Day 2 : The Prize of Prayer (James 5:13-16)
It’s day 2 and we are starting into our first discipline which is prayer – or communication, both speaking AND listening to God. And just as we started with this entire challenge, I want to spend time talking about the prize of prayer- why is it something to work at and commit to daily?
There are many reasons to value the discipline of prayer but one way to summarize them is simply this: It invites and unleashes God’s power and presence in your life. Let me say that again, prayer invites and unleashes God’s power and presence in your life.
James 5:13-16 runs through a list of the results of making this discipline a priority:
Are you in trouble? Then pray. Are you happy? Then sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Bring in the mature believers and leaders of the church to pray over them in the name of the Lord and the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a faithful man is powerful and effective.
Prayer is the Gorilla Glue of life- it can be applied to anything and everything. There’s no situation, emotion, person or problem that can’t be hit with prayer. If you go onto the Gorilla Glue website, from crafts to cars you can find a page dedicated to the infinite amount of projects and problems that it can fix – But here’s the thing, it doesn’t do anything for you if it sits on the shelf. You have to bust off the top and use it for the powerful adhesiveness to actually work and fix things.
Prayer works the same way guys – it only works when we use it. Prayer is powerful and effective – not because of the one offering the prayer, but because of the One on the other side of that communication. And He wants all of your honest, raw emotions, questions and problems to come His way because He already knows about it anyway. But to unleash His power and presence in your life, you have to invite Him in, you have to open the bottle up and start using it to see the results.
Here’s your training discipline, it is short and simple: I want you to share why you would value the discipline of prayer- either from personal experience or go back in and read those verses from James 5. What prize of prayer would you want from that list? Throw a sentence into a text message to someone and tomorrow we’ll start diving into power and effectiveness of prayer.
Discipline Training
- Read James 5:13-16 and choose one benefit of prayer you desire in your own life and share that with your friend
