The Prayer That Works | James 5:13-20 | Faith That Works
Watch This Sermon from James 5:13-20
We are an incredibly connected people. We carry devices that "blip and bleep" at us constantly, creating a persistent state of digital overload and anxiety. Yet, when those bars on our phones disappear or a system goes down, we often feel a different kind of stress—the fear of being out of the loop.
In this final sermon on the book of James, we explore a far more important connection: prayer. James 5:13–20 teaches us that prayer is not a "last resort" or a backup system; it is the primary connection through which everything in a believer's life should flow.
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Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon from First Reformed Church in Edgerton, Minnesota. Each week we dig into God's Word, trusting that the Holy Spirit will continue the good work of sanctification in us. We live in an extremely connected world. We walk around with devices in our pockets that blip and bleep at us constantly.
We are so connected that it is actually the truth that there are substantial discussions about helping people who deal with persistent anxiety that comes from all this connectivity. And it has a few different names: digital overload, digital stress, or digital anxiety. And I'm guessing to some degree most of us can relate to one of the descriptions of this problem. Our persistent connectivity has made us feel overwhelmed. But at the same time, if we were to even cut back on our connections even a little, We're afraid that we might be missing out on something.
Now, occasionally, you may intentionally pull away from this connectivity, and when we're purposeful about it, we enjoy it. We find it to be helpful. I've even heard people say, "I can feel my brain healing." There's a peace that comes from this. But there are also times where we have this lack of connectivity thrust upon us against our will. The connections we have become so addicted to are dependent upon systems in a world where things break or a system fails.
Even if there's redundancies, the system can go down.
You've likely been out and about and noticed your phone hasn't called out for your attention in a while, and you wonder what's going on. So you look at it and there's an X where those bars should be. There should be 5 of them there that are full. You pay a lot of money for your cell phone service. You don't want an X. You want 5 bars. Can you hear me now? That's what you want. Or maybe you've been sitting at home, everything is connected, everything should be working, but one of these denial of service attacks has taken out your favorite website or your favorite social media app. And so you have this unplanned forced fasting from connectivity. And it isn't quite as welcome as when we do it on purpose.
Instead of feeling relief and relaxation because we've stepped away intentionally, we find ourselves wondering who is trying to contact us and can't because the connections have been broken against our will. Well then, the connections inevitably are restored, and instead of having the stress of not being able to be contacted, our stress now becomes a fear of somebody can now once again contact us anytime they want, and we're worried about what the next beep in the pocket is going to be. Well, as we finish up the book of James this morning, we're reminded about a far more important connection. A connection that never breaks. And it's a connection that is designed to bring us peace and confidence.
The connection that we have through prayer is actually an antidote to the overload, the stress, and the anxiety that we have. Our wireless connection with the Almighty doesn't fail. And it allows us to lay our burdens at His feet. Well, we've made our way to these final 7 verses of the book of James, and here we find an assortment of admonitions with the overriding emphasis being on prayer. So as we arrive in these verses today, we find James asking 3 questions. And the first is in relation to suffering. Now the original audience of the book of James contained believers who were experiencing substantial persecution.
Suffering was not an abstract concept for many first century Christians. Persecution was very common. But we have the word suffering here. So he's not just talking about the tribulation that comes when religious leaders or the state oppresses you for being a Christian. Suffering happens in other circumstances as well.
When we lose a loved one, When the doctor shares a difficult diagnosis with us, or when we endure financial hardships. Suffering is a very real reality in a fallen world. There is no one who is immune to suffering. And the answer James gives to those who are suffering is for them to pray. Now, that isn't an answer that is likely to elicit a positive response most of the time, right? I know how I've mentally reacted and responded to someone who told me to pray when I was going through something that was hard.
When you're experiencing suffering, that suffering is real, and prayer is an inherently intangible thing, right?
