James 5:13-18
James chapter five, verses 13
to 18. And this is the brother of our
Lord Jesus giving his final little letter finishing sentences. And
he says, if anyone among you is suffering, let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing
praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let
him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over
him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 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. Therefore, confess your sins
to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.
The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. And he prayed fervently
that it might not rain. And for three years and six months,
it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and heaven
gave rain and the earth bore its fruit. Amen. This is the
word of the living God. I think there are several lost
tools of the church, and if you’ve been hanging around us long enough,
you know what we think they are, because it’s all we have, right? We’ve peeled away all the layers
of the American church onion. You know, we’ve taken away the
dog and pony show, the cotton candy machine. These are our
little jokes. And we believe that the church
needs worship. The church needs preaching. The
church needs sacraments. The church needs fellowship,
not just lunch. Like today, fellowship is not
primarily about fried chicken. It’s partnership in the gospel.
But we believe the church also needs pastoral care. The church
needs prayer time together. But the church also needs the
full range of words to use to praise God in all the moods of
life. And I think our passage tonight
lends us a little help to think through, does our church have
all the right tools in its toolkit? Does our church, and I don’t
mean just ours, does the church that we might look for, the church
that we might go to in the future, does it have all the right tools? I think about, oh, eight plus
years ago, eight and a half years ago now, when I was thinking
about coming here, and I was talking to the elders, and they
said, you know what, we really wanna add an evening service.
And I thought, oh boy, I can go there. And they also said
we need to add a prayer meeting. Now, we think about churches
around the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, maybe into the 1980s, people
came when the church doors were open. But somewhere along there,
the church got wise, at least they thought so, and said, you
know, nobody’s coming to the prayer meeting, let’s just don’t
have it. Nobody’s coming to the evening service, let’s just don’t
have it. You know, preaching is, well, preaching’s too authoritative,
so let’s get rid of the pulpit. and we’ll have a little chat,
right? Let’s only serve the sacraments here and there. We don’t want
to talk too much about blood and gore and crosses. And then
before you know it, we took away everything that God said to do
in order to be his church. And we added back things. We
took away the means of grace, the means by which God communicates
his grace to us, and we made up our own. Well, let’s build
a basketball gym. and will win people through a
sports ministry. Well, you’ll get them on Saturday,
but you won’t get them back on a Sunday. And on and on we can
go. You can gather a crowd, but have
you done it for the right reasons? And James here at the end of
this little letter, which you’ll remember was read aloud. We’ve
taken, what, a couple months to go through James. Maybe we
started in October, November, something like that. I can’t
really remember. but it would have been read all at once in
the churches where it circulated, and they would have had to put
it to memory. You know, we sit in church, I
see some Bibles, there’s probably an iPhone out, I’m gonna tell
on y’all. There’s probably some pens and some pads, but there’s
some of you who are old school. You’re just listening, and it’s
written on the waxen tablet of your mind, right? That’s the
way it used to be. You had to sit and you had to
listen, and you had to etch it in your mind because you did
not have an ESV study Bible or Reformation study Bible. You
didn’t have a tablet with an app. You couldn’t go back to
sermon audio later and re-listen to it. You couldn’t take notes
in a spiral-bound notebook or on some stenographer’s pad or
whatever. You have to work really hard
to get it into your mind and then let the Spirit put it to
work in your heart. You know, one thing I love about
our church is we don’t have clear windows. So if somebody’s out
jogging or cutting the grass or, you know, a loud car goes
by, you can’t really look at it and be distracted. We’re kind
of stuck in here, right? And I think today people were
seeing how many RPMs the new fans had. And some of you are
watching other things. You find some things to let your
mind do. But I love James’ ending here. He kind of machine guns three
questions. And with those three questions,
he gives three imperatives. Now, some of you are cheating
and looking ahead to verses 19 and 20. And you’re saying, well,
actually he gives four questions and four imperatives. And I want
to save verses 19 and 20 and treat them alone. And we’ll do
that in two weeks. as we end the book of James,
and you’ll see why then I want to take those up. But tonight
I want us to look at the three questions with the three imperatives.
