James 5:13-18 Notes

Title

Prayer and Confession

Beg and Blab

The power of prayer

Beg and Blab: how prayer and confession are necessary to your spiritual and physical well-being.

Purpose

To encourage participation in mutual prayer and confession as vital to the life of the church and to your physical and spiritual well-being.

Summary

James writes to the church with some amazing news: prayer is powerful and sin is dangerous. His advice (command) to the church is ridiculously practical: pray for each other (inviting God to heal) and confess your sins to one another (breaking the power of sin). It is silly not to practice these.

Exegetical Idea

We should respond readily in all circumstances with prayer and worship.

The Church should practice prayer and confession, God responds with inner and outer healing.

Prayer is powerful. Confession is necessary to our health (spiritual and physical). It is silly not to practice both.

Two possible blockages to God wanting to heal you: you haven’t asked (prayer) or you’re choosing sin instead (confession implying repentance).

Big Idea

Pray for each other. Confess your sins to one another.

Cover your bases: pray and confess.

Two powerful weapons for life and healing: prayer and confession

Two powerful weapons of the church…

Context

Predations of the wealthy

Patience in trial and suffering. Patience of the prophets (did the prophets pray?)

Initial Theological Questions

Prayer "of faith" will? save the one who is sick.

Not enough faith?

Confession of sin?

"heaven gave rain" (reference back to farmer?)

Elijah - wasn't it really a response to God's directive? (End of the rain was God's command).

The rain is more significant than Elijah raising the Widow's son from the dead?

Difference between prayer and magic (technology)!

Is verse 15 a promise? 99.9% of Christians have died, and they died of something that God could have chosen to miraculously heal.

Prayer of faith – not because you have convinced yourself but because you have heard from God.

On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to ask, and it could hurt to not ask (James 4:2-3). “You do not have because you do not ask… or you ask wrongly).”

Sin is a possible but not necessary cause of sin. So don’t go accusing others of sin as a cause for their suffering… but cover your bases.

Words

No real tricky words. Prayer is prayer, faith is faith, etc…

Suffering – same as previous passage (suffering of the prophets).

Heal/Save – double meaning, could be physical, spiritual, or both.

“as it is working” or “powerful and effective”. Better as “when it is exercised.” (temporal) (Sometimes, rarely, you have lots of great translation options.)

Confess your sins – public context, probably Matthew 18 as a background. Need not make the confession more public than the sin. “We must never confess sin beyond the circle of that sin’s influence.”

Commentaries

“It is a prayer of faith, i.e. the prayer which expresses trust in God and flows out of commitment to him, for only such prayers are effective”

Faith of the prayer (elders with ex officio power) not the sick one? Other way around for many of Jesus’ healings.

Jesus healed: half the time a result of their faith, half the time seeking to instill or strengthen weak faith.

Jesus sometimes healed all present, sometimes one amongst many (cripple at pools)

“Prayer of faith” has to leave room for God’s will to override ours.

“Those who claim that God heals every case, and that it is not His will for His children to be sick, are denying both Scripture and experience. But where we have the inner conviction from the Word and the Spirit that it is God’s will to heal, then we can pray “the prayer of faith” and expect God to work.”