Healing Prayer
Download MP3I invite you to open your Bibles to James 5 James 5. We're gonna go over a lot of material tonight. Probably raise some questions that we won't have time to answer in full. Just so you know, Tuesday morning, 6:45, I'll be at Church Street Coffee. If anybody wants to swing by and talk some more through the text, I'd love, to do that with you.
Joel Brooks:James 5, we'll begin reading in verse 13. Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
Joel Brooks: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. Even if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
Joel Brooks: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 is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain. And for 3 years 6 months, it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and heaven gave rain and the earth bore its fruit.
Joel Brooks:Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for your word. And we pray now that through your spirit, you would write it on our hearts. Lord, that you would, give us a discerning mind. Give us a soft heart that can receive your truth.
Joel Brooks:Lord, I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. And I pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. One of my good friends, started an orphanage in India and, she has for many years been trying to get me to take a a team over there to do a mission trip.
Joel Brooks:And every time she invites me, she always does this little disclaimer, this little warning. She says, I need to warn you that, you're probably gonna be really frustrated and your whole team will be really frustrated. And I said, why? She goes, well, it's it's it's because you're Americans. She's has nothing to do with, like, the labor I'm going to give you or, or the manual task, anything like that.
Joel Brooks:It's just when the teams come in, I typically ask them to spend the first few days in prayer. And a lot of the American teams have a lot of problem with that. They come in and like, what do you mean? I took all this time off. I raised all of this money and I'm coming here, you know, Give me a hammer.
Joel Brooks:Let me, let me teach a VBS. Let me do something. And she says, no, I want you to pray. And she's been there long enough to realize that, you know what? A hammer or another VBS or something like that isn't going to really make a dent in the spiritual oppression that is going on there.
Joel Brooks:What she needs is for God to break through. She needs hearts to be softened. She needs God's spirit to go before and to basically to send revival to this place. And so she asked the teams to pray. And and she wants them to understand that, you know what?
Joel Brooks:Prayer is the greater work. It is the greater work. It is the needed work. And prayer does have tremendous power. We see prayers all throughout the Bible do amazing things.
Joel Brooks:Prayers have called down fire from heaven, raised people from the dead, made lame people walk, rid people of diseases, expelled demons, rescued cities from destruction, rescued people from the mouths of lions. It has stopped the sun in its place, And prayer has given people dreams and interpreted those dreams, opened up prison doors, set hearts free. All of these things have happened through prayer and scripture. Has a tremendous power. And here, James, he's he's getting ready to end his letter.
Joel Brooks:And in his letter, he asked us to pray. Pray so that everything we've been hearing up to this point in the letter prayer would finally, cement that in our lives. Give what we have heard a power in our lives to change us. If you've been here for any amount of time, you've heard me say over and over as a pastor that if we cease to be a people who pray, may God close these doors. And I believe that with all my heart, that is what I would want if we ever cease to pray.
Joel Brooks:If we ever lean towards, entertainment or just music or marketing or something like that as a way of trying to reach people as some kind of manipulative power. If we ever lean on those things instead of prayer, I pray that God would shut the doors because I have no desire to be a mile wide and an inch deep. James begins this section like a rest like many parts of the New Testament, ending their letters as well with a call to pray. For the words that we've heard throughout the book to now have power in our lives. James knows at the very beginning that prayer is hard for us in different seasons.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 13. He says, is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
Joel Brooks:And so James knows that, hey, there's some people, they have different dispositions and sometimes when things are going really wrong, they don't pray. They think I could just get through this with my own resolve, my own determination. And he said there's other people who are just the opposite. It's when things are going, really, really well that they don't pray. They just forget about God.
Joel Brooks:And he says, listen, pray at all times. If if bad things are happening, pray. If things are going really well, don't forget about God. Sing praises to him. You need to be you need to be praying without ceasing.
Joel Brooks:He's agreeing with Paul in this. You know, Paul in first Thessalonians 5 says that we are to pray without ceasing. Try doing that just one day to pray without ceasing. It's it's kinda hard. Some early Christians tried doing this in a monastic community, and they taught themselves to say the phrase, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner, with every breath.
