the old Prayer Warrior, E. M. Bounds,
People of Prayer
We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the person or sink the person in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make much of the person, far more of the person than of anything else. People are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better people.
"There was a man sent from God whose name was John." The dispensation that heralded and prepared the way for Christ was bound up in that person, John. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." The world's salvation comes out of that cradled Son. When Paul appeals to the personal character of the men who rooted the gospel in the world, he solves the mystery of their success. The glory and efficiency of the gospel is staked on the people who proclaim it.
When God declares that "the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him," he declares the necessity of a person and of His dependence on that person as a channel through which to exert His power upon the world. This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget. The forgetting of it is as baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere. Darkness, confusion, and death would ensue.
What the Church needs today is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but people whom the Holy Spirit can use -- People of prayer, people mighty in prayer. The Holy Spirit does not flow through methods, but through people. He does not come on machinery, but on people. He does not anoint plans, but people -- people of prayer.
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