Introduction

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. JAMES 5:16

E. M. Bounds died in 1913 in a small town in Georgia, known to a few friends and to the older members of the churches he had served. He had published one short book in his lifetime. He left a pile of manuscripts and a reputation for getting up at four in the morning to pray. More than a century later his books on prayer are among the most widely read devotional writings in the English language, translated many times over and still in print. Very few writers have had so much of their influence arrive after their death.

One conviction beneath all the others

The reason is not his style. Bounds repeats himself, piles up his phrases, and drives the same nail again and again. The reason is that he had grasped one thing with unusual force and never let it go. The thing is this: God does His work in the world through people who pray.

He said it most famously on the first page of the book we now call Power Through Prayer: “Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.” Everything else he wrote is that sentence worked out. If God works through praying people, then the preacher’s first task is to pray, and the real sermon is made on his knees. Faith is what gives prayer its grip, and the Word is what gives faith its ground. Importunity is prayer that will not let go; the early hour is prayer given the best of the day; holiness is the life that makes prayer honest. Trouble is where prayer is tested, revival and missions are where it is multiplied, and the praying saints of the Bible are its proof. And behind all human praying stands the one Intercessor who never stops.

For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. 2 CHRONICLES 16:9

That is the thread running through every chapter of this book, and it is the question to keep asking as you read: do I actually believe that my praying makes a difference to what God does?

Why he still matters

Bounds is worth reading for at least three reasons. The first is that he takes the promises of Jesus about prayer at their plain meaning. Ask, and it shall be given you. Men ought always to pray, and not to faint. He does not hurry to soften them. He asks what would happen if a believer took them at their word.

The second is that he is a physician for a very modern disease. He lived in an age that was learning to run the Church like a business, with committees and campaigns and statistics, and he saw that busy organisation could quietly replace dependence on God. Our age has more machinery than his ever dreamed of. His warning is more pointed now than when he wrote it.

The third is that he wrote about prayer as a man who prayed. The friends who knew him in his last years describe someone who spent the first three hours of the day on his knees. He does not write like a professor describing a subject from outside. He writes like a man who has just come out of the room and is urging you to go in.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, thirteen short chapters set out his teaching. They begin where he began, with the claim that men are God’s method and that the preacher’s power is made in the closet. Then come the partners of prayer that he treated in The Necessity of Prayer: faith, the Word of God, and importunity. The next chapters take up the early morning, holiness and obedience, and prayer in trouble. Then come the larger horizons: what God does in answer to prayer, revival and missions, and the praying men of the Bible and of history. The last two teaching chapters turn to the intercession of Christ Himself and to the hindrances that choke our praying.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Bounds would not have wanted it otherwise. He thought that most talk about prayer was a substitute for praying, and he had no patience with it. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say plainly at the start where Bounds must be weighed rather than simply received.

First, his intensity can crush. He writes in superlatives. Prayer is the one thing, the only thing, the sole condition. Little praying is worse than none. Unanswered prayer is almost always our fault. For a reader who is already anxious, or worn out, or grieving, some of his pages can land like a sentence of condemnation. His aim was to wake up comfortable Christians, not to break bruised reeds, and the chapters that follow will try to keep both his fire and the gentleness of Christ.

Second, he belongs to his age. He writes of men where he often means people, and sometimes he really does mean men, insisting that praying men matter in a way praying women do not quite, even while praising Hannah as one of the great intercessors of Scripture. He speaks of the heathen and of foreign lands with the confidence of his century. He served as a chaplain in the Confederate army, a cause fought to preserve slavery, and nothing he later wrote about prayer alters that.

Third, most of what we read under his name was prepared for the press after his death by his friends Claudius Chilton and Homer Hodge. They loved him and they worked hard on the manuscripts, but the books bear the marks of that process: paragraphs that appear word for word in more than one book, chapter epigraphs written by the editors themselves, and stories gathered from other preachers. We cannot always be sure where Bounds ends and his editors begin.

Why read him, then? Because on the central matter he was right. The Church does not advance by cleverness, and God does delight to work through those who ask. The counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Bounds is faithful, which is most of the time, receive it gladly and act on it. Where he presses beyond what is written, set it aside and lose nothing.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before going further, ask honestly whether you believe that your praying changes anything, or whether you pray mainly out of habit or duty.

2. Estimate how much time you actually spent in prayer last week. Write the number down and keep it for the end of this book.

3. Choose a pace for reading — a chapter a day or a chapter a week — and decide now when and where you will read it.

4. Resolve to test Bounds against Scripture as you go, keeping what is true and setting aside what is only intensity.

5. Ask God to use this book to send you not to Bounds but to your knees.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You taught Your disciples that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. I have fainted often, and prayed seldom.

Teach me what Your servant Edward Bounds learned in the dark hours before morning: that You work through those who ask, and that no busyness can take the place of prayer.

Keep me from admiring a man of prayer while remaining a man of little prayer myself. Where he is faithful to Your Word, let me receive it; where he is not, give me discernment and a gentle heart.

And let this book do its work by bringing me into Your presence, day by day. Amen.