Power Through Prayer is E. M. Bounds’s short, burning book on where spiritual power actually comes from. Its answer never wavers: not from method, machinery, or talent, but from praying people. First published in 1907 as Preacher and Prayer, it is aimed squarely at the man in the pulpit — yet its edge reaches every believer, because its real subject is that God works through consecrated people, not programmes. You can read the whole book free on Ochorus (Power Through Prayer); this guide is a companion to help you get the most from it, whether you are reading it for the first time or returning to it as a summons back to the closet.
What the book is, and Bounds’s one conviction
Bounds has a single thesis and he hammers it from twenty angles: men are God’s method. The famous opening lines of the first chapter set the whole book in motion, and everything after them is variation on this theme.
Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
E. M. Bounds
This is the axis on which the book turns. Bounds watched a church constantly devising, in his words, “new methods, new plans, new organizations,” and he was convinced the instinct itself was the danger — because it quietly moves the man out of view and puts the machinery in his place. Against that, he sets a stubborn counter-claim about how God has always chosen to act. When Scripture says “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (John 1:6), or “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6), Bounds hears the same pattern: God stakes his work on people. And the person God can use is the person who has learned to pray.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use—men of prayer, men mighty in prayer.
E. M. Bounds
From there the argument descends, relentlessly, into the private life. If the messenger matters more than the message, then the messenger’s hidden hours matter most of all. Bounds’s most quoted sentence puts the whole book in a phrase: “The real sermon is made in the closet.” What is preached in public is only the overflow of what was wrestled out alone with God.
How the book is structured
There is no elaborate scaffolding here. Power Through Prayer is twenty very short chapters — most only two or three pages — each of which opens with the words of an earlier praying man before Bounds presses his own case. He reaches for Robert Murray McCheyne, for William Penn writing of George Fox, for Richard Cecil and Canon Liddon, letting a saint or missionary testify first and then driving the point home himself. The chapters are cumulative rather than sequential: he is not building a system brick by brick so much as circling one truth and striking it again and again.
The titles alone trace the movement. He begins with the need — “Men of Prayer Needed,” “Our Sufficiency Is of God,” “The Letter Killeth” — then turns to the priority and cost of prayer in “Prayer, the Great Essential,” “Much Time Should Be Given to Prayer,” and “Begin the Day with Prayer.” The later chapters gather around unction, that anointing of the Spirit which Bounds treats as the one thing a preacher cannot manufacture: “Unction a Necessity,” “Much Prayer the Price of Unction.” The closing chapter, “A Praying Pulpit Begets a Praying Pew,” widens the circle from the preacher out to the whole congregation. Because each chapter stands almost on its own, the book is unusually easy to read a piece at a time — which is exactly how Bounds means it to be taken.
The central themes
The priority of prayer
For Bounds, prayer is not one ministerial duty among many; it is the ground from which all the others draw life. He will not let prayer be demoted to a preliminary or a formality. Answering Paul’s cry, “Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2:16), Bounds insists the sufficiency is borrowed, never native: “Our sufficiency is of God” (2 Corinthians 3:5). The treasure is real, but it is carried in earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:7), and only prayer keeps the vessel from mistaking the treasure for its own.
Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor.
E. M. Bounds
Prayer over talent and method
The book’s sharpest edge is its refusal to let gifting substitute for God. Bounds concedes that eloquence, learning, and organization can produce impressive effects — and then insists those effects, cut off from the Spirit, are lifeless. In the chapter “The Letter Killeth” he leans on Paul’s warning that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6): orthodox, polished, earnest preaching can still be dead if the man behind it has never broken down before God. What is bought with prayer cannot be bought any other way.
It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man.
E. M. Bounds
The cost of a praying life
Bounds never pretends this is cheap. Much prayer means much time, and time is the currency he keeps naming. He points to Bishop Andrewes on his knees for hours, and to Jacob’s all-night wrestling by the Jabbok (Genesis 32:24) as the shape of prayer that prevails. He is scornful of the hurried, occasional approach.
