November 26, 2023 | James 5:13-20 | Pastor Chris Baker
Good morning, First Baptist Church! We arrive this morning at the end of the book of James. It has been an intense three months. James is a little over 1700 words in English, depending on your translation. I say it’s intense because in these 108 verses we have found about 54 commands. Every other verse, James is telling us to do something. This book, in my opinion, is one of the most intensely practical books in all of the Bible. James pulls no punches. There are some hard texts to sit under. There have been some hard texts to preach, because to preach a sermon you first have to hear a sermon and that hasn’t been easy. But I love where James leave us. This is the most encouraging passage in this letter and I can’t think of a better way to finish this study. Let’s read together from James 5:
Read James 5:13-20
Pray
A turkey hunter in southwest Missouri did what he had done a million times. He awoke early on a cold morning, gathered his gear, and drove to his spot. He parked his prized, 4WD pickup truck—in perfect condition and freshly waxed—in a nearby pasture and strolled into the woods.
He went about a mile into the woods and started calling turkeys, but he had no luck. He did hear something, a vague, far-off sound of crushing metal, but he ignored the sound and kept on hunting.
A few hours later, he trudged back to the pasture to find four horses surrounding his truck, licking its exterior.
When he got closer, he realized it was more than mere licking. Distinctive teeth marks marred the paint all over the vehicle.
The horses had even chewed on the fenders and dented the doors. The horses stopped grazing only as the truck rolled away. It was then the owner remembered the special polish used after his most recent car wash: a brand of carnauba wax that carries the unmistakable (and apparently irresistible) scent of bananas.
That story is strange, but true—according to Farmer’s Insurance. They know a thing or two, because they’ve seen a thing or two.
(https://www.farmers.com/learn/unbelievable-claims/horses-are-the-worst-car-detailers/)
That’s the slogan for their ad campaign. And love it or hate it, it’s effective. They know what to do in every situation.
Your life as a follower of Jesus is going to put you in some difficult situations—and the response of genuine faith in all those situations is prayer, according to James. We’ve prayed for a thing or two because we’ve been through a thing or two. And you’re going to go through some particularly hard things as you follow Jesus. That’s no surprise, especially since you’ve now studied the book of James. That’s right where we started, after all. James 1:3, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4 And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.
We know the testing will come. Some of you are here today in the middle of that test. You’ve spent the week with family and your heart is heavy because there are people you love desperately who are not following the Lord. You’re facing an illness that is going to change the way that you live your life. You have a loved one who is suffering. Christmas is right on top of us and the financial burden you’re under is starting to break you. Whatever your particular trial is, James has already pointed us to the only place we should turn.
1:5 Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God—who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly—and it will be given to him.
That was the beginning of the letter. James emphasizes and unpacks that even more in the passage we just read. The letter begins with an encouragement toward patient endurance anchored by prayer.
Last week, in James 5:7-12, we saw that patience was mentioned seven times. In the verses we just read, prayer is mentioned seven times. We’re right back where we started. How do we do all these things James has told us to do over the course of these five chapters? We pray.
Genuine faith is visible faith. That has been the primary argument James is making for five chapters. That means that genuine faith isn’t passive—especially in the face of difficulty, especially in moments where patience is required.
Patient endurance is expressed through prayer. Our trust in God’s sovereignty manifests itself through prayer.
Genuine faith is praying faith. That’s the sermon in a sentence. That’s the one big overarching thing James closes this letter with. And the goal, church, is simply to demonstrate our growing trust in God by praying more. In fact, that’s the primary takeaway this morning. The point of the passage is that the genuine faith James has been teaching us is saturated with prayer. And the primary takeaway is that all of us need to demonstrate our genuine faith by continued growth in the frequency and depth of our prayers.
That’s right where James starts in verse 13 where we see him urging prayer in our highest highs and our lowest lows. We’re to respond to all life’s circumstances in prayer.
Respond to All Life’s Circumstances in Prayer (v.13)
13 Is anyone among you suffering? He should pray. Is anyone cheerful? He should sing praises.
Hymn writer Horatio Spafford gave us these two points in opposite order, didn’t he? When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, thou has taught my to say what? It is well. Why is it well? Because God is in those circumstances with us. He’s not just in them with us, He’s the author of our peace and the author of our sorrows.
The good and the bad in the Christian life is to be lived in fellowship with God. The joyful and the heartbreaking in the Christian life is to be lived in fellowship with God. And that fellowship, that communion that we’ll picture here at the end of our services, that fellowship with God in good times and in bad times is to be expressed by prayer
James’ response to suffering is not some empty platitude. It’s not ‘well, just hang in there.’ It’s not ‘God won’t give you more than you can handle.’ It’s pray! Prayer is always the appropriate response.
Pray when you’re suffering, praise when you rejoice and sing when you are cheerful, he says. In periods of trouble, in times of rejoicing, prayer and praise acknowledge that God is sufficient to help us.
No matter what is happening in life, we should pray and praise God. James is calling on us in suffering to pray, and in our joy to praise.
