Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

James 5:16

INTRODUCTION:

As we discuss the matter of praying for others, let’s look into our own hearts and seek to correct attitudes and beliefs that interfere with our ability to reach heaven and serve others with our prayers. As we evaluate our own hearts, not in judgement or evil criticisms, but to simply wash our hearts with God’s word, we will find ourselves in deep places whereby we are increasingly sensitive to God’s Spirit and prevail in prayer.

CONFESSION, PRAYER AND HEALING

As we explore the art of praying for others, we will lay some ground work here in focusing on 3 points of contemplation to start…confession, prayer and healing. Now, there tends to be a natural desire to pursue healing, which is the alleviation of pain or particular problems. That’s fine, but we will look at a pathway here that will lead us into the healing that we desire.

CONFESSION:

The first point that we will address is confession. Well what is a confession? Basically, a confession is an admission. It is a statement of truth. In this verse, James tells us to confess our faults one to another. Why would we do that? For what benefit will this confession serve? Here, we are instructed to confess our faults in particular. Have you ever been keeping something secret and you felt like you couldn’t share it with anyone else? Do you remember the pressure you felt inside holding it in? Do you remember the feeling of relief that you felt once you released it and shared the secret with someone you trusted? This is the reason for the confession.

In order for you to be healed, you must be relieved of the pressure that you are carrying inside. This pressure can contribute to stress, which can cause serious health problems for you. So here, God is wanted us to relieve ourselves of the pressure by releasing it. I don’t want to sound crude, but you can think of it this way. Imagine you had eaten a lot of enjoyable food. Of course you know that food was never intended to stay in your body. We eat the food, digest it and then it exits our body. So you at some point begin to feel pressure within that signals to you that you need to make it to the restroom soon or there will be problems. So you go to the restroom to eliminate the waste from your system.

Now if your body is not regularly eliminating waste, there are health problems that will develop. Likewise, If we keep things bottled up inside that we really should talk about, the result will be similar. There are physical and or emotional problems that may develop due to us holding things in. So we have to decide with whom we can open up to and when we should open up to them about our faults.

Here’s another reason why confession of faults is necessary. In context, this is a group of people confessing to one another their faults. One particular benefit this serves is that you understand that you are not alone. Oftentimes we are defeated by life because we feel isolated. We believe that we’re alone and as a consequence we suffer defeat because we thought something was wrong with us and we were an anomaly. In this group of friends, that lie is destroyed, shame is lifted and you are healed.

PRAYER

The next point is prayer. To piggy back off of the first point of confession, the aim of which is to take us into the point of prayer. So the purpose of confession is not for gossip, but it is for the purpose of prayer. You see we can prayer more effectively as we talk to one another. This is because, in conversation, we learn things that we may never have learned without it. So in this phase, we are to use what we learned in the confession phase as a point of reference in the prayer phase.

As an aside, you can use this principle when praying alone, as well as in groups. You can begin this type of prayer by confessing your faults and or sin to the Father.

So at this point when the group enters the prayer phase, you can take turns praying as you are lead based upon the confessions made in phase one. It is not necessary that all persons pray. Each setting may be different. The leader may pray for the group or each person in the group may provide prayers as they are lead to do so.

I want to point out something here that may not be obvious. We are told to pray “for one another.” In order to pray for one another, we need to care about one another. We need to love each other and care about each other’s highest good. Without loving one another and caring about the well-being of each other, praying for one another will be a daunting task.

HEALING

What does it mean to be healed? When I think of healing I think of a problem being resolved. For example, if someone had cancer, healing would be the cancer is no longer in their body. If they cut their finger, the wound closes up and there’s no more pain. Healing is the putting back of things as they should be or as God intended. So the aim of the first 2 phases is to carry those in the group into phase 3.

This, you should have in mind as your target or goal. But not only that, you are fully believing for those in your group to be healed. You are believing for things to be set right in your lives as a result of your confessions and prayers.