“13 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. 18 Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. ”
Prayer is not about technique. Some people think about prayer the way a thirteen-year-old thinks about kissing. A thirteen-year-old thinks kissing is all about technique. They want to make sure they do it right. Kissing isn’t about technique. I’m not thinking about technique when I kiss my wife. I’m thinking about her. It is relational. Prayer isn’t about technique. Prayer is relational.
Powerful, effective praying is not a matter technique. Powerful, effective praying is an expression of your relationship with God. That’s why Luther could say that, “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”
The Christian prays. Prayer cannot be broken down into simple cause and effect, but something happens when a Christian prays just like something happens when a man and wife kiss. You can’t break either into simple cause and effect but they are both quite real. They are relational. They are both powerful and effective.
James didn’t write these words to explain how prayer works. He wrote these words to urge people to pray. If our study of James’ words leaves you with only questions of how these prayers work, you have missed the point. The point is for you to pray.
Prayer is powerful and effective which is why we must pray. That is the claim of this sermon: Prayer is powerful and effective which is why we must pray.
We see this in three points. First: pray in all circumstances. Second: prayer offered in faith. Third: great people of prayer are just people like you. We see the call to pray in all circumstances in verses 13-14. We see the prayer offered in faith in verses 15-16. We see the power of prayer in a man just like us in verses 17-18.
First: pray in all circumstances. The Christian man does not simply say his prayers. The spiritually dead man can say his prayers before going to bed at night. The spiritually dead man can say his prayers out of custom at the dinner table. The Christian man doesn’t simply say his prayers. He prays and such prayer takes place in any circumstance. Verse 13, “Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray.”
Praying when you are in trouble might seem obvious, but it is hard to remember. When trouble hits, we tend to mope and worry. I’m sure you can resonate with what Calvin said, “when afflicted [we] are disheartened and driven to despair.” James words, “Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray,” might seem obvious but I need to hear the obvious and I imagine that you do too.
Pray for help when you are in trouble. Anne Lamont wrote that one of the best prayers she knows is, “Help me, help me, help me.” Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray, “Help me, help me, help me.” You see that prayer all over the Psalms. Psalm 5:2, “Hear my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray.” Psalm 10:12, “Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless.” Psalm 12:1, “Help, Lord, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race.” Psalm 22:19, “But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me.” Psalm 30:12, “Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me; Lord, be my help.” When God’s people find themselves in trouble, they can pray, “Help me, help me, help me,” to the God who can help.
You might be downcast by a circumstance at work. Pray. You might miss your mother who has been dead for years. Pray. You might have no idea how best to help your child. Pray. You might be in anything that you perceive as trouble. Pray.
Pray when you are in trouble. Pray when life is going well. “Is anyone happy?” James asks, “Let him sing songs of praise.” Anne Lamont wrote about this prayer too. It is her other best prayer, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”
When you find yourself happy, be happy and praise God. Carl Boberg did just that. He found himself happy and praised God. “When through the woods and forest glades I wander, and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees; when I look down from mountain lofty grandeur and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze.” Carl was happy. He was enjoying life. What did Carl do? “Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee, how great Thou art, how great Thou art.” “Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.”
If you never consider God when you are happy, take this as a call to repentance. Enjoying the gifts without thanking the Giver is an all too common ingratitude as we saw this morning. Calvin agreed; “such is the perverseness of men, that they cannot rejoice without forgetting God.”
They say that there are no atheists in foxholes. Everyone thinks of God in the midst of trial. Do you think of God in the midst of happiness?
Ask God for help when you are in trouble. Praise God when you are happy. Pray in those circumstances. Pray in sickness as well. “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.”
Now the power is not in the oil. The oil is simply a sign that this person is set apart for God’s special attention. This isn’t about oil. This isn’t about technique. It is about connecting with God. Remember what Carson said, “effective prayer is the fruit of a relationship with God, not a technique for acquiring blessings.”
If God invites us to use oil in prayer for sick people, then by all means let’s feel free to use oil in prayer. Simple obedience is what these verses are about. James isn’t telling you how prayer works. He is telling you to pray.
Sometimes a man is so sick that he needs others to pray for him. Sometimes a man is so sick that his elders need to pray for him what he can no longer pray for himself. “He should call the elders of the church to pray over him,” as James puts it.
