Prayer is a lot like Chemistry. You need to understand the ingredients, the necessary attitudes and everything needs to be properly balanced, -proportioned, to get the desired result… communicating effectively with GOD.
It’s tragic how easily we can miss the main ingredient in effective prayer. SIN, has rewired our minds to focus on US — what do we need to do for our prayers to be heard. Prayer is not about method - a reproducible process — the right formula and results will multiply. While this applies to certain things, it doesn’t apply to prayer — or at least that’s not the vision the apostle James gives us. The main ingredient in effective prayer is emphatically not US.
Most of us recognize James 5:16b to be a familiar verse: “The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” (NIV) which is also translated, in the ESV… “The effective prayer of a righteous person has great power.”
This is one of those coffee-mug verses. It’s commonly understood like this: Be righteous and your prayers will work. It’s what most of us think. But that’s the skim-milk meaning. It’s what happens when we fly thru the text without asking the deeper questions. Our inclination is to make the burden of this passage something to do with us. We simply settle to think that if we want our prayers to be effective then we need to be righteous.
But this idea doesn’t hold up. First, look at the context surrounding verse 16. James’s whole point is that prayer is effective. He asks in verse 13, “Is anyone among you suffering?” Then he replies, “Let him pray.” What about cheerfulness? Or sickness? Or sin? In each case, James encourages his readers to pray. Why? Because prayer is effective, which means, God hears his people and acts on their behalf.
OK, what about the beginning of verse 16, because prayer is effective (verses 13–15), he says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16a). That verse is a double-dose of support for our praying. James’s concern is not how prayer is made effective, but that prayer is effective. And then verse 17 personalizes his point. James introduces Elijah…. “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed fervently . . .” (James 5:17).
What does Elijah have to do with our praying? Does it mean that Elijah was righteous and his prayers worked so we should be like Elijah for our prayers to work too? Is that what he is saying? No.
James is reassuring us by saying that Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. He was just a man. He was like us. He had a nature like ours. And being just a man, being like us, having a nature likes ours, he prayed fervently and God heard him. The point is not that we should be righteous at the extraordinary level of an Elijah, but that he was normal like you and me. James doesn’t say for us to be like Elijah for our prayers to be answered but that Elijah was like us and his prayers are heard and answered — therefore pray.
Don’t miss the main point in what James is saying. This means that the focus of effective prayer is not us, but God. Prayer has less to do with the specifics of how we say what we say, and everything to do with the one to whom we are saying it.… Almighty God!
We pray as ordinary people who have an extraordinary God. We’re just normal, you and I. We’re just normal like Elijah. Prayer is effective, not because of great men who pray, or even great words eloquently said, but because of a great God who in Christ graciously hears his people.
GOD is the main ingredient in the power of prayer… So pray often and fervently.