Hardship is an experience that we want an immediate solution to. Telling us to pray doesn't feel like much of an answer. But at the same time, we know it's the best answer. We understand that. We know that while we want a magic bullet, and a quick solution to what we're experiencing, an easy solution is unlikely. Prayer not only has us calling out to God and putting our circumstances in His hands, it also has us moving to a position where we can say those important words: "Thy will be done." When we take our difficult circumstances to God, we're not only hoping that He will intervene to bring us relief, It reminds us that even in our suffering, God is able to work all things together for good, even our tribulations and our suffering.
Prayer shows that we have a belief that we are not the ultimate power in our experiences and our circumstances. And neither are those who are oppressing us. They do not have the ultimate power. Prayer is us humbly taking our circumstances that we have in our lives to the foot of the throne of the One who is in control. And we see that those circumstances, yes, they are suffering, but James also tells us that those circumstances, one of them can be joy.
Because the next question James puts out there for us is, cheerful? Well, what a contrast from the first question. There's not much a greater range of experience in the human life than suffering on one end and being cheerful and joyful on the other. But the place where we're to go when we are cheerful is to bring praise to God. Just like in suffering, we go to the foot of His throne. We go not only with requests for relief, but petitions of praise. God is the giver of good gifts, and we're called to bring thanks to Him for the blessings of joy that we have. But the third question that James asks returns us to hardship, right?
The question asks, Is anyone among you sick? James tells them to call the elders of the church that they might pray for them and anoint them with oil.
Well, the anointing of oil in the first century was very common. We don't do it anymore, but in the first century, olive oil was used medicinally in all of the ancient world. But it was also likely a visible symbol of what they were praying for. That they were asking that the power of the Holy Spirit would cover them with healing for their sickness. And the emphasis here is actually not on the oil itself, but instead the name that is given in the anointing.
The oil is to be administered in the name of the Lord. And this shows us that the oil itself was not magical or anything like that. There's always a trust that God is ultimately the one who is going to do the healing in people. And then James tells us that this prayer is able to be powerful and effective. He says that the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick. Now this isn't some specific formula for prayer. The idea here is that putting our requests forward to God by faith is a means by which God works in the lives of His people.
There is no guaranteed recipe for having your prayers answered. That's not how it works. Whether it's the 21st century or the 1st century, there will be times where the answer to our prayers is no. And that's hard. But we have to understand that we pray not to bend God to our will, but to submit ourselves to His will.
And James is drawing out here that there may be physical benefits by an ailment being relieved, but also that there is great spiritual benefit to the people of God praying together. God builds up His people through the proclamation of the Word and through prayer. And the healing they may receive is the confidence that their sins are forgiven and that they submit to God's will in humility. It's really easy to read these verses of James in isolation from the rest of the themes in the rest of the book of James.
But we have to be sure that we don't fall into that trap, that we just read these few verses and think that somehow these are a formula for getting the answers to our prayers. That's not what this is. James has been calling on his readers to endure persecution. He's been calling on these people and us to be faithful in all things. So clearly, James understands that hardship is a reality in this world.
To think that suddenly, now that we get to the final chapter and the last few words, that suddenly he's suggesting that the solutions to all these hardships that they're to endure is to pray would be really out of place. From the day in day-out faithfulness that James is calling us to in this book. He has been saying over and over that this is what the readers of his letter needs to pursue: faithfulness in the midst of all hardship, in all circumstances. So the key to understanding what is being said here is about this benefit of pursuing righteousness. He says that the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
A person who is righteous isn't going to be righteous so that God is required to answer their prayers.
We don't pursue holiness so that we have a special line to God and we get what we want. That's not the purpose of righteousness. Instead, someone who is righteous is going to have prayers that are centered on a desire to see the will of God be accomplished in their lives and in the world, even in the face of hardships that we might face. And before we move on to the rest of this chapter, I think it is important to make what is arguably the most difficult part of James here practical for us. We easily feel what James is driving at here with these calls to prayer. I look out at the eyes that are upon me, looking at me this morning, and I know many of your sufferings, your joys, your sicknesses. I know him.
James calls us to prayer and praise in these circumstances. And that is really hard to do. We live in a fast-paced world where it's so easy to dash from notification to notification and crisis to crisis instead of slowing down and praying and praising. We can find ourselves even in our hardships seeking to do the will of others instead of the will of God. And here, James tells us that when hardships come, it is time to slow down and look up.
