If you have ever knelt down, said a few words, and stood up again with the uneasy sense that nothing has actually happened, Purpose in Prayer was written for you. E. M. Bounds wrote it to attack that very feeling — not by making you feel guilty, but by convincing you that real prayer is deliberate, definite, and stubborn, and that God has staked the advance of His cause on people who will pray that way. This study guide walks through the book’s argument, its shape, and its main themes, and offers a few questions to pray over. Ochorus hosts the full text for free, so you can read every chapter alongside these notes.
What the book is, and Bounds’s one great thesis
Purpose in Prayer is a short, hard-hitting book of thirteen chapters on the discipline of asking God for definite things and refusing to stop. Edward McKendree Bounds (1835–1913) was an American Methodist pastor and former attorney who, in his last obscure years in Washington, Georgia, rose at four in the morning and prayed until seven. He wrote eight books on prayer; only one appeared in his lifetime. Purpose in Prayer was published in 1920, seven years after his death, by friends who refused to let his manuscripts sit in an attic. You can read more about his life on his author page.
Bounds is not a systematic theologian, and he does not pretend to be. He hammers one nail. His thesis is that prayer is the appointed engine of everything God does on earth, and that it works only when it is purposeful. Vague, drifting, dutiful prayer accomplishes nothing; prayer that asks God for a specific thing and holds on until the answer comes moves heaven. He puts it flatly:
Prayer puts God in full force in the world.
E. M. Bounds
The title itself carries the argument. “Purpose” means both intention — you pray for something, not just at large — and resolve, the settled determination to keep praying. Behind the whole book stands the refrain Bounds returns to again and again from the Second Psalm, “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance” (Psalm 2:8). To Bounds, that Ask of Me is not a nicety. It is the condition God has attached to the triumph of His kingdom.
How Purpose in Prayer is organized
The book moves in a loose arc rather than a rigid outline, but its thirteen chapters fall into recognizable movements. The opening chapters set the stakes cosmically: “God Shapes the World by Prayer,” “Prayer Changes the Purpose of God,” and “We Have Not Because We Ask Not” argue that history itself turns on whether God’s people pray. The middle chapters turn practical and personal — “Men Who Prayed with a Purpose,” “Prayer Is a Trade to Be Learned,” “Pray and Never Faint,” and “Men Ought Always to Pray” — pressing the reader toward perseverance and skill. Later chapters, such as “Reaching the Ear of God,” “Prayerless Praying,” and “The Prayer of Faith Never Fails,” diagnose the difference between the form of prayer and its fire. The book closes by tying prayer to spiritual awakening in “Revivals Are Born in Prayer” and lifts every reader’s eyes to the master of the discipline in “Christ Our Example in Prayer.”
Chapter by chapter the method is the same: a bold claim, a sweep of biblical examples — Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hannah, Daniel, Jonah, Hezekiah — and a scattering of testimonies from later saints. Bounds circles his theme rather than building toward it, so the reader who expects a step-by-step manual should instead expect repeated, forceful pressure on the conscience.
The central themes
Definiteness: prayer that asks for something
Bounds is impatient with prayer that has no object. Genuine prayer names what it wants and expects an answer, because Scripture ties the having to the asking: “ye have not, because ye ask not” (James 4:2), and “Ask, and it shall be given you” (Matthew 7:7). For Bounds the tragedy of the church is not that God is reluctant but that we are casual:
God is willing to give, but we are slow to ask.
E. M. Bounds
Perseverance and importunity
If definiteness tells you what to pray, perseverance tells you how long — until the answer comes. Bounds draws his title theme from the Lord’s own command that “men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1), and from Paul’s charge to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and to “continue in prayer” (Colossians 4:2). He points to Elijah, who “prayed earnestly that it might not rain” and then prayed again for its return (James 5:17), as proof that fervent, repeated prayer bends the natural order. Praying once and giving up, for Bounds, is a contradiction in terms.
