If you want to be inspired to pray in 2012 and don’t have time for a long book, Here is a short one.

Probably no book has had a greater effect on my prayer life in proportion to its size than E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer. It was the seed from which grew the tree, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals.

The preacher . .. is not a professional man; his ministry is not a profession; it is a divine institution, a divine devotion. (Location 55)

His passion is perhaps best expressed in this quote that he gives from William Wilberforce, a man of political action and great fruitfulness.

This perpetual hurry of business and company ruins me in soul if not in body. More solitude and earlier hours! I suspect I have been allotting habitually too little time to religious exercises, as private devotion and religious meditation, Scripture-reading, etc.

Hence I am lean and cold and hard. I had better allot two hours or an hour and a half daily. I have been keeping too late hours, and hence have had but a hurried half hour in a morning to myself.

Surely the experience of all good men confirms the proposition that without a due measure of private devotions the soul will grow lean. But all may be done through prayer -- almighty prayer, I am ready to say -- and why not? For that it is almighty is only through the gracious ordination of the God of love and truth. O then, pray, pray, pray!

Quoted in Power Through Prayer, Location 734.