How to Pray Effectively — Bounds on the Praying Life
⏱ 13 min read
How Do You Pray Effectively When You Already Know All the Techniques?
You have read the books. The acronyms — ACTS, PRAY, the five-finger method — have all been tried. The structured journal has had its season. The bullet-pointed intercession list has had its season. The Scripture-praying app has had its season. And after all the methods have done what they can do, a quieter question has surfaced under the noise of them: am I praying effectively, or am I just praying tidily? The two are not the same. The technique has been honed. The praying — the actual being-present-to-God of it — has, somewhere along the way, gotten thinner instead of deeper.
The question how to pray effectively is the question of a Christian woman who has, by all visible signs, done her homework. She prays. She journals. She intercedes. She has been faithful for a decade or more. And the asking how do I pray effectively is the asking of a woman who suspects, in the quiet, that the effectiveness she is reaching for is not on the other side of a better technique — that the next stretch of her prayer life is not a sharper method but a different kind of life, of which the praying is the natural overflow rather than a discrete activity.
This is the slow version of the answer. E. M. Bounds, the nineteenth-century American pastor who spent the last seventeen years of his life rising at four in the morning to pray and writing eight books on prayer afterwards, will be our older voice. Three passages from Power Through Prayer, Purpose in Prayer, and The Essentials of Prayer, read at the speed he intended. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Bounds’s central claim, taken across the whole of his eight books, is that effective prayer is not a method. It is a life — and the praying is what that life naturally produces, the way a healthy tree produces fruit. The woman who is asking how to pray effectively has often been asking the wrong-shaped question. The right-shaped question, in Bounds’s grammar, is how do I become the kind of person whose life is a praying life — and the prayer that flows out of that life is what effectiveness actually means.
(If you have been carrying specific people into your prayer — the husband, the child, the grown daughter — how to pray for your husband walks one practical companion to this slower article. If the inner posture of humility has been part of the question — the soul-shape from which effective prayer rises — how the saints practiced humility sits beside this one. And if the season you are in is the single woman’s season, with its particular contours of prayer, how to be content in singleness walks that ground.)
The thing effective prayer is not
It is not the right method. That is the first thing to settle.
The modern Christian woman, raised in the era of the spiritual self-improvement book, has often inherited a quiet assumption: that if her prayer life is not producing the inner fruit she hoped for, the problem is technique. There must be a better way to structure the morning hour. A better acronym. A better journal layout. A more biblical order of operations. The assumption is gentle and well-meant and not entirely wrong — structure does help, for a stretch — and Bounds, gently, would tell you it is not the deepest answer.
Bounds spent forty years inside prayer, and the conclusion he came to was that the men and women in the New Testament whose prayers moved heaven were not people who had found a better method. They were people whose whole lives had become so thoroughly given to God that their praying was, in effect, the breath of the life they were already living. The praying was not a discrete activity bolted onto the day. The praying was what the day was, from its inside.
This is the line that re-frames the whole question. Effective prayer is not a thing you do. It is a thing you are becoming — and the praying that comes out of the becoming is what the New Testament calls effective.
The first passage: the marvelous power of the praying life
“‘I felt still in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on God.’ It was prayer which gave to his life and ministry their marvellous power.”
— E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Bounds is quoting David Brainerd here — the young eighteenth-century missionary who died at twenty-nine of tuberculosis, having spent his short life among the indigenous peoples of New England and New Jersey, and whose journals Bounds carried with him as a kind of measuring stick for the praying life. I felt still, in a sweet frame, under a sense of divine love and grace, and went to bed in such a frame, with my heart set on God. The sentence is doing one piece of work. It is naming the state, not the method. Brainerd does not say I prayed for an hour in the closet using the following pattern. He says I felt still. He says under a sense of divine love and grace. He says with my heart set on God. The state is what Bounds notices. The state is what made the praying effective.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that shifts the centre of the question. The effectiveness of Brainerd’s prayer was not in the words. The effectiveness was in the state of the heart from which the words rose — still, under a sense of divine love and grace, with the heart set on God. The praying flowed naturally out of a soul already settled into the presence of God. The settling came first. The praying came second. The effectiveness was the natural consequence of the order.
Bounds’s whole pastoral counsel for the woman asking how to pray effectively is contained in that ordering. Do not begin with the praying. Begin with the settling. Sit. Be still. Become aware — slowly, by the small daily presence of yourself in the chair — that you are under a sense of divine love. Let the heart be set on God before the asking begins. The praying that rises out of that prior settling is the praying Bounds would call effective. Not because it follows the right method. Because it is the natural overflow of a soul already at home in His presence.
This is the part that ends the chronic worry of am I praying right. The praying is right when the heart is set on God before the words begin. The words, in that case, are the small visible surface of a much deeper inner orientation. The method matters less than the orientation. The orientation is the praying life Bounds spent his books pointing toward.
The somatic that goes with the orientation
Pause here. Bounds’s vocabulary has a body to it, and the body is where the effective-prayer question most needs translating into a quiet Tuesday.
Sit somewhere quiet. Press both feet flat against the floor. Place both hands, palms down, lightly on your thighs — settled, not gripping. Notice the chest. The chest of the woman who is asking how to pray effectively is often slightly forward, leaning in, trying to do the prayer well. Let the chest soften. Let the spine settle backward by a small amount, into whatever is supporting you. Take one slow inhale, and on the exhale, let the small ongoing effort to get the prayer right set itself down. You are not performing the prayer. You are coming home to the One you are praying to.