Prayer takes effort and sometimes people are so sick they can’t give that effort. Hudson Taylor was so beaten down by his missionary work that his health collapsed. As he lay in bed, unsure if he would ever walk again, he scrawled these words in a letter to a friend. “I am so weak that I can hardly write, I cannot read my Bible, I cannot even pray, I can only lie still in God’s arms like a little child, and trust.” Some of our brothers and sisters find themselves so weak that they can no longer pray; they can only lay still in God’s arms and trust. They need us elders to pray for them. If this is you, please ask us to pray with you. Since you are no longer healthy enough to come to the church, the church must come to you.
Prayer is so important that if you find yourself unable to pray, get someone else to do it for you. When we go on vacation, I don’t care if anyone fills up our birdfeeder. That never crosses my mind because it isn’t important to me. The birds are not my responsibility. I do care that my dog is fed. I care to the point that since I am away and unable to do it, I find someone else to do it. Prayer is important enough to be done for you if you can’t do it.
You do have someone who is always praying for you. “Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” Please don’t take that as a reason not to pray; ‘well Jesus is praying for me; what more could I add?’ Take that a reason to pray. ‘Jesus is praying for me. How can I not pray for myself?’
Pray when things are difficult. Pray when things are good. Have others pray for you if you are unable. That’s ourfirst point: pray in all circumstances. Now James turns our attention to the necessity of faith for prayer. That’s our second point: the prayer offered in faith.
The man who puts no faith in Christ has no reason to expect his prayers will be heard. God might show kindness upon kindness to that man because He is a good and generous God but that man’s prayer are not heard like the prayers of a child of God. The prayer of the unrighteous man is powerless and ineffective. Psalm 66:18, “if I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened, but God has surely listened and has heard my prayer.” 1 Peter 3:12, “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and His ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” Isaiah 59:2, “Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”
In contrast, the prayers of the righteous man are powerful and effective as James puts it in verse 16. Here James is speaking about healing, “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up.”
Now, remember James didn’t write this to explain prayer; he didn’t write this to give you a flow chart of prayer—‘if you do this then that will invariably happen.’ If you read these verses that way, you will wind up quite confused. What James is saying is similar to this sentence, ‘if you swing, you will hit the ball.’ That sentence doesn’t say that if you swing, the ball will invariably be hit. That sentence says that if you don’t swing, you won’t hit the ball. The ball is hit by swinging. James isn’t saying that every prayer will heal. He is saying that people are healed by praying.
Listen to a Chinese Christian named Yun, ‘My father was sick. He suffered from a severe type of asthma, which developed into lung cancer. The cancer then spread to his stomach. The doctor told him he could not be cured and would soon die. My mother was told, “there is no hope for your husband. Go home and prepare for his death.”
Every night my dad lay in bed and could hardly breathe. Being a very superstitious man, he asked some neighbors to fetch a local Daoist priest to come and cast the demons out of him, as he believed his sickness was the result of upsetting the demons.
My dad’s sickness sapped all our money, possessions, and energy. Because of our poverty I wasn’t able to attend school until the age of nine, but then I had to drop out at sixteen because of my father’s cancer. My brothers, sisters, and I were forced to beg food from our neighbors and friends just to survive… things were so hopeless that [my mother] even contemplated suicide. One night my mother was laying on her bed, barely awake. Suddenly she heard a very clear and tender, compassionate voice say, “Jesus loves you.” She knelt down on the floor and tearfully repented of her sins and re-dedicated herself to the Lord Jesus Christ… she immediately called our family to come and pray to Jesus. She told us, “Jesus is the only hope for Father.” All of us committed our lives to God when we heard what had happened. We then laid our hands on my father and for the rest of the night we cried out a simple prayer, “Jesus, heal Father! Jesus, heal Father!” The very next morning my father found he was much better! For the first time in months, he had an appetite for food. Within a week he had recovered completely and had no trace of cancer! It was a great miracle from God.’ Yun’s father put his faith in Christ and told he and his wife told their extended family about what Jesus had done and the put their faith in Christ.
The hope is that you hear that account and you pray with sick people and for sick people. This is about obedience not about wondering whether or not we have prayed with the right technique.
