This is a passage that means business: James 5:13-20 The Message
13-15 Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven—healed inside and out.
16-18 Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. Elijah, for instance, human just like us, prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t—not a drop for three and a half years. Then he prayed that it would rain, and it did. The showers came and everything started growing again.
19-20 My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.
There are several things that make me so happy about these verses. The main thing that jumps out is the power of prayer. It is the recommendation for every situation and not something to be taken lightly. It works.
But here’s what really rocks my boat: I love that God wants us to be accountable one to another. His commandment that we love our neighbor as ourselves sets us up to be in community with others. In this passage in James, He shows us again that He doesn’t expect us to do life on our own, but to surround ourselves with partners that will buoy us up when we need it most.
It is a natural thing to want to “hunker down” when life gets tough…to close yourself off from everyone. It’s a defense mechanism sometimes, to keep from being hurt one more time. I’m guilty of this. You’d think I would know better by now than to try to get through things on my own, but I have to make myself vulnerable again and again. In doing so, I reap the benefits of someone carrying my burdens with me and that person reaps the benefits of lifting the burdens off of me.
Things come around full circle and even if we walk away from God, He has it set up so that someone is praying, someone hasn’t given up on us…God is always there waiting. He heals, He forgives, and He draws us back in when we try to do it our own way.
Stay prayerful today~you never know, you just might prevent an epidemic.