The reality of prayer

by Edward M. Bounds

God’s Gospel has always waited more on prayer than on anything else for its successes. A praying Church is strong though poor in all besides. A prayerless Church is weak though rich in all besides. Praying hearts only will build God’s Kingdom. Praying hands only will put the crown on the Saviour’s head.

The Holy Spirit is the Divinely appointed Substitute for and representative of the personal and humanised Christ. How much is He to us! And how we are to be filled by Him, live in Him, walk in Him, and be led by Him! How we are to conserve and kindle to a brighter and more consuming glow the holy flame! How careful should we be never to quench that pure flame! How watchful, tender, loving ought we to be so as not to grieve His sensitive, loving nature! How attentive, meek and obedient, never to resist His Divine impulses, always to hear His voice, and always to do His Divine will. How can all this be done without much and continuous prayer?

The importunate widow had a great case to win against helpless, hopeless despair, but she did it by importunate prayer. We have this great treasure to preserve and enhance, but we have a Divine Person to entertain and help. We can only be enabled to meet our duties by exceeding much prayer.

Prayer is the only element in which the Holy Spirit can live and work. Prayer is the golden chain which happily enslaves Him to His happy work in us.

Everything depends upon our having this Second Christ, and retaining Him in the fullness of His power. With the disciples, Pentecost was made by prayer. With them, Pentecost was continued by giving themselves to continued prayer. Persistent and unwearied prayer is the price we will have to pay for our Pentecost, by instant and continued prayer. Abiding in the fact and in the spirit of prayer is the only surety of our abiding in Pentecostal power and purity.

Not only should the many-sided operation of the Holy Spirit in us and for us, teach us the necessity of prayer for Him, but His condition with our praying assumes another attitude, the attitude of mutual dependence, that of action and reaction. The more we pray the more He helps us to pray, and the larger the measure of Himself He gives to us. We are not only to pray and press and wait for His coming to us, but after we have received Him in His fullness, we are to pray for a fuller and still larger bestowment of Himself to us. We are to pray for the largest and ever-increasing and constant fullness of capacity. “That ye might be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man,” as Paul prayed for the Spirit-baptised Ephesian Church. It will be remembered that He also prayed that “Christ might dwell in your hearts by faith,” rooted and grounded in love, measuring up to the breadth, length, depth and height of the most perfect sainthood, and up to the immeasurable love of Christ, being “filled with all the fullness of God.”

In that wonderful prayer for those Christians, Paul laid himself out to pray to God, and by prayer he sought to fathom the fathomless depths and to measure the illimitable purposes and benefits of God’s plan of salvation for immortal souls by the presence and work of the Holy Spirit. Only importunate and invincible prayer can bring the Holy Spirit to us, and secure for us these ineffably gracious results. “Epaphras always labouring fervently in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.”

The Word of God provides for a mighty, consciously realised religion in His saints, into whose happy, shining spirits God has been brought as a Dweller, and whose Heaven-toned lives have been attuned to melody by God’s own hand.

Then will it prove true: “He that believeth on me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” Here is a promise concerning the indwelling and outflowing of the Holy Spirit in us, life-giving, fructifying, irresistible, a ceaseless outflow of the river of God in us.

How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow of this mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader, more overflowing than the Amazon’s broad and mighty current! And yet what mere rills we are and have!