Generally, I think we treat prayer as a last resort. What we do when the connection fails or our systems have collapsed around us. But here James wants us to understand that as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, prayer is to be our primary connection.
It's not a backup. Prayer is not the spare connection we keep around when we need it. It should be the connection that everything else in our life flows through. So the call on us is to put ourselves in the rhythm of life that comes from prayer and praise. A rhythm that aligns with the things of God.
That we might learn to desire His will over our own. And so, to show us what this righteous prayerful connection looks like, James points us back to the story of Elijah from the Old Testament. So, you likely know the story. Elijah delivered a prophetic word to King Ahab, and he declared that God was going to bring a drought on Israel for their idolatry. And their false worship. So following the lead of the king, the people had gone after the fertility god Baal.
And so God showed that He was the one who brought plenty for the land by stopping the rain. Oh, you're going to go after this false worship of the Baals, these fertility gods, because you think it will bring fertility to the land and to the people? Guess what? Now, here comes a drought. Who really controls the skies? Who really controls the land? And the book of 1 Kings tells us that Elijah prayed and God withheld the rain for 3.5 years. Well then, after Elijah had a very famous confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah prays that rain would come, and what happened? God opened the floodgates of heaven. He showed that He was the one who was in control. Now Elijah didn't get the idea of this judgment on his own. He was the messenger of God. God gave him this word to deliver to Ahab. He would have known this was the will of God. But what did he do?
He still prayed. His desire was that the will of God would be done. And James here only tells us part of the story, but we know what Elijah went through. Elijah endured severe persecution. Elijah was persistently in danger to the point of losing his life.
But still, he did what God sent him to do, and he continued in faithful prayer. Now, you're not the prophet Elijah delivering the message of a drought, but like Elijah, you are called to prayer as a servant of God. We pray as Elijah prayed that the will of God would be done God was not at the mercy of Elijah's requests. Elijah was devoted to seeking God's will, and God worked through Elijah. Seek to be righteous. Pray that the will of God would be done, and trust that God is at work in you, in the life of his people, and in the world as a whole. The end goal of prayer isn't getting what we want. The end goal of prayer is growing in holiness and learning to seek what God wants instead of the selfish desires of our hearts.
And as the epistle of James closes up, we get more of this abrupt style of James. In James, there is no concluding formulary that he follows here to close up the letter with a nice clean bow. Instead, he talks of those who wander from the truth. Yes, even in the first century, people were prone to wander like we are in our day. The temptation for the original audience of James would not just be to go after sinful desires or other gods simply because they felt like it. They would have been tempted to wander to avoid persecution as well.
The temptation to step away was strong. And so the early church and the people that James is writing to, it's likely that they were dealing with a substantial problem of people succumbing to the pressures all the temptations that were around them and leaving the faith. And James does not tell them just to leave those who wander to go off into the destruction of their sin. Instead, he admonishes his readers to bring them back from their wandering. It is so easy to just forget about those who wander, whether we actively forget because we don't want to deal with it, or passively because we just lose track of people in our busy lives. We know that this happens. And this closing admonition from James is important for us to hear. And I think it's important for us to remember that this comes immediately after his calling us to be persistent and faithful in our prayers. Seek those who wander.
Pray for those who wander. And trust that God will bring them back to himself. And the final statement of the book here tells us that whoever brings back a wanderer will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins. And once again, it's important that we don't see what James is calling us to here as some sort of magic formula or that we get extra sin forgiveness for us and for the wanderer by going through this process here. This isn't like some promotion where you bring a friend and you both get a bonus gift, right?
Instead, James is showing us the significance of our connection to God and to each other. James has been deeply concerned with his readers having a faith that works throughout this whole letter, and the same thing is true in this final statement. We are saved by God's grace. That is how our sins are forgiven. When we go after those who wander, we show the means by which God works in His people. Our faith is put into action by serving widows and orphans, but it is also shown in our prayers for one another. Our faith is shown to be an active faith when we are pursuing those who have wandered from the faith. And in this statement here about covering sins, James shows us the gospel in action.
