472: Prayer Offered in Faith | Tim Henderson

Good morning everybody. Is it still morning? Just barely. Good to be with you guys today.

So a couple weeks ago, when I was last up here, we passed these out—this kind of menu of who the fellows are that are incoming. And so a whole bunch of you have reached out to say that you're interested in housing a fellow, which I'm always astonished every year at just the generosity and the hospitality of that. And so we're so grateful to you.

We do have one kind of special case that I want to put before you. On the front here, we got Kyla Davis, sweet Kyla. She's getting married to this guy Elijah in October. And when they get married, they want to live together. And so we're hoping that there might be a family and the Holy Spirit that has a carriage house or a mother-in-law suite or a basement apartment—something that would be suitable for a married couple.

I was actually talking to somebody who suggested they thought that they might be interested in hosting a married couple. And that they'd rather host a married couple because they assumed that they'll just kind of entertain themselves. Especially a newlywed married couple. So if you're interested in hosting a fellow, but you don't want to have to pay much attention to them, and you have a mother-in-law suite that's audibly private from the rest of your house, that would be awesome.

So we have more of these out there on the connection table and my contacts on the back and Kyla's and Cody's. But if you're like, yeah, we have an arrangement that might actually be suitable for a newlywed couple, we'd love to hear from you. That'd be fantastic. So take a look at that.

James 5: Prayer Offered in Faith

Well, today we're going to finish up our series in James. We've been studying James for ages because we took a long break in the middle of it for Lent, but we're finally now in that last section in James chapter 5.

And as I was reading it and preparing for what I wanted to share with you this morning, I was reminded of this family when we lived in State College. Kelly and I used to work at Penn State. And when we were there, there was this little preschool that all of our kids went to one at a time, and we just loved this school. And we met, as you'd imagine, just different families whose kids were there. And there was one family in particular that while we were there, the mother in that family developed Lou Gehrig's disease.

And right, I mean, if you know ALS is just tough. It's a very brutal, difficult, progressive disease. Meaning it gets worse. And it varies in the speed of the progression, but for this particular one, it moved very rapidly. And she suffered very quickly—she suffered intense loss of function.

And one afternoon, their daughter, Anna, was at my home playing with our daughter, Sadie. And her dad came by to pick her up. And while we were standing in the foyer while Anna was gathering her things, I just asked him, you know, how's your wife doing? And his answer was, she's great. She's wonderful. The Lord is healing her.

She was not great. She was not doing wonderfully. And the Lord was not healing her. In fact, she had recently lost her ability to speak, which was a function that she never regained. And then she died a few months later.

So why do you imagine standing there in my foyer, this husband felt compelled to say something so obviously not true? Because he was part of a Christian community that believed basically three things. Number one, that faith heals. Number two, that lack of healing is an evidence of a lack of faith. And number three—though they wouldn't say so—that faith is a Christian term that means pretend. It means lie to yourself. It means claim things to be true that you know are not true. Claim to expect an outcome that you know isn't going to happen. Claim that your wife who can no longer speak and who is actively dying is being healed before your eyes. Because if you don't pretend, she will die and it'll be your fault. Everything's a test and you better pretend or else.

He pretended that she was being healed because he loved his wife and he had been taught that God demands this charade as a cost of intervention. And I'm quite sure that it was excruciating for him and maybe in particular for their children who were denied what they needed, which was to acknowledge and accept and grieve the very painful story that they were walking through.

Now, some of the beliefs that he held are rooted, I believe, in a misunderstanding of this passage this morning—James 5:13 and following. What James meant as an exhortation to faith and hope, to trust in a good God, has sometimes been used as a cudgel to blame people for their suffering by attributing it to their lack of faith. That might seem odd to some of you and I kind of hope it does. I hope that seems like a really strange thing for people to do.

But if it seems really bizarre, then you might be at risk of the opposite and alternative error. It's possible that you would never find yourself in a community that weaponizes the power of faithful prayer because you don't really expect prayer to do anything in the first place. And for you, it's all just empty words that are bouncing off the ceiling.

It might be that you've become jaded by the same empty nonsense that Anthony Jeselnik is joking about in his standup routine. Watch this clip and tell me if this might have any resonance for you.

