A Key to Deepening Community; James

May the mumbling commence!

Want to know a key to deepening community?  The community that prays together stays together.  Be open.  Be honest.  The synergy between you (all) and God will help miracles to happen.  Read from James chapter five (Peterson’s The Message paraphrase):

Are you hurting?  Pray.  Do you feel great?  Sing.  Are you sick?  Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master.  Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet.  And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven – healed inside and out.

Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.  The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.  Elijah, for instance, human just like us, prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t – not a drop for three and a half years.  Then he prayed that it would rain, and it did.  The showers came and everything started to grow again.

My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off.  Go after them.  Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.  (Verses 13-20)

Give full expression to your hurts and glories and sicknesses.  You will make yourself vulnerable in doing this, but you will also open the door to a deeper level of community.  With the grace of God, this level of God-like community will bring healing both inside and out. 

The world will see individuals and a community whole and healed.  What a witness to the power and love and mercy and grace of God!

Together, we will find the God-groove.  Then the things that we ask for would be in the keeping of the Way of Jesus.  We can be confident that we will get what we ask for in those cases.

And, when things go wrong (which they will), know that you are to pursue those who are wandering from the God-groove.  Go get them.  Get them back.  Precious lives will be saved.

This kind of rich communal prayer will make for an ever-deepening community, where belonging is no longer a question.

May it be so!  Amen.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out