Conclusion

Pray without ceasing. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:17

Thirteen chapters can make it look as though E. M. Bounds taught many things. He taught one thing, and everything else is that one thing applied. The one thing is this: God does His work in the world through people who pray.

Follow it through and the whole shape appears. Men are God’s method, and the real sermon is made in the closet. Faith gives prayer its grip, and the Word gives faith its ground. Importunity is prayer that will not let go, and 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 and deepened. What prayer can do is limited only by what God has promised and what He is able to perform. Revival and missions are prayer multiplied through a burdened Church, and the praying saints of the Bible and of history are its witnesses. Behind all our praying stand the Son who intercedes in heaven and the Spirit who intercedes within. And the hindrances, however many, are overcome in the same way — by beginning to pray again.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and Bounds would have named it first. He thought that reading about prayer could become a substitute for praying. A person can admire a chapter on the early hour and stay in bed. He can agree with every word about importunity and give up his prayers the same week. The peculiar risk of Bounds is that his fire warms the reader without ever reaching the reader’s knees.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

There is a second danger, the opposite of the first. His intensity can crush. A reader who takes every superlative literally may conclude that his own feeble praying is worthless, that God is disappointed in him, and that every unanswered prayer is his fault. That is not the gospel, and in his better moments it was not Bounds either. He wrote that prayer is the helpless and needy child crying to a Father’s heart. The Father who invites us to pray is not a taskmaster. He is the God who knows our frame and remembers that we are dust.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. PSALM 103:13–14

So the plainest counsel this book can give is the same as in its companion volumes. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, not the one you found most interesting. Take its application points and work them slowly over months. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, begin. Bounds’s own counsel, repeated through all his books, was that there is no substitute for actually praying. Do not wait until you feel ready or until you can pray for an hour. Take the time you have, the best of it you can give, and give it to God. Ten honest minutes will teach you more than ten chapters.

Second, do not pray alone. Bounds lived at a time of great religious activity, and he feared that the Church would trust its organisation more than its God. Our danger is the same. Find others to pray with — a friend, a small group, your church’s prayer meeting if it has one. Pray for your minister. Pray for the work of God in places you will never see. Remember that the Son and the Spirit are already praying, and join them.

Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer; ROMANS 12:12

A last word about the man

We have been honest about his limits. He wrote in superlatives that can wound the weary. He made unanswered prayer too simply our fault. He belonged to an age that spoke of men where it meant people and of the heathen where we would speak of neighbours, and he served, as a chaplain, a cause that fought to preserve slavery. Much of what bears his name was shaped by devoted friends after his death, and we cannot always tell where his voice ends and theirs begins.

None of this has been said to diminish him. It has been said because his own teaching requires it. A man whose whole message was that God does the work, and that we can do nothing without Him, cannot be honoured by pretending that he was more than a man of like passions with us.

Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake. PSALM 115:1

He died in the summer of 1913 with his best work unpublished, having told a friend that when God was ready, he was ready. He did not live to see what came of those dark mornings in Georgia. But the prayers he prayed and the pages he wrote have gone on doing their work for more than a century, in languages he never heard, among people he never met. His life is the best argument for his message. What is done in secret, God rewards openly.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the chapter of this book that made you least comfortable. Read it again, and choose one application point to work on for a month.

2. Look again at the number you wrote down at the start of this book — the time you spent in prayer in a week. Decide, realistically and without guilt, what you want it to be, and ask God for help.

3. Find at least one other person to pray with regularly, even briefly.

4. Choose one person, one church and one nation to carry in prayer for the next year.

5. Choose one of Bounds’s own books from the Reader’s Guide that follows, and begin it this week.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have read much about prayer, and I am capable of reading more and praying no more than before. Keep me from that.

Draw me to my knees. Give me the desire to seek You, the faith to expect You, the persistence to keep asking, and the humility to accept Your answers.

Where Your servant Edward Bounds was faithful, make me faithful. Where I am weak, remember that I am dust, and hold me up.

Let my life, in its small measure, be one through which You work, until the day when prayer gives way to sight. Amen.