Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: James 5:13-20

N:

Opening

Welcome to our Family Worship service here at Eastern Hills.

Those joining us online, welcome.

Those here in the room, it’s great to see you.

I truly love being a part of this church, and it’s a joy to get to worship the Lord with you each week.

Veterans Day

A group of people who really help in that regard is our AV team, and I want us to say thanks to those guys, whose responsibility has gotten more complex in the last couple of years.

Thanks for your faithful service, guys.

Announcements

Business Meeting tonight.

Special called next Sunday following morning service if we don’t make quorum tonight.

International Mission Sunday next Sunday.

Excited to have Kit Klein, who serves with European peoples, to come and share with us next weekend.

There will be no Wednesday night activities for any age group on the night before Thanksgiving.

Message

This week is our last week in our series on the book of James.

I know that we could spend a whole lot more time in James, but I know that the time we’ve spent has been incredibly convicting for me personally, and I pray that God has done some serious remodeling in your heart through this study as well.

Remember that we are defining wisdom as “knowing how to live a life that glorifies God.”

This last message answers the question: “How do we do life together as a church for God’s glory?”

As we read our focal passage from God’s Word this morning, let’s stand together:

PRAYER

When the apostle Paul was on his second missionary journey, he founded the church of Corinth.

In Acts 18, we read that Paul was in Corinth for about a year and a half, so of all the churches he had been a part of starting, the Corinthian church was the one he had spent the most time with at that point.

After he left Corinth, he corresponded with the people there from Ephesus during his third missionary journey, and we have that correspondence in 1 and 2 Corinthians.

Now, the city of Corinth had some interesting issues.

It was a wealthy city in an important location for trade, the capital of the province of Achaia at the time, and was home to the temple of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of the body and of love.

So commerce, power, money, sensuality, and pagan worship ruled the city of Corinth.

The church that Paul founded there was predominantly Gentile in makeup.

We can tell from what he wrote in what we call 1 Corinthians that the Corinthian church had some problems.

They weren’t all on the same page.

They argued about who their primary teacher was: some saying Paul, some saying Apollos, some Peter, and some saying Christ.

They were in conflict.

They struggled with a lack of wisdom, with immaturity, with worldly perspectives instead of eternal ones.

They had to deal with the cultural preoccupation with sex and money, and with lawsuits between themselves.

It was a mess in Corinth.

One of Paul’s teachings to the church at Corinth during this time was his attempt to get them to understand who they were as a church family.

He wrote in 1 Corinthians 12 perhaps the greatest explanation that we have in Scripture of how we should view the local church body.

His summary of this teaching is found in verses 24-27 in chapter 12:

1 Corinthians 12:24–27 (CSB)

24 Instead, God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the less honorable, 25 so that there would be no division in the body, but that the members would have the same concern for each other.

26 So if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.

27 Now you are the body of Christ, and individual members of it.

Those in the church belong to each other.

It’s a family dynamic, a body dynamic.

We are to show concern for each other in the church body.

I know, we’re not studying 1 Corinthians.

We’re studying James.

But the book of James was also written with the idea of the community aspect of the church in mind.

Sure, we can take this book and make application individually, which we have done.

But if we only look at the individual applications of the things that we find in this little book, we miss the bigger picture.

Remember that James was writing to the pockets of Jewish Christians who were scattered around the diaspora:

So he’s not writing to a single local church, but to several local church fellowships throughout the Roman Empire at the time.

His focus on the community aspect of the church is seen throughout the letter, speaking of how they were to treat others who came to their worship gatherings in James 2, of how there were those in their congregations who wanted to be teachers but were not qualified to do so in James 3, about their internal conflict leading to church conflict in James 4, and even about how they spoke about one another in the first part of James 5. And now, James is landing the plane, so to speak.

He’s addressed some of the negatives about how they are relating to one another, and now he speaks to the kind of community they should be, which is the kind of community that Eastern Hills should be.

When we live like this, church, we live in wisdom together, glorifying God in how we function as a body.

First, the local church is to be a community of prayer.

1) Community of prayer

The truth is that this could be almost the only point for this message this morning.

Prayer is seen throughout our focal passage today.

Our problem is that it’s easy for us to see prayer in really anemic terms: boxes to check before and after we do things.

We might even get so used to praying that we stop actually thinking when we pray: just say the same words in the same way.

But this isn’t who we are supposed to be.

As God’s children, He wants us to pray, coming before Him in humility in every situation we find ourselves in.

So James writes:

James starts out with the individual.

The one who is suffering a trial.

The one who is cheerful.

Both of these people in the church family are to go before the throne of God: the suffering in prayer, the rejoicing in praise (which is also prayer).

So a part of our community life is to be individuals of prayer.

But James takes it a step further.

This is family life.

Trials, rejoicing, sickness, and struggling with sin are a part of what we’re in together.

Remember from 1 Corinthians: when one of us suffers, the whole body suffers.

We belong to each other in a very real, very tangible way, and we should act as such.

This is life, and it’s being lived out all around us and between us in this body of believers.

So when one member is sick, they are to call the elders of the church, who are to come and pray and anoint the person with oil.

Now, it’s not that the elders of the church have some more direct line to God or anything.

They don’t go and pray because they are more holy than other members of the body.

No, they go because as those recognized as leaders of the church community, they are representatives of the church body as a whole.

The image here is that of the church body sending trustworthy representatives to stand in the stead and with the backing of the entire body, as the entire body can’t be there in person to pray over the sick member.

Here’s how David Platt sees it in his commentary on James:

“No special power is reserved for the elders: the power is in God, and it is available to the praying church.

Care and prayer for one another are not just intended to happen within the context of leadership in the church but in the context of the church as a whole.

When we are sick, we call on one another to pray, not just this or that leader.”

— David Platt, Christ-Centered Expository Commentary: James

Just a quick note about the anointing with oil: Oil in this case is likely symbolic of health, as it was often used medicinally in Israel, however, I doubt that actually using it as medicine is what is in view here, as if the oil would heal the sick person.

Instead, it’s God who heals both our physical and spiritual infirmities, as we see in verse 15.

Verse 15 can be a difficult verse.

James 5:15 “15 The prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up; if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.”

Does this mean that if we pray in faith, then every sickness will be healed?

Or that if a sickness isn’t healed, then we didn’t have enough faith or pray enough?

This isn’t how we are to read this.

Instead, we need to keep in mind that James says that it is the “prayer of faith.”

Faith how?

That healing will take place?

No.

The object of our faith is the God to whom we pray, not the words of our prayers or the heart of our prayers or the passion of our prayers.