“Prayer – Proactive Patience”
James 5:13-20
June 29, 2008
Dr. Jerry Nelson
P.
16, Healing & Prayer, Nelson
P.
16, Various quotes, Craig Blomberg
P.
17, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
P.
17, The Epistle of James, James Adamson
P.
18, Faith that Works, R. Kent Hughes
Many years ago a woman of our church called and asked if some of the other elders and I would come and pray for her healing.
Cancer had racked her body.
The treatments were done, nothing but a miracle could change the course of her life.
As two other elders and I drove to her home, some questions plagued me:
· What if she isn’t healed?
· Maybe she will assume her faith, or ours, isn’t strong enough?
· Maybe she or her family members will now question God?
· Is it worth the risk?
The closer I got to that home the more skeptical I became about what could happen as a result of our prayers.
Oh, I wanted God to heal her, I believed that God could heal her but I realized that I didn’t expect that God would heal her.
In the text before us today, it is probably this issue of healing that is of most interest to people.
Soon we will read again the following words from James 5:
“Is any one of you sick?
He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with
oil in the name of the Lord.15 And the prayer offered in faith will
make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up…”
Oh, how we’d love to believe that, when a loved one or we are very sick and death threatens.
When our computer doesn’t work, we pull up the help menu to find the formula to follow to fix the problem.
We push the right buttons in the right order and it works.
When we get sick we go to the doctor to get the medicine to correct the problem.
We take the prescribed number of pills for the correct number of days and we get well.
When we think of this verse, we’d love to call the elders, anoint with oil and say the right words and voila, healing occurs.
As good as that would be, most of us have been around long enough to know it doesn’t work that way.
In fact most of us have been around long enough to conclude it simply doesn’t work at all.
And the result is that we just dismiss these verses as maybe nothing more than quaint relics of another era.
But instead of dismissing them, I’d like us to see these ideas as James presents them.
I’d like to show you that the primary issue here is not healing but an active daily dependence on God as manifested in prayer.
It’s probably time to read the text:
James 5:13-17 “Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. 14 Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.17 Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.
These words were not written in a vacuum.
James has written to Christians who were living under severe circumstances.
Today, Christian minorities in Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, as elsewhere around the world, know about severe circumstances.
Likewise, these Christian minorities in that pagan Roman world lived with discrimination, exploitation and other forms of oppression.
James began his letter calling his readers to perseverance, to patient endurance of hardship: James 1:2-3 “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.
Last week we saw, in chapter 5, that he returned to that theme near the end of his letter by giving them reason to be patient in the midst of suffering and trials: 5:7-11 “Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming… You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near… As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered...”
Perseverance, patience, endurance – James doesn’t want them to give up or to abandon the faith.
Throughout the letter, as we have seen these past three months, James calls them to genuine Christianity evidenced by changed speech, changed conduct, changed hearts, compassion for those who have even less, consideration for each other, and mercy toward all.
And all of that even while they are being mistreated.
Is that all they can do; are they just to be patient, waiting for Jesus to return?
No, James says, you can be proactively patient; you can pray!
You can pray for yourselves (verse 13), you can ask the elders to pray for you (verses 14-15) and you can pray for each other (verse 16).
Why, because as summarized at the end of verse 16, God acts in response to the prayers of his people.
And this is
illustrated by Elijah’s experience in verses 17-18).
Let’s start where James does in verse 13 “Is any one of you in trouble? He
should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.”
Life is constantly
changing.
Are you sad; wait a while.
Are you happy; wait a while!
The
verse covers both ends of the circumstantial and emotional spectrum and all
that is between – whether troubled or contented – the bad and the good.
“Is any of you in trouble?” The word
“trouble” (from two Greek words meaning “to suffer evil”) is a term that
probably includes all kinds of difficulties.
This includes the natural, physical,
emotional, spiritual and in James, even the hostility of the world against
Christians.
What are we to do?
Pray, talk to God.
“Is anyone happy?” The word “happy” means cheerful, peace of mind, or
contented.
It speaks of those times in life when all
seems well.
What are we to do? Sing to God. Praise him.
The point is that in every circumstance of life, bad or good, our first
reaction is to appeal to God.
The Psalmist is a great example of that kind of prayer life.
He
praised, he complained, he grieved, he reveled, he asked, he pleaded, he
rejoiced – it was the full range of emotions depending on the situation.
Most of all, he knew God was part of all
that was happening and he intentionally went to God with it all.
