If you have ever suspected that your prayers were missing something — that the words were right but the life behind them was thin — The Necessity of Prayer is E. M. Bounds putting his finger on exactly what. Rather than teach prayer as a technique, Bounds sets it down beside the graces it cannot live without — faith, trust, desire, fervency, importunity, character, obedience, vigilance, the Word of God — and asks, one at a time, whether yours is joined to them. It is the most orderly of his eight books on prayer, and the one most likely to change how you pray this week. This guide gives you the book’s single claim, the way it is built, the themes to watch for, and some honest ways to read it. The full text is free to read on Ochorus at The Necessity of Prayer.
What the book is, and Bounds’s one claim
The title is not decoration. Bounds means necessity in the strict sense: prayer is not an optional accessory to the Christian life but the thing without which that life does not run at all. He wrote it near the end of nineteen obscure years in Washington, Georgia, when he rose at four in the morning and prayed until seven with no congregation and no salary — and it reads like a report from a man describing what he did every day, not a theory he had read about. Published only after his death in 1913, it is the most systematic statement of a conviction he never once softened: that God works through praying people, and that everything else the church builds is scaffolding around that.
His deeper argument is that prayer never stands by itself. We tend to treat praying as a self-contained act — say the words, and the machinery turns. Bounds insists it is bound up with the whole condition of the soul:
Faith does the impossible because it brings God to undertake for us, and nothing is impossible with God.
E. M. Bounds
That is the heart of the book in one line. Prayer is only as alive as the faith, desire, and obedience it flows out of. A prayer offered without faith, or without real longing, or by a life that will not obey, is not weak prayer — in Bounds’s reckoning it is scarcely prayer at all. This is answer-first teaching for anyone who has felt their praying go dead: the trouble is rarely the words, and almost always the graces the words are meant to carry.
How the book is built: one grace set beside another
The structure is refreshingly plain. After a brief foreword, Bounds gives a chapter — sometimes two — to prayer paired with each of the qualities it depends on, and lets each pairing do its own work:
- Prayer and Faith — the initial quality, the hand that reaches for the Unseen.
- Prayer and Trust — faith settled into rest and confidence.
- Prayer and Desire — the inward craving that gives prayer its heat.
- Prayer and Fervency — earnestness that stakes something on the outcome.
- Prayer and Importunity — the holy stubbornness that keeps asking.
- Prayer and Character and Conduct — what we are and what we do, shaped on our knees.
- Prayer and Obedience — praying and doing as two sides of one loyalty.
- Prayer and Vigilance — the watchfulness that guards a praying life.
- Prayer and the Word of God — Scripture as the soil prayer grows in.
- Prayer and the House of God — the praying congregation, where my house shall be called the house of prayer (Isaiah 56:7).
Because the chapters are modular, the book reads well in short sittings — one grace at a time. And because Bounds teaches through stories rather than syllogisms, the argument never turns dry. He opens the faith chapter with the parable of a hunted fawn that runs and hides its head between a hunter’s legs, and draws the point without apology: so it is when human helplessness appeals to Almighty God. His method is portraiture more than proof, and it is deliberate.
The central themes to watch for
Desire is the engine. Bounds will not let you separate prayer from wanting. Desire, he says, precedes prayer, accompanies it, and follows it; prayer is simply desire finding its voice. Where the longing is faint, the praying will be faint too:
The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words.
E. M. Bounds
It is a searching test. Jesus tied asking to seeking and knocking in Matthew 7:7, and told his hearers in Mark 11:24 to desire and believe as they pray. Bounds simply asks whether we actually want what we say we are asking for.
Fervency is what desire looks like when it burns. If desire is the engine, fervency is the heat it throws off, and Bounds has no patience for prayer that risks nothing. Cold, formal petition, he warns, comes with empty hands and stakes nothing on the outcome:
Fervourless prayer has no heart in it; it is an empty thing, an unfit vessel.
E. M. Bounds
This is the same earnestness James 5:16 has in view when it promises that the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous person avails much — and it is one reason the book can be uncomfortable reading. Bounds is not describing a mood you can manufacture, but a fire he expects to be tended.