He shows us faith that works. Where sin has crept in, it has caused a broken connection with God, and it leads to death. But the prayerful and active intervention of the people of God brings restoration and life. How are people restored? By returning repentance and faith to the God who has rescued them from sin. God not only forgives the sins of the wanderer, but He daily forgives the sins of His people because He is slow to anger and He's abounding in steadfast love. This is who our covenant God is. And while I said that James doesn't finish up his letter traditional letter-closing formula. This is truly an excellent summary to the ideas that we've seen expressed in his letter. There are so many areas where we have been convicted as we have gone through the epistle of James. But we know that this should not lead us to despair as we consider our failings. Instead, It calls us to continued faithfulness to the One who is faithful to us.
We are called to a faith that works because God has worked salvation in us by grace through faith because of the work of the Lord Jesus that has been accomplished for us as His people. And this final passage emphasizing prayer is the perfect application for us as we consider how to have a faith that works in our daily lives. As I started out, I mentioned the persistent connection that we have in our modern world, and that it's important that we remember that the true connection we need is not delivered by technological means, but by connecting to the God who is sovereign over all things. When we stop and think about it. So much of our modern obsession with being connected and informed is a desire to have all knowledge, to always know what is going on.
Maybe for you it's being informed about what everyone around you is up to all the time and feeling in control of those circumstances. Maybe you're sitting here today thinking this doesn't apply to you. Because you don't even have one of those glowing rectangles that dominates people's lives. But perhaps for you, it's about needing to be continually informed about issues that you have zero control over. Of course, there's nothing wrong with knowing where people are at or what's going on in the world. That's not what I'm saying. The issue is our hearts. What are we trying to satisfy within us by fulfilling those desires. We want to be in control. We want to have all knowledge. We deeply desire to be sovereign.
But you are finite. You can't do it. If you try to do it, you are going to burn yourself out. You can't know all things. You can't control everything. And you can't control everyone in your life. No matter how hard you try. The call to prayer here at the close of James reminds us that first and foremost, a faith that works trusts in the sovereignty of God. A faith that works says, "Thy will be done." It's really hard to submit these things that we hold so tightly to God. It really is.
I'm not going to stand here and pretend that it's easy in any way. It means that we have to daily take up our cross, that we have to daily walk in repentance and faith, and we have to trust that God's will is better than ours. That is not easy at all. Where we can start though, is by properly ordering our connections. What is our priority? Our connection to the world? Or our connection that we have with God? If we start with our worldly connections and notifications as our primary connection, we will be overloaded, we will be anxious, we will be stressed.
But if our primary connection is not to the things of this world, but to the throne room of heaven where the Lord Jesus Christ is right now interceding for us, we allow ourselves to be blessed with a peace that comes from trusting in the sovereign hand of God. I'm not suggesting that the concerns that come about from the notifications of the world won't impact us.
But doing this, by starting with prayer, it will help us to start the concerns of our lives in the hands of a sovereign God instead of thinking that somehow we are sovereign over these things, that somehow we should have control of these difficult things. Putting things in the hands of God, trusting that he is sovereign, continually asking that his will would be done, That's a faith that works. It's a faith that trusts that God is in control. A faith that desires to love and serve our neighbor because God has first loved us. So as we depart from here today, may we live into our faith because it works. It brings peace.
Even in a world that constantly demands your attention, We're called to seek His will, to seek His righteousness, and in faith, lay our lives at the foot of His throne. Amen. Let us pray. Great and merciful God, we thank You that we have a connection to You that does not fail. A connection that we have confidence in because of the work of Jesus on our behalf and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
We pray that we would start with our connection to You instead of the connections that we have to the world. We pray that we would desire to have Your will be done and that we would desire to seek understanding that You are sovereign and in control over us trying to take a stranglehold on all that we have going on in our lives, thinking that our will needs to be done. Grant us peace and give us perseverance and help us to desire to trust first and foremost in You alone. It's in the name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.
Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon. For more information about First Reformed Church, head to our Facebook page to our website, edgertonfrc.org.
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