James 5:13 Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.17 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18 Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
As James calls his people to prayer, he uses as an illustration Elijah as a man of prayer. The memorable part of the story is that he prayed for rain and it did. But before that, he had prayed that it NOT rain. Why? As a call to revival for his nation for how they had turned their back on God. That is the kind of prayers many of us offered on Thursday during our National Day of Prayer. Prayers of confession and pleading with God to wake up our nation spiritually. Along with those fervent kind of prayers we pray many others: prayers for the sick, prayers for forgiveness, prayers for our persecutors, and on we could go. At this point in time many of us in our part of the country are not praying for rain - we want it dry enough to plant our gardens! But may we continue to pray for revival, for the sick, for the injustice all around us, and may we have the persistence in our prayers that Elijah did.
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