Stay there for thirty seconds. The body of a praying life is not a body leaning forward in effort. It is a body settled backward in trust. The leaning-forward is the body of the technique. The settling-backward is the body of the life. Bounds would say the second is what makes the first effective. The praying that flows out of the settled body, on a given evening, is the praying that lands.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women is built around this kind of small daily settling. One page each evening, a short passage, room for one honest sentence, no demand to perform. The journal is not the cure for the inner question of effectiveness — He is — but the daily small practice keeps the body in the chair long enough for the settling to happen. The praying that rises out of that settling is what Bounds would call the praying life.
The second passage: the values we put on communion alone with God
“The self-denial, the sacrifices which we make for our prayer-chambers, the frequency of our visits to that hallowed place of meeting with the Lord, the lingering to stay, the loathness to leave, are values which we put on communion alone with God, the price we pay for the Spirit’s trysting hours of heavenly love.”
— E. M. Bounds, Purpose in Prayer
This is the passage that turns the question inside out. Read it twice.
Notice the verbs. The lingering to stay. The loathness to leave. Bounds is not naming the duration of the prayer. He is naming the posture of the soul during it. The praying life is not measured by how long the chair-time lasts. It is measured by the soul’s loathness to leave — by the felt-sense that one would rather stay in His presence than do almost anything else, even if the practical day requires the leaving in ten minutes.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that quiets the small chronic guilt of not praying long enough. Bounds is not asking for more minutes. He is asking for a different quality of minutes — for the kind of presence inside the chair-time where the soul, at the end of fifteen minutes, is reluctant to get up. The reluctance is the marker. The reluctance is what effective prayer feels like from the inside.
And Bounds is being honest about cost. The self-denial, the sacrifices which we make for our prayer-chambers. The praying life is not free. It costs the half-hour that could have been spent on the phone. It costs the early rising on the morning that the body wanted to stay in bed. It costs the small ongoing prioritising of the trysting hour over the dozen other claims on the day. Bounds is not saying this to shame the woman who has skipped the prayer this morning. He is saying it to name, accurately, that the praying life has an economy — and the cost of it is what makes the praying effective, because the soul knows what it has set aside in order to come.
The price we pay for the Spirit’s trysting hours of heavenly love. That is the line worth keeping near the page. Trysting is the older English word for a lovers’ meeting — a kept appointment between two who love each other and have agreed to be in this place at this hour. Bounds is naming what prayer actually is, at its centre. It is a kept appointment with the One who loves you, in a place set aside for the meeting, at a time you have both agreed to. The effectiveness of the prayer flows from the keptness of the appointment. The Lord is faithful to the kept appointment. The praying woman who is faithful to it on her end finds her praying becoming, slowly, the praying life Bounds spent his books describing.
The third passage: the harmony of wills
“There is perfect harmony between the will of such a man and God, and His will. And the two wills being in perfect accord, this brings rest of soul, absence of friction, and the presence of perfect peace.”
— E. M. Bounds, The Essentials of Prayer
This is the most pastoral of the three passages. Read it slowly.
Bounds is naming, in plain language, what effective prayer finally produces in the praying woman. Rest of soul. Absence of friction. The presence of perfect peace. The fruit is not louder prayers or longer prayers or more eloquent prayers. The fruit is a harmony of wills — the slow, daily merging of your will with His will, until what you ask for is, more and more often, what He was already going to give, because the asking has been re-shaped by the praying life into the shape of what He delights in.
This is the deepest answer to how to pray effectively. Effective prayer is not the bending of God’s will to yours. Effective prayer is the slow, gentle bending of your will into His, over years, in the chair — until the two are in perfect accord and the rest, the absence of friction, the presence of perfect peace, become the natural inner weather of the praying woman.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that ends the chronic anxiety about whether her prayers are being answered. The praying life produces rest of soul in the praying one. The rest is the answer. The rest is the evidence that the wills are coming into accord. The specific requests will be answered as He sees fit — some yes, some no, some not-yet — but the deeper effectiveness of the praying life is the rest it produces in the woman doing it. The rest is the fruit. The fruit is the proof of the life.
The two wills being in perfect accord. That is the slow long arc of the praying life. Bounds did not get there in a year. He got there over forty. The Christian woman who is asking how to pray effectively today is at the beginning of an arc that will, over decades, slowly bring her will into accord with His. The praying is not the technique. The praying is the life inside which the harmony slowly forms. The effectiveness is the rest the harmony produces — and the rest will arrive, in the chair, before the harmony is complete. The rest is the down-payment on the harmony. The praying life is the long becoming.
What praying effectively will actually feel like over a year
The methods will quiet. You will find yourself, three months in, no longer reaching for the acronyms — not because they are wrong but because the praying has begun to flow out of a settled centre that no longer needs the structure to begin. The bullet-pointed intercession list will still have its place. The journal will still have its place. But the praying itself will have become less of a discrete activity and more of an underneath — a continuous quiet conversation with the One who is always present, surfacing into formal prayer at the bookends of the day and continuing, in a quieter form, through the dishes and the drive and the queue at the supermarket.
By the sixth month, the loathness to leave will have visited you at least once. You will have sat down for ten minutes and found yourself, twenty-five minutes later, reluctant to get up. By the end of the year, the praying life will have begun. The praying will be what your day is, from its inside. The asking how to pray effectively will have been answered not by a technique but by a life — and the rest of soul, the absence of friction, the presence of peace will have started to become the underlying weather of your week.
That is what Bounds’s slow grammar promises. Not a better method. A different kind of life, inside which the praying becomes effective because it is the breath of who you are now.
(For the wider context this sits inside, how to develop a quiet time with God walks the foundational daily practice in Brother Lawrence’s gentler grammar. And how to pray morning and evening carries the two-bookends-of-the-day shape into a practical pair of rhythms.)
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the trysting appointment between the praying woman and the One who waits for her there.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Bounds’s slow vocabulary — the praying life, the lingering to stay, the harmony of wills — into a daily companion built for the woman whose praying is, at last, ready to stop being a technique and start being a life.