There’s an example of this in the life of Job, isn’t there? Job 1:20 Then Job stood up, tore his robe, and shaved his head. He fell to the ground and worshiped, 21 saying:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will leave this life.
The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Every good thing we have in life is a gift from God for which we should joyfully thank Him, and every struggle, every pain, every tear is sent by God to grow us through patient endurance to maturity in our faith. So in everything, we should acknowledge that truth though prayer.
The aim of last week’s passage was to call us to look toward Jesus’s second coming as the focal point of life. This week, James adds to that that we’re not to sit silently bearing the heavy load of life until that day. We’re to talk to God about it in an ongoing conversation that is both an evidence of and a means of grace for growing our genuine faith.
And prayer is not a private matter. Look at verse 14, where we see:
Prayer drives us to depend on the Lord as we depend on one another (14-16a)
Is anyone among you sick? He should call for the elders of the church, and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 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. 16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.
The Christian life is not a solo endeavor. There is no biblical category for a lone Christian. We’re meant to grow toward God in community with other believers. James just assumes that any Christian who reads this letter is connected to a local body of believers, and He’s not alone in that. That’s an assumption made by all the New Testament writes, because it’s the natural order of things in God’s Kingdom. God calls us to be part of a people, not a couple of hundred little individual units.
James shows us here that especially when life gets hard, we demonstrate our dependence on God by depending on the people He has placed in our lives as part of the local church. Specifically, here, he points us toward depending on the leaders of the church to come alongside us in prayer.
There are certain times when you don’t simply need another Christian to pray with you, but you need the whole church to be praying with and for you. That’s why we take these connect cards and your prayer requests seriously.
As God’s people, we depend on the Father to work in us through the Holy Spirit, and that dependence is made visible as we trust each other to go to God on our behalf.
James is bold here, church. He believes the radical doctrine that prayer actually works! When the church prays for healing, we pray in the expectation that God is not only able to heal, but we’re asking Him to be willing to heal.
This is where this passage can get tricky. This section is used to justify the practices of confession and last rites by our Catholic friends. I think they’ve missed the point here. I don’t think this is calling on a priest to pray over someone who is dying and I don’t think this passage instructs us to confess our sins to a church leader in a private setting.
There is a time, though, when we need to specifically call the church, through its leaders, to a specific time of focused prayer for the sick.
James seems to be addressing a very grave illness here. There are some things in the context that help us get that. First, the elders—and elder is a term for the office of the church that we call pastor—the elders go to the sick person. That means the sick person probably can’t come to them. The elders do all the praying in this instance. They don’t pray together, the sick person doesn’t join with them according to the text. The word in the original language that James uses here refers to a grave illness, one that would understandably lead to death. So the elders are called on to pray over this person. It seems to indicate they aren’t able even to pray for themselves. I believe that James is teaching us here to pray over all circumstances, but especially and specifically in a circumstance that seems hopeless—like when a believer lies on their death bed. It demonstrates a trust in God’s sovereignty even over the gravest of illness. That’s emphasized in verse 14 when James mentions anointing.
There is nothing magical in the anointing oil but served as a symbol of hope that God would restore the sick person to service in His Kingdom. James is writing to an audience who grew up as Israelites and they’d remember how priests and kings had been anointed in ancient Israel. It was a symbol of their divine call to serve the Lord. Anointing was prayer made visible.
So, that means if we go to the hospital and pray for someone they’re going to get better, right? After all, that’s what James says in verse 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.
Remember, church, James taught us back in chapter that we don’t move forward without a sense of God’s will. If the Lord wills we’ll do this or do that. So we pray for God to heal, if it’s His will. If God’s will is for something else, then we yield our will to His. Prayer is not about shaping God’s will and God’s desires to match our own. It’s about shaping our will and our desires to match God’s.
And this prayer of faith James mentions in verse 16 is an example of that. When we cry out to God in prayer for salvation, God will hear, God will heal the sickness that has caused us spiritual death, God will raise us up in Christ and forgive our sins. This is not a faith healing passage, but every heart that has been healed has been healed by faith.
I love that James connects the hopelessness of the deathbed to the hope of salvation. Church, prayer does work. Prayer is effective. If you’re here and you belong to Jesus, then prayer has already worked a lifesaving miracle in you.
Ephesians chapter 2 begins this way: And you were dead in your trespasses and sins. That’s all of us. We were dead, but God brought us to life. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, 5 made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
Sin separated each and every one of us from God. It caused our spiritual death and we deserve an eternity in hell because of our sin. But instead of giving us what we deserved, God gave us Himself. He sent His one and only Son to live a perfect life and die a sacrificial death as our substitute. Jesus overcame death for us.
He opened the path to life and our dead hearts have been brought to life through prayer. So to expect prayer to overcome death is a perfectly reasonable expectation for God’s people. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be God’s will, but it does mean we should pray with every ounce of expectation that God is capable of overcoming death because each and every one of us has experienced it.
