Sermon Prep: James 5:13-20

13Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.

What is the etymology of pray and praise in this verse? Is one a supplication and the other a thankfulness, or are the roots closer than that? I want to believe that application to the Lord is the same regardless of the context…

Blue skies,

Lark

Where to begin….

First, I admit that I may be a bit overly touchy about some things, you hear all kinds of gunk, even from Christians…they mean well, but sometimes in our discomfort people say things when they should just be still….

That said, I first and foremost believe that the purpose of this passage is to remind us to keep our focus on GOD, whatever, and even in spite of, our circumstances. If you’re happy, remember to be thankful. If you’re troubled or sick, keep your eyes on Him, rather than on your infirmity or your problems. God is unchanged-He is the same yesterday, today, tomorrow…so no matter what crashes in around us from day to day we can find peace and strength when we keep our eyes on Him. We do that through prayer and praise. We need to remember to praise Him always, and keep the dialog open through prayer–good times or bad-not as a last resort but as a first priority. Specifically to v. 14 and 15…..we have heard numerous times about how so and so’s child, who has battled the same disease that our son did, is a testimony to the power of prayer. Verse 15 SAYS the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. Does that mean we didn’t say the right prayers, or have enough faith? Indeed, “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. (v. 16)” So are we not righteous, even by the blood of Christ?….

My Life Application Bible says of these verses that this refers to the faith of the people praying not of the sick person, and that faith does not heal, God heals. I agree. He often heals in ways we don’t expect, or even want. I would have much preferred He heal Braeden here, on earth, but he is nonetheless healed, according to God’s will. I also believe that our prayers during these times help in our own healing process. God has heard some pretty dark and desperate things from me, and He didn’t run away. Although He did not answer those prayers in the way I had asked, He has afforded me a glimpse of the eternal, showing me a ripple from one tiny life that has astounded me. And beginning to see those answers played out helps in my own healing.

Sorry….I kind of went on and on… and probably still could….

but I’ll give it a rest…..would LOVE to hear this sermon, so can you get it up on the web?

James wrote to a church full of poor people who had been (and apparently were being) badly treated by richer people. He promised them that God saw, and that God would put things right. But his message was not all “jam tomorrow”.

In this final section of the letter, he reminds his folk to pray, and to be a church together, so that together they can deal with temptations, afflictions, and sins while they wait for God’s day.

The temptation to fall into the trap of greed, to become one of the afflictors and not the afflicted, is what James wants his flock to avoid. He encourages patience using the image of a farmer patiently waiting. This is an image Jesus also used. Mark 4: 26-29 says:

A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain. First the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.

Jesus’ story could have been shorter: A man with seed scatters it on the ground. As soon as the grain is ripe, he cuts it, because it’s the time to gather in the corn. Jesus, however, paints a picture of a gradual and sequential process. It is an image of working and waiting. The sower has to go and sow, and having sown, has to reap. But first, he must wait.

The growth is through the earth. If the sowing is done right, and the reaping is done right, then the hard bit, the actual mystery of the seed’s life-process, is taken care of. At night and by day, irrespective of whether he is sleeping or getting up, the seed sprouts, and grows. He does not know how or why it happens. It just does. All on its own, the soil produces corn. The point is that your life is not your own project. You cannot make yourself grow, any more than you can control the early or the late rains…

It is harder work to reap than to sow. But the hardest work, which takes the longest time, is to have patience during the growth.

First the stalk appears.
Then the ear.
Then the full grain in the ear.

The process can be observed, but in unseasonable times, observation can be fraught, nervous work. At any moment, blight can set in and spoil the labour. This is James’ fear too, and it explains why he writes:

My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, 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.

He knows what sorts of sins too: the kind that men get themselves into with their dishonest mouths:

Above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

A proverb (Proverbs 19:1) speaks to this situation:

Better a poor man whose walk is blameless
than a fool whose lips are perverse.

With the “Better…than…” proverbs, you can usually oppose one thing with another, and this one is no different. The interesting thing here is that “a poor man” is not opposed to “a rich man”, but a “fool”. Dorothy Parker once said: If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. So is that the point? Is it foolish to be rich?

On the contrary, the proverb (and James’ teaching!) is about those people who lie or misrepresent the truth to become wealthy: doing that is foolish and perverse. James instructs cheerful people to sing praise. It is difficult to be cheerful if you have not been blessed with enough, and with peace to enjoy it, so the issue is not that it is wrong to be rich.

