The Possibilities of Prayer

It is E. M. Bounds's fullest case for what prayer can actually accomplish. Ranging over the promises of Scripture, the recorded facts of answered prayer, and the history of God's dealings with praying men, he argues that prayer is no pious formality but a real force that moves the hand of God and changes what happens in the world.

Its focus is on prayer's power and results — not merely the duty or the discipline of prayer, but what prayer can do. Bounds sets out to enlarge the reader's expectation, contending that Scripture and history alike show prayer accomplishing things otherwise impossible, and that most Christians ask far too little of a God who has promised so much.

Emphatically. He rejects the idea that prayer only changes the one praying, arguing from the plain promises of Scripture that prayer moves God to act — that God has bound himself to answer, and that real prayer brings real results in the world. For Bounds prayer is a genuine transaction with a God who hears and does, not a mere spiritual exercise.

He piles them up as evidence, pointing to the sweeping breadth of Christ's assurances — whatsoever ye ask, ask and it shall be given — and insisting they mean what they say. Bounds refuses to explain the promises away or shrink them to fit our small experience; instead he presses the reader to take God at his word and to expect that prayer can do what the promises declare.

Bounds appeals to the recorded facts of Scripture and the history of praying men, holding up cases where prayer plainly changed the course of events. He treats these not as exceptions but as illustrations of a standing rule, meant to persuade the reader that the God who answered then answers still, and that the possibilities of prayer are as wide as his promises.

An American Methodist minister who spent his later years in long hours of morning prayer and in writing about it. His prayer books, mostly published after his death, are marked by an unusual confidence in what prayer can do — a confidence this volume presses harder than any other of his.

For the Christian whose faith in prayer has grown small, and who prays without expecting much. Bounds writes to enlarge that expectation — to convince the reader that prayer is a real power and that God's promises are meant to be believed and drawn upon — and so to send them back to prayer with hope.

At the beginning, letting Bounds build his case from the promises of Scripture through the facts of answered prayer. The book is meant to stir faith and expectation, so it rewards being read with an open Bible and a willingness to take its argument to heart, and then to prove it in prayer.