Pray
James 5:16-18 (NLT)
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. Elijah was as human as we are, and yet when he prayed earnestly that no rain would fall, none fell for three and a half years! Then, when he prayed again, the sky sent down rain and the earth began to yield its crops.
Does reading this raise your faith, or make you question your own?
Full truth? It makes me question mine. It makes me question the expectation I carry when I pray. Do I carry the same expectation as Elijah? Do I have faith that God will heal when I lay hands, or stop the rain for three years simply because I asked him to? I’d love to say, yes, I do! But in truth, I don’t always.
James makes it clear that our prayers hold 'great power and produce wonderful results.' So why is it we don’t pray more often, more boldly, and more expectantly? Some reasons perhaps: we don’t pray for fear of being naïve, for fear of silence, for fear of selfish motives, and we don’t pray for fear of doing it wrong.
So why should we persist with prayer despite these fears? Because Jesus told us to! We pray even though we’re overwhelmed because trust comes before faith because Jesus welcomes complaints as well as praise. The only way to get prayer wrong is by thinking we must get it 'right' before he will listen.
We pray because prayer gives birth to new life. *
Dom John Chapman says to ‘pray as you can, and don’t try to pray as you can’t’. No instructions, no obligations, just you talking to Jesus, bringing to him anything and everything. The invitation is to simply show up, on the days we believe he’ll stop the rain, and on the days when we don't.
Maybe you haven’t shown up to pray this week - you haven’t quite found the time or the words. That’s okay. Start now - let today’s devotional guide you into prayer, maybe to reflect on the previous days' wisdom from James, or perhaps on what you're facing today.
Prayer – Holy Spirit guide me in prayer, give me the words where I lack them, and the discipline when it feels difficult to show up. And thank you for the grace when I don’t.
* Tyler Staton, Praying like Monks, Living like Fools, 2022.