Now you’ll notice the first two questions give a quick answer.
Are you sick? Are you suffering? Pray. And
then it moves on. Are you cheerful? Sing. Moves
on. But then when you get to 14,
is anybody sick? He fills in a whole several verses of things
to think and do. So let’s think about these three
questions, these three imperatives tonight. And we wanna begin with
the first one in verse 13. Is anyone among you suffering? And his advice is simple. It’s
godly. It’s wisdom from above. It’s
through the power of the Holy Spirit. Is any of you suffering?
Let him pray. What a novel thought. You know,
I think generally by the time we get to praying, it’s kind
of a, well, has it come to that moment, right? We don’t pray
consistently. We don’t pray without ceasing,
as the Bible tells us. We pray when we’re in dire straits,
when we’re in a hardship. And I think if we recognize the
reality of the world, we’re always in that situation. We live in
a world that has fallen, it is broken by sin, creaking under
the curse of sin in this world. Maybe you watch these movies
and you got your hi-fi stereos now and there’s your sound bar
and it spits out sound here, there, and behind you and all
the rest. And maybe you watch one of those shows about an old
wooden ship and you can hear it creaking in the night as it
rocks on the waves. And that’s sort of the way our
life is. we can hear the creaking and
the stretching of the planks and the structure of our ship.
And could you imagine being on one of those boats crossing the
sea? I would have stayed a Puritan back under persecution before
I ever got on a ship of that sort across the ocean. But could
you imagine their prayers at night as they listen to the creaks
of life on a boat? And that’s what we do when we
don’t sleep. We pray, the creaking and the pain and the suffering,
the people called to mind your ride to church tonight. We’ve
got friends with cancer. We’ve got friends, people we
know that aren’t saved. I know some of you are longing
for your spouses to be better or your children to walk with
the Lord. And so, This verse 13 is very simple, isn’t it?
Is any of you suffering? It really could be a statement,
couldn’t it? We’re all under suffering of some sort. We all
have ailing bodies, failing bodies. We all have relational strife.
We all have creaks and aches and pains, thorns and thistles
from life in this fallen world. And so we should pray. And just
a few thoughts about prayer. I think it’s wonderful, and I
think especially tonight was sweet to hear many of you pray. And I know in all of your hearts
and minds, some quiet time before the Lord is a good, sweet, wonderful
thing that we often don’t get. But the church that stops praying
lays down its greatest weapon. against the world and the devil
and even our own flesh. A church that stops praying says,
God, we know better than you. A church that stops praying will
probably see very little good done in this world. And you say,
well, what can a little church like ours do? Well, we’re praying
for three little kids sitting in our church services now. We’re
praying for all your great grandkids, your grandkids. We’re praying
for the health and well-being of our loved ones, and it’s all
with a kingdom purpose in mind, why do we pray for daily bread
and expect God to give us? Why do we pray that we’ll be
healthy? Why do we pray for our big toe and all the rest? That’s
the organ recital, right? At church, so-and-so’s cousin’s
friends who once knew somebody who has a ruptured spleen. That’s
usually what the church prayer list is. But if we’re gonna pray
for that stuff, why do it? So that we can live for the kingdom
of God. That’s how we ought to think.
So is any one of you suffering? Of course you are. Maybe to various
degrees, but let him pray. And he has told us already in
the book of James, we need to pray through temptations. We
need to pray through trials. We need to pray that our convictions,
our beliefs about God will stand firm under hardship, whether
it’s the devil’s hardships or life’s hardships. We need to
be people of prayer. And so a little more about prayer
in a few moments, but that’s the first. shot across the valley,
you might say, from James as he ends this letter. The second
thing comes there also in verse 13, is anyone cheerful? Does anyone have a happy heart? Let him sing praise. I mentioned
at the beginning, we’ve lost some tools in the church. And mentioned preaching and worship
and sacraments and pastoral care and all those sorts of wonderful
things. But I think one of the things we’ve really lost in the
church is a songbook that has a full range of the emotions
we experience so that we can sing to God in all seasons. A
friend of mine was visiting with a couple, I don’t know, a couple
months ago at his church. And I was asking him about his
church, this, that, and the other. He was showing me around and
asking him who he had on staff. And he mentioned his music person.
