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. James 5:16 (NIV)
During a late-night Pinterest (obsessed) session… (I’m not alone, right?), I came across this scripture. As I read it over a few times, I realized that my focus usually lands on the 2nd part of this verse, “The prayer of the righteous person is powerful and effective.”
Then these thoughts usually turn up… Am I righteous? Are my prayers effective and powerful? And how do you measure that? I know people of great faith and integrity, full of belief, whose prayers have seemed to go unanswered… so how do you figure out if your prayers are powerful and effective?
And as these thoughts swirled around, I let my focus fall on the first half of the verse…
“Confess to and pray for each other so that you may be healed…”
Not just confess and pray to God, but to EACH OTHER.
In Matthew 22 Jesus says that the greatest commandments are
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Connection, relationship, community…
Maybe a pathway to some of our healing is to talk to each other. Not about the weather, about deep stuff… confession stuff. Maybe you need to talk to someone about something that has happened to you, or you need to go and talk about forgiveness and trust with someone you’ve wronged, or maybe you just don’t know what you to do… sharing helps. Opening up with someone (trustworthy) is part of the healing.
Another pathway complimentary to talking is praying with and for each other. Being mindful of what those around us are going through and inviting God and His divinity into the story. Burden bearing accompanied with hope and faith. Making connection open between three people… you, the other person, and God. Doesn’t Ecclesiastes say something about the strength of a three-stranded cord? (Ecc 4:12)
When contemplating righteousness and prayer and answers, just remember that sometimes healing comes from unexpected places in extraordinary ways while walking down the path of life with others.
Open your heart, talk and pray.
So that we may be healed.
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