Confession, healing and intimacy (III) Prayer

I ask the Lord morning by morning, to give me something applicable to my own life as I write these blogs. And the Lord, being the playfully strategic God that He is, set me up this morning. In particular we are talking about confessing to one another, and yesterday I mentioned that I am naturally open. And now as we come to the subject of prayer in this third post on James 5:16, I am finding that I need to confess that my public prayer life is more impressive than the private prayer part. What I hadn’t noticed before though, is the connection of the first part of this verse (confess… and pray ..) to the last part “The fervent prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” We stand in His righteousness of course, and we need to be growing in righteousness (sanctification), but in order to claim healing and intimacy, our prayers need to be fervent, passionate and persistent (Luke 18:1- 8).

There is a reason for this. Let me relate it again to twelve-step programs. In these programs, we have observed, that many give up at steps 4 and 5 (the fearless moral inventory, and the admonition to share it with at least one other person). Well people give up because it is very difficult. Part of this, is that we will likely need to re-live the pain of the hurts we have received, and to come to terms with the guilt and shame of our own failures. It requires truth in the inward parts. It requires a level of honesty with ourselves and others that is likely foreign to us, and many times it flies in the face of our experience that the world is not a safe place. And on top of this, you can be sure that the enemy is mightily at work to preserve his destructive influence in our lives. To put it another way, it is at the heart of the spiritual warfare that needs to take place in order to claim the promises of the healing of broken hearts, the release of captives, and the restoration of the broken family structures of many generations (Isaiah 61:1-4).

The Lord is, as I say, playfully strategic. Though there are in fact some amazing things happening, at the same time ministries I’m involved in are in danger of falling apart. And I’m beginning to realize this morning, that most of my prayers are reactive, praying for the horse after it has bolted the stable. We are desperately in need of fresh blood in leadership in these ministries. And as I thought on these things, I was reminded of the passage where Jesus seeing the multitude as sheep without a shepherd tells us that the harvest is plenteous but the labourers are few. He then commands us to “Pray therefore to the Lord of the harvest to thrust out labourers into His harvest” (Matthew 9:36-38).

Father, once again we see in the above passage the need for us to cooperate with You in prayer. Since You are indeed Lord of the harvest, and You have told us that if we pray anything according to Your will you will grant it (1 John 5:14), then we can have confidence that what You tell us to pray You will answer when we come before You with passion and persistence. We need Your help Lord to not be weary in well doing. Grace us Lord, to be like Jesus who pushed through the pain to the joy that was set before Him, and endured the cross despising the shame. I know Lord that we will be changed in the process, and we will give You the honour, glory and praise in Jesus Name Amen