Sunday, February 23, 2014

The Necessity of Prayer (E.M. Bounds)

I didn't write today, but rather spent a portion of it reading E.M. Bounds book, "The Necessity of Prayer." I've selected a few small (okay, big) titbits (well, mouths-full) from my reading to share.

"There is bound to be much delay and long days of waiting for true faith, but faith accepts the conditions--knows there will be delays in answering prayer, and regards such delays as times of testing, in the which, it is privileged to show its mettle, and the stern stuff of which it is made." ...

"Delay is often the test and the strength of faith. How much patience is required when these times of testing come! Yet faith gathers strength by waiting and praying. Patience has its perfect work in the school of delay. In some instances, delay is the very essence of prayer. God has to do it." ...

"Faith is not believing just anything; it is believing God, resting in Him, trusting His Word." ...

"We need to be constantly reminded to be reminded that faith is the one inseparable condition of successful praying. There are other conditions entering into the exercise, but faith is the final, the one indispensable condition of true praying." ...

"Our eyes should be taken off self, removed from our own weakness and allowed to rest implicitly upon God's strength." ...

"Trust is faith become absolute, ratified, consummated." ... "But trust is firm belief, it is faith in full flower. Trust is a conscious act, a fact of which we are sensible." ... "Trust see God doing things here and now. Yea, more. It rises to a lofty eminence, and looking into the invisible and the eternal, realizes that God has done things, and regards them as being already done." ... "We know when we trust just as we know when we see, just as we are conscious of our sense of touch. Trust sees, receives, holds." 

"Yet, quite often, faith is too weak to obtain God's greatest good, immediately; so it has to wait in loving, strong, prayerful, pressing obedience, until it grows in strength, and is able to bring down the eternal, into the realms of experience and time. 

To this point, trust masses all its forces. Here it holds. And in the struggle, trust's grasp becomes mightier, and grasps, for itself, all that God has done for it in His eternal wisdom and plenitude of grace. 

In the matter of waiting in prayer, mightiest prayer, faith rises to its highest plane and becomes the gift of God. It becomes the blessed disposition and expression of the soul which is secured by a constant intercourse with, and unwearied application to God.

Jesus Christ clearly taught that faith was the condition on which prayer was answered." ...

"Trust grows nowhere so readily and richly as int he prayer chamber." ...

""Have faith in God," "Trust in the Lord" form the keynote and foundation of prayer."

(E.M. Bounds, The Necessity of Prayer)

No comments: