The Prayer of Faith

James 5:13-18. Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.

Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. Alright.

Well, that's James 5. If you've got your Bibles with you, please keep them open. We're gonna spend some time in there as we go this morning. We've, I've chosen this passage not because I think you particularly need to hear it, but it's just what we preached on last week in Redlands. So I'm not trying to say anything particular about you guys or anything like that.

As we begin, I wanna tell you a little bit about myself. In my late teens and early twenties, I had a friend, actually really quite a good friend. We spent a lot of time together as very young men. His family lived about an hour away from where I did, and so even though we hung out all the time, it wasn't for a year or so before I met his brother. And his brother actually had quite a severe mental and physical disability.

Really quite severe. He was quite disabled. It affected not only his brother's life, but actually the life of the whole family. Maybe somebody knows, maybe you guys know somebody in a similar situation. In the end, that disability was actually the cause of his parents' marriage breaking up.

And at the heart of that marriage breakup was verse 15. It was verse 15. The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. The Lord will raise him up. My friend's parents were Catholic, and they had a local priest come around and pray for their son just like this verse suggests.

I think they had a bunch of friends around as well. The Catholic church doesn't have elders to come around and pray, so they got their friends around to pray. And they were praying and praying and praying and praying for their son's healing, and he wasn't healed. He continued on in his disability. And because of that, the father ended up asking for an annulment of his marriage from the church on the grounds that if his son wasn't healed, it couldn't have been his fault because he had enough faith.

It must be his wife's fault. She mustn't have had enough faith because their son wasn't healed. And if he, if she doesn't have faith, then I presume he's married to an unbeliever and his marriage isn't old. I'm not up on all the details, I must admit. This passage that we've gone through, verse 15 in particular, says some strong things about prayer, about healing, faith, and even sin.

How are we to read it? How does God, well, maybe not how, but does God guarantee healing? Is that a lack of faith the real reason we're not healed sometimes? We're gonna step through this passage this morning and hopefully answer those questions and consider our attitudes towards prayer and towards healing. And if we're talking about healing and if James says the Lord will raise the sick up, which he does in our passage, the first question I have is, what should we expect of prayer?

What should we expect of prayer? It's a fair question out of this passage, I think. In the scenario that James describes and in the passage we've just read, the person seems pretty sick. I don't know if you've read through that carefully. You might have missed it.

But being pretty sick must have been a pretty common occurrence at the time. Right? In fact, back then, things were much worse than they are now. Sickness and death were more frequent, more likely, more debilitating than today. A small injury can take away a person's capacity to work, and therefore the family's income can make them a beggar.

A fever could take a life. A wound, a small wound, could cause permanent injury. Disaster is around every corner in every age and place except their own. Right? We've got it good.

And there are hints in this passage that a fair degree of illness is present. Firstly, the elders are summoned. That already makes it seem a bit more than a stubbed toe. Right? If you've summoned the elders, something serious is going on.

In fact, the elders have to go to him. He doesn't go to the elders. Maybe he's too unwell to go. Also, the elders, it's the elders who do all the praying. And in verse 13, our first verse, it says that if you're in trouble, you should pray, presumably for yourself, but here the elders are doing all the praying.

On top of that, verse 15, the word used for sick here means weary and worn out. He might have been sick for a long time and be physically wasting away in bed. And lastly, the elders are said to pray over him. And that might just be metaphorical, but it might be that this man is drastically sick, confined to bed, and the elders have had to come to him and pray for him. Now maybe we don't wanna read too much into it, but he does seem sick.

Maybe you know someone who's sick, properly sick. Maybe they're sick right now. And in this situation of grave illness, we're not called to give up or despair. We're called to pray with faith and actually anticipate healing. God heals in powerful ways, we're told.

The power of prayer, James says, is great. James says that the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. The Lord will raise him up. Prayer, the idea here in James is that prayer has great power just waiting to be released. It's an untapped resource.

It's like an ocean of oil underneath our feet that we just don't even know is there, waiting to be taken advantage of. Now I don't know what the situation's like here in Open House. Tony just prayed for sick people. I don't know who they are, but it's likely you've got some people living with sickness. Certainly at Redlands we do.

We've got people with cancer, people with mental illness, people with physical disabilities, and of course as you get older they just increase. Right? We pray for them. We pray for these people. Right?

We did this morning. But what do we expect? I suspect that a lot of you are just like me. I pray for people all the time. In fact, it's actually part of my job to pray for people, but Jude and I pray for people at night.

