1907
In the early years of the twentieth century President Teddy Roosevelt exuded power, inspiring Americans to believe that, whatever their circumstances, they could rise above them.
Rise above them? Of course. In the first decade of the century, skyscrapers were being built, the Wright brothers had their first successful airplane flight, and wireless telegrams were flying through the air. Was there anything we couldn't do if we really tried?
The Christian church was captured by the same philosophy. John R. Mott talked about reaching the world in this generation. Evangelist Billy Sunday talked about winning entire cities for Christ. A newly created Federal Council of Churches sought to bring about the redemption of the world by getting social justice into all areas of life. We can do it, they said.
In the small town of Washington, Georgia, lived a retired Methodist minister who began each day with three hours of prayer. If you forget prayer, he said, you won't accomplish anything.
This man knew about accomplishments. Edwin McKendiee Bounds had attended a one-room school in Shelbyville, Missouri, but became a lawyer before he turned nineteen. After practicing law for five years, he felt the call to preach. Soon he was pastoring a Southern Methodist Church, but during the Civil War, he was arrested by Union troops, charged as a Confederate sympathizer, and jailed for about eighteen months. After the war he served churches in Tennessee, Alabama, and back in Missouri, but then he turned to the written word—as associate editor of the Christian Advocate, the nationwide weekly magazine for Methodists.
When he was nearly sixty years old, he and his family moved to Washington, Georgia, where he spent his time engaged in
prayer and writing and in an itinerant revival ministry. Each morning he awoke at 4 a.m. to be alone with God for a few hours.
His close friend Homer W. Hodge helped him get his writings published. All told, eleven books by Bounds reached print, seven of these on the subject of prayer. Said Hodge, "There is no man that has lived since the days of the Apostles that has surpassed him in the depths of his marvelous research into the life of prayer."
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Power through Prayer (originally called Preacher and Prayer) was the only one of his seven prayer books to be published before his death but it gained a worldwide audience (causing Hodge to dust off other Bounds books on prayer). Bounds was writing for ministers, but the book is applicable to all. In twenty short chapters, the old lawyer makes the case for prayer. It's a pep talk more than a how-to and it's filled with memorable aphorisms.
"The Holy7 Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men," Bounds writes in chapter 1. "He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does n ot anoint plans, but men— men of prayer." The chapter concludes with what might well be Bounds's theme sentence: "Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in the world."
In the final chapters he urges ministers to inspire their congregations to pray for them. "Where are the Christly leaders who can teach the modern saints how to pray and put them at it?
... We are not a generation of praying saints. Nonpraying saints are a beggarly gang who have neither the ardor nor the beauty nor the power of saints."
On page after page of this concise book, Bounds is both eminently quotable and pointedly challenging. British evangelist Leonard Ravenhill wrote: "Bounds's writings on prayer have never been equaled." Power through Prayer has deeply influenced the lives of thousands of pastors as well as laypeople. Translated into many languages, it remains in print after nearly a century and continues to sell briskly today.