The Apostle Paul said it this way in Philippians 4:6-7 “Do not be anxious
about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with
thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God,
which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in
Christ Jesus.
I know people whose first response to every situation of life is to
think of God and to go to him.
Things
are going badly for them or someone else and their first response is to pray.
Something special happens in their day
and their first response is “praise God” and say “thank you Jesus.”
Oh, to live that way!
At times it seems kind of maddenly simplistic; they’re praying when we’d
be calling for an ambulance.
But
I have to respect the priority that is being expressed – they understand that
God is more central and important in the everyday affairs of life than anyone
or anything else.
The best response is to pray while you
call for the ambulance.
In every circumstance of life, we are to
pray.
We are called on to pray for ourselves.
Now that is great overview of how we should handle life, but in the next
verses James will be even more specific.
James 5:14 “Is
any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him
and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.”
What
about medicals doctors and medicine?
The Bible
doesn’t often mention physicians but it does assume them.
·
Matthew
9:12 “Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
·
The
author of the Acts of the Apostles, the gospel
writer Luke was himself a physician, who attended the
Apostle Paul.
·
In 1 Timothy 5:23 Paul urged Timothy to use a little wine, medicinally,
for his stomach and frequent illnesses.
In the Bible it isn’t prayer or physicians, prayer or
medicine but it is God working through it all.
Every era seems to have people who run to one extreme or the other.
Even
today we have people who refuse to go to doctors, believing it is a
contradiction of their faith
But most Evangelicals don’t go to that
extreme, we go to the other.
We don’t really expect God to do
much when we are sick – our faith is in medicine and physicians, not in God.
We
rightly dismiss the miracle healers that appear from time to time because some
of them have been shown to be charlatans and the others have no higher success
rate of healing than when people are unattended.
These “healers” present themselves as following the practice
of Jesus and the Apostles but their “healings” are seldom instantaneous and
almost always unverifiable.
The
result is that we end up dismissing it all; dismissing any real expectation of
God intervening in any way.
Remember the woman, I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, who asked the other elders and me to come and pray for her?
I had more confidence that a spontaneous remission might take place, or that some new medicine might yet be discovered than expectation that God might heal her.
Our theology says God can heal miraculously, but our skepticism says he probably won’t.
What has brought us to such a sorry state of skepticism?
In 2 Chronicles 16:12 there is a description of a man who sounds like some of us:
It says, “In the 39th year of his
reign Asa was afflicted with a disease in his feet. Though his disease was
severe, even in his illness he did not seek help from the Lord, but only from
the physicians... and he died”.
I’m not going to argue that if Asa had sought the Lord he necessarily would have been healed - the text doesn’t tell us that.
My point in showing you that text is that Asa, like us, apparently had more confidence in the doctors than he did in the Lord.
In the last couple of centuries there has been much more information about our world and our bodies than ever before.
As the amount of information grew we became less dependent upon God.
The more we understood about the “natural” process of healing the less we saw God involved.
People formerly had to pray that God would cure infections - now they just take penicillin.
We have seen new medical discoveries such as vaccines, antibiotics, and medical procedures, and have a growing understanding of the cause and effect of clean water, sterilization of surgical instruments, and vitamins.
Instead of praising God for any and all of the means that he uses to heal us, many of us believe that God is not really necessary for these things.
God may have been important in healing in a pre-scientific time but not now.
And he may still be necessary for the spiritual but not the physical.
But that is unbiblical thinking.
My Bible says in Hebrews 1:3 that the Lord Jesus is “sustaining all things by His powerful word. It also says the same in Colossians 1:17 “in Him all things hold together”
God is involved in the “normal” or ‘regular affairs of life.
He is actively involved in our everyday lives in every detail – “sustaining all things.”
Penicillin, antibiotics, and sanitation, etc. are all part of God’s involvement in our world.
He is as much involved in the
things that we would call normal as He is in the miraculous.
So what does James say?
James 5:14 “Is any one
of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and
anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.
Notice
the sick person calls for the elders.
Maybe
the sick person was too sick to go to the elders and needed the elders to come
to him or her.
Praying “over him” suggests that the sick person is incapacitated and
even lying down.
These words suggest that the situation is
serious and not merely temporary.
We don’t call for the elders when we have
a cold or the flu.
That doesn’t mean we don’t pray for
ourselves, and each other, when we have lesser illnesses but calling for the
elders seems to for particularly serious situations.
James says to “anoint him with oil.”
Was the oil a form of medicine?