Joel Brooks:So they'd be like, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me a sinner. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me a sinner. And it just became their mantra, and that is what they tried to say unending. You you you're welcome to try that. I I don't think that's what Paul has in mind.
Joel Brooks:When Paul says to pray without ceasing or to pray continually, he's using the same word that was also used to describe an uninterrupted cough or like a chronic cough that never left you. You all are familiar with what that's like because I think half the world is sick right now. Our family is just coming through it. Where you always have that tickle, like, it never quite leaves you. Lauren is in the ending stages of that, and she'll lay at night and I'll hear her say, mind over matter.
Joel Brooks:Mind over matter. Mind over matter. Just, just trying not to let that tickle. Just, just make her cough that nagging little cough. And Paul, when he says to pray without ceasing, that's what he's saying prayer life is like.
Joel Brooks:It's not that you're coughing every single minute. It's just that the tickle is always there. The urge to do it is always there, and it will always come up. Prayer is just kind of what you do. Prayer is who you are.
Joel Brooks:You pray without ceasing. And that's what James is alluding to here, that we are to be chronic prayers. And then James moves to a very specific type of prayer, prayers of healing for the sick. Look at verse 14. Is anyone among you sick?
Joel Brooks: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. James seems to be describing here somebody who is too sick to make it to the gathering, to make it to church. That's why they are they are praying over the person.
Joel Brooks:It's like the person is bedridden and later says that the person will rise up, will get out of bed. And so you have a person who can't make it here normally. They're they're too sick to even get out of the house. Verse 16 says that we're called to pray healing for one another. So typically, we're all supposed to be praying healing for one another, but for those who can't make it to this gathering, they can call for the elders to go to their house and to pray over them and their sickness.
Joel Brooks:Now before moving on to just the application and kind of nitty gritty of these verses, let me state the obvious, but it needs to be stated. We worship a God who heals. We worship a God with the power to heal and who does heal. Jesus healed entire cities of their sicknesses, and Jesus is still alive. He is still working and Jesus is still healing.
Joel Brooks:And James knew this. The early church knew this and experienced it. He knows the power of Jesus to heal is unleashed through the prayers of God's people. Prayer, think of it this way. In a sense, it's like you you put 1 foot in heaven and you put 1 foot in earth, or you put 1 foot in healing and you put 1 foot in sickness, and you unite those worlds together through prayer.
Joel Brooks:And James understands this. Now, I'm sure that there's some here who probably have a somewhat maybe small or large objection when you hear God still heals people today. Maybe you want to believe this. You know, you've heard about a guy who knows a guy who maybe has seen it happen, but really you're just kind of full of doubt. You don't doubt that scripture teaches that they got healed in the past, but really today, although you want to believe, you're not sure.
Joel Brooks:Let me just say I partially agree with you. Partially. If you read through scripture, you see 3 intense periods of miracles and healings, 3 intense ones. You have Moses and Joshua, the period of the Exodus and the conquest where God's doing miracles all of the time. I mean, he's parting the Red Sea.
Joel Brooks:He's sending the plagues. He's raining down manna from heaven. So so miracle seemed to be the norm there. And then you come to a time of Elijah and Elisha, and Elijah is calling fire down from heaven, consuming the altar, killing the prophets of Baal. And then he come to the time of Jesus and the apostles, and he's healing entire, cities of all their diseases.
Joel Brooks:And each one of those periods lasted about 60 to a 100 years in which there were many, many miracles. You would say that the miraculous was the norm. Healing, the supernatural was was normal during these times, not the exception. You could pretty much always count on god to do something that was gonna defy logic in these points. And and I agree with that.
Joel Brooks:I see that in scripture. But that does not mean that today the lord ceases to do the miraculous. Yes. There are 3 really intense periods I would see in scripture, but God still does heal. It might no longer be what we describe as the norm in which entire cities are being healed, but yet He still does move this way.
