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The power of the Church truly to bless rests on intercession—asking and receiving heavenly gifts to carry to men.
“The word of God is the food by which prayer is nourished and made strong.”
We’ve got a lot of ministries going on in my church. Preaching, worship team, children’s ministry, small group ministry, men’s ministry, women’s ministry, sound ministry, projection ministry, and, perhaps most importantly, the coffee ministry. We do a boat load of planning in all these ministries. All the different people involved work hard to figure out what songs to sing, what food to eat at the men’s breakfast, what music to play at the women’s breakfast, what new equipment is needed in the sound room, and what roast of coffee is the most tasty and the most cost effective.
And I’m all for planning. You can usually tell when something has just been thrown together. The first sign that things haven’t been planned well is when someone gets up on stage and says, “Well, I don’t really know what we’re going to do today, but we’re trusting the Spirit to guide us.” Planning is a good and necessary thing.
But sometimes we can be tempted to put way too much trust in our planning, at the expense of relying on the Holy Spirit. E.M. Bounds said:
What the Church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men [and women, of course] 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.
Yes, we need to plan. Worship leaders, you need to plan. Small group leaders, plan your butts off. Preachers, map out those sermon series. But what we need the most – what I need the most – is the Holy Spirit. I need the Holy Spirit to move when I preach. I may have the best sermon, with the greatest points and illustrations, yet without the Spirit, it’s a big, fat nothing.
More time and early hours for prayer would act like magic to revive and invigorate many a decayed spiritual life. More time and early hours for prayer would be manifest in holy living. A holy life would not be so rare or so difficult a thing if our devotions were not so short and hurried.
“Our praying, however, needs to be pressed and pursued with an energy that never tires, a persistency which will not be denied, and a courage which never fails.”
E. M. Bounds said that when our devotion is gone, prayer is essentially gone as well…
“When the angel of devotion is gone, the angel of prayer has lost its wings and it becomes a deformed and loveless thing”
(The Essentials of Prayer, 93)
Putting Prayer First—E. M. Bounds (1835 – 1913)
Edward McKendree Bounds was a noted American clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. He served as a chaplain to the Confederate army during the Civil War and pastored churches throughout the South. Yet Bounds’ most famous work was his writing on prayer. Noted for his personal devotion to Christ, he prayed each morning from four until seven.
This selection, taken from his 1906 book Power through Prayer, argues that beginning the day with prayer reflects passion for God and a willingness to mortify the flesh, and it follows the pattern of eminent saints in Scripture. Of course, Bounds lived in a different time with different scheduling conventions. Today ready access to electricity and telecommunications makes late-night work unavoidable at times, and early appointments have become a reality of life. Plus, many people simply do not feel mentally alert in the pre-dawn hours. Such circumstances combine to make lengthy prayer sessions immediately upon waking impractical for some. Thus, Bounds’ comments should not be received as legalistic prescriptions for when a believer must pray.
Still, whenever Christians choose to pray, they would do well to emulate the zeal for God and the self-discipline that drove Bounds to give his mornings to the Lord.
The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees. He who fritters away the early morning, its opportunity and freshness, in other pursuits than seeking God will make poor headway seeking him the rest of the day. If God is not first in our thoughts and efforts in the morning, he will be in the last place the remainder of the day…
A desire for God which cannot break the chains of sleep is a weak thing and will do but little good for God after it has indulged itself fully. The desire for God that keeps so far behind the devil and the world at the beginning of the day will never catch up.
It is not simply the getting up that puts men to the front and makes them captain generals in God’s hosts, but it is the ardent desire which stirs and breaks all self-indulgent chains. But the getting up gives vent, increase, and strength to the desire. If they had lain in bed and indulged themselves, the desire would have been quenched.1
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| 1 | E. M. Bounds, Power through Prayer (1906), available at Christian Classics Etheral Library Website, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/bounds/power.IX.html (accessed March 23, 2010) |
According to E.M. Bounds…
God has ordained prayer as a means by which we can reach that happy state of heart!
“Our praying, however, needs to be pressed and pursued with an energy that never tires, a persistency which will not be denied, and a courage which never fails.” (E. M. Bounds)
God shapes the world by prayer. The more praying there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil…
~ E.M.Bounds
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