If you have ever wondered what people actually did when they prayed — not the theory of it, but the practice — Prayer and Praying Men is E. M. Bounds handing you the answer through a gallery of examples. Instead of arguing that prayer works, he walks you down a line of portraits: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hezekiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Samuel, Daniel, and finally Paul, and lets each one show you. This guide gives you the book’s thesis, its shape, its central themes, and a few ways to read it well. The full text is free to read on Ochorus, so you can move from this summary straight into Bounds’s own pages.

What the book is, and Bounds’s one claim

Bounds’s thesis can be stated in a sentence: God’s cause has always advanced through praying men. Not through better machinery, larger organizations, or newer methods, but through people who had learned to lay hold of God. This was the conviction of his whole life, and in this book — one of eight he wrote on prayer, and among the last, published in 1921, eight years after his death — he proves it not by logic but by biography. He opens by surveying the sweep of Scripture and finding prayer everywhere his eye falls:

Old Testament history is filled with accounts of praying saints. The leaders of Israel in those early days were noted for their praying habits. Prayer is the one thing which stands out prominently in their lives.

E. M. Bounds

That is the pattern Bounds wants you to see repeated until it becomes undeniable. The great turning points of redemptive history — a city spared, a nation delivered, rain returned to a scorched land, a captive people brought home — turn out, on his reading, to hinge on someone on their knees. If that is true, then prayer is not a devotional accessory to the Christian life. It is the hinge on which God has chosen to move.

How the book is built: portraits, not proofs

After two opening chapters that range broadly over the praying saints of the Old Testament — touching Jacob’s vow, Jonah’s cry from the deep (Jonah 2:2), David’s penitence, and Solomon’s request for an understanding heart (1 Kings 3:9) — Bounds narrows to one figure at a time. Each chapter takes a single man and asks the same three questions of him: what did he ask for, what did it cost him, and what came of it?

So you get Abraham drawing near to plead for Sodom (Genesis 18:23) and interceding even for Ishmael (Genesis 17:18); Moses standing in the breach when God’s anger burned, first beseeching the Lord (Exodus 32:11) and then offering to be blotted out of God’s book rather than see the people perish (Exodus 32:32); Elijah calling down fire and then, head between his knees, praying rain back into the sky (1 Kings 18:37; 1 Kings 18:42). You get Hezekiah spreading his crisis before the Lord (2 Kings 19:15), Ezra the reformer, Nehemiah the builder who prayed before he answered the king, and Samuel, the child given in answer to a mother’s prayer (1 Samuel 1:27). Then Daniel, setting his face to seek God with fasting when he read that the seventy years were ending (Daniel 9:3). The book closes with a long, unhurried study of Paul — the persecutor of whom heaven said simply, “Behold, he prayeth” (Acts 9:11) — as both a man of prayer and a teacher of it, forever asking the churches to pray for him (Philippians 1:19).

Between the Old Testament figures and the great study of Paul, Bounds pauses over the faith of sinners in prayer — the tax collector, the thief, the desperate parents and outcasts of the Gospels who had no standing to pray and prayed anyway. It is a deliberate widening of the gallery. The praying men are not only prophets and kings; they include the ruined and the ashamed, which is Bounds’s quiet way of telling the reader that the door he keeps describing is one they too may walk through.

Because the structure is cumulative rather than argumentative, this is the easiest of Bounds’s books to read straight through. You are not being marched through a system. You are being introduced, one at a time, to men whose lives make the case, until the sheer weight of example does what no argument could.

The central themes to watch for

Intercession — praying for others. The men Bounds admires most are rarely praying for themselves. Abraham pleads for a wicked city; Moses stands between God and a rebellious nation, willing to be blotted out with them; Daniel confesses the sins of a whole people as though they were his own. Bounds sees this outward-facing prayer as the highest kind, the point where a praying man becomes useful to God for the sake of everyone around him. It is also, he notes, the costliest, because to intercede in earnest is to take another’s burden onto your own knees and refuse to put it down until God has answered.

