The Prayer of Faith

I remember and old joke about a guy who was praying and he stopped and looked up and said,

“Lord, could you answer a question for me?” To his surprise, a voice came back and said “Yes child, what do you want to know?”

“Well,” the man continued, “what is a million years to you?”

“Well,” the Lord replied, “a million years to me is as a second.”

“Hmm ok then, what about a million dollars, what’s a million dollars to you?”

The Lord replied, “Well, a million dollars to me then is like one cent.”

The man thinks about this as he continues to pray and he looks up again and he says, “Lord, could you give me one cent?”

“Of course,” says the Lord, “Just wait one second.”

Prayer is a strange thing for us as Christians, we have so many different ideas about how prayer works, we have different ways of how we might pray, and we believe different things about prayer. But we are called to pray, no, actually we are commanded to pray, and yet almost every one of us would probably admit that we do not pray as we should. One strange phenomenon is that people tend to pray more when they face times of deep trial, I know some of my own most earnest prayers were in my own deepest times of need.

James, as you might remember, was nicknamed ‘Camel knees.’ He spent so much time on his knees in prayer that his knees became so calloused and rough they looked like those of a camel. It seems that James was one who truly practiced what he preached and so it’s fitting that he ends his letter on the practice of prayer. This Sunday we’ll be looking at James 5:13-20 which will bring our journey through James to an end. Now obviously there is no way that we can even come close to doing justice to the topic of prayer, so like we have done throughout this book, we will focus on a few ideas, maybe some difficult questions that might arise from prayer, and how we might reconcile them with our Christian journey.

I pray that God truly enriches you as you engage in prayer with our Lord.

Josh