The Prayer of a Righteous Person

Reading daily devotions from Our Daily Bread, I was directed to read James 5. This passage deals with the prayer of a righteous man (person.) My reading this morning caused me to consider the connection between the prayer of a righteous person and its immediate context. The previous comment is about confessing sin to other believers and praying for each other. The prayer here is related to the confession of sin. It makes most sense that the prayer is for forgiveness of the confessing believer.

How interesting that I, along with most of Christendom, have applied this truth about prayer being powerful and effective to the accomplishing of signs and wonders.

Further challenge to my usual read, the reference to powerfully-praying Elijah points to binding and releasing. Elijah prayed and God bound up the regular rainfall. He prayed again and God released the pent-up precipitation. Our Lord Jesus Christ told Peter that, in connection to his confession of the God-revealed truth of Jesus' Divine Messiahship, He was issuing the "Keys to the Kingdom." With them Peter would bind and release things on earth in conjunction with them being bound/released in Heaven.

When we confess to a fellow believer, we see the sign of our forgiveness from our Heavenly Father in the face of our brother/sister.

Their prayer for us in this exposed, shame-filled and doubt-vulnerable moment binds up the power of the hidden sin to dominate our thoughts and behaviors. This praying brother/sister binds up our heart and spirit broken by the guilt of failure and breach of trust. They bind the ability of our Enemy to exploit our weakness into an enslaved cycle of defeat. We now have an ally in our personal struggle with temptation toward this sin.

Simultaneously to the binding power of prayer, this fellow Christ-follower at the time of our confession releases as well. We experience forgiveness as a release. We are set free from the culpability of our wrong--committed or omitted.  This prayer releases assurance of reconciliation into our spirit. A fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit empowers us to "go and sin [in this particular way] no more" as our sister/brother releases it in prayer.

One last touchpoint can be seen between the powerful prayer and confession of sin. The person declared powerful and effective in pray is the "righteous." James could have referred to a devout person or a Spirit-filled person or a gifted person or a believing person. His choice of righteous ties directly into the covenant of grace God offers through Jesus Christ. Righteous carries the connotation of "right behaving or rightly relating to the Law." This covenant keeper stands as a foil to the rule breaker.  The concern here is not miraculous proof of God, but rightly relating to God.

Elijah stood for God in the covenant of Sinai as he confronted Ahab, Jezebel and the 400 prophets (all who had abandoned YHWH for Baal) there on Mt. Carmel. The drought and the rain were a call to return to the LORD and renew the Covenant He offered. This call culminated in the challenge to follow whichever deity answered prayer by fire. While spectacular and miraculous, the emphasis of the passage is a renewal of covenant relations with the True and Living LORD.

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective in dealing with sin. God uses our Christian community to effect forgiveness and reconciliation. Let us all humbly open ourselves to this means of  grace so often abandoned by Protestantism.

70 Times 7 Times

Recently, to justify my unforgiving spirit, I reasoned the following:

"What was done to me was hurtful."

"It has happened repeatedly. It's becoming a cycle."

"I won't forgive you any more just because you say a simple, 'I'm sorry.'"

"I need more than that."

I even thought of the "preacher story" of the lying post. Everytime the child told a lie, the dad drove a nail into a fencepost out back of the house. When he asked forgiveness Dad pulled a nail. But the wound, the hole remained. Forgiveness doesn't fix everything.

Then my hardness of heart is exposed by the Holy Spirit whispering the words of the Lord to Peter, "70 times 7 times..." He leads me to the truth of my part in this frustrating cycle. Matthew records Peter asking Jesus how many times he must forgive someone who wrongs him. Jesus replies 70 times 7 times. Luke records Jesus saying if a person sins against us 7 times in one day and turns to us asking forgiveness, we are to forgive them each time.

I don't get to keep a tally sheet. I don't get to assess sincerity. I don't get to set a timer or deadline. I don't get to ask for more than that.

The sameness of the offence, the mutliple times, frequency of repeated hurt does not alter my requirement to forgive. To with hold forgiveness is not an option. The simple, "sorry..." is enough.

I do need more, however. More grace, more mercy, more of God's life in me. The One who calls me to be this forgiving, to live without lists, to function free of grudges is the One who has forgiven so much more in me, zeroes out my account and allows me to live free. So I ask Him to forgive my unforgiveness and as He does, grace and forgiveness flow through me and it washes away that small thing I was trying to hold over someone else. He extracted no price, He paid it for me.