Some More Thoughts on Prayer

In the recent past, I have posted a few times about this vital spiritual discipline called prayer. Today I want to post again on prayer. Why? This morning as I was doing some reading in one of E.M. Bounds' works on prayer, I ran across a section that really got me pumped to pray. Not wanting to be selfish with this gem, I shared it at our weekly church staff meeting this morning. I thought you might also be challenged by this man who not only wrote about prayer - he prayed!

"Prayer is no petty invention of man, a fancied relief for fancied ills. Prayer is no dreary performance, dead and death-dealing, but is God's enabling act for man, living and life-giving, joy and joy-giving. Prayer is the contact of a living soul with God. In prayer, God stoops to kiss man, to bless man, and to aid man in everything that God can devise or man can need. Prayer fills man's emptiness with God's fullness. It fills man's poverty with God's riches. It puts away man's weakness with God's strength. It banishes man's littleness with God's greatness. Prayer is God's plan to supply man's great and continuous need with God's great and continuous abundance.  What is this prayer to which men are called? It is not a mere form, a child's play. It is serious, difficult work, the manliest, the mightiest work, the divinest work which man can do. Prayer lifts men out of the earthliness and links them with the heavenly. Men are never nearer heaven, nearer God, never more Godlike, never in deeper sympathy and truer partnership with Jesus Christ, than when praying. Love, philanthropy, holy pledges,-all of them helpful and tender for men-are horn and perfected by prayer" 

 (E. M. Bounds. Complete Works of E. M. Bounds on Prayer, The: Experience the Wonders of God through Prayer (p. 232). Kindle Edition). 

Thanks for stopping by . . .
pj