Power Through Prayer Quotes: 15 Lines from E. M. Bounds, by Chapter
E. M. Bounds wrote in short, sharp sentences, and Power Through Prayer is full of lines that people underline and pass along. But many of the versions online are reworded. Below are fifteen of the book's best-known quotes, copied word for word from the text in TheWay Library, with the chapter each comes from and a short note on what Bounds meant. You can read Power Through Prayer free to see every line in its setting.
1. Men are God's method
Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
This is the line the book is known for. It was the sentence that made A. C. Dixon keep reading, as he says in his foreword. Bounds isn't against planning. He's saying God's first concern is the person, and that no method can make up for a minister God hasn't shaped. We look at this idea closely in Men Are God's Method.
2. Not methods, but men
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.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
The next paragraph explains the first quote. Notice where he lands: not just men, but "men of prayer." That's the thread of the whole book.
3. Twenty years to make a sermon
It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
Preaching, Bounds says, "is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life." A sermon carries the life of the one who preaches it.
4. Made in the closet
The real sermon is made in the closet. The man—God's man—is made in the closet.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
"Closet" is Bounds' word for the private place of prayer, taken from Jesus' words in Matthew 6. He comes back to it again and again.
5. Crucified preaching
Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter II
This closes Bounds' long description of "preaching that kills." Correct words aren't enough. Life-giving preaching costs the preacher death to self.
6. Dead orthodoxy
Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter III
Bounds loved sound doctrine. He says so in the same paragraph: "We love orthodoxy. It is good." His warning is that right belief without prayer still goes cold.
7. Talking to God for men
Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter IV
This may be the simplest summary of his view of ministry. The preacher speaks to people on God's behalf, but first he speaks to God on theirs.
8. The first, second and third thing
Prayer is the first thing, the second thing, the third thing necessary to a minister. Pray, then, my dear brother; pray, pray, pray.
Edward Payson, quoted at the opening of chapter 5
This is one of the quotations from other writers that open many chapters. It's often credited to Bounds, but in the book it comes from the American pastor Edward Payson.
9. Little praying
Of these two evils, perhaps little praying is worse than no praying. Little praying is a kind of make-believe, a salve for the conscience, a farce and a delusion.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter V
A hard word. A few hurried minutes can make us feel we've prayed when we've hardly begun.
10. Much time with God
No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter VIII
Bounds ends a long list of praying saints, ending with Adoniram Judson, with this conclusion. Prayer takes time, and there's no shortcut.
11. First in the morning
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.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter IX
Chapter 9 is about early prayer. Bounds' point isn't the clock but the desire: a heart that wants God will seek Him first.
12. The right kind of a man
For nothing is too hard for God to do if He can get the right kind of a man to do it with.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I1
He wrote this of David Brainerd, the young missionary whose prayer life fills chapter 11. It echoes chapter 1: God works through people He has prepared.
13. A prepared heart
A prepared heart is much better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I2
Bounds didn't tell preachers to stop studying. He told them their deepest study was the heart, and that the heart is prepared in prayer.
14. Little with God
To be little with God is to be little for God.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I9
Eleven words that sum up chapter 19, his warning against short, hurried devotions. In the same chapter he says, "We live shabbily because we pray meanly."
15. The greatest thing we can do
To pray is the greatest thing we can do: and to do it well there must be calmness, time, and deliberation; otherwise it is degraded into the smallest and meanest of things.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I9
Albert A. Head quotes this line in his foreword to the book. For Bounds, prayer wasn't preparation for the real work. It was the real work.
A few more short lines
Bounds packs truth into very short sentences. A few more, all exact:
A praying pulpit will beget praying pews.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter II0
Prayer makes the man; prayer makes the preacher; prayer makes the pastor.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter I
God can work wonders if He can get a suitable man. Men can work wonders if they can get God to lead them.
Power Through Prayer, Chapter II0
Read them in context
Quotes are a start, but Bounds builds his case chapter by chapter, and many of these lines hit harder when you read the paragraph around them. Our chapter-by-chapter summary shows where each idea fits. To learn about the man who wrote them, see Who Was E. M. Bounds?, and to work through them with a group, use the Power Through Prayer Study Guide. Then open the book and read the whole thing.