"This is who I'm making fun of when I make a joke on Twitter the day of a tragedy. The people who see something horrible happen in the world and they run to the internet and they run to their social media, their Facebook, their Twitter, whatever they got, and they all write down the exact same thing. My thoughts and prayers. My thoughts and prayers with the people in Aurora. My thoughts and prayers with the families in Boston. Do you know what that's worth? Nothing. You are not giving any of your time, your money, or even your compassion. All you are doing is saying, don't forget about me today. Lots of crazy distractions in the news right now, but don't forget how sad I am. Nothing. Less than nothing."

You guys, is there a proper posture towards prayer and faith instead of either of those caricatures? Faithful prayer is not a game to see who can pretend better. And it is not less than nothing. What James is commending here in James chapter five, as he closes this letter, is something meaningful. Something that actually produces real change in the world.

But I think if we're going to understand what he's saying, we're going to have to do just a little bit of work to make sense of what these words all mean. Let's read this again, and then we'll try to figure out what it is that he's saying that should be helpful to us in the realities of life.

Is anyone among you 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. 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 the heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. — James 5:13-18

There's a lot of stuff in here, more than we have time for, but let me give you some categories to organize this a little bit, and then we'll unpack what we can. James is going to give us three circumstances. You might be suffering, you might be cheerful, and you might be sick. Put an asterisk next to sick, because that one's a little bit complicated and we'll go back to that in a minute. And then there are three actions that he directs us to. He says that you should pray, that you should sing, and that you should call the elders for them to pray. And then he gives us this bonus action that might need a bit of clarification. Those elders that you call are supposed to anoint people with oil, so that as a result, the sick person can be—and I quote—saved.

So we're going to unpack as much of that as we can in the next fifteen minutes.

Three Circumstances, Three Actions

Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. I'm curious: is it easier for you to pray when everything is awesome and you're just killing it, or when your life is hard and miserable and you're sad and desperate? Which is easier for you?

It's easier to pray when things are tough. How many of you are on that side? I'm totally in that camp, and then it always terrifies me because I feel like that incentivizes God to bring miserable things into my life to draw me to him. But that might actually be true, right? He is interested in exposing to us the fact that we are dependent. And he probably knows that when he's given us everything, we're like, "You know what? Look at that. I'm amazing, right?" So I think sometimes he brings difficult circumstances into our life to cause us to hunger—as it says in Deuteronomy 8—that we might need him and depend on him.

And I think it's embarrassing, but it's true that when everything is amazing, we can be forgetful of him. And what James is saying is, don't do that. He says, when somebody is cheerful, and look at this, it's literally four words: let him sing praise.

In ESV, that whole sentence, "let him sing praise," is literally one word in the Greek. And that word looks like this, which probably isn't any more helpful to you than it is to me, but if we transliterate that in English, it looks like this: Psallo. Does that ring a bell for anybody? Does that remind you of anything? Psalm. This is literally the verb form of the word Psalm. He says, when you're cheerful, you know what you should do? You should Psalm. God has given us this Psalter, this book, this divinely ordained book of inspired songs that we should sing. He's giving us the pattern of how we are to live our lives.

And it's true. When everything is amazing, the Psalms of praise are a perfect place to go. They train us. They teach us how to express our gratitude that anchors us and instructs us. And by the way, there's plenty of Psalms of lament that helps us there, too. So in any experience, whether it's in joy or in sorrow, the Psalms are the guidebook that trains us how to pray.

The Problem of Sickness and Faith

And as he goes on, I think James gets a little bit more confusing, or at least it's confusing if you just simply take the English at face value. Now, here's what he says:

Is anyone among you sick? Let them call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil and the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. If he's committed sins, he'll be forgiven. — James 5:14-15

Now, I think this is what my friend's community got stuck on. The NIV is a little bit more pointed, kind of a little more direct in the way it states it. It says:

The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well. — James 5:15 (NIV)

And I mean, you could be forgiven to read that and be like, "That's pretty definitive, right? The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well." From which you could conclude, "Well, I haven't been made well. Therefore, I must not have real faith. I must need to gin up." If you feel the logic of that, it kind of makes sense.

And not only that, then James goes on to say the promise of forgiveness, from which you might infer that sickness and sin are somehow intrinsically related. Maybe the reason that you're sick is that you're sinning, right? That sin is the cause of your sickness, and it would only go away if you could just pray better. Can you see how this could be oppressive to people? I think it has been for a lot of folks.

