EFFECTIVE PRAYER

Introduction

-{James 5}

-I want to continue our Summer Sermon Series on prayer with something I hope will be helpful and practical

-But first, I wonder if you have ever thought about how God keeps all the prayers straight that come to Him. It’s so wonderful that He is eternal and infinite. Us finite humans can barely listen to one conversation, but God hears millions upon millions all at the same time.

~Right now there’s a little German girl raised in the Lutheran Church in Berlin who is asking God to bring her father home. He has been gone so long, and she misses him. “God, my heavenly Father, bring my papa home so my mother will not cry at night.”

~And there’s a single mother in El Salvador who stands in her one-room home and looks at her three children all sharing the same bed. Her prayer is whispered with hands stretched over her sleeping children. “God of mercy and grace, protect my children from gangs and drugs. Let them love Jesus all the days of their life. Lord Jesus, send angels to protect them when they are in my home and even more when they are out of my sight.”

~And then there’s that elderly Ethiopian couple holding hands and praying for rain, for crops, for provision, and for hope. Tears of sincere need flow down their faces. “Creator God, you made the heavens and the earth. You love your people. In the name of Jesus, provide bread for our family. This is all we ask: daily bread and water.”

-God hears them all and has no problem sorting it all out and answering according to His will and His bounty.

~And all these prayers are not in competition with one another. It’s not like God has just one slot for an answered prayer and we’re all jockeying for position to be the one that He hears and answers.

-And yet, there are some lessons that the Bible gives that can make us more effective in prayer. I’m not going to stand here and try to sell you some book that says 7 STEPS TO ENSURE YOUR PRAYERS ARE HEARD AND ANSWERED or something crazy like that. But there are some things we can take to heart to make the most out of our time in prayer.

-In the passage that we’re looking at, James wrote to the church to encourage them in cultivating an effective prayer life. And what we can glean from this is that we Christians can be encouraged that we too can experience a wonderful, effective prayer life with God.

~And maybe that’s what we need—we might not pray because we are discouraged, so let’s be encouraged today.

READ James 5:13-20

James 5:13–20 ESV

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.

-What do we learn about effective prayer:

1) The occasions for effective prayer

-Obviously, the short, short answer is that every occasion going on in our lives is a time to pray. While we might know that theologically, practically it is something different. We haven’t programmed ourselves to think this way.

~We might pray when things are going bad, but then we sluff off when things are going good. We might categorize what’s going on in our life and only bring those certain categories to God in prayer.

~But James makes it simple for us—if there is something going on in your life, bring it before God in prayer. If it is weighing heavy on your mind, pray about it.

-Look at the way that he talks about it.

~He says that if any of you are suffering (some translations IN TROUBLE) then let him pray. If you have some problems in your life, don’t fret about it, complain about it, go off on social media about it—YOU PRAY ABOUT IT

~If there is something that is troubling your spirit, taking away your peace, obscuring your hope, you take it to the throne of grace and you talk to God about it. How else are you going to get the help you need? But that’s not the only occasion for prayer:

~He says if you are cheerful then sing praise—praise is part of prayer. You pray to God about the things going right in your life as much as you do about the things going wrong in your life. You thank Him and praise Him that He has blessed you as much as He has.

~James says that if anyone is sick then you go to God in prayer. He says to have others pray for the sick person too—specifically church leadership. But again, you pray.

~If you have sin to confess, you pray.

~At the end of the passage, James talks about those who wander from the faith—those who are believers who maybe backslide, or those confronted with the faith and refuse to believe. Within the context it talks about us bringing them back, but how do you do that? You pray.

-If it is our concern, we pray. Whether good or bad—and it’s important to remember that. As one pastor warned:

When things are bad we might become angry and bitter. When thing are good we might become too comfortable, laze, and self-reliant.

