James 5:16
Confess your offenses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective.
WEB
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.
KJV
What James 5:16 means
James is telling believers to be honest with each other about their sins and to pray for each other, because God works powerfully through the prayers of ordinary people who are right with him, and that kind of prayer brings healing.
James wrote this letter to Jewish followers of Jesus who had been scattered far from home. Many of them were poor, some were being mistreated by wealthy landowners, and they were waiting, often impatiently, for the Lord to return. So the letter is full of practical advice about how to live together as a community while life is hard.
Near the end, James turns to what people should do in different situations. If you're suffering, pray, and if you're cheerful, sing. If you're sick, call the elders of the church so they can pray over you and anoint you with oil, and he promises that the Lord will raise the sick person up and that any sins they have committed will be forgiven.
Verse 16 opens with "therefore," which shows James is drawing a wider lesson from that scene. Prayer and healing belong to the whole community, so every believer is to confess their sins to one another and pray for one another, so that they may be healed. Confessing here simply means admitting your wrongs openly to people you trust, so that the community can carry them with you instead of each person hiding them alone.
The word for "healed" in the original Greek can mean physical recovery, and it can also mean being made whole in a wider sense. James seems to keep both in view, since he has just linked sickness and sin in the same breath. Broken bodies, broken consciences and broken relationships all belong to the kind of healing he has in mind.
Then comes the line many people remember: the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. The Greek pictures a prayer that is actively at work, doing something. "Righteous" can sound like a word for spiritual heroes, so James immediately points to Elijah and says he was a human being just like us. Elijah prayed that it would not rain, and it didn't rain for three and a half years. Then he prayed again, and the rain came back.
That example is the point of the verse. A righteous person is simply someone who is honest with God and living in his ways, and God takes that person's prayers seriously. So James pictures a church where people tell each other the truth about themselves, pray for each other, and expect God to answer.
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