Joel Brooks:He is still sovereign. He can still make the lame walk. He could still make the blind see. He can still cure people of cancer. He can do these things.
Joel Brooks:Jesus's words in John 16 are still true. When he says, truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the father in my name, he will give it to you. Anything we ask in Jesus' name, he gives to us. Let's take a closer look at some of these verses in James 5. The first thing that might seem a little odd to us when we look at this is James seems to make a connection between sin and sickness.
Joel Brooks:At the end of verse 15, he says that if a person has committed sins, they will be forgiven. This is that bedridden person. And then in verse 16, he says that if we confess our sins to one another and we pray for one another, that we will be healed. And so once again, you have this sin and sickness being joined together in James' mind. And this is certainly a teaching, not the only teaching, but it certainly is a teaching in the New Testament.
Joel Brooks:Often in the New Testament, sickness is a result of sin. I mean, we see that sickness came into the world as a result of sin, as a result of Adam's sin, brought in sickness, brought in decay, brought in death. And you see that at times in the New Testament. I realized I need to be careful here. So let me go ahead and say that not all sickness is from sin.
Joel Brooks:Not at all. Jesus says in John 9, amen. He's about to heal a blind person and the disciples are asking, so are the teachers around are asking him, is this person blind because, because of his sins or was it his parents? Jesus like, well, because of neither. He's blind in order that I might demonstrate my power and that people might believe, And he heals them.
Joel Brooks:You look at the entire book of Job. Job didn't become sick because of his sin. Job actually became sick because of his righteousness. It's because he was righteous that God sent sickness and allowed Satan to torment him in that way, not because of his sin. But there are certainly some sicknesses that are a direct result of sin.
Joel Brooks:We see that in what we would call, you know, psychosomatic, sickness. And I used to think, oh, that just means everything's in the mind, but it's not in the mind because people with a psychosomatic sickness have real ulcers. They have real stress. They have real headaches. They have real high blood pressure.
Joel Brooks:They have a real strain on their heart. They have a real lowering of their immune or In any case, whether sickness is caused by sin or it isn't, We need to use sickness as an opportunity to examine our lives and to see what sin is there and to confess. Because maybe God is making us weak in order to show us our weaknesses, to show us our vulnerabilities, to show us our sin. And so we need to use our sickness as a way to confess and to look at our sin. Back to the text, James says that this sick person is to call the elders to come and pray over him.
Joel Brooks:Notice that he doesn't say if the person's sick, call the healer. You know, call Benny Hen. It's time. It's time. We need to get Benny Hen.
Joel Brooks:We need to bring him in here or bring someone in like him. And it's time to pray. He doesn't do that because there are no faith healers in the church. God does not give the power to heal to any one individual. You're not gonna find James saying, like, alright, it's time for you to put your hands up against the screen of the TV, and we're gonna pray for you.
Joel Brooks:He doesn't say you need to forward this email chain if you wanna get healed or anything like that. He says, call the elders to come and to pray over you, not the healer. As a matter of fact, you know, we we talk about the gift of healing, yet it's only mentioned one place in scriptures mentioned in 1st Corinthians 12. And let me read you about this gift. It says to each is given a manifestation of the spirit for the common good.
Joel Brooks:For to one is given through the spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same spirit. To another faith by the same spirit. To another gifts of healing by the one spirit. To another, the working of miracles. To another prophecy and so on and so on.
Joel Brooks:Paul lists these gifts. And so these this gift of healing is listed among all these other gifts, but Paul describes it differently than all the other gifts. All the other gifts are singular here. He uses plural. He says, gifts of healings, gifts of healings.
Joel Brooks:This suggests that what's happening in the gifts of healings is God has given different gifts of healings to different people at different times for different situations, that there's no one gift for one healer. But this is something that is spread out for different situations at different time. The New Testament does not talk about the gift of healing. He doesn't intend for 1 person to have a monopoly on this. Instead, there are gifts of healings.
Joel Brooks:And what this means is God might be putting on you to go and pray for some person, and you go and you pray in faith and you see this person healed. And then you go to another person, you feel like, I want I need to pray for this person. And you pray for this person, and they're not. God has given you a gift of healing here, and he has not given you a gift of healing here. He gives his gifts of healings at his discretion.