That’s not an easy way to pray, but James believes that our genuine faith can and will mature us to that point. And the writer knows that the one things that often stands in our way is our own humanity. We’re not going to follow Jesus perfectly and from time-to-time our own struggle with sin will impact those around us who are following Jesus.
James says confess your sins to one another. James has been echoing Jesus’s teachings in every chapter of this letter. Take some time this week and look at Matthew 18 to see how Jesus would have us deal with sins committed against one another. 18:15 “Now if your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have gained your brother.
Holding up James 5 and Matthew 18 together, we see the wisdom recognizing your own sin and going to confess that sin to the person you’ve sinned against. The point is to bring about reconciliation. To bring about peace. Just like physical illness can throw the physical body into disarray, sin can cause the body of Christ to break down just the same.
Kent Hughes, in his commentary on James, lists some guidelines for confession and I found them helpful so I want to pass them along with a few edits of my own.
(1) First, confession should generally be made to an individual. That’s what we talked about already. Confess your sin to the one you sinned against.
(2) Second, if the sin is not against a person, but it’s a habitual sin or a sin we struggle with on a regular basis then we need to confess it to a mature believer as we seek help to overcome it. You’re probably not going to overcome your porn addiction or your substance abuse in your prayer closet. You need help and God has given you a family to come alongside and provide that help.
(3) Third, confession must be concrete. We commit specific sins and we need to confess specific sins. This is true when you’re confessing before God in prayer or confessing to another Christian. Naming the sin you've committed helps you understand it and overcome it.
There is power in confessing, but the power is not in the confessing, as necessary as it is, but in the resulting prayer, that’s what the last half of James 5:16 emphasizes: "Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect."
We need to be a people quick to confess our sin toward one another and quick to forgive one another just like God has forgiven us. When we do that, we get to see that prayer is a tool God uses to bless us as His people and draw us to Himself.
Prayer is the tool God uses to bless His people and draw them to Himself (v.16b-20)
The prayer of a righteous person is very powerful in its effect. 17 Elijah was a human being as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the land. 18 Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain and the land produced its fruit.
19 My brothers and sisters, if any among you strays from the truth, and someone turns him back, 20 let that person know that whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.
James leaves us with a picture of the praying prophet Elijah. The context is still our prayers for one another and James knows we’ll be tempted to say, “This relationship is too broken. There’s no way, there’s no way that it’s going to be restored.”
It can be true of any circumstance, though. “My illness is just to far advanced. There’s just nothing that can be done.” And so He gives this picture of Elijah, who was a sinful person like we are, yet when Elijah prayed, it didn’t rain in the country where he was for three and a half years. And then he prayed again and it poured. And James’ point is this, “Don’t ever discount prayer, don’t ever underestimate the power of prayer.” Do you really believe in prayer? Does your daily prayer life reflect that you really believe in prayer? James is saying that in every circumstance in life, our response is to pray. Never discount the power of prayer as a means of grace. Let us pray.
Do you want to be a united church? Do you want to have joy? Do you want this body of believers to impact the community for Jesus? Do you want to see lost people become saved people? Do you want to get along better with the people sitting across from you today? Pray.
It’s nearly impossible to be divided from someone you pray for everyday. The Holy Spirit is either going to change them or change you. Either way, whatever it is that divided you is going to soften.
Do you want to grow closer to God as you mature in your faith? Pray over your own circumstances. Do you want people around you to be closer to you and closer to God? Pray. Do you want the lost around you to come to Jesus? Pray for them.
Genuine faith is praying faith. 108 verses. 54 commands. James is intensely practical. And God doesn’t heap burdens on us without empowering us to carry them. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 11:
28 “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
The yoke is what you put on the animal that enables them to do the work. It’s supposed to be heavy, because the ox or the donkey is doing heavy work. Yet, Jesus says his yoke is easy. The work isn’t easy. But He gives us what we need to patiently endure, and prayer is one of the things that makes Jesus’s yoke not just bearable, but it makes the burden light. Let’s resolve together to grow in the frequency and depth of our prayers as we move forward together. Let’s pray.
Questions for Further Discussion and Reflection
According to the sermon, what is the response of genuine faith in difficult situations?
How does the idea of patient endurance connect with the discipline of prayer in the sermon?
How does prayer demonstrate trust in God's sovereignty, especially in challenging moments?
According to the sermon, what is the primary takeaway regarding the role of prayer in demonstrating genuine faith?
How does James encourage believers to respond to various circumstances in life through prayer?
How does the sermon connect the fellowship with God to the expression of prayer in both good and bad times?
Explain the role of the local church and its leaders in times of suffering.
Discuss the idea that prayer is a tool God uses to bless His people and draw them closer to Himself.
How does the speaker address the common misconception that prayer is about shaping God's will to match our own desires?
How does the theme of faith and works intersect in the five chapters of James, and what implications does it have for the Christian life?
How does James generally advise believers to approach challenges, and what role does perseverance play in the development of faith?