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6.
A
Praying
Ministry Successful
The principal cause of my leanness and unfruitfulness is owing to
an unaccountable backwardness to pray. I can write or read or converse
or hear with a ready heart; but prayer is more spiritual and inward
than any of these, and the more spiritual any duty is the more my
carnal heart is apt to start from it. Prayer and patience and faith
are never disappointed. I have long since learned that if ever I was
to be a minister, faith and prayer must make me one. When I can find my
heart in frame and liberty for prayer, everything else is
comparatively easy. -Richard Newton
It may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in every truly
successful ministry prayer is an evident and controlling force...
It may be put down as a spiritual axiom that in every truly
successful ministry prayer is an evident and controlling force --
evident and controlling in the life of the preacher, evident and
controlling in the deep spirituality of his work. A ministry may be a
very thoughtful ministry without prayer; the preacher may secure fame
and popularity without prayer; the whole machinery of the preacher's
life and work may be run without the oil of prayer or with scarcely
enough to grease one cog; but no ministry can be a spiritual one,
securing holiness in the preacher and in his people, without prayer
being made an evident and controlling force.
The preacher that prays indeed puts God into the work.
God does not
come into the preacher's work as a matter of course or on general
principles, but he comes by prayer and special urgency. That God will be
found of us in the day that we seek him with the whole heart is as true
of the preacher as of the penitent. A prayerful ministry is the only
ministry that brings the preacher into sympathy with the people. Prayer
as essentially unites to the human as it does to the divine. A prayerful
ministry is the only ministry qualified for the high offices and
responsibilities of the preacher.
Holiness is the product of his work; transfigured hearts and lives
emblazon the reality of his work, its trueness and substantial nature.
God is with him.
Colleges, learning, books, theology,
preaching cannot make a preacher, but praying does. The apostles'
commission to preach was a blank till filled up by the Pentecost which
praying brought. A prayerful minister has passed beyond the regions of
the popular, beyond the man of mere affairs, of secularities, of pulpit
attractiveness; passed beyond the ecclesiastical organizer or General
into a more sublime and mightier region, the region of the spiritual.
Holiness is the product of his work; transfigured hearts and lives
emblazon the reality of his work, its trueness and substantial nature.
God is with him. His ministry is not projected on worldly or surface
principles. He is deeply stored with and deeply schooled in the things
of God. His long, deep communing with God about his people and the
agony of his wrestling spirit have crowned him as a prince in the things
of God. The iciness of the mere professional has long since melted under
the intensity of his praying.
God's true preachers have been distinguished by one great feature:
they were men of prayer.
The superficial results of many a ministry, the deadness of others,
are to be found in the lack of praying. No ministry can succeed without
much praying, and this praying must be fundamental, ever-abiding,
ever-increasing. The text, the sermon, should be the result of prayer.
The study should be bathed in prayer, all its duties so impregnated with
prayer, its whole spirit the spirit of prayer. "I am sorry that I
have prayed so little," was the deathbed regret of one of God's
chosen ones, a sad and remorseful regret for a preacher. "I want a
life of greater, deeper, truer prayer," said the late Archbishop
Tait. So may we all say, and this may we all secure.
God's true preachers have been distinguished by one great feature:
they were men of prayer. Differing often in many things, they have
always had a common center. They may have started from different points,
and traveled by different roads, but they converged to one point: they
were one in prayer. God to them was the center of attraction, and
prayer was the path that led to God.
...he prayed earnestly that it might not rain:
and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six
months.
These men prayed not occasionally,
not a little at regular or at odd times; but they so prayed that their
prayers entered into and shaped their characters; they so prayed as to
affect their own lives and the lives of others; they so prayed as to
make the history of the Church and influence the current of the times.
They spent much time in prayer, not because they marked the shadow on
the dial or the hands on the clock, but because it was to them so
momentous and engaging a business that they could scarcely give over.
Prayer was to them what it was to Paul, a striving with earnest
effort of soul; what it was to Jacob, a wrestling and prevailing; what
it was to Christ, "strong crying and tears." They "prayed
always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching
thereunto with all perseverance." "The effectual, fervent
prayer" has been the mightiest weapon of God's mightiest soldiers.
The statement in regard to Elijah -- that he "was a man subject to
like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain:
and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six
months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth
brought forth her fruit" -- comprehends all prophets and preachers
who have moved their generation for God, and shows the instrument by
which they worked their wonders.
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Copyright © 2001
S.G.P. All rights reserved.
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Topic E.
M. Bounds Index 
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Edward
McKendree Bounds
(1835-1913)
E. M. Bounds was a
Pastor around the time of the American Civil War. It is said
that he prayed daily for four hours before he would begin work on
his writings.
We are very happy
to be presenting his writings as one of our New Monthly Features.
Copyright © 2001
S.G.P. All rights reserved.
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E.
M.
Bounds:
Power
Through
Prayer
