Wednesday 19th
James 5:13-18
NIV (v16) – ‘Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.’
ESV (v16) – ‘Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.’
‘The prayer of a righteous has great power as it is working.’ This one phrase tells us that prayer can achieve great results. James refers to Elijah of old, ‘Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit’, a recollection of what we find in 1 King 17, here in verse one, he declares ‘As the LORD, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.’ What a bold and a brave statement to make, but he was able to utter it because of the relationship he had with the LORD God, he was a righteous man and had strong faith in God. It is later in 1 Kings 18 that Elijah sends Ahab to go and to eat and to drink, for there is a sound of abundance of rain, and three plus years after Elijah had declared it would not rain, it rained again. That is the faith of a righteous man. There are so many other examples of men and women who demonstrated a great faith in what God would do, perhaps some of the most incredible are found in Daniel and the three Hebrew lads, who when faced with severe opposition for their faith and trust in the living God, were willing to defy the authorities despite the resulting punishment, they had a resolute, unshakable faith and hope in God, look at what the three lads had to say, ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.”’ (Daniel 3:16–18) Whatever the outcome, whether they were saved or would perish they would not bow down because of their strong faith in God, and God came to their aid in a miraculous way, we know the story of Daniel, again a man who trusted God to the point where he also had faith to believe that God could come to his aid, and as a result God did, preserving his life in the den of lions.
As I consider these things, I feel that I need to join with the disciples in Luke 17:5 where it says that they said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ Perhaps too often we are like the man who cried out in Mark 9:24 ‘I believe, help thou my unbelief!’
Lord help us, help our unbelief to believe, to exercise faith for greater things to happen among us, faith to believe that as we are obedient in the anointing with oil and the laying on of hands that God will move among us and do great things.
An old chorus is ‘He hath done great things’ may we be able to say among us ‘He is doing great things’ to the glory of his name.