Much time spent with God is the secret of all successful praying.
E. M. Bounds
And more bluntly still, in a line that pricks every busy servant of God:
God’s acquaintance is not made by pop calls.
E. M. Bounds
He presses the same point about the morning. Following McCheyne, and Christ himself, who “rising up a great while before day” went out to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35), and David’s “Early will I seek thee” (Psalm 63:1), Bounds treats the first hour as the tell-tale of the heart. This is where his own life quietly stands behind the book: for years he rose at four in the morning to pray until seven.
The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees.
E. M. Bounds
Holiness, unction, and a crucified life
Running underneath the whole book is the conviction that power in ministry is inseparable from holiness in the minister. God will not lend his weight to an unsurrendered life. Bounds gathers this under the old word unction — the Spirit’s anointing that no study can win — and he is clear about its price: it is bought with much prayer or not at all. The demand is total, and he states it without softening.
Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
E. M. Bounds
Who should read it
Preachers, first and most obviously. Bounds writes to and about the man in the pulpit, and any minister who has leaned on preparation, personality, or programme instead of prayer will feel the book’s heat. It is a bracing corrective for anyone who preaches, teaches, or leads — a reminder that the hidden work decides the public one.
But it would be a mistake to shelve it as a manual for clergy. Its deeper theme — that God’s kingdom advances through praying people rather than through efficiency — belongs to every Christian. Paul’s charge that men “ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1), his call to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and his summons to “continue in prayer” (Colossians 4:2) are not addressed only to leaders. If you have ever trusted your own ability over the closet, this book has your name on it. And it pairs naturally with Bounds’s other prayer classics — Purpose in Prayer and The Necessity of Prayer — which press the same convictions for every believer, not only the preacher.
How to read it today
A few suggestions to keep the book from washing over you. First, read it slowly — a single short chapter at a sitting, not the whole book in a rush. Bounds is repetitive by design; the repetition is meant to wear a groove, and reading fast defeats it. Take one chapter as a day’s meditation.
- Pray it, don’t just study it. Bounds wrote to disturb the comfortable and set the reader on his knees. Let each chapter end in prayer rather than in notes.
- Sit with the opening quotations. Each chapter begins with an earlier witness; don’t skip past them to reach Bounds. They are part of his argument, showing that praying lives, not theories, prove his case.
- Watch for the sting, and keep it. When a line accuses you — about the wasted morning, the hurried prayer, the trust in method — pause there rather than reading on. That discomfort is the book working.
- Translate “preacher” outward. Where Bounds says “preacher,” read your own calling. The principle holds for the parent, the teacher, the friend who longs to do others good.
A word of balance is fair. Bounds is a man of one note, and he strikes it hard; he is not offering a rounded theology of ministry, and he can leave the impression that method is worthless rather than merely secondary. Read him as a corrective, not a complete account — a needed weight thrown onto the neglected side of the scale. Taken that way, few books do more to send a reader back to prayer.
For reflection
Use these questions alone, or with a group working through the book a chapter at a time.
- Bounds says the Church looks for better methods while God looks for better men. Where in your own life or ministry have you reached for a better method when God was asking for a praying person?
- He claims “the real sermon is made in the closet.” What is the honest relationship, in your week, between your public work and your hidden prayer?
- Bounds insists that unction — real spiritual power — is bought with much prayer or not at all. What would it cost you, in time, to pray as he describes? What are you unwilling to give up for it?
- Following McCheyne and Christ’s own habit of rising before day (Mark 1:35), Bounds treats the morning as the index of the heart. What does the first hour of your day reveal about where God ranks in it?
- Where have you trusted talent, preparation, or organization to do what only the Spirit can do — and what would change if you truly believed “our sufficiency is of God” (2 Corinthians 3:5)?
When you are ready, the full text is free to read here: Power Through Prayer by E. M. Bounds.