Part of obedience is repentance. “If he has sinned, he will be forgiven,” writes James. “Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”
Not all sickness is a result of sin, but some is so if you are sick, search yourself. This verse isn’t here to heap confusion upon a man who has repented of his sins and is sick. It is here to tell the man who is sick that he should repent of the sin that is entangling him. If he does that, and prays for healing, and the Lord does not heal him, you know that healing was not the Lord’s will, but if he refuses to repent of sin, then he has troubles even if he is healed. If a man wants healing more than he wants forgiveness, healing is not ultimately what he needs. He needs to repent.
Repentance and healing often do go together. Yun, whom we just heard from, was in prison for his faith. One of his duties in prison was to help in the infirmary. He got to know the prison doctor. Her father had recently had a stroke and needed massage therapy to ease the pain. Yun was regularly forced to massage guards in prison and had gotten quite good at it. That doctor took him out of prison and brought him to her parents’ home to massage her father. Before working on her father, Yun shared the gospel with the man. The man cried over his sins and repented. ‘The next morning before dawn, the old man suddenly felt someone strike him on his neck and back,’ Yun wrote, ‘For the first time in months he could easily move his head. He exclaimed, “It is as if a rope around me has snapped!”… The old man’s health recovered and soon he was able to walk up and down the stairs. This was remarkable for a man who’d been paralyzed by a stroke. He witnessed to all his old friends and sought forgiveness from people he’d wronged in the past.”
Now the more compelling miracle in that situation is not the healing; it is the transformed heart of that man. His repentance is more profound than his healing, but his repentance did bring healing.
James wouldn’t be surprised by Yun’s story; he would be rather surprised that we find surprising. Living in our age and culture has made us more ignorant of all of this than we can begin to comprehend, and I certainly include myself in this ignorance. I am the merest beginner in these matters.
Jesus isn’t a beginner in these matters. He is the master. His ministry is certainly proof of the words that, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” You see him heal through prayer. He didn’t explain his techniques to his disciples. He told them to pray. He told them what James tells us. If he did explain his miracles to us, what ultimate good what that do us. By definition we are not able to understand miracles. By definition we are not able to understand prayer for the miraculous. We are simply told to obey. We are told to pray so pray.
Your prayers matter. We see that in our final point: great people of prayer are just people like you.
I included two illustrations from Yun in this sermon because he is alive today. You could meet him. You could see that he is just like you and then ask God, ‘well, why not me? God if you can use Yun that way, why not me?’ James made the same point in verse 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. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.”
If you are asking, ‘why not me?’ then pray. Prayer is powerful and effective so you should pray. James gave the example of Elijah to motivate you to pray. Reading the Bible will motivate you to pray. Reading David’s cries for help will motivate you to pray when you are in trouble. Reading David’s songs of praise will motivate you to talk to God when you are happy. Reading about the miracles that God has done, which are the same sort He continues to do, will motivate you to pray. The world of the Bible is a world of prayer.
Now the world of the Bible is the real world. You read the Bible, in part, to give you eyes to see life as it is. You will not see life as it is without God’s word. Your sin will prevent you. The assumptions of the world to which we are as blind as a fish is to water will prevent you. The devil will prevent you from seeing life as it is. You read the Bible, in part, to give you eyes to see life as it is. James opened the Bible to accounts of Elijah to teach that early church to see life as it is. “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. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.”
Whether or not you believe the Bible gives you eyes to see life as it is really is the heart of the matter. If Elijah’s prayers really did what James said they did, then you should take prayer very seriously. If, however, you don’t think Elijah was as real as you are or that his prayers really did what James said they did, you won’t take prayer seriously. You might still say your prayers—whatever that phrase really means—but you won’t pray in all circumstances. You won’t pray with faith. You won’t pray like the great men and women of prayer. You could. You could pray like them because they were men and women just like you.
Jesus was a man just like you. Now you can believe that he is God and believe that he is a man just like you. That is the doctrine of the incarnation; he is fully God and fully man. If you believe that Jesus was a man just like you just like Elijah was a man just like you, then you read in the gospels will give you eyes to see life as it is; it is a God-centered, God-saturated business.
The great men and women of prayer have seen it that way. That is why they have prayed. The question is whether or not you see it that way. The question is whether or not you pray. Amen.