James 5:13-18
Who can pray to God? Anyone!
You don’t have to be a great saint in order to pray. Elijah wasn’t. We tend to have this image of him as a great prophet, one of the superheroes of the Old Testament – but he was an ordinary man, just like us. He had faults, and failings, and fears – and doubts.
So you don’t have to be able to create long and eloquent prayers. Elijah didn’t! When we read about him in the first book of Kings, the most striking thing about his prayers is how short they are! In chapter 17, he prays for the dead son of the widow with whom he’s staying: “LORD my God, have you brought tragedy even on this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?… LORD my God, let this boy’s life return to him!” (I Kings 17:20,21) And the boy comes back to life! And then in the next chapter, when he’s duelling with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and they’ve been praying frantically to Baal all day, asking him to send fire from heaven onto their sacrifice, Elijah’s prayer is just a couple of sentences long. And the words are barely out of his mouth when another great miracle happens: fire falls from heaven onto his sacrifice and burns it up completely.
Christian prayer should be brief and to the point! James doesn’t say that the prayer of a long-winded person is powerful and effective, but “the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” Things like unbelief, or persistent deliberate wrongdoing, can cut us off from God and stop our prayers from getting through. But when James talks about a ‘righteous’ person here, he doesn’t mean someone without sin (because then none of us would qualify). None of us is by nature good enough to be on speaking terms with Almighty God – but anyone and everyone can have their sins forgiven through Jesus Christ. So it’s a good idea, before I start praying, if I know that something in my life isn’t right in God’s eyes, for me to clear the decks, as it were, by confessing my sin first! Because if we confess our sins to God, He promises to forgive us. And then we can talk to Him about absolutely anything that’s on our minds.
Should we pray on our own, or together? Both! Alone and in groups. At church and in our homes. There’s something special about a group coming together for prayer, like the elders praying for the sick person in verse 14.
We see similar blessings with group prayer in Acts – chapters 4 and 12 are just a couple of examples. When the apostles are first arrested for preaching the gospel and then released, what do they do? They meet with the church to pray for courage and boldness in evangelism. And the Holy Spirit falls on them a second time, just as He did at Pentecost – and Luke says that “they spoke the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:31) as a result. When Peter is held in prison and awaiting execution, what do the Christians do? They meet in their homes to pray for his release – and an angel sets him free!
Discovering the Bible 