So what's going on here? Let me follow me on this. I'm going to go on a little bit of an expedition, and we'll come back around, and I think it will hopefully make sense when we're done.

The word here that is translated in English as "sick" can mean sick. It can mean illness, like the flu or cancer, like that you're sick. But it very often in the New Testament is translated as weak or powerless. Usually, when it's translated as weak or powerless, it's not talking about physical weakness or physical powerlessness, but kind of an emotional or spiritual weakness or powerlessness.

So, for instance, Paul says:

We're to accept those whose faith is weak. — Romans 14:1

Same word.

We are not to wound those with a weak conscience. — 1 Corinthians 8:12

Same word. And then after describing an enormous amount of discouragement in ministry, Paul says:

Who is weak? And I do not feel weak. — 2 Corinthians 11:29

Now, it can be used in reference to illness, and so the question is, what's the best way to understand this? What exactly is James trying to impart to us? I lean towards the broader, kind of more spiritual malaise. That's what I think James is actually talking about. And there's two reasons I do.

Number one, the particular prescription that he offers, and then number two, the outcome that he says will follow when we abide by this prescription.

The prescription is that the elders would anoint with oil and pray. The elders here, in our context in particular, the elders are the spiritual leaders of the church. Here at Church of the Holy Spirit, that's Dave, and it's Brian, and it's myself. We are the presbyters at Church of the Holy Spirit. Presbyters is the Greek word behind elder that James is using. And here, we are too lazy to say presbyter, and so we abbreviate presbyter. Do you know what word we abbreviate presbyter into? It may not be obvious to you. This is what we mean when we say priest. Priest is—we treat priest as an abbreviation of presbyter. We are distinctly not claiming to be anything like the Levitical Old Testament priests who offered sacrifices. We're not those. The time for sacrifices has come and gone. It has been completed by Christ. We're not Levitical priests. We're presbyters. We're the elders of the church. We're the ones that God has entrusted with the spiritual nourishment of his people.

And so, we are the presbyters who care for the sheep. It's our job to see to your total well-being, that your heart, that your soul would be well. But we're not particularly good physicians.

It's not our expertise. There are many of you who are, but that's not us. Second, the overwhelming use of anointing oil in the scriptures is as a symbol for setting people apart. People throughout the scriptures are anointed for service. They're set apart to a particular end. The word Messiah, the Hebrew word Messiah, literally means the anointed one. Christ was set apart for the work of redeeming the world. And so, when elders anoint people with oil, what we're doing is performing this sign that says, "You are his. You're set apart for him." We're reminding people, signifying that you're set apart, that you are God's own, that he has not abandoned you. He loves you. You are set apart, special, distinct.

I think the primary circumstance that James is referencing here, as he closes this letter, is our recurring tendency to discouragement. Sometimes, to be sure, that discouragement is born of our own illness. We wonder, "How could a good and loving God allow me to suffer so much?" And that is discouraging. But it's not limited to that. We falter in faith for all sorts of reasons. We feel unworthy. And we turn to unhelpful crutches instead of turning to him. Sometimes we posture in our self-righteousness. Other times, we wallow in our unrighteousness. But all of it isolates us. We isolate ourselves from the God who loves us. And when we are hurting, weak, weary, or sick, when we are discouraged, we need to be reminded that we are his, that he has set us apart, that we are his anointed ones.

Just this week, I have a friend who has been carrying an insanely heavy burden for, I don't know, eight years or something. It's been a long time, and it's terrible. And he just sent me a poem from a guy named George Herbert. I don't know if you guys know George Herbert's work. He's been dead for like 300 years, but his stuff is gold. I love George Herbert. I've never seen this one. The name of this poem is "Love." And I think my friend sent it to me because it speaks to him in his own discouragement. I've watched him walk through this, and there have been moments of great faith and trust and expectation and hope. And there have been moments of great anger and despair. But in our weakness and in our powerlessness, in our discouragement, and in our sin, God loves us. And he promises good things for us.

