Diggin' Deeper

Yesterday I spoke at church and part of the talk involved the much quoted verse, "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective" from James 5:16. Now I understand that not all of you reading this pray, but hang in there - my point isn't about prayer. Anyway, people that do pray obviously want those prayers to be powerful and effective, but the author says we need to be "righteous" in order to achieve that. Based on our own preconceived ideas of what "righteous" means, we might immediately conclude that we are not righteous and therefore there is no point in praying because there will be no power or effectiveness. However, upon digging deeper, we find that the original greek word for this actually means "repentant sinner." We know that we are all sinners, every single one of us; but if we repent of our sin (admit it, apologize, and try to change), then we are considered "righteous" and our prayers are powerful and effective. How much more inclusive is this powerful prayer when we think about being a repentant sinner versus righteous.

My point is that there is great value in digging deeper into many issues of life. Obviously if we dig really deep in every issue, we will suffer from analysis paralysis, but if we just take everything at a surface level or make big assumptions on things, we will not be exposed to the real truth.

I'm sure we can all think of a number of examples of this. Consider personal relationships - when someone acts a certain way I might conclude one thing based on my experiences and preconceived ideas, but by digging deeper find it was an entirely different set of causes. Consider questioning leadership - again, digging deeper reveals information and truth that, if left to a surface reaction, would have been missed leading to an inappropriate conclusion.

We all know people that probably dig too deep on certain things (guilty), but it is important to seek the ultimate truth and not be satisfied with what appears to be truth on the surface.