Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. – James 5:16
Right before my wedding my two maids of honor presented me with a gift. It was a journal they had created for me that included letters they each had written and prayers. Unbeknownst to me, in the months leading up to my wedding day, the two of them joined in prayer for my marriage and my husband. They prayed that God would bless not only my marriage, but my future children, that I would be the wife my husband needed and that together, God would prepare our hearts for the ministry He was calling us to.
When I opened the journal and begin to realize exactly what it was I was overwhelmed. The thought that they considered my future marriage important enough to carve out time each month to pray specificialy for it rocked me.Their prayers were valuable and worth more to me than any other gift they could have given.
It was in that moment that I realized the power of prayer. James 5:16 says that the “prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” Not only is your prayer life a blessing to you but your prayers for others can be life changing for them. For someone to know that you have gone to God about an issue in their life that’s important to them, can be refreshing. It can cause an unbeliever to want to know more about this God you look to for answers and guidance and to the believer it can be a reminder that they are not alone.
So today, I encourage you to give someone one of the greatest gifts I think you can give. Pray for them. Purposely and with as much persistence as you would if you were talking to God about your own issue. And then let them know that you did it. They might not know how to respond but I believe that knowing you thought enough about them to take their situation to the Lord will have an impact in ways you may never know.
Illuminated Salt 