Here's the poem:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in, drew near to me, sweetly questioning if I lacked anything. "A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here?" Love said, "You shall be he." "I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee." Love took my hand and, smiling, did reply, "Who made the eyes but I?" "Truth, Lord, but I have marred them. Let my shame go where it doth deserve." And know you not, says Love, "who bore the blame?" "My dear, then I will serve." "You must sit down," said Love, "and taste the meat." So I did sit and eat. — George Herbert, "Love"

Yes, when we are struggling, we don't need to be condemned and we don't need to work it off. For me, at least, the most poignant line of that is when the author finally is like, "Okay, okay, okay. I'll come into relation with you, but how can I earn it? I'll serve, I'll work." And he's like, "Stop it. Sit down and eat." We need to be reminded in the midst of our despair, when we're struggling, that there is comfort in the unreasonable love of God in Christ, that he has not abandoned us.

Okay, that's all verse 14. Now, the other time that James uses the word "sick" is in verse 15, but once again, it's not exactly what he says. The ESV has it like this:

And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick. — James 5:15

That is a different Greek word than the one in verse 13. And it's used only one other time in the New Testament. It shows up in Hebrews 12:3, which is a pretty familiar passage:

Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. — Hebrews 12:3

That's our word. With that understanding, what James would be saying back in chapter 5 is, "The prayer offered in faith will save the one who has grown weary." And I think we all, sometimes because of our illness and sometimes for lots of other reasons, grow weary.

But here's the final nail in the coffin for me that makes me think that we may have misunderstood exactly what it is that James is saying. If you keep following this, it says, "The prayer offered in faith will save the one who has grown weary." Now, the word there for "save" is "sozoe." And it is the normal word for salvation that just appears across the New Testament. It actually shows up 99 times in the New Testament. It's in Romans 5: "Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood." That's awesome, it's coming.

Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God? For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, how much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life? — Romans 5

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, to those who are being saved, to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. — 1 Corinthians 1

For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this not from yourselves, it's a gift of God, not a result of works that no one should boast. — Ephesians 2

Jesus might heal your body. He might. He cleansed lepers, healed paralytics. He gave sight to the blind, and he has healed people in this very room of cancer. We can ask him to do that. You may, you should. But if he doesn't heal you, it is not because you lack faith. He is not punishing you. Don't let my friends' misunderstanding be your misunderstanding here.

You guys, this world was not designed to limit human suffering. We can wish that it was, but is it not obvious that it's not? It's a world filled with pain. Perfect health, perfect happiness is being reserved for the world to come, and not for this one. In this world, the best thing that he does, and the most reliable thing that he does, is forgive sinners and restore us to himself. In our weariness and in our brokenness, he restores us. He draws us near.

One of my favorite little clips in the Old Testament is 2 Samuel 14:14. It says this:

Like water spilled on the ground, so we all must die, but God does not take away life. Instead, he devises ways so that a banished person may not remain estranged from him. — 2 Samuel 14:14

And he has devised a way that we would not remain estranged from him. In his brilliance and his mercy and his love, Jesus lived a perfect life. He took upon himself an ignominious death, and then he offers us this outrageous exchange. He offers us our sin for his righteousness, his death for our pardon, and we are invited by James to pray when we are troubled by any circumstance.

God may graciously grant you a change in your situation. He has done that over and over and over in my life, and I'm incentivized to ask him. James says, "You don't have because you don't ask." Well, I want to ask, because there's a million things I want to help with.

We are to psalm when we are happy. He deserves our thanks, and it's just good to remember that every good gift comes from him. And then when we are hurting, when you are hurting, if any of us, we elders can be helpful to you, can remind you that you are his, that you are set apart. If we can help you to a clearer sight of all that is yours in Christ, we are at your service. It would be our great pleasure to anoint you and to remind you that you are his. Love bids you welcome. If you've drawn slack, come to him.

Lord Jesus, we love you. We honor you. We adore you. We thank you that you see our grief, that you are the hairs of our head are numbered. And when a sparrow falls to the ground, you know it. There are some right now in this room that are facing grave things, grave illness, difficult relationships. Help us, we read these seemingly outrageous promises that we want to come in faith and trust you. Would you give us the grace to do so, to know that if you should choose, you could heal.

But we also know that every one of us in this room is terminal. That we are all marching quickly or slowly towards our death. A letter of that day should be soon. Would you help us to faithfully walk with you till it comes? And if it's far off, would you let us honor you and trust you in the meantime? That your plans and your purposes are good? Then we would fix our hearts on the world to come.

We love you Lord. Amen.