I pray sometimes throughout the day. But if I'm honest, I expect little. If I'm being honest, I wonder if you're like that as a church. I don't know you guys. Certainly in Redlands, we're a much larger church with maybe 300 plus people, and we have one small frail prayer meeting once a week.

Poorly attended. What's it like for you guys? What's your prayer life like? Do you gather together for prayer? Are you praying individually and as a group?

Are you praying in your small groups? Maybe if you don't, that reflects somewhat about what you expect of prayer and how powerful you think it is. And if that's you, I have to admit I'm right there with you. I struggle here to pray with expectant faith. But there is a great power to get things done in prayer.

Instead, right, we plan and we act long before we pray. The idea here is, we're talking about healing, that we should never go to the doctor without going to God. What are we leaning on here? Verse 15 says we're supposed to pray in faith. Faith is linked to prayer's effectiveness.

Alright. So if faith is linked to prayer's effectiveness, what does that mean? Was my friend's father right? Was his wife's lack of faith the real reason his son was not healed? It's a fair question.

My father died about nine years ago now at 57 years old. And some of you will go, 57, that's so old. And some of you go, 57, that's so young. Right? He had called the elders of the church to come around.

I was actually one of them. I was one of the elders in the church at the time. And we came around, and we prayed together for at least an hour with faith, I think. We actually anointed him with oil. We weren't quite sure what that should look like, but it was in our passage today in James 5, and so we anointed him with oil.

He died. Were the elders lacking in faith? Well, what is faith? Faith is simply confident expectation. Confident expectation.

It's our theology in action. You haven't been part of the rest of the series, so hopefully you can catch up here. But our theology, faith is our theology in action. It's our knowledge of God, the things we know about Him, His goodness, His power, His love, His forgiveness, stuff we've been talking about already this morning, those things we know about God being worked out in our lives and in what we do and in our expectations. What does this look like?

Well, I wonder if you remember the time when Jesus marvelled at someone's faith. When He marvelled at someone's faith. It was a centurion in Matthew. Matthew chapter 8, if you wanna go back and look at it. I think it was also in Luke 6, I think.

Anyway, the centurion comes to Jesus with a paralysed servant, and he has great faith. What does it look like? All he does is simply state the problem. He comes to Jesus and he says, Lord, my servant lies at home paralysed, suffering terribly. Sounds very much like this scenario in James.

Right? Servant lying at home, paralysed, suffering terribly. He doesn't try to force Jesus' hand. He doesn't even make a request of Him. He states his problem.

Jesus asks if He should come and heal him, and he replies with confident theology, with his knowledge about Jesus worked out in his expectations. He says, I don't know if I could say this to Jesus. You don't need to come. He says, you don't need to come. Your authority, Jesus, is a bit like mine.

I'm a centurion. I order people, and they obey. Jesus, you order creation, and it will obey. That the content of his faith is not certainty that Jesus will do what he wants Him to do, but confidence in the power of Jesus to do anything. I don't think we should read this promise of James with a Western contractual mindset.

I think that's how we come to it, where we see James promising that God will heal all of us if only enough faith is involved. Instead, faith is confident expectation. Confident expectation. This whole passage from 13 to 18 is about prayer. And the main idea with prayer is not strong-arming God into doing what you want Him to do.

Right? That's not what prayer is about, but it's a deliberate and peaceful acceptance of the will of God. That's what prayer is. It's not aligning God's will with our will so that He does what we want Him to do. It's aligning our will with God's so that we trust in what He is doing.

That's prayer. Jesus in the garden, while facing His death, prayed not my will, but yours be done. Prayer is a commitment to the will of God, and all true prayer offers its truest faith in patiently waiting to see what God has determined to do. This passage uses expectant language. It's intended to bring us with confidence into the place of prayer to remember we speak to a God who can do all things.

That's who we're speaking with. When Tony led us in prayer, we're speaking to that God. He is so generous that He will withhold nothing from us that is good. That's who we're speaking to and who listens to our every single word. What an amazing thing.

But the one thing this promise from James does not encourage or even allow is that we should come into prayer with a stubborn insistence that things should be done our way, that we have got it right, and that our will must be done. To say after our expectant prayer, after my expectant prayer with my father, Lord, heal my father. Heal the grandfather of my children. Lord, heal a godly man who's active in the church. Lord, give him more years of service to You.