~So, instead of going down those roads, we take it to the Lord in prayer. That is the biblical injunction:

[Cast] all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:7 ESV)

pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17 ESV)

-Effective prayer is the prayer that is given for every season and circumstance of life. Next, James talks about:

2) The power for effective prayer

-In v. 15 James says that THE PRAYER OF FAITH WILL SAVE. The power of our prayer is found in our faith that God will hear and God will answer. God wants us to actually believe and trust Him when we pray.

-Faith is so important. God is not going to answer prayers if you approach Him with an attitude that is something to the effect of: I GUESS I’LL GO AHEAD AND ASK GOD EVEN THOUGH I DON’T THINK HE ACTUALLY HEARS ME OR CARES, OR WILL ANSWER.

~You come with that attitude what you’re really doing is thinking very little of God. That is not faith.

-All throughout Scripture we are told to have faith in God, believe in God, and He will work in our lives. How many miracles did Jesus do, and He told the person YOUR FAITH HAS HEALED YOU. It wasn’t the faith itself that healed, but the object of their faith, Jesus Christ who healed, but the people accessed His answer to their request through their faith. They believed that He could and would, and He did.

-Listen to all these injunctions about the importance of faith in our relationship to God, and especially when it comes to prayer.

~We are told:

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6 ESV)

~Jesus told His apostles and He tells us:

“Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22–24 ESV)

~Did you hear that? Believe that you already received it from God and it will be yours.

~Jesus healed a blind man and said:

“According to your faith be it done to you.” (Matthew 9:29 ESV)

-When you have faith that God will answer prayer, He answers prayer. When you do not believe God will answer prayer, then He will not answer prayer.

~Sometimes we have very little faith and so we give very little prayers and we receive very little answers. Sometimes we have big faith and we give big prayers and God gives big answers.

-Now, obviously I need to mention a few qualifications to this. One, this is not some sort of name it and claim it theology. I’m not saying that if you have enough faith and God will just give you everything. We are warned elsewhere in Scripture that wrong motives hinder prayer.

You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. (James 4:3 ESV)

-We also need to mention that all prayer is subject to God’s loving, holy, eternal, perfect will.

And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 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. (1 John 5:14–15 ESV)

-So, faith is having confidence toward God in Jesus Christ. Jesus said Let it be done to us according to our faith. But how do we get this faith, or how do we increase our faith? It comes through God’s Word.

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17 ESV)

~Paul is not only talking about saving faith, where you hear the gospel and believe in Christ as your Lord and Savior. But it’s also talking about living faith and praying faith. As we meditate on God’s Word daily, the Holy Spirit lets the Word get into our heart and it becomes a seed of faith.

~The Word of God will also give us ideas of what to pray because it tells us God’s promises and we can pray according to those promises.

-Faith might be hard because we look for something to see or hear or feel to hold onto, but we’re reminded that we walk by faith and not by sight. It’s when we do the opposite that we run into problems—when we walk by sight and not by faith.

~When we walk by sight and not faith, then what’s running us is our emotions which are dependent on our circumstances. When I’m on a spiritual high, I have faith. When I’m on a spiritual low I don’t have faith.

~We begin to think that God goes up and down with our emotions—we think that God can only be faithful when we feel it.

~So, do we quit praying when we don’t feel it? Are God’s promises null and void when we don’t feel it? We limit God by our fleeting emotions.

-But faith is dependent on God and His Word, not our emotions. I believe God in spite of how I feel because of what He has revealed to us.

-There’s a story about a church in Scotland back in the 1940s that was struggling to keep the doors open. A couple of its members were two older ladies who were homebound and couldn’t get out for worship any longer. But these ladies refused to allow their infirmities to get in the way of serving their God. They became convinced that their community needed Jesus desperately and they were going to do something about it. They were going to pray. They determined to make their house a house of prayer. Around the clock they prayed for God do something powerful. Then one day, one of the ladies became convinced that God wanted a revivalist by the name of Campbell to come and hold meetings at their church. They talked to their preacher and he contacted Campbell...but Campbell was unavailable. He was booked up.

