Powerful and Effective Praying

Contributed by:
Ron Klopfenstein
men's life director

The focus of this past weekend’s services was based around James 5:16b

“the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.”

One thing that struck me right away as we sang together is that this God that we pray to is in fact mighty, awesome, able to do anything and in control of everything. It seems to me that too often our prayers are small and anemic. We pray with attitudes like: “I sure hope God can handle this” or “I know God could answer my prayer, but He probably won’t” or “I cannot honestly see how this situation could work out” and our variations on that pathetic theme go on and on. I wonder when we do this, if God thinks to Himself “I just wish they could grasp what I am able – what I am longing – to do in their life!” As we sang, “My Savior, He can move the mountains…” Oh, if we (I) could just get that.

Not only is a lack of confidence in God a hindrance to our prayers, but so are things like unconfessed sin, a lack of forgiveness, pride and wrong motives. These all create barriers between us and God. If we don’t deal with them our prayer life will be ineffective.

Our focus needs to get off ourselves and back onto our Awesome God. When our focus is on ourselves, our problems, our rights, and our perspective gets messed up. Turning our attention to God changes that. It lengthens our horizon and gets us thinking about the bigger picture of life – both this life and life eternal.

This does not happen by accident. It requires a commitment on our part; a commitment to carve out time to be quiet before God, to read His word, to seek Him and to pursue our relationship with Him with the vigor we put into so many other things that aren’t nearly as important.

So, will you set aside time this week to do that? Will you modify your schedule to make it possible? Will you sit still before the God that has formed you and longs to have a deep relationship with you? I am convinced if we do that then we will start to experience the realization of powerful and effective prayers.