Show Your power in doing what the doctors cannot do. To say after all that, Your will be done is not a lack of faith in what God can do. Instead, it's lifting all earthly restrictions on what God should do. Restrictions that our limited thinking places on the plans of God. The week before last at Redlands, before I first talked about this, we actually spent some time in two Samuel 7, where David has been made king.

He's settled down. He's expanded his power. The Lord has given him heaps of stuff. Like, he's got his own palace. He's living there.

Everything's fine. Everything's great. He's loving life. God has blessed him. Right?

God's blessed him. And David sees all the things that God has done for him, and he says, God, you've done all this. Like, it's he prays in two Samuel 7, this amazing prayer. He's going, Lord, thank you so much.

I'm so amazed at what you've done for me and for your people. Lord, now it's time I did something for You. Let me build you a temple, Lord. You've given me a palace. I wanna give you a palace.

I wanna give you a place to honour you and a place for you to dwell in. And what an amazing plan. Right? David's got a plan for God, and it's amazing. Who could have argued with David's intentions to build a temple. Great intentions.

In fact, Solomon ends up building one because God tells him to. Surely that's a great thing for David to do. Right? Surely that's good. Of course, that will be in God's plan until God said no.

God said no. You've got a plan. Great. I've got a better plan. And He did.

God's plan was better. Somehow, the best plan is that sometimes people will not be healed. Do I understand that? No. That's the point.

Right? David couldn't see the better plan. I don't see it. I didn't see it at all. I couldn't imagine anything better than my father getting another thirty years.

And nine years later, I still can't. I don't get God's plan, but I trust that God has one and that it's better than mine. Our second question is what should we expect of prayer? That's the long one. You're gonna get your money's worth today, by the way, but it will get faster.

Our second question, after what should we expect of prayer, is how does God heal? How does God heal? Now I've just been through one Corinthians. You guys haven't, but we've just preached through one Corinthians. And one Corinthians is filled with people with the gift of healing.

Right? Miraculous stuff happening. And if you've read Acts lately, it's got very similar stuff in it. The book of James is written not too long after the book of Acts, where all sorts of miracles are happening. The apostles are healing like left, right, and centre.

It's just throughout the book. Peter's shadow, Peter's shadow as he is walking along through the day, falls on people who are lying on the side of the road and heals them. What? That I mean, that's crazy. Right?

That's extreme. Haven't seen it before. Haven't seen it since. Even Jesus didn't do that. Even Jesus didn't do that.

Not saying He couldn't, but He didn't. Paul's handkerchief, his hanky. Handkerchief's a bit of a nicer word. I'm not quite sure he's blowing his nose in it. But his hanky and his apron, his apron, maybe they are. Maybe that's what the significance of them.

They're the dirtiest parts of him. Right? His work apron and his hanky are passed around the sick to heal them. Astonishing. And this is for people paralysed, blind.

This stuff has just been happening in the churches, and yet the first port of call for healing isn't send for one of the apostles. It's not. It isn't send for someone with the gift of healing. It isn't, oh, well, we've kept Paul's hanky. We've kept his apron.

And in a couple of months' time, it'll do the circuits of the church again. Wait for the hanky. Wait for the mysterious relic. That's not what happens. The first port of call, the healing ministry of the church, is associated with the local leaders of the church.

Is anyone among you sick? James writes. Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. The elders. Now Tony reminded me as we started that you guys don't have any elders.

Hadn't quite thought that through. Come back and preach it in another month. We'll be alright. We're gonna have some, I'm sure.

But the elders are the first port of call. Right? They're normal men, appealing in faith to the name of Jesus, the name of the Lord. God doesn't limit the healing ministry to times and places when someone with the gift of healing is present. Elders are responsible.

Another word for elders is overseers. They're responsible for overseeing, watching out for the welfare of their people. And part of watching out for people is presenting them before God in the name of Jesus for healing. They bring oil and anoint with oil. Anoint is one way of translating it.

It might be smear or rub it on the person. Translators have to make these choices sometimes. And it's hard to be sure, honestly, what the oil's use is. Everybody has different opinions. I'm gonna run you through the two main ones.

It could be that the oil is medicinal. Right? It's used for medicine. In New Testament times, oil was used medicinally all the time.

The Good Samaritan, for instance, pours on oil as well as wine to the man who was mugged in Luke chapter 10 as a soothing ointment. And all the way back in Isaiah chapter 1, verse 6, like, that's a long time ago, even then we read about wounds and sores being soothed with olive oil. Hippocrates, often called the father of medicine, wrote about using oil and wine therapeutically. It was common practice, using it for fevers and illnesses, using it to warm the skin and soften the flesh of the body.