The women refused to give up in their prayers however...and it wasn’t long before--oddly enough--some of Campbell’s other revivals became cancelled and he decided to accept the invitation of that small church. He arrived and held 5 weeks of revival meetings. The Revival was so well received that hundreds showed up each night. And lives were so changed that many of the local taverns had to close up because they lacked patrons. One might think it was because of the powerful preaching of a renowned revivalist. But in reality it was because of the two homebound ladies who had faith and so they dedicated themselves to prayer.

~Oh, that this would be us.

3) The example of effective prayer

-In vv. 17-18 James gives us a biblical example of someone praying in faith and they received mighty answers. He talks about the prophet Elijah that we are very familiar with. Elijah did a lot of mighty things. He faced off against a wicked king and queen. He faced off against hundreds of false prophets. And James talks about an amazing prayer that Elijah gave.

~Because the kingdom was so wicked, and Ahab and Jezebel were so wicked, Elijah prayed that it would stop raining and there would be a famine in the land for 3 ½ years. And that’s exactly what happened. And then at the end of the 3 ½ years Elijah prayed that rain would return, and again that’s what happened.

-Elijah is held up as an example of a big prayer done in faith given to God for His glory and honor. But it would be easy for James’ readers and easy for us to just dismiss this because, I mean, come on, it’s Elijah. Of course Elijah the prophet would pray a big prayer and get a big answer.

-But listen to what James reminds us: Elijah is a human being with a nature just like ours. There is absolutely nothing special about Elijah. He wasn’t a super-saint and all the rest of us are just nobodies. Elijah was just like us. And He prayed fervently and in faith and His prayer was answered. This is an encouragement to us that we are to pray fervently and in faith and see what God will do.

-James said at the end of v. 16 THE PRAYER OF A RIGHTEOUS PERSON HAS GREAT POWER AS IT IS WORKING. Or you might be more familiar with the NKJV: THE EFFECTIVE, FERVENT PRAYER OF A RIGHTEOUS MAN AVAILS MUCH.

~Either way, when a child of God prays in faith things happen. Elijah is an example of this, and there are so many more examples through history.

-George Muller was a Christian evangelist in England. He had an amazing evangelistic ministry as well as an amazing ministry to the needy. He opened up orphanages that serviced over 10,000 orphans in his lifetime. He also established 117 Christian schools that taught over 120,000 children. Here’s the amazing thing, he never once asked any person for a penny to help fund these things. He gave all of his needs over to the Lord in prayer and God provided through so many people who donated.

~Once, George was travelling to Canada by ship for an evangelistic crusade of some sort, and the captain of the ship tells this amazing story:

"We had George Muller of Bristol, England on board," said the captain. "I had been on the bridge for twenty-four hours and never left it and George Muller came to me and said, 'Captain, I have come to tell you I must be in Quebec on Saturday afternoon.'

"'It is impossible,'" I said.

"'Then very well, if your ship cannot take me, God will find some other way. I have never broken an engagement in fifty-seven years. Let us go down into the chart room and pray.'

"I looked at that man of God and thought to myself, 'What lunatic asylum can that man have come from, for I never heard of such a thing as this?' 'Mr. Muller,' I said, 'do you know how dense this fog is?'

"'No,' Muller replied, 'my eye is not on the density of the fog, but on the living God who controls every circumstance of my life.' He knelt down and he prayed a simple prayer. When he had finished I was going to pray, but he put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to pray. 'As you do not believe He will answer, and as I believe He has, there is no need whatever for you to pray about it.'

"I looked at him and George Muller said, 'Captain, I have known my Lord for fifty-seven years and there has never been a single day when I have failed to get an audience with the King. Get up, Captain, and open the door and you will find the fog has gone.'

"I got up and the fog indeed was gone, and on that Saturday George Muller kept his promised engagement.

Conclusion

-You say these things are impossible, but that shows your level of faith. How many times did Jesus chide people OH YOU OF LITTLE FAITH.

~Christian, come to the altar today and pray in faith about whatever is going on in your life.

-But I also want to remind people that James said that it is the prayer of the righteous that works—given righteousness in Jesus Christ…