Prayer and Praying Men

Rather than argue for prayer in the abstract, E. M. Bounds introduces the men of Scripture who prayed. After opening chapters on the praying saints of the Old Testament, he takes them one at a time — Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Hezekiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Samuel, Daniel, and Paul at length — showing from their lives what prayer is and what it accomplishes.

Its method is biographical. Where his other prayer books reason about prayer's necessity, essentials, or power, this one lets the Bible's praying men make the case by example. Bounds walks through their stories, drawing from each the lessons of a life given to prayer, so the reader learns prayer by watching those who practised it.

Chiefly the great intercessors of the Old Testament — Abraham pleading for Sodom, Moses standing in the breach, Elijah praying down fire and rain, Hezekiah turning his face to the wall, Ezra, Nehemiah, Samuel, and Daniel — and then, at length, the apostle Paul, whose letters are steeped in prayer. Each becomes a study in some aspect of praying.

He points to Moses as a supreme intercessor — the man who stood between God and a sinning people, who pleaded for Israel when judgement threatened, and whose prayers turned aside destruction. Bounds uses him to show the power of intercessory prayer and the weight that a single praying man can carry for a whole nation before God.

Bounds gives Paul extended treatment, showing how thoroughly prayer saturated the apostle's life and letters — his constant thanksgiving, his intercession for the churches, his requests for their prayers, and the great prayers recorded in his epistles. Paul stands as the model of a prayer-soaked ministry, proof that the mightiest gospel labour rests on prayer.

An American Methodist minister who devoted his later life to early-morning prayer and to writing about it. His prayer books, published mostly after his death, remain classics of the subject; this one gathers the Bible's praying men to let their examples teach what Bounds elsewhere argues.

For any Christian who learns best from example, and who wants to see prayer lived out rather than merely explained. By following the praying men of Scripture, the reader is both instructed and stirred — encouraged to believe that the God who heard them hears still, and moved to pray as they did.

At the beginning, with the Old Testament intercessors, and on through to Paul. Because each chapter studies a different figure, the book can be read straight through or dipped into by name, but taken together the lives build a cumulative portrait of what it means to be a man or woman of prayer.