E. M. Bounds on the Power of Prayer

The great author and Methodist clergyman E.  M. Bounds wrote wonderfully of the power of prayer.
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.'"

Here is some of the wisdom that God gave E. M. Bounds that I pass on to you.

"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 use -- men 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 men -- men of prayer."

These words are just as true today as when the faithful minister first wrote them.  And when he says men, I will add women, for God works through both genders in mighty ways when we surrender to His will and pray from the heart.  The most powerful position is when we are on our knees iu prayer.  Amen. Amen!