It appears that the ancient world considered oil to
have curative powers.
But I don’t think the oil was medicine; I
think it was a visual aid.
It was a physical symbol.
In the OT, anointing with oil was used
that way.
It meant the special setting-someone-apart for
God.
Here the anointing symbolizes in a physical way, the
special prayer being offered for this person.
The oil is not magic; like the water of
baptism and the bread of the Lord’s Supper, it simply aids both the elder and
the sick person in understanding the special nature of this prayer.
The
text says you are to call for the elders, they are to pray and they are to
anoint the sick person with oil “in the name of the Lord”
Now,
it doesn’t say the elders must say those exact words.
This is not Christian “abracadabra.”
In John 14:13 Jesus said “I will do
whatever you ask in my name.”
We have turned that into a perfunctory conclusion to
every prayer; “In Jesus’ name, amen.”
But the point is not formula; it is recognition that the
power and authority behind any answer to prayer is our God – we are dependent
on him alone.
Then
James gives the conclusion of such prayers:
James 5:15 “And the prayer offered in faith will make the
sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be
forgiven.
This raises several questions from us:
·
What does a prayer “offered in faith” mean?
·
Will this prayer always result in healing?
·
What does sin have to do with this?
James seems to have added a qualification to the kind of prayer that
will make a sick person well.
It
is a prayer “offered in faith.”
I have told you before about this startling experience that I had
several years ago.
A
middle-aged man of our church died at work and a co-worker of his called me to
tell me.
I rushed to the hospital where the body
was taken so I could be with his wife and family.
After spending time praying with her, we waited until the man’s mother
and siblings arrived from Fort Collins.
The
mother saw me first and asked in a demanding voice, “Where is he?” Not where is the body, but where is he?
For the next hour she and her other adult children gathered around the
body of the dead man and demanded that Satan release him and demanded that God
raise him up.
At
one point a sister asked what Scripture she should read and the mother said,
“Read anything!”
The worst moment came when after an hour of no results, the mother
turned to the dead man’s wife, the woman I had gone to console, and said to
her, “He’s still dead because you don’t have enough faith.”
At
that point I called a halt to the whole thing and got the nurses to eject them
from the room.
James is not saying the elders had to have a certain amount of faith as
if they had to conjure up greater faith or greater passion.
He’s
not saying you can’t have any doubts or that your faith must be perfect.
He’s simply saying their faith must be in
God.
These are people who have made up their minds about God.
They
recognize and believe in the providence of God – they know he is in control and
they are looking to him to provide.
The issue isn’t the amount of faith but
the object of their faith – God.
Some teach that the “prayer offered in faith” is a special kind of faith
that God provides in some situations.
Their
idea is that sometimes God gives special insight to his servants in some
situations; the insight is that in this particular situation, God does in fact
plan to heal the person.
Knowing the mind of the Lord, the ones
who pray must believe that God will do it.
The pastor I served under in Minneapolis believed this.
I
remember one occasion when the infant daughter of my good friend was near
death.
The pastor told me that he was convinced
by the Spirit that God would heal the little girl and when we gathered to pray,
he prayed that way.
The little girl survives to this day.
I offer that as one possible explanation for what “in faith” means.
But
I am troubled when others whom I know have had equal certainty about God’s will
and have prayed that way only to have the sick person die.
British evangelist, David Watson,
believed wholeheartedly that God said he would heal him and David prayed “in
faith.”
But David Watson died.
I
find it hard to believe that we know with certainty the mind of God in such
matters.
So what are we to think when this verse makes it sound as if the result
we desire is guaranteed? “The Lord will
raise him up.”
Will
God heal every time if we pray correctly?
To argue that God always heals, whether in this life or by taking us to
heaven, seems to be an attempt to avoid the plain words of the verse.
I will readily acknowledge that I don’t fully understand what James
means here.
This much I do know from James and the rest of the Bible – we must pray
and pray with faith.
The elders pray, we pray and we pray with
an expectancy that God will do the very best for us in his way.
But our faith is not in faith, it is not in a
particular answer, and it is not in our fervency; our faith is in God to do his
perfect benevolent will.
James adds something quite surprising to his statement about prayer and
healing: “If he
has sinned, he will be forgiven.”
Is
there a connection between sin and sickness?
Both the OT and the NT make this
connection; some sickness is caused by sin.
And I’m not just talking about living in a fallen world –
though it is true that much sickness is a result of a sin-ridden world.
I think
James is talking about the sin of the individual who is sick.
