Christ: The Power of Prayer
Notes
Transcript
This morning, our Scripture lesson from Luke is just one verse—we are revisiting Luke 6:19. Although, the function of Luke 6:17-19 is to provide the context and location of the Sermon on the Plain, this verse jumped out at me and I could not get it out of my mind. It is a very powerful picture of Jesus’ healing and deliverance ministry. Let me read it to you again:
And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all.
Power came out of him! Doesn’t that make you wish that Jesus were physically among us today so we could touch him? Who of us here does not need the power of Christ flowing out of Him into us?
As I thought of this, the Lord placed James 5:13-18 in my mind. Let me read this passage to you now as our second Scripture lesson:
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.
Did you catch the similarities between these two passages? Luke 6:19 is about power flowing out of Jesus to heal, and James 5:16 is about the power of Christ flowing out of our prayers to heal! Brothers and sisters, the power of Christ is unleashed in our prayers!
The Power of Christ Unleashed in Prayer
The Power of Christ Unleashed in Prayer
In vs. 14, which we will get to in a moment, James is writing about the prayer of the elders of a church, but in vs. 16, James is writing about the prayers of all Christians. We know this because the person praying is “a righteous person”. If there is anything the Bible makes clear, it is this: the only way a person can be righteous is by faith in Christ. Consequently, the “righteous person” is a Christian.
Have you placed your faith in Christ as your Lord and Savior? If so, then in God’s eyes you are a “righteous person”, because what God is seeing is the perfect righteousness of Christ. Therefore, when you pray in Jesus’ Name your prayers have “great power as they are working”!
When Jesus said, “it is to your advantage that I go away” (Jn 16:7) and “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father” (Jn 14:12); He was not joking or speaking in hyperbole. He was speaking the truth!
Most Christians are totally unaware of the power at work in them. This is the reason Paul prayed like this: “may Christ might dwell in their hearts through faith…in order that they might comprehend…the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge…and that they might be filled with the fullness of God” (Eph 3:14-19). He concludes his pray this way:
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Did you catch what Paul is saying is true for you as a believer?
You are filled with the fullness of God’s love and power! If you are full, you cannot receive anymore! If you pour water in a full glass, it overflows! The power of Christ that is unleashed when you pray is beyond your ability to comprehend, because it is an infinite power! Do you now understand why James writes, “The prayer of a righteous man has great power as it is working”?
Transition: Simply put, prayer “works”! Many people deny this. They do not believe prayer “works” because they asked for something and God did not give them what they asked for. What we do not take into account, is whose “will” our prayers are “working” to establish. Earlier in his letter, James reveals one of the reasons we do not get what we pray for. He writes:
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
Often, what we “will” is not what Christ “wills”. This is made abundantly clear when we look at the immediate context of James 5:13-18.
Transition: This brings us to the second thing James wants us to understand about prayer:
The Will of Christ Lived Out in Prayer
The Will of Christ Lived Out in Prayer
This is clearly seen once you recognize the literary structure of James 4:11-5:20. In this section, James addresses three problems and three solutions. He does this in a way that a first century Jew would do it, not as a twenty-first century American would. We would list the problems 1, 2, 3; and then solutions the problems 1, 2, 3. The Hebrews would list the problems 1, 2, 3; but address the solutions in reverse order: 3, 2, 1. Consequently, the problem James 5:13-18 is addressing is found in James 4:13-17. Let us look at that passage:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
What is James identifying as the problem? Is it not prideful presumption. It is the heart that says, “I have the wisdom and knowledge to know what is best, therefore “My will be done”, rather than “Thy will be done”!
Faced with sickness or some other type of suffering, people will say, “I cannot understand why God would not take this away from me immediately.” In that statement, they have their answer. It is “I do not understand.” That’s right, we do not understand, but God does!
The antidote to this type of prideful presumption is found in our text today:
Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
All of life is to be lived in humble reliance upon God’s loving wisdom. In our suffering, we turn to the Lord in prayerful petition. In our joys, we turn to the Lord in prayerful praise. Petition and Praise are the marks of the godly Christian life.
This trust in God’s providential kindness is reflected in James 5:15:
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.
Both the words “saved” and “raised” are allusion not only to physical healing now, but the ultimate healing of the Final Resurrection when the believer will be “saved” in the fullest sense and be “raised with Christ” in an incorruptible body! That James has spiritual healing in mind, as well as physical healing, is clearly seen in his mentioning of the forgiveness of sin. In fact, when you pause to think about it, all sickness has its origin in Adam’s sin in the Garden and the final permanent healing will only take place at the resurrection. There is no sickness that can be healed in this life that will not in time be replaced by another, and ultimately, we will all die physically.
The Resurrection is not like this. At the Resurrection, we will be completely and eternally healed from all physical, spiritual, emotional and mental illness! It is never a question as whether or not a believer will be “healed”, it is just a question of when they will be healed! God is “working all things together for good, for those who live Him and are called according to His purposes” (Rom 8:28).
This is not all, Christ understands how hard it is to believe when we are undergoing extreme suffering. The author of Hebrews says of Christ:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Transition: As our Great High Priest, Jesus has made provision for us in our weakness:
The Care of Christ Provided in Prayer
The Care of Christ Provided in Prayer
Christ’s care and provision for us is found in James 5:14-15:
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.
As we all know, there are different levels of sickness. For example, on one end there are sicknesses like a common cold, and on the other end are sicknesses such as heart attacks. The two Greek words translated “sickness” in our English bibles refer to the later. The “sickness” in vs. 14 is the type of sickness that makes us feel “weak” both physically and spiritual, and the word in vs. 15, is the type of sickness that makes us feel “worn out”.
It is while we are in this “weakened” and “worn out” state, that God is instructing us to call the elders of the church to pray over us and anoint us with oil. Throughout Scripture both the anointing of oil and the laying on of hands act as visible signs of blessing and power. They do not actually impart God’s blessing and power; they remind us of it.
This is exactly what we need when we are in a weakened state physically and spiritually. People who are in a weakened state physically and spiritual often feel numb to the world and to God. It is at such times that we feel as though God does not love us and that we do not have enough faith to reach out to Him.
It is for this very reason, God commands the sick person to take the imitative, not the elders. As we saw earlier in Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians, the reality is that every believer is filled to the brim with God’s love and power. The problem is not that God’s love and power are not there, it is that we are blind to the fact. In that same act of calling the elders of the church, the sick person is reminded that even faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains (Lk 17:20)!
Conclusion: To illustrate the power of prayer, James uses the example of the prophet Elijah.
Elijah is considered by many to be the greatest miracle worker of the Old Covenant, although his disciple Elisha did twice as many miracles. Yet, James reminds us that Elijah “was a man with a nature like ours”. James is saying that if we need to experience the supernatural miracle working power of God in our lives, we do not have to go to some “miracle worker”, we simply need to go to the Lord in prayer. In fact, the most insignificant New Testament believer is greater than the greatest prophet of the Old Covenant.
Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
This is not hyperbole, this is reality! When we pray in Jesus’ Name “power comes out from Him”!