Importunity — praying with force that will not quit. Bounds has no patience for the polite, half-hearted prayer that expects little. Writing of Elijah, whom James 5:17 holds up as a man of like passions with us who nevertheless prayed and shut the heavens, he insists that the strength of the praying is what tells:

Elijah’s praying was strong, insistent, and resistless in its elements of power. Feeble praying secures no results and brings neither glory to God nor good to man.

E. M. Bounds

The man behind the prayer. This is Bounds’s deepest and most searching theme. He is convinced that prayer is not a technique that anyone can operate, but the overflow of a certain kind of life. The prayer has power because the man has been made powerful in God. Of Elijah he writes with characteristic bluntness:

Elijah could touch nothing but by prayer. God was with him mightily because he was mighty in prayer.

E. M. Bounds

Prayer, revival, and the reach of God. Running under every chapter is Bounds’s belief that no situation is beyond the reach of a prayer that lays hold of God. When Moses came to walls that prayer did not seem to move, Bounds does not flinch — he locates the limit in us, never in God:

There were conditions of extremity to which Moses was reduced which prayer did not relieve, but there is no position of extremity which baffles God, when prayer puts God into the matter.

E. M. Bounds

He says the same over Jonah, dragged back from ruin in the belly of the fish: “Nothing is too hard for prayer because nothing is too hard for God.” It is the sentence the whole book is written to persuade you of. And it carries a corporate edge: the revivals and deliverances Bounds points to did not begin with crowds but with individuals, and he clearly hopes his reader will become one of them. The recurring question hanging over every chapter is whether this race of praying men has gone out of the world, or whether it might yet be raised up again — in you.

Who should read this book

This is a book for anyone whose praying has gone flat, or who suspects that prayer is more than they have made of it. If you find abstract treatises on prayer hard to finish, start here: the biographical frame carries you along, and you close each chapter wanting to pray rather than merely knowing more about it. Pastors and leaders will feel Bounds’s challenge most sharply, because his lifelong complaint is aimed at church activity that has quietly replaced prayer with programs. And students of Scripture will find it a rewarding tour of the Bible’s prayer life, gathering scattered episodes into a single, insistent argument. It is a short book, plainly written, and it asks nothing of you but attention and a willingness to be provoked.

How to read it today

Read it with an open Bible. Bounds constantly points to the passages behind each portrait, and the book comes alive when you stop at, say, Exodus 32 or Daniel 9 and read the actual prayer before returning to his commentary. Read it slowly, a chapter at a time; because each chapter stands on its own, it makes an excellent companion for a stretch of morning devotions, one praying man per day. Expect repetition — Bounds hammers one nail, and he knows it — and let the repetition do its intended work, wearing a conviction into you rather than merely informing you. Above all, read it as an invitation rather than a rebuke. Bounds was not a scholar describing a subject; he was a man who rose at four in the morning to pray, writing about what he did with his own dark hours. When a theme moves you, put the book down and pray it. That is the response the book was built to produce.

Bounds returns again and again to the same quiet contrast: it is easier to admire praying men than to become one, and the whole point of the portraits is that these were people of like passions with us. What they had was not genius but access, and the same door stands open.

For reflection

  • Bounds insists that God works through praying people, not through methods or machinery. Where in your own church or ministry have you leaned on organization to do what only prayer can do?
  • The men in this book pray most for others — Abraham for Sodom, Moses for Israel, Daniel for his people. Whose burdens are you carrying to God, and whose have you quietly set down?
  • Bounds calls feeble praying fruitless and points to Elijah’s insistent, resistless praying instead. What would it look like for your own prayers to become more importunate this month?
  • Each portrait shows the prayer flowing from the person. What is God doing in your inner life to make you the kind of person whose prayers have weight?
  • Which of these praying men do you most need as a companion right now — and will you read his chapter with your Bible open beside it?

You can read Prayer and Praying Men in full, free of charge, on Ochorus, and explore more of E. M. Bounds’s life and work. If this book stirs you, his Power Through Prayer presses the same conviction into the life of the preacher, and Purpose in Prayer takes up the resolve and intent that make prayer prevail.