That shouldn’t really surprise us.
I have read that fear, sorrow, envy, anxiety, resentment
and hatred are responsible for a large percentage of the illnesses people
suffer.
For example, an unwillingness to forgive can create
many emotional and physical ailments.
I have also read that confession and release of anger have
caused the healing of many infirmities.
Having said that, the Bible also makes it clear that sickness isn’t
always connected directly to our sin.
Even here James says, “If” – it is by no
means a given, but “if” it is true, then confession is called
for.
It is reasonable for a believer to ask
himself or herself if their sickness is the result of unconfessed sin.
That said, James moves to the conclusion of the matter:
“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for
each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful
and effective.”
Notice that James has moved from praying for yourself, to having the
elders pray, now to the subject of praying for each other.
Here
we have two commands and a proverb.
The
first command is to confess your sins to each other.
Some have made of this “confess your sins
to each other” a kind of group experience of public confession of specific
sins.
Roman Catholics have used these verses to support
confession to a priest.
Anglicans and others have used these
verses to support the kind of corporate confession at the beginning of their
services of worship.
I don’t think the text demands that confession be either public or
specific.
Instead
as one man wrote, “The confession of sin entails humble honesty about the fact
of having committed sin, not a public retelling of the details of the act.” (Kurt Richardson, James, 236)
But James has made it clear that some sickness is the result of
unconfessed sin, and therefore, it is good practice, if sick, to confess to God
the sins that may be causing the sickness.
And
if we have sinned against others, we confess to them.
The
second command is to pray for each other.
James says it is good preventative medicine to confess our
sins and to pray for each other.
The
last sentence of verse 16 is a fitting conclusion to the conclusion:
“The prayer of a righteous man is
powerful and effective. “
The NASB translates it this way: “The
effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.
The KJV
translates it this way: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man
availeth much.
But the word “fervent” is simply not in the Greek text and is an
addition that is uncalled for.
This
verse does not call for a special amount of passion to be persuasive with God
or effective in results.
Even the NASB’s “effective” prayer seems to suggest another
qualification of the prayer that works.
But James has already made it clear that the only qualification is faith
in God – a dependence on God.
Another qualification that some want to place on this prayer is that it
must be offered by a certain kind of person – a righteous person.
Then
they define righteous as particularly holy.
We joke that someone’s prayers didn’t get
answered because they weren’t righteous enough.
But the “righteous” person here is not one who is holier than all the
others but one who is in right relationship with God.
This
is not a super saint but simply a person who lives in dependence on God.
To prove his point that this promise is not only for exceptional Christians, James uses Elijah.
And in particular he points out that Elijah was a man like us.
As one man said it, “Elijah does
not stride across the stage of history ten feet tall but as an ordinary man
with an extraordinary God.” (Davids, 125)
Again, I think most translations mislead us when they say Elijah prayed “earnestly.”
The Greek text says he “prayed with prayer.”
It is not that Elijah prayed with
greater intensity “but that praying was precisely what he did.” (James Adamson, James, NICNT,
201)
So James’ point is that every Christian has access to the same powerful, gracious God and that praying makes a difference – it is powerful and effective.
Do we believe that?
Let me return to the story with which I began the message – the woman
who was dying of cancer and called us elders to pray for her.
No, she was not healed.
When that is the case more often than not, why do we elders continue to go
and pray for others?
Why
do we all pray for ourselves and for each other?
I could tell stories of others who were healed.
But empirical evidence doesn’t usually
convince anyone.
We can explain away almost anything.
Ultimately
it comes down to whether we take God at his word or not.
Will
I believe him when he says that our prayers make a difference?
Will I believe him that he chooses to use
our prayers as one of the means whereby he directs the course of our lives and
the world around us?
The
Rev. Dr. James Montgomery Boice was,
until May of 2000 the pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia.
At 62 years of age he died of liver cancer.
Just a
few weeks before his death, he asked to speak briefly to the congregation.
Obviously weakened by the cancer, he stood and said,
“A relevant question, I guess, when you pray is, pray for what? Should you pray for a miracle? Well, you’re free to do that, of course. My general impression is that the God who is able to do miracles—and he certainly can—is also able to keep you from getting the problem in the first place. So although miracles do happen, they’re rare by definition. A miracle has to be an unusual thing.