Prayer and the preacher
Bounds is famous for insisting that God’s work depends on praying people, not on machinery, methods, or organizations. The most important qualification for any servant of God is skill in prayer, learned like a craft over years — which is why one chapter is titled “Prayer Is a Trade to Be Learned,” echoing the disciples’ own request, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). He puts the pastor and the ordinary believer under the same demand:
He does the most for God who is the highest skilled in prayer.
E. M. Bounds
And the lesson is not optional or advanced; it is the first thing:
The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray.
E. M. Bounds
Prayer that shapes history
The boldest strand in the book is Bounds’s claim that prayer is not merely personal but world-shaping — that revivals, missions, and the whole advance of the gospel run on it. He reads Hezekiah’s reprieve, where God tells the king through Isaiah, “I have heard thy prayer… I will add unto thy days fifteen years” (2 Kings 20:5), as a pattern of how prayer alters outcomes. He anchors the church’s calling in the promise, “my house shall be called a house of prayer” (Isaiah 56:7), and in Paul’s summons to be “praying always with all prayer” (Ephesians 6:18). The result is a conviction stated in a single sentence:
The story of every great Christian achievement is the history of answered prayer.
E. M. Bounds
Yet Bounds mourns how little the church actually prays. His lament is one of the book’s most searching lines:
Everything depends upon prayer, and yet we neglect it not only to our own spiritual hurt but also to the delay and injury of our Lord’s cause upon the earth.
E. M. Bounds
Who should read it
Purpose in Prayer rewards several kinds of reader. It is for the discouraged believer whose prayer life has gone flat and formal, and who needs to be told, plainly, that the fault is not with God’s willingness. It is for pastors, teachers, and ministry leaders tempted to trust programs and technique — Bounds will not let them forget where power actually comes from. It is for anyone praying for a revival, a wayward child, a hardened city, or a mission field, who needs both the courage to ask definitely and the stamina to keep asking. And it is a bracing read for the mature Christian who has grown comfortable, because Bounds writes to unsettle comfort.
A word of orientation: Bounds repeats himself, and his prose runs warm and rhetorical rather than cool and analytical. Readers looking for a balanced treatment of prayer’s mysteries — how petition and God’s sovereignty fit together, why some prayers seem unanswered — will find Bounds pressing the one point rather than weighing every side. Read him as a summons, not a systematic theology, and he is hard to put down.
How to read it today
Because the chapters circle one theme, you do not have to read Purpose in Prayer straight through to profit from it. A few suggestions:
- Read one chapter a day, slowly. Each chapter is short enough for a single sitting and dense enough to reward a second pass. Let one sentence stay with you rather than rushing to finish.
- Keep your Bible open. Bounds preaches from example — Moses, Elijah, Hannah, Daniel. Look up the accounts he cites and read the prayers themselves; the book comes alive when you do.
- Turn reading into praying. Bounds’s whole aim is that you would put the book down and pray. Choose one definite thing to ask God for, and resolve to keep asking until He answers.
- Read it alongside its companions. Purpose in Prayer is one of Bounds’s eight books on the subject, and the others deepen the same themes. Pair it with Power Through Prayer, his classic on the praying preacher, and The Necessity of Prayer, which sets prayer in relation to faith, trust, and obedience.
Remember, too, that Bounds himself lived this book before he wrote it — rising in the dark to pray for a church and a country he would not see changed in his lifetime. Reading him is less like taking a course and more like kneeling beside an old man who has done the thing he is describing.
For reflection
Use these questions on your own, with a prayer partner, or in a small group working through the book together:
- Bounds says “God is willing to give, but we are slow to ask.” What specific, definite thing have you stopped asking God for — and why did you stop?
- Where in your prayer life is the difference between praying and simply “saying prayers” most real? What would fervent, persevering prayer look like this week?
- Jesus taught that “men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1). Which unanswered prayer are you tempted to abandon, and what would it mean to keep praying it?
- Bounds insists God works through praying people, not machinery. Where are you leaning on effort, planning, or technique in place of prayer?
- If “the story of every great Christian achievement is the history of answered prayer,” what would you dare to ask God to accomplish that only He could?
Then do the one thing Bounds most wants of his reader: close the book, and pray. The full text of Purpose in Prayer is free to read here, chapter by chapter, whenever you are ready to begin.