Trust is faith at rest. Bounds is careful to distinguish trust from faith without divorcing them: faith believes the promise, and trust leans its whole weight on the One who made it. He tells the small story of a lost muffler returned by the wind to make an outsized point — that the God who rides upon the storm bends even the weather to answer his people — and uses it to argue that the settled, restful confidence of trust is what keeps faith from collapsing into anxiety while it waits.
Importunity is not impatience — it is endurance. Reading the parable of the persistent widow, where the Lord taught that men ought always to pray, and not to faint (Luke 18:1), Bounds recovers a word most of us have quietly dropped. To pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17) is not to nag God but to hold on until the answer comes:
Importunate prayer is a mighty movement of the soul toward God. It is a stirring of the deepest forces of the soul, toward the throne of heavenly grace. It is the ability to hold on, press on, and wait.
E. M. Bounds
He points to Epaphras, who labored fervently in prayer (Colossians 4:12), and to Paul begging the Romans to strive together with him in prayer (Romans 15:30), as men who knew that wrestling.
Character and conduct are made on the knees. One of the book’s freshest turns is its refusal to keep prayer in a devotional corner. Prayer, Bounds argues, governs conduct, and conduct makes character; the more we pray, the more we become:
The more we pray, the better we are, the purer and better our lives.
E. M. Bounds
Obedience and prayer rise or fall together. Bounds leans on Moses’ cry that God’s people would keep all my commandments always (Deuteronomy 5:29), and on Jesus’ words that the one who keeps his commandments is the one who loves him (John 14:21) and abides in his love. Obedience, for Bounds, is not the reward of prayer but its companion:
Obedience, moreover, is faith in action, and is the outflow as it is the very test of love.
E. M. Bounds
Behind all of it stands faith, which Hebrews 11:6 makes the ground of any approach to God, and which John 15:7 ties to abiding in Christ so that we may ask what we will. These themes are not a checklist so much as a single organism: pull on any thread and the others move.
Who should read this book
The Necessity of Prayer is for the Christian whose prayer life feels stalled and who wants a diagnosis rather than a pep talk. If you have prayed for something once and quietly given up, the chapters on desire and importunity will find you. If your praying has become dutiful and cold, the chapter on fervency will sting in a useful way. It is a good fit for anyone in ministry or leadership, because Bounds’s lifelong burden was a praying church rather than a busy one; and it is a bracing read for the mature believer who suspects, rightly, that there is more. New Christians can read it too, though they may want to pair its intensity with something gentler. One caution worth naming: Bounds hammers a single nail and repeats himself, and he assumes a reader who wants to be pressed, not merely encouraged. If that is you, few books will do you more good.
How to read it today
Read it slowly, one chapter at a time, and treat each pairing as a mirror. When you finish Prayer and Desire, stop and ask what you actually long for; when you finish Prayer and Obedience, ask where a known command is going unkept. Bounds’s early-twentieth-century prose runs a little formal, and he quotes older writers freely, so give the sentences room to breathe rather than skimming. Keep a Bible open beside it: the book is soaked in Scripture, and looking up the texts he leans on — Matthew 6:6 on the closed door, James 5:16 on the effectual, fervent prayer that avails much — turns his assertions into something you can test. Because the chapters are self-contained, it also works as a two-week devotional, a chapter a morning. If Bounds’s voice grabs you, the shorter and more famous Power Through Prayer is his call to praying preachers, and Purpose in Prayer gathers his thinking on prayer that means business. All three, and the rest of his work, are free to read on Ochorus, along with his full biography.
For reflection
- Bounds says that without desire, prayer is only a mumble of words. What do you actually want when you pray — and does your praying show it?
- Is there a request you stopped bringing to God because the answer was slow? What would it look like to hold on, press on, and wait again?
- Bounds ties prayer to obedience as faith in action. Is there a command you know but are not keeping that is quietly draining your prayers?
- He claims the more we pray, the purer and better our lives become. Where might more prayer, rather than more effort, be the thing actually needed?
- If prayer really is a necessity and not an extra, what would have to change in an ordinary week for you to treat it that way?