And he just kind of off the hand said this, and it’s a pretty
common saying. Yeah, we’ve got a person that
does our music. They pick all the songs. And I tell them two
things, make sure the songs are singable and that none of them
are sad. Well, sometimes we’re sad. And
sometimes we need to lament. What do sad Christians sing in
the repertoire of today’s Christian music scene? I mean, you go to
some churches, you gotta wear the earplugs. You got to boogie
when you sing, right? There’s nothing sad, there’s
nothing dark. What do they sing at funerals?
I don’t know if y’all have been to a funeral lately, and forgive
me if I step on anybody’s toes. They’re really sad. And they’re
not sad because someone died. They’re sad because nobody comes
and sings to the family. Nobody comes and sings amazing
grace, or the Lord’s my shepherd, or for all the saints. Nobody
comes and sings to the bereaved family, how firm a foundation.
I found this very often to be true. And if I offend you, I
don’t think I apologize. Most funerals now are listening
to a Cracker Barrel CD of Alan Jackson singing hymns. I love Alan Jackson, but Way
Down Yonder on the Chattahoochee is more my speed with him. But
people are sitting and listening to a soundtrack. Where are the
people of God in times of trial and hardship,
either for themselves or for their fellow church members?
Where is the range of song to sing? Now I’m probably sounding
a little grumpy and maybe you’re wondering what did he eat for
lunch? Well, I ate what y’all ate, because we had lunch together. But this little phrase here is
anyone cheerful, let him sing praise. Go to the source, go
to God and sing praise to him. I don’t know if you’ve caught
this. Maybe you’re reading through the Psalms, And you’ll see some
Psalms where David in particular says, I’m in hot water. So he
goes to God and says, God, I’m in hot water. You’re a God who
can get me out of hot water. That’s a good simple way to look
at the Psalms sometimes, isn’t it? So God gets David out of
hot water. And what does David do? Does he go on his merry way
and say, well, aren’t I great? I’m King David. No, he says,
I’m gonna go to the temple. I’m gonna go to the congregation.
I’m gonna pay my vow. congregation what God has done
for me. And in a sense that’s what we
do on Sunday when we lift up our voices together in unison. We pick the songs that are singable
out of our book. We also pick songs that try to
match the theme of the day. And sometimes we just pick them
because it’s time to send it. Maybe because it’s Christmas
or Easter or Trinity Sunday or something of that nature. I can remember September 11th. That changed the American church
sing, didn’t it? I don’t think many people sang the happy clappies
that next Sunday. Why is that? They couldn’t. And they really shouldn’t have.
But that lasted a week or two. But shouldn’t we in our congregation,
shouldn’t we in our Christian singing, shouldn’t we sing the
whole range of who God is, the whole range of what God has done,
The whole range of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, but sometimes it’ll
be happy. Sometimes it’ll be sad. Sometimes
we’re under judgment. We should sing songs of repentance.
Sometimes we should come to the Lord’s table, maybe somber and
sober, but is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. It’s good to go to the source,
God himself, and sing. Otherwise, if we don’t sing,
I think we’re somehow saying to ourselves with a little pat
on our own back, way to go, self, You did this, it’s your checkbook,
it’s your hard work, it’s your savings account. And so we become
idolaters when we don’t praise God. We mentioned David, we mentioned
the Psalms, how about Moses and Mary? They just crossed the Red
Sea on dry land. And they had just left Egypt,
which they had asked Pharaoh 10,000 times, can we go? Can
we go? Can we go? Can we go? Finally, they get to go. He rescues
them on dry land. And as they look back, the sea
is closing up on their pursuers. And Moses, And Miriam, sing that
little song in Exodus 3. I will sing to the Lord, for
he has triumphed gloriously. The horse and the rider are thrown
into the sea. My God and my Savior, I will
exalt him. How often do we fail to sing
when God has done great things for us? Martin Luther said it
so well. He said, music is the handmaiden
of the soul. We have these wonderful hymns,
and they’re set to many, not all the time, but they’re set
to wonderful tunes. And the music, I don’t know if
you’ve caught this, it matches the theology. Like today, we
sang to the tune Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s, is that his fifth
symphony? God on nature sings thy glory.
