Power Through Prayer by E.M. Bounds available FREE online

We can do nothing without prayer. All things can be done by importunate prayer. It surmounts or removes all obstacles, overcomes every resisting force and gains its ends in the face of invincible hindrances.

Faith, and hope, and patience and all the strong, beautiful, vital forces of piety are withered and dead in a prayerless life. The life of the individual believer, his personal salvation, and personal Christian graces have their being, bloom, and fruitage in prayer.

God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. They outlive the lives of those who uttered them.

By prayer, the ability is secured to feel the law of love, to speak according to the law of love, and to do everything in harmony with the law of love.

Non-praying is lawlessness, discord, anarchy.

Prayer is of transcendent importance. Prayer is the mightiest agent to advance God’s work. Praying hearts and hands only can do God’s work. Prayer succeeds when all else fails.

The goal of prayer is the ear of God, a goal that can only be reached by patient and continued and continuous waiting upon Him, pouring out our heart to Him and permitting Him to speak to us. Only by so doing can we expect to know Him, and as we come to know Him better we shall spend more time in His presence and find that presence a constant and ever-increasing delight.

Prayer honors God, acknowledges His being, exalts His power, adores His providence, secures His aid.

Prayer is a trade to be learned. We must be apprentices and serve our time at it. Painstaking care, much thought, practice and labour are required to be a skillful tradesman in praying. Practice in this, as well as in all other trades, makes perfect.

Natural ability and educational advantages do not figure as factors in this matter of prayer; but a capacity for faith, the power of a thorough consecration, the ability of self-littleness, an absolute losing of one’s self in God’s glory and an ever present and insatiable yearning and seeking after all the fullness of God.

The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be; the mightier the forces against evil everywhere.

Other duties become pressing and absorbing and crowd our prayer. “Choked to death” would be the coroner’s verdict in many cases of dead praying if an inquest could be secured on this dire, spiritual calamity.

I feel it is far better to begin with God, to see His face first, to get my soul near Him before it is near another. In general it is best to have at least one hour alone with God before engaging in anything else.

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Trouble and prayer are closely related. . . . Trouble often drives men to God in prayer, while prayer is but the voice of men in trouble.

Private place and plenty of time are the life of prayer.

Straight praying is never born of crooked conduct.

Praying which does not result in pure conduct is a delusion. We have missed the whole office and virtue of praying if it does not rectify conduct. It is in the very nature of things that we must quit praying, or quit bad conduct.

Our praying, to be strong, must be buttressed by holy living. The life of faith perfects the prayer of faith.

We cannot talk to God strongly when we have not lived for God strongly. The closet cannot be made holy to God when the life has not been holy to God.

If we would have God in the closet, God must have us out of the closet. There is no way of praying to God, but by living to God.

Men would pray better if they lived better. They would get more from God if they lived more obedient and well-pleasing to God.

We can never know God as it is our privilege to know Him by brief repetitions that are requests for personal favors, and nothing more.

There is neither encouragement nor room in Bible religion for feeble desires, listless efforts, lazy attitudes; all must be strenuous, urgent, ardent. Flamed desires, impassioned, unwearied insistence delight heaven. God would have His children incorrigibly in earnest and persistently bold in their efforts. Heaven is too busy to listen to half-hearted prayers or to respond to pop-calls. Our whole being must be in our praying.

It is only when the whole heart is gripped with the passion of prayer that the life-giving fire descends, for none but the earnest man gets access to the ear of God.

To say prayers in a decent, delicate way is not heavy work. But to pray really, to pray till hell feels the ponderous stroke, to pray till the iron gates of difficulty are opened, till the mountains of obstacles are removed, till the mists are exhaled and the clouds are lifted, and the sunshine of a cloudless day brightens-this is hard work, but it is God’s work, and man’s best labor.

Importunity is a condition of prayer. We are to press the matter, not with vain repetitions, but with urgent repetitions. We repeat, not to count the times, but to gain the prayer. We cannot quit praying because heart and soul are in it. We pray “with all perseverance.” We hang to our prayers because by them we live. We press our pleas because we must have them, or die.

Jesus taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be in earnest when they kneel at God’s footstool. Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point where we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will.

The possibilities of prayer are found in its allying itself with the purposes of God, for God’s purposes and man’s praying are the combination of all potent and omnipotent forces.

Prayer puts God’s work in his hands-and keeps it there.

I think Christians fail so often to get answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God. They just drop down and say a few

words, and then jump up and forget it and expect God to answer them. Such praying always reminds me of the small boy ringing his neighbor’s door-bell, and then running away as fast as he can go.

Prayer puts God’s work in His hands-and keeps it there.

It is hard to wait and press and pray, and hear no voice, but stay till God answers.

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God’s willingness to answer our prayers exceeds our willingness to give good and necessary things to our children, just as far as God’s ability, goodness and perfection exceed our infirmities and evil.

Prayer is the easiest and hardest of all things; the simplest and the sublim-est; the weakest and the most powerful; its results lie outside the range of human possibilities-they are limited only by the omnipotence of God.

Prayer, like faith, obtains promises, enlarges their operation, and adds to the measure of their results.

Prayer is our most formidable weapon, the thing which makes all else we do efficient.

Jesus taught that perseverance is the essential element of prayer. Men must be in earnest when they kneel at God’s footstool. Too often we get faint-hearted and quit praying at the point when we ought to begin. We let go at the very point where we should hold on strongest. Our prayers are weak because they are not impassioned by an unfailing and resistless will.