The Prayer of Faith
Notes
Transcript
13 Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
14 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.
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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
19 My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back,
20 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.
James has went to great lengths talking about the power of our words. Here, he turns this to prayer. And the power that prayer has.
James 5:13 “13 Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.”
Just like we talked about with the farmer last week, we do not get the luxury of just sitting back and relaxing.
If any of you are suffering, what should they do?
Prayer is our response
And if things are going well, we also have a response, praise.
What I see here is that we should have a response for anything that is going on in our life.
What are some reasons that we neglect either prayer or praise?
What are things that cause us to suffer?
What things would make us cheerful?
Praise and prayer should be our response
14 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.
When we are sick, we need prayer.
James tells them that if they are sick, what should they do?
Call the elders of the church
You mean that the elders don’t already know? Shouldn’t they know if a person is sick. Not always.
The people of the church, if they want people to pray for them, must let the elders know.
Does it say to let their friends know? Does it say to let the secretary know?
James here would be considering dire situations. Someone who is weak and bedridden to the point that they could not gather with the body.
So the elders would gather together to go and pray for the person.
It talks about anointing the person with oil. There is much discussion that has happened over this. Some think that it is referring to medicine because oil would be used medicinally. Some think it may refer to something sacramental, that it has the power to remove sins. But the most likely thing is that it is symbolic. Anointing would be done to consecrate something. We know that the oil itself does not heal but only God who answers prayers.
The elders can come in a pray over the person and anoint them with oil, but the oil only symbolizes setting them apart for special attention and care from God.
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.
What is the prayer of faith?
1 John 5:14–15 “14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.”
The prayer of confidence is the prayer we pray when we know the will of God. And in this case, the elders would seek the will of God and pray for that to happen.
Do we always know the will of God?
There are times where we must just pray for God’s will to be done without knowing it.
But God’s will will always be done.
When he says, “if he has committed sins”, he is saying that in the chance that he is sick because of sin, then he will be forgiven.
16 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.
Interestingly, this is the only place in the New Testament that commands us to confess our sins to one another
1 John 1:9 “9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
In the context, we should see that James is speaking about fellow Christians sinning against one another.
When it comes to confessing sin, private sin doesn’t necessarily need to be confessed publically. And the same public sin does deserve to be confessed publically.
But through confession of sin, we can find healing.
But does God always heal someone? I think this is an important question.
I know that we have been praying for some things here for quite some time. Just because we pray for it, does it always happen?
Would you tell a family that lost someone to cancer or some disease that the reason that they lost them is because they didn’t pray hard enough for them?
When we look at the end of verse 16, does this mean that we need to find someone who is more righteous?
It says the prayer of someone who is righteous has great power. What we need to be reminded of is the power that is in that pray does not come from the person who is asking it, but from the one who answers it.
17 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.
18 Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
We find this story in 1 Kings 17-18.
Because of the state of Israel after being led away from God by King Ahab and Jezebel, God said that he would not let it rain. 3 and a half years.
But then God said that it would rain and it did.
The amazing part of this story is how God used Elijah. God didn’t need to use man to do anything. God is all powerful.
But God had Elijah pray for these things. He prayed that it would stop raining, and it did. Then he prayed that it would start raining, and it did.
What are some big prayers that you have prayed that you have seen God answer?
19 My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back,
20 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.
We, as people of the church, should be committed to watching over each other. We need to keep an eye on each other.
James here is referring to what the OT would call backsliding.
I think that we have taken the term backsliding and applied it to people who have made false professions of faith and were never really Christians to begin with.
But James is referring to people in the church who have “wandered” from the truth.
What truth would they wander from? the word of God
For us not to wander from the truth of God, we must stay close to the truth.
What are ways to stay close to the truth?
How do we know when someone wanders away? We see it in the form of sin in their life
We see this idea of closeness in each others lives here as well. To be able to see when someone wanders, we need to have close relationships.
Anybody can put on a good face and walk in the door on Sunday mornings and fool us. But what about when we are having dinner together every Tuesday night, or lunch every Thursday.
This is missing in most of the church today. This is discipleship and there is very little of it happening is the life of Christians.
And this is why people wander from the truth.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that they leave a church. They can stray away from the truth and still be at church every time the doors open. They can still serve on committees, participate in outreaches, and even serve as a deacon.
This is one of the reasons that churches stray from the truth.
We need to be vigilant to pull people back to the truth.
James says when we do this, we save his soul from death.
I think this application can be used for the unbeliever as well. We need to be vigilant to see unbelievers come to faith in Jesus.
We need to have this mentality that we are all ministers of the gospel.