We sang about the beauty of creation. We sang about the wonder of being
made in God’s image. We sang about the reality of
sin and how much more wonderful it will be. But the tune, the
music, aided the words and the soul, the heart and the mind
to give praise to God. So is anyone cheerful, let him
sing praise. And then verse 14, this is the
third one. And this one, I just had to fill
in the details. I got to make up what I wanted
to tell you, right? Here, it’s gonna tell us what to say. Is
anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of
the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with
oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will
save the one who is sick. The Lord will raise him up, and
if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore,
confess your sins to one another, pray for one another that you
may be healed. Prayer of a righteous person has great power as it
is working. Elijah was a man with a light
nature, a nature like ours. He prayed fervently that it might
not rain. And for three years and six months,
it did not rain on the earth. And he prayed again and heaven
gave rain and the earth bore its fruit. Go back to verse 14. We said there’s three questions
and then a quick comparative. Is anyone suffering? Let them
pray. It’s an imperative. Is anyone cheerful? Let them
sing praise. That was an imperative. They
all remember imperatives. That’s the do it verse, right?
Do it now. The third, anyone among you sick
and the imperative, let them call for the elders of the church. This is probably a little bit
of a strange phenomenon in our mind, but I remember growing
up in church. Every Wednesday night we had prayer meeting.
Our church was a small congregation, but on the average Wednesday
night we would have about 75 people at prayer meeting. This
was just down the street in Burlington. pretty ordinary church, but people
would come straight from work. A lot of times they’d come without
having had supper. And all we did was pray. I think
maybe we sang a song, but we broke up into groups and we had
those Bainish cookie tins, you know those? Everybody has a cabinet
full of them. Well, in our cookie tins, we
had prayer cards, and it was a card for all the missionaries
each from our church. And so we’d sit in a circle,
and six or eight of us would pray, and we’d pray through those
cards. And I learned to pray because my dad would sit beside
us, and he would say, you’re going to pray for your grandmother,
son. And we knew that we’d better. We feared him more than God,
and that’s how we learned to pray, getting dropped in the
deep end. But I remember that as a kid is pretty remarkable
event in the life of the church. But one thing that really stands
out in my memory is something that took place at the end. The
groups would regather at the end of prayer and the elders
would stand at the front. I can remember each of them by
name and they had a little jar of oil and they would ask if
anyone is sick. And if they would like to come
forward and have the elders lay their hands on them, anoint them
with oil and pray for them, where did we get that from? Right here
in the book of James. I can’t tell you in 20 years
of ministry that somebody has come to me and said, I’d like
for the elders to come pray over me. Tell them to bring the oil. But that’s a biblical thing to
do, isn’t it? It’s a thing that’s prescribed for us in the scripture. Now, as you pick your way through
verses 14, 15, 16, and 17, and 18, he begins to explain a little
of what that might be like in the context of a gathering of
God’s people. If anyone among you is sick,
let him call for the elders of the church. of the Lord. Can you think of
anything unbiblical there? I mean, of course, it’s in James,
right? So we’re not like Martin Luther that said it’s the epistle
of straw and I’ll be thrown out of the Bible. We like James,
but this is a biblical process. Now you might be thinking in
your heads, especially some of you who are recovering Catholics,
right? This could sound a little bit
like some of those Catholic you know, we go cast out demons or
we go, you know, this may sound like TV preaching, you know,
name it and claim it, heal the sick and little Benny Hinn whack
on the head and you’re all better. It could sound a little bit like
that, but notice it’s in the name of the Lord. What you do
in the name of the Lord, the master of heaven and earth, the
creator, the redeemer and the sustainer, what you do in his
name as the creator and the governor is done in faith. It’s not hocus
pocus. It’s not something strange. And
what does God promise? The prayer of faith will save
the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up. Now, y’all
know I’ve had a little sickness in our family. We’ve been dealing
with the problem of pain, the problem of suffering. And, you
know, my mom will have a well-meaning person saying, I’m praying that
you’re going to be healed. And that’s great. That’s wonderful.