Rather the issue is that the poor man’s very poverty is his representative characteristic. Yet the man who accrues wealth through dishonest gain should not be thought of as a “rich man”, as though his wealth defined his situation, for it does not. His defining characteristic is folly and perversity. It is foolish to be richer than God has decided you should be. This is James’ point, and he develops it at the start of chapter 5.

God is in charge, and is against folly and perversity. What is more, he sides with the blameless, and the oppressed, no matter what states of poverty they struggle through. That is why James can say: “Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.” He knows God listens.

The gospel story of Jesus’ temptation gives us hope. He was tested with all of wealth’s temptations, and declined it for our sakes, preferring to identify with the poor, and suffer with the afflicted. He chose the path of obedience for the sake of a blameless walk. Philippians 2 talks about Jesus’ descent into poverty and ascent into glory. If Jesus, for the sake of obedience, became poor – and God therefore lifted him up – will this not also be the case with us? A similar line of reasoning is obviously at work here.

A previous parable in Mark’s gospel, that of the sower who sowed along the path, represents the seed as the word. The seed sown on good soil are those who hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown. This is the hope.

The hope of community-family life with God also involves his power to heal body and soul, and James insists on it. How could we hope to “confess our sins” to each other if we were not close to each other, or if we did not insist on grace as a foundation for our faith. I won’t tell my sins to a stranger. Jesus has put us together to suffer and rejoice together, and to find out what it means that iron that sharpens iron.

Should we really ask God to do “impossible” things? Of course! God loves it when his church’s leaders come to him together, in the sort of unity of spirit that Paul wrote about in Romans 12.

God has given his church these very leaders so that people can come to them, under their authority, and example, and give them the occasion to pray. Notice that the elders are the first to pray for the sick person, but that James soon also instructs “pray for one another”.

God, who is sovereign, may say “No”, to the specific details of our hopes, but then again, the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick.

The wholeness that God brings transcends the earthly: after all, to be *healed* is more than to be *cured*. A cured person is just a person waiting for natural decay and eventual bodily death.

It may be that to be well and whole and healed is to be taken to be with God. The Lord will raise the sick person up, and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven, if this is what the elders pray. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah wasn’t a magician. He just believed what we believe. God still does the heavy lifting. Elijah just prayed as he was supposed to, and we can do that too.

Augustine put it like this: Faith is believing what you may not observe; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe. Planting a seed is an act of faith. It requires forces beyond human control to be worth the effort.

And as a PS:

http://caughtnottaught.blogspot.com/search/label/James

John Piper: The text does not teach that everyone the elders pray for will be healed. It teaches that if the elders pray “the prayer of faith,” the sick person will be healed. This is stated so absolutely that it seems to me that a gift of faith is meant here which assures the elders the healing will be done.
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It seems to me that what we have in Mark 11:23–24 and 1 Corinthians 12:9 and 13:2 and James 5:15 is an unbroken line of teaching about a gift of faith that enables a person to pray a completely assured prayer because God has given extraordinary assurance. This is why the “prayer of faith” in James 5:15 WILL heal the sick person. It is certain because this faith is God’s special gift of assurance about what he intends to do.

So the “gift” here is not “the power to heal” but rather an extraordinary assurance that the person will be healed. This is kind of different from your average “faith healer” who seems to bring “the gift” with him in a traveling roadshow.

I guess it also implies that although we always pray for healing, that is obviously not always God’s plan. So the “prayer of faith that saves” is a prayer that is prayed after much other prayer and seeking of God and the receiving of assurance that God WILL heal.

As you know, I was sick for quite awhile from 2006 to 2008 and this is a topic that many felt the need to enlighten me on. But one person, whose book I’d read years ago, that really encouraged me is an author/speaker named Joy Dawson. She emphasizes the connection between humbling and healing that is brought out in James. II Kings 5 is one example of that in Naman’s needing to dip himself 7 times in the river.

She also states elsewhere in the book, that while God heals some instantaneously, He does not always do so because it is whatever will bring Him the greatest glory in a situation that He chooses to do. And whatever process will draw us closer to him in a surrendered, humble fashion.

II Chronicles 7:14 is another example of humbling related to eventual healing.

p.s. Joy’s book is called, “Some of the Ways of God in Healing”

Very biblical…

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