What Is Importunate Prayer? E. M. Bounds on Persistent Prayer
Importunate prayer is prayer that keeps on asking. It doesn't give up after one request. It presses, waits and asks again until the answer comes. The word comes from the King James Version, where Jesus tells of a man who knocks on his friend's door at midnight and gets his bread "because of his importunity" (Luke 11:8). In plain English, importunity means a bold, almost troublesome persistence.
E. M. Bounds believed this was not an extra for unusually devoted Christians. He taught that it belongs to the very nature of prayer. In Purpose in Prayer he puts it this way:
Christ puts importunity as a distinguishing characteristic of true praying. We must not only pray, but we must pray with great urgency, with intentness and with repetition. We must not only pray, but we must pray again and again. We must not get tired of praying.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
That chapter, along with the book's last chapter, holds his fullest teaching on the subject. You can read Purpose in Prayer free and follow along.
Where the Bible teaches it
Bounds rests his teaching on the words of Jesus. The clearest passage is the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, which Luke introduces by telling us exactly what it means:
And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.
Luke 18:1
The widow had no money, no friends at court and no claim on a judge who "feared not God, neither regarded man." She simply kept coming back. In the end the judge gave in so that she would stop wearing him out. Jesus' point is not that God is like that judge. It is that if persistence moves even a hard man, how much more will our Father answer His children who "cry day and night unto him."
Bounds sets two more scenes beside this one. The first is the friend at midnight in Luke 11, who "stays and presses, and waits and gains." The second is the Syrophenician woman in Matthew 15. Jesus at first gave her no answer, then said He was sent only to Israel, then spoke of not giving the children's bread to dogs. She would not be turned away, and Jesus said, "O woman, great is thy faith." Bounds calls her case "a parable in action."
He also finds the lesson in the Sermon on the Mount:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.
Matthew 7:7
Asking, seeking, knocking
Bounds reads those three words as rising steps, each more earnest than the one before. This is one of his most helpful pictures of what persistence looks like in practice:
If asking does not get, let asking pass into the settled attitude and spirit of seeking. If seeking does not secure the answer, let seeking pass on to the more energetic and clamorous plea of knocking. We must persevere till we get it.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter XIII
He asks why Jesus repeated His promises about answered prayer so many times and on more than one occasion. His answer is that Jesus knew some answers would be slow in coming. Without strong assurance, delay would wear down our faith, and we would quit.
What importunity is made of
Bounds gives a careful definition. Notice that it holds two things together that we usually think of as opposites:
Importunity is made up of the ability to hold on, to press on, to wait with unrelaxed and unrelaxable grasp, restless desire and restful patience.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
Restless desire means we really want what we are asking for. Restful patience means we trust God while we wait. Importunate prayer is not anxious nagging, and it is not lazy resignation either. It is steady, hopeful pressing.
He also separates it from the "vain repetitions" Jesus warned against in Matthew 6:
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.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
The difference is the heart behind the words. Empty repetition hopes that many words will do the work. Urgent repetition comes back again because the need is real and the request still matters.
Wrestling with God
Bounds often describes this kind of prayer as wrestling, and he goes straight to Jacob at the brook Jabbok:
I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
Genesis 32:26
For Bounds, that night changed Jacob's character, turned Esau's anger, and became a turning point for a whole nation. He describes the struggle this way:
Prayer in its highest form and grandest success assumes the attitude of a wrestler with God. It is the contest, trial and victory of faith; a victory not secured from an enemy, but from Him who tries our faith that He may enlarge it: that tests our strength to make us stronger.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
That last phrase matters. God is not our opponent. When He seems to hold back, He is strengthening the faith of the one who prays.
Examples Bounds gives
Bounds fills chapter 6 with people who pressed their prayers. Moses prayed forty days and nights for Israel after the golden calf and was heard. Elijah prayed again and again before the rain came. Jesus Himself, Bounds says, prayed through the night to find power for His days of work, and learned submission to His Father's will in importunate prayer before the cross.
He also points to two cases that warn us. Abraham pleaded for Sodom but stopped at ten righteous men, and Bounds quotes an old saying that "Abraham left off asking before God left off granting." Joash struck the ground only three times when the prophet told him to strike, and so won only three victories (2 Kings 13). In both, the lesson is the same: we can stop too soon.
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.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
Is it a lack of submission?
Some Christians worry that praying again and again for the same thing means we don't accept God's will. Bounds saw the opposite danger. He warned that spiritual laziness often hides behind the language of submission:
And that our spiritual sloth would come in, under the guise of submission, and say it is not God's will to give what we ask, and so cease praying and lose our case.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter XIII
At the same time, he never pictures prayer as a fight against God's will. In chapter 9 he writes that prayer "never rebels against the will of God, never comes into conflict with that will." Importunate prayer pleads within God's will and trusts His promises. It also abides in Christ, asks in His name and comes from a life that seeks to please Him, which Bounds lays out in chapter 10 and chapter 13.
And when the answer is long in coming, Bounds offers this comfort:
They may have to wait long for the answer, and they may not live to see it, but the prayer of faith never misses its object.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter XI
Why God asks us to persist
Why would a loving Father make us ask more than once? Bounds' answer is that persistent prayer changes the one who prays. Long seasons of earnest prayer, he says, leave a mark on us:
Our seasons of importunate prayer cut themselves, like the print of a diamond, into our hardest places, and mark with ineffaceable traces our characters.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
He ends the chapter with a sentence worth remembering the next time you feel like giving up:
God loves the importunate pleader, and sends him answers that would never have been granted but for the persistency that refuses to let go until the petition craved for is granted.
Purpose in Prayer, Chapter VI
How to start
You don't need a new method to begin. Choose one real need that is on your heart, something you can name plainly. Ask God for it each day. When nothing seems to change, keep asking, then seek Him more earnestly in His Word, then knock with fresh urgency. Pay attention to how God works on your own heart along the way.
The best next step is to read Bounds himself. Chapter 6 of Purpose in Prayer is short enough to read in one sitting. For the rest of the book, see the Purpose in Prayer summary or the book's best lines in Purpose in Prayer quotes. Bounds' other books return to this theme too; our guide to E. M. Bounds' books shows where, and Power Through Prayer applies it to preachers and ministers.
Then open Purpose in Prayer and pray along with it.