And if that's what James is talking about, oil being used that way, this might be a situation where James encourages us that when we are sick, even when we are deathly sick, to come to God in the name of Jesus with faith and also with best medical practice. I raise this because, sadly, I think at times there is a bit of a sentiment in the church that somehow you can't have faith and use medicine. You can't have genuine faith and use medicine. That somehow these things are mutually exclusive. Using medicine proves that you didn't really trust God.

Right? But even if that's not what this passage is saying about the oil, James 1:17, which Redlands has gone through, has just finished telling us that every good gift and every perfect, well, every good endowment, I think is the translation, and every good gift is from above, everyone, including medicine. Isaiah says that we have the Lord to thank for things like agricultural science. We learn from Exodus that the Spirit of God is the moving force behind artistic craftsmanship. Knowledge, science, medicine, even craftsmanship and art and the trades are good gifts from God.

Paul called Luke the beloved physician. He obviously had respect for the profession and for the practice of medicine. He encourages Timothy to take wine for his ailments. In our day, the abundance, availability, and effectiveness of medical care is a marvellous illustration of the goodness of God. Whether it's the humble Band Aid or the most advanced surgical therapy, we should always be thankful to the God who gives us these things for our benefit.

When the Panadol works, it is the Lord who made it work. When the surgeon cuts out a tumour, it's God who's given us and him the knowledge and skill to do it. When the oncologist pours chemotherapy into our bodies, it is the Lord who has enabled it to attack cancer. Every good gift is from above. To say, I don't need medicine.

I've got God, is to leave God's providential gift of medicine to one side and say, I don't want God to help me in that way. It's the miraculous or nothing for me. Now in saying that, the treatment you choose is up to you. I'm not trying to push hard. I'm trying to push back on the idea that medicine and faith are enemies, but they're not.

Medicine and faith are brothers. They're partners together. Now I've spent all that time on medicine, but actually the oil might not be being used in that way. It could be being used simply, or actually not simply, but to vividly show that the person being anointed is being set apart for God's special attention in prayer. You know, a way for us to more seriously bring to mind our dependence on God and to ask for His intervention.

Whichever it is, whether it's that vivid portrayal or whether it's medicine, the emphasis is not on the oil. It's not on the medicine. It's applied in the name of the Lord, the name of Jesus. And it's He, pardon me, it's He who raises up. That's how God heals.

Third question, and they're getting faster now. Third question, how might sin be involved? How much sin being involved? And I ask this question because at the end of verse 15 through to verse 16, James raises the idea of sin. It's a bit startling.

Right? He's talking about healing, then all of a sudden, sin's involved, the possibility that sin might be the cause of our sickness. He writes, if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. Now I think we have to be careful here to avoid two different extremes.

Like many in biblical times, we could be tempted to think that when we're sick, God is punishing us. That's one extreme. When we're sick, God is punishing us. As if there's some kind of biblical karma at work. I don't know how you get biblical karma.

They seem to be two completely different faiths, but that's the idea. And although this passage doesn't actually push back on that, Jesus did. In John 9 and Luke 13, Jesus talks. Well, Jesus answers two different sets of questions about two different tragedies. There was a tower that fell down and killed a bunch of people. That's one of the tragedies.

And there was a man born blind. And in both of those situations, the people around Jesus assumed that both of those people, or all the people who were crushed by the tower and the man born blind, that those people had deserved it by either sinning terribly themselves or by their parents sinning terribly. And Jesus pushed back firmly on that idea. You can go back and read about it in John 9 and Luke 13. That's one extreme, and Jesus pushes back on that.

The other extreme is that God could never be disciplining us. Right? God could never be disciplining us. He could never be teaching us. He could never be confronting us about sin that we will not confront.

James leaves that open as a possibility. And I'm not sure if you've thought about that, but it's a sobering idea. Right? But as we think about it, we have to understand that discipline is an action of love. Now if you're a parent, I'm sure you've used that line on your kids.

Right? And if you've been a child, which all of us have been, I'm sure your parents used it on you. I'm not doing this because I love it. I'm doing it because I love you. Right?

Discipline is an act of love. And if you're still young, you might not yet get that, but you will as you get older, I think. Discipline is meant to restore us to what is right, particularly God's discipline. James doesn't spend a lot of time on this topic. The solution if sin is preventing your healing is easy.

