“Unique Elements”
Historical Context from the 19th & 20th Century relating to EM Bounds' writing.
E. M. Bounds, a famous American clergyman and author, wrote "The Possibilities of Prayer" in 1923.
Perhaps no other contemporary Christian theologian had a more thorough knowledge of prayer than E. M. Bounds. He was a Methodist Episcopal Church South clergyman and author of eleven works, nine of which were about prayer. At the age of nineteen, Bounds was a practising lawyer, and after three years, he began preaching for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. His classic writings on personal communication with God look at how prayer must come from the complete person and how it deepens one's Christian faith. He was known to say, “Continue to pray, and pray some more! It is adored by God and despised by the Devil.”
Bounds advocates that, "Prayer should be the sound of our hearing, the growth of our growing, the breath of our breathing, the thought of our thinking, the soul of our feeling, and the life of our living." We communicate our ideas and desires to our heavenly father through prayer. Good deeds, communion, church activities, and other such activities do not and should not take the place of prayer.
Bounds discusses The Ministry of Prayer, Prayer and the Promises, Its Possibilities, Answered Prayer, Divine Providence, and much more in "The Possibilities of Prayer."