But my mom will say, you know, I’m 74 years old. If the Lord’s
going to take me, the Lord’s going to take me. And I’m going
to get healed, yes, ultimately. My soul will go to heaven when
I die. And at the resurrection, my body in the grave will be
raised up in glory. My body and soul made perfect
to enjoy God forever in heaven. And see, we don’t think of that.
You know, we get down the street, and there’s the teeth-biting
place. There’s the teeth-straightening place. There’s the weight loss
place. There’s the get your hair put
back in place or color a place. And we want to live life really
long term on this earth and perfectly. And sometimes in this life, it
may be our lot to suffer and die and only to find healing
in heaven. And we’ve got to have room in
our theology and our belief for that. And so I think we can say
with confidence, as James does here, the prayer of faith We’ll
save the one who is sick. It may not be in this life. It
may be in the next that we are fully made whole, but we may
suffer in this life with hardship. And then it speaks of being forgiven. Now I can’t help but think, you
know, you’re under hardship, you’re praying, you’re vulnerable,
the Spirit’s at work. And you say maybe to your fellow
elders or to your fellow church members, You know, maybe I’m
sick because I’ve committed sin, and we don’t want to get into
all that theological air. But it could be the tenderness
of heart under the threat of death, under
the threat of not being well again. I remember hearing someone
who went through some great suffering said, you rarely in this life
have moments of clarity. And sometimes it’s a sickness
that does it, it’s a disease that does it, it’s a pain, a
hardship, it’s a loss or a cross that does it to us. And so we
confess our sins, we pray for one another, and we find healing
and forgiveness. But there’s another little interesting
statement here. It says something about the prayer
of the righteous person. It’s powerful, it works, it’s
effective. And then he gives the example
of Elijah. Now, when I was in high school, we had a little
section in English class, and it was called The Imagery of
the Bible in Literature. And I remember being the only
person who knew about Elijah praying for no rain and then
praying for rain. These biblical images ought to
pop up in our minds as we read the stories of the scripture. Elijah prayed that it wouldn’t
rain, and for three and a half years it didn’t. Do you ever
get to thinking during the summer when it’s a little drowish? Right
here, your lungs getting crispy. All that seed you put in. All
that fertilizer you’re putting down, true green still coming
by and charging you for nothing. You think, boy, we need Elijah.
And we need a man of God to pray for the rain so that my grass
will grow and I’ll get my dollar’s worth, right? We may think of
that. But look at how God uses the
prayers of his people to see his work accomplished. No, we
don’t change God’s mind. No, we don’t cajole him into
doing something. divine Santa Claus that when
we send up our wish list, it comes raining back down on us.
He somehow meshes together our prayers and his desires. The
Puritans used to say it this way, when God wants to get the
work among his people, he sets them praying. And that’s what
James wants us to be, is people of prayer. During our suffering,
during our sickness, certainly for confession of sin. And what
a sweet context tonight to think of this passage in light of our
prayer time together. Now, we’ve got to think about
Christ for a moment. He was a man of prayer. He found
himself suffering in agony in the garden, sweating the droplets
of blood because he faced the next day the wrath of Almighty
God. We find Jesus in the wilderness, suffering under the temptations
of the devil. He’s in prayer. He’s calling
to mind the scriptures that he’s learned. And so we can take great
heart that we had a high priest who ever lives above to make
intercession for us, but while he was on earth in his mortal
body, He suffered like us, and we having him, a high priest
who can sympathize with us in our hardships. And so let us
look to him to pray with me. Father, we thank you for the
chance to think about these three little but important concepts
of the Christian life. Help us to be praising and praying
people. Help us to be a community of
faith that prays with and for one another in faith, calling
on your promises, laying hold of your covenant mercies so that
we all might receive your grace and live out of the riches of
heaven. Hear us and help us as we make our prayer in the name
of Christ, our great savior. It’s in his name we pray. Amen.