Confess your sin. Confess your sin. Now I don't think next week you're gonna have a time at the start of the service where everybody comes up with a list and confesses your sin. That's not what James is talking about here. It's not some time of standing up in front of the church publicly and confessing all the sin, the secret sin that you have between you and God.

Neither is it you going to visit the priest in a booth and telling him all the sins of that week in great detail. It's going to a fellow believer that you've harmed, that you've sinned against, and confessing to them the sin of your actions. And then praying, what does this text say? Praying for each other. Right?

Praying for each other. And the result of that is not uncertain. The result is restoration, both with the person you sinned against and with God. How do we know this? Because the people pray with each other.

Of course, their relationship is restored. They're praying together, and the barrier between, of healing between you and God is gone. James isn't pounding us here on sin, trying to get us to worry about the cause of our sickness. Sickness may be a result of sin, but it can never definitely be. He's saying restoration and healing is available even for those who have wronged each other and wronged God.

There's good news for spiritual salvation or for physical healing, that with Jesus, sin is no longer a barrier. Our last question. Whose prayer will be answered? Whose prayer will be answered? It's an important question, I think, because James says the prayer of a righteous person, the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

I think in the ESV, I forgot that you use ESV. I think it says the prayer of a righteous person is powerful as it is working. And if you're anything like me, you'll straightaway, as soon as you hear that word righteous, you'll think, well, that rules me out. You'll straightaway think, I know my sin. You know, I'm still raw from what I did last week.

And then, you know, yesterday morning, I did this thing over here. Who am I to pray expecting God to listen? How can I expect God to act? How can I expect God to work His power through me? And to that, James reminds us of Elijah in verse 17.

He says, Elijah was a man with a nature 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. Again, he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crop. Elijah was a man just like us. You can go back and read the story in 1 Kings 17 through to 19, and the big idea is that God did amazing things through Elijah.

Right? Amazing things. Some of those unusual miracles that just don't happen every day. A young child was healed from death. When does that happen?

Rain started. Rain stopped. Fire came down from heaven to strike an altar, burning up water, burning everything on the altar. These things never happen. But God did them through Elijah, and we say, of course, He did.

Elijah's a prophet. He's a great man, a man of faith. He's in the Bible. Of course, God's gonna use him. If he's in the Bible, he's pure and good and perfect.

But no. Elijah's ministry was full of both effective prayer. Don't miss a. His ministry was filled with both effective prayer and major failures of faith. His prayers raised that boy from death.

They brought down fire from heaven to burn up an altar, and they stopped and started rain, but he could rise to the heights of faith and commitment, but then fall into the depths of despair and depression about God and his lack of faith in Him. He could be brave and resolute sometimes like we all think a prophet should be and then fly for his life at the whiff of danger without a hint of trusting God for His protection. He could be selfless in his concern for others and then filled with self-pity the very next minute. The prayer of a righteous person in James is not the prayer of the perfect or the prayer of the near perfect. James' point is that Elijah was a man with a nature just like us, and the Lord acted.

Ordinary people just like Elijah, and God chooses to invest our expectant prayer with His power in action. Frail human prayer, powerful divine results. Verse 13. Is anyone of you happy? Sing songs of praise.

Is anyone among you in trouble? Pray. We're encouraged to come to God in all circumstances of life. And where there is suffering, we come together in the name of Jesus with expectant confidence that He will bless us, that He will heal the sick, and accomplish His will out of His good nature. Let's pray together now expectantly.

Lord, we are so thankful that You give us the ability to pray. We can stop at any moment in the day and out loud or quietly, we can connect with You, the God, the Creator, the lover of this universe. What an astonishing thing prayer is. A phone line straight to You. And, Lord, we confess that sometimes we do not trust that You are listening.

Sometimes we do not trust that You will act. Sometimes we do not trust that You care. But, Lord, we encourage today to be filled with expectant confidence, and we pray that You would help us do this. For Lord, for anyone who is sick in this community, we pray for healing. We pray expectantly.

You are filled with authority, and whatever You want to do, You can do. And, Lord, we lay our needs that You know of at Your feet. Lord, we also expect with great confidence that sometimes Your plans are so much better than ours. And, Lord, we pray that in all things, Your will will be done. And where our will is not Your will, we pray that You would align ours to Yours and that we would have faith not just in Your power, but in Your goodness and Your wisdom.

Pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.