(He then spoke of the need for them to pray for the physicians, the medicines the therapy – by all means pray)
“Above all, I would say pray for the glory of God. If you think of God glorifying himself in history and you say, where in all of history has God most glorified himself? He did it at the cross of Jesus Christ, and it wasn’t by delivering Jesus from the cross, though he could have. Jesus said, “Don’ t you think I could call down from my Father ten legions of angels for my defense?” But he didn't do that. And yet that’s where God is most glorified.
http://www.tenth.org/index.php?id=364
James 5:13-16 “Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone
happy? Let him sing songs of praise. 14 Is any one of you sick? He
should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil
in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will
make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he
will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and
pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is
powerful and effective.
Song: “I Need Thee Every Hour” sung by Selah
Amen
Permission: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by SoundLiving.org.
Other Notes:
PRAYER
Prayer is rebellion against the status quo!
Jerry Nelson
HEALING AND PRAYER
For
more see “Expectant and Accepting” under “Special Topics” at www.soundliving.org
“We should view prayer as another revolutionary
tactic, not a passive resignation
to a situation. In prayer, we enlist
the aid and ear of the Lord of Hosts (recall 5:4), our God who is more than
capable of righting our wrongs and helping us in our pain.” (Blomberg, 315)
ON CONFESSION OF SIN
“More difficult to
apply is James’ command to confess our sins to one another. Catholicism elevated this procedure to a
sacrament but limited it to a private encounter between church members and
clergy. The Lutheran and Anglican/Episcopalian liturgies include a public
confession of sins at the start of each service, followed by the pastor’s
pronouncement of absolution. But still
neither of these practices is quite the same thing as going to the person
against whom one has sinned to acknowledge one’s failure and seek forgiveness. Matthew 18:15-18 lies in the
background. When sin has estranged two
parties, one of them needs to take the initiative to restore the
relationship. If that fails, then other
Christian helpers must be brought into the process. If at all possible, the confession should not be made any more or
less public than the original sin. And
“any confession should be offered in the presence of those who have been harmed
by the sin or in the presence of the leaders of that community rather than a
wider context, so that wise counsel may be offered.” Community life can be
powerfully strengthened by sensitive application of appropriate confession,
whereas cavalier and irresponsible application can do great damage. If a person does not know that one has
sinned in one’s thoughts against them, it can probably only harm them for one
to confess the sin. But when people are
aware of offenses, even when two parties are each partly to blame, it is almost
always healthy to take the initiative in apologizing.” (Blomberg, 330,331)
Resource:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (especially chapter 5).
AN OUTLINE OF 5:12-20:
5:12 Be people of integrity
5:13-18 Be people of prayer
5:19-20 Be people who lovingly correct each other.
AN OUTLINE OF 5:13-20
While waiting patiently for Jesus’ return, do two things:
5:13-18 Intercede for one another.
5:19-20 Intervene for one another
ON INTERPRETATION OF
5:16
The
translation of this verse (5:16) depends somewhat on the verb form of the word
“energoumene;” is it passive or middle.
A good discussion of
this is in Excursus I of James Adamson’s The Epistle of James, NICNT,
205ff
On ELDERS
The words “Elders” – Presbuteros (James) ; Overseer - episkopos- (1
Timothy 3:1); Pastor/shepherd – poimane (Acts 20:28) are always used in the
plural meaning not one but several men in any one church. All refer to the same
office in the church. They are to be spiritually mature men who are responsible
under God to guide the church (I Timothy and Titus 2).
It is at least interesting that James does not tell the sick to call for
those with the gift of healing but to call for those who are spiritually
mature. It is the spiritually mature who should be expected to be able to pray
with discernment and a proper perspective.
Notice that the welfare of the members of the congregation is a primary
concern of the elders. They are not
only servants of an institution but more importantly they are servants of the
people.
It is not that the elders have some magical power but that the elders
represent the congregation. They go to the sick person who has called
them.
1. Upon request, the elders assemble at the home of the sick person.
2. The sick person is asked about the nature of his/her illness; care should be taken to not encourage too much detail, but enough to pray specifically.
3. James 3:13-16 is read.
4. The sick person is gently questioned about their understanding of the passage: has confession of sin been made where appropriate; do they understand faith as faith in God, not faith in faith or faith in prayer; are they ready to accept God’s will in the matter, etc.
5. The sick person is anointed with oil in the name of the Lord (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).
6. Laying hands gently on the sick person, several of the elders pray for him/her.
7. Together we sing the “Doxology” as indication of trust in God’s providential care.
(Ideas guided by R. Kent
Hughes, in James, Faith that Works, 256-7)