Sermon Tone Analysis

James 5:15 “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.”

Will a prayer of faith always bring healing?

At first glance, this seems straight forward.

If someone is sick, you get the elders to pray for them and God will raise them up.

End of story.

Unfortunately, this creates a real dilemma.

Just like me, many of you have friends or loved ones that were diagnosed with a serious disease.

Powerful prayer was mobilized for them.

With all the faith that could be mustered, this verse was claimed and believed, but they didn’t get better.

Instead of being healed, they died.

No not always .

It looks like this verse is clearly wrong.

How should we handle it?

Here are some options people have taken:

1. Blame God for not keeping his promise to heal.

(God failed.)

2. Erode your confidence in God’s Word because it appears to make promises that are not true.

(The Bible failed.)

3. Blame yourself and believe the reason your friend or loved one wasn’t healed is because you didn’t have enough faith when you prayed.

(I failed.)

4. Blame the one who was sick for not having enough faith to be healed.

(The one who was sick failed.)

Of course, all of us have seen the fruitcakes on television who say that if there is no healing in your life it is the fault of the one who is sick for lacking the faith to be healed.

Of course these fruitcake faith healers eventually die themselves and prove their own words wrong.

But while they are alive, they cause many people needless pain with their false teaching.

Which of these four options should we take when it comes to understanding the disconnect between faith and life in James 5:15?

None of them are right.

(NO)

To explain the right way to understand this verse,

I want to begin by laying a proper biblical grounding for understanding the role of sickness in our life.

Once that is done, we will return to the verse and look at it with fresh understanding.

A Concise Theology of Healing and Sickness

It is not always God’s will to heal.

2 Timothy 4:20, “20 Erastus remained at Corinth, and I left Trophimus, who was ill, at Miletus.”

we find Paul left Trophimus sick in Miletus; why didn’t Paul just pray for him, anoint him with oil and heal him?

2 Corinthians 12:7-9, “7 So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

we discover that while Paul had the gift of healing,

he prayed three times for his own healing, and it was not granted.

Does this mean Paul didn’t pray with enough faith?

We shouldn’t neglect the obvious.

Have you noticed everyone eventually dies?

If James 5:15 was an unqualified statement,

we should expect some really old Christians around the church.

Every time they were sick, they would simply call the elders to pray over them and they would be healed.

I don’t think we can look at this passage and say it is God’s will to heal everyone all the time when the elders pray for them.

Sometimes sickness is caused by sin.

James 5:15 “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.”

We see in verse 15 that sometimes there is a connection between sickness and sin.

When there is sin in our life,

God may choose to bring sickness as a form of discipline for refusal to repent of particular repetitive and willful sins.

Let’s look at

1 Corinthians 11:27-30 “27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.

28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.

30 That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.”

The Corinthian church had all kinds of problems.

One of them was Christians partaking of the Lord’s Table while harboring sin in their hearts.

The Lord’s Table celebrates the story of the gospel.

Jesus died in my place for my sin.

When I participate in a celebration of repentance, forgiveness, mercy and grace but intentionally relish sin in my heart, don’t forgive others and repent of my sin, it is a kind of gospel blasphemy.

We are to examine ourselves and put our sins before the Lord.

We are to open our hearts, confess our sins and strive for our lives be an extension of the forgiveness, mercy and grace we receive from Christ.

A refusal to do this on some of the Corinthians part led to sickness, illness and even death.

This is not just a New Testament thing.

God punished many in the Old Testament with sickness as a form of discipline for their sin.

Gehazzi, Elijah’s servant, contracted leprosy as discipline for his sin against God.

King Uzziah was also given leprosy because of his sin.

It is not hard to know why God uses sickness as a form of spiritual discipline.

Nothing gets our attention quicker than when we don’t feel well.

What we must remember is that if sin is the cause, confession is the cure.

But let’s be careful here.

It is easy to adopt an over-simplistic view that all sickness is the result of sin.

Sickness is not always caused by sin.

The Bible teaches that many times sickness is not God’s discipline for sin.

The great example of this is Job.

The reason his children died and his life fell apart was not because of his sinfulness but because of his righteousness.

His sickness was a test of his faith.

His sickness was not an act of discipline but a trial to demonstrate his righteousness.

This is something Job’s friends had a hard time understanding.

They were convinced the reason his world fell apart was because he had hidden unconfessed sins.

Look what Eliphaz, one of his friends, tells him.

Job 4:7-9 “7 “Remember: who that was innocent ever perished?

Or where were the upright cut off?

8 As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.

9 By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed.”

Job’s friends had an over-simplistic view of sickness that would have resonated well with some television preachers.

Unfortunately, it was just dead wrong.

Another great example of the disconnection between sickness and sin is seen in

John 9:1-3 “1 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

First of all, this man’s sickness was not as a result of sin, just like we saw with Job.

Why was this man suffering with blindness?

It was “that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

Sometimes healing is not the blessing we think it may be.

Most of us think that if we are healed of sickness then all will be fine.

While we are sick we think of all the things that could be, just if i was not hindered by this suffering or ailment.

We say “Lord if you just heal me then, I could do this and that, I could serve you so much better and do more for you.”