My prayers are powerful

Does this describe how you feel about your prayer life? Here's the rub, if this is not how you feel, then it's likely not true. The Bible tells us “The prayer of a righteous man or woman is powerful and effective” (James 5:16). You may answer “Well the true rub here is that I am not righteous!” However if you belong to Christ then you are the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The context of the James quotation is important. The first part of verse 16 reads “Confess your sins one to another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” There are three things here that I want to mention. Firstly the healing of which James is speaking, while it certainly includes physical healing (verse 14 and 15), also has to do with healing of the heart, mind and emotions. Jesus tells us that His mandate includes the healing of broken hearts (Luke 4:21 and context, see also Isaiah 61: 1). Now part of this involves believing what He says about us. We are the righteousness of God, we are saints, we are qualified to be inheritors of the Kingdom of God (Colossians 1:12).

So part of the healing we are promised is that we will progressively know who we are in Christ, precious sons and daughters of the living God. But secondly the context is about walking in the light, and in particular about that aspect of walking in the light that has to do with confessing our sins. When we do this, God is faithful to forgive us our sins, and He is faithful to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). If we are not doing this regularly, we will not be walking in the light, and we will not feel cleansed, we will not feel the joy of repentance and we will not have confidence before Him in our prayer life. In fact when we have known and unconfessed sin in our lives, He will not hear us (Isaiah 59:2).

So if we are to be powerful in prayer, we need to know who we are, and we need to keep short accounts with with God. But this brings me to the third thing that I see in this context, the confession also has to be to one other! This can be very scarey. If your experience is anything like mine, you will have confessed to others and it has either become the subject of gossip, or it has come back to you as accusation! This is not healing! We need to be wise here, and we need to find a safe place. It will probably start with finding someone who you can trust, someone who will keep your confidences and not judge you, and someone who will pray for you (and you for them – still in verse 16). Not all fellowships are safe, but it is imperative that we find a place (or places) that are safe. We are deeply into what true fellowship means here. It has to do with being real, it has to do with being honest and humble enough to realize that “in many things we all fail,” and that “all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God” (James 3:2; Romans 3:23).

To put all this another way, it is about living at the foot of the cross. It is about living in the perspective of what He needed to do for us and what He has done and continues to do for us. It is about knowing that He loves us unconditionally. It is about knowing who we are in Him, about recognizing Him in each other and treating each other accordingly. It is about walking in the light. It is about knowing our authority in Him. It is about knowing that when, to the best of our ability we are doing all this, that our prayers are powerful.

But know the enemy will test this in you. He will whisper in your ear that you are not worthy. As did Jesus, we need use the Word of God. We need to tell him and tell ourselves “I am the righteousness of God in Him.” Then we need to tell ourselves “My prayers are powerful.” We need to keep saying it until we believe it, and then we need to keep saying it because we believe it, and because it is true! And we need to pray!