Edward M Bounds - Power through prayer

POWER THROUGH PRAYER

by

EDWARD M. BOUNDS About the Author

Edward McKendree Bounds (1835-1913), Methodist minister and devotional writer, born in Shelby County, Missouri. Studied law and was admitted to the bar at twenty-one years. After practicing law for three years, began preaching for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. At the time of his pastorate at Brunswick, Misouri, war was declared, and he was made a prisonar of war for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Federal Government. After release he served as chaplain of the Fifth Missouri regiment [for the Confederate Army] until the close of the war, when captured and held as prisoner at Nashville, Tennessee. After the war ended, Bounds served as pastor of churches in Tennessee, Alabama, and St. Louis, Missouri.... Spent the last seventeen years of his life with his family in Washington, Georgia, writing his 'Spiritual Life Books.'" (From "The Wycliffe Biographical Dictionary of the Church," page 54, Elgin S. Moyer, 1982, Moody Press, Chicago, IL)

Edward McKendree Bounds was the author of eleven books, nine of which focused on the subject of prayer.

Only two of Bounds' books were published before he died. After his death, Rev. Claudius (Claude) Lysias Chilton, Jr., grandson of William Parish Chilton and admirer of Bounds, worked on preserving and preparing Bounds' collection of manuscripts for publication. By 1921 more editorial work was being done by Rev. Homer W. Hodge.

Chilton said of his books:

These books are unfailing wells for a lifetime of spiritual water-drawing.They are hidden treasures, wrought in the darkness of dawn and the heat of the noon, on the anvil of experience,and beaten into wondrous form by the mighty stroke of the divine. They are living voices whereby he, being dead, yet speaketh!

Nonfiction

• Power Through Prayer
• Prayer and Praying Men
• Purpose in Prayer
• The Essentials of Prayer
• The Necessity of Prayer
• The Possibilities of Prayer
• The Reality of Prayer
• The Weapon of Prayer
• Preacher and Prayer
• Satan: His Personality, Power and Overthrow
• Heaven: A Place - A City - A Home

Source: Wikipedia

Power through Prayerhas been called "one of the truly great masterpieces on the theme of prayer." The term classic can appropriately be applied to this outstanding book.

In twenty provocative and inspiring chapters, each prefaced with quotations from spiritual giants, Edward M. Bounds stresses the imperative of vital prayer in the life of a pastor. He says, "... every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world."

Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with the mowerthat is, to be used only so far as is necessary for his work. May a physician in plague-time take any more relaxation or recreation than is necessary for his life, when so many are expecting his help in a case of life and death? Will you stand by and see sinners gasping under the pangs of death, and say: "God doth not require me to make myself a drudge to save them?" Is this the voice of ministerial or Christian compassion or rather of sensual laziness and diabolical cruelty. Richard Baxter Misemployment of time is injurious to the mind. In illness I have looked back with self-reproach on days spent in my study; I was wading through history and poetry and monthly journals, but I was in my study! Another man's trifling is notorious to all observers, but what am I doing? Nothing, perhaps, that has reference to the spiritual good of my congregation. Be much in retirement and prayer. Study the honor and glory of your Master.- Richard Cecil 1 Men of Prayer Needed Study universal holiness of life. Your whole usefulness depends on this, for your sermons last but an hour or two; your life preaches all the week. If Satan can only make a covetous minister a lover of praise, of pleasure, of good eating, he has ruined your ministry. Give yourself to prayer, and get your texts, your thoughts, your words from God. Luther spent his best three hours in prayer. Robert Murray McCheyne

WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. "There was a man sent from God whose name was John." The dispensation that heralded and prepared the way for Christ was bound up in that man John. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." The world's salvation comes out of that cradled Son. When Paul appeals to the personal character of the men who rooted the gospel in the world, he solves the mystery of their success. The glory and efficiency of the gospel is staked on the men who proclaim it. When God declares that "the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him," he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which to exert his power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere. Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.

What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can usemen of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but menmen of prayer.

An eminent historian has said that the accidents of personal character have more to do with the revolutions of nations than either philosophic historians or democratic politicians will allow. This truth has its application in full to the gospel of Christ, the character and conduct of the followers of ChristChristianize the world, transfigure nations and individuals. Of the preachers of the gospel it is eminently true.

The character as well as the fortunes of the gospel is committed to the preacher. He makes or mars the message from God to man. The preacher is the golden pipe through which the divine oil flows. The pipe must not only be golden, but open and flawless, that the oil may have a full, unhindered, unwasted flow.

The man makes the preacher. God must make the man. The messenger is, if possible, more than the message. The preacher is more than the sermon. The preacher makes the sermon. As the life-giving milk from the mother's bosom is but the mother's life, so all the preacher says is tinctured, impregnated by what the preacher is. The treasure is in earthen vessels, and the taste of the vessel impregnates and may discolor. The man, the whole man, lies behind the sermon. Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because the man is full of the divine unction.

Paul termed it "My gospel;" not that he had degraded it by his personal eccentricities or diverted it by selfish appropriation, but the gospel was put into the heart and lifeblood of the man Paul, as a personal trust to be executed by his Pauline traits, to be set aflame and empowered by the fiery energy of his fiery soul. Paul's sermonswhat were they? Where are they? Skeletons, scattered fragments, afloat on the sea of inspiration! But the man Paul, greater than his sermons, lives forever, in full form, feature and stature, with his molding hand on the Church. The preaching is but a voice. The voice in silence dies, the text is forgotten, the sermon fades from memory; the preacher lives.

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