing an
audience? He has lost the divine art of speaking. This unction makes
God’s truth powerful and interesting, draws and attracts, edifies,
convicts, saves.
This
unction vitalizes God’s revealed truth, makes it living and
life-giving. Even God’s truth spoken without this unction is light,
dead, and deadening. Though abounding in truth, though weighty with
thought, though sparkling with rhetoric, though pointed by logic, though
powerful by earnestness, without this divine unction it issues in death
and not in life.
Mr. Spurgeon says:
“I
wonder how long we might beat our brains before we could plainly put
into word what is meant by preaching with unction. Yet he who preaches
knows its presence, and he who hears soon detects its absence. Every one
knows what the freshness of the morning is when orient pearls abound on
every blade of grass, but who can describe it, much less produce it of
itself? Such is the mystery of spiritual anointing. We know, but we
cannot tell to others what it is. It is as easy as it is foolish, to
counterfeit it.
Unction
is a thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse
than worthless. Yet it is, in itself, priceless, and beyond measure
needful if you would edify believers and bring sinners to Christ.”
The complete chapter on unction is the difference:
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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