Joel Brooks:Different people, different times, different situations. All you have to do is look at Paul. Look at Paul to see that not everybody always had the gift of healing because Paul did heal people yet at the same time he left many people sick. He left Epaphroditus sick. He couldn't heal himself when he had the thorn in the flesh.
Joel Brooks:He prayed three times and it was not healed. He told Timothy when Timothy had a sick stomach, he he said, Timothy, he didn't pray for his healing. He said, take a little wine for your stomach. Different gifts of healing at different times. Now there's a huge question that jumps out when we read verse 15.
Joel Brooks:It says, the lord might raise him up. For the lord, it does not say sorry. It does not say the lord might raise him up. Says the lord will raise him up. There's no might about it.
Joel Brooks:That when the elders come and the reason I think it's the elders here is because if you have a sick sheep, you need the shepherds of the church to come and to to mend the sick sheep here. And it says that when they come and they pray this prayer of faith, not that the person might be healed, but the person will be healed. Definitely. So the question is this, what about all of the times that there have been prayers of faith in which the person has not been healed? I remember being around a time when the elders and at this church, I was a pastor of another church.
Joel Brooks:We gathered around somebody with brain cancer, and we prayed for his healing and we anointed him with oil. And, we're all very excited because a year later he seemed to be cancer free. And then in 2 years he was dead. Now in something like that, and I'm sure that maybe you all have seen this happened. Is that because he didn't believe?
Joel Brooks:Is that because, you know, he just didn't have enough faith? If only he had enough faith, then he would have really been healed. Or perhaps if only we had enough faith, then really he would have been healed. Is that what it's talking about here? Well, you know, once again, you look at Paul.
Joel Brooks:I think Paul is a man of faith, and he prayed 3 times. God will remove a thorn of flesh, and he was thrown from his flesh, and it was denied. I don't think that's why this person was not healed. I've been around, in prayer meetings that are kind of like pep rallies, in which people feel like they have to work themselves up, really work up the faith. And, and after a while, you hear their prayers and, like, they're saying, you know, we you're gonna be healed.
Joel Brooks:We could do this. We do this. And and and really all they're doing is trying to convince themselves at this point. Trying to convince themselves that this is really gonna happen. They're trying to work up this faith.
Joel Brooks:It's almost like the, the little engine that could saying, I think I can. I think I can. I think it, and you say it enough and it's really going to happen. Is that what is being described here? Is that the prayer of faith?
Joel Brooks:I don't believe so. I've heard this verse abused in that way many times, but that's not what James is talking about. And before I tell you what the, I think the prayer of faith is, let me just ask you, do you think it would be a good idea for God to always give you what you ask in faith? That everything that you really sincerely ask for and believe, do you think it would be a good idea for God to give you those things? Would it be a good idea for me to give my children everything they asked for if they asked for it sincerely?
Joel Brooks:You know, Natalie if if you know Natalie, my middle child, if she said, daddy, I really want a chainsaw for Christmas, I I I would love it. I've seen you use a chainsaw. It's really cool. You do a lot of good with it. You help out a lot of people with it, And I just think of all the good that I could do with it.
Joel Brooks:And so I really would like for you to give me a chainsaw, daddy. Please, please. I'm begging you. I know you'll give it to me because you're a good daddy. Now would it be a good idea for me to give her a chainsaw?
Joel Brooks:Some of you actually nodded yes on that. It was a rhetorical question. No. No. If you knew Natalie, it's a double no.
Joel Brooks:It would not be a good idea because of the harm that would come upon her or the harm she would inflict on others because with the thing that I can wield for good, she cannot. It's way too powerful her for her. She she would lose control of this. And so even though she doesn't understand it, I would I would say no. But I will tell you this, I will not deny my daughter.
Joel Brooks:If I have the resources, I will do not deny her one good gift ever. Anything that she asked me that I know will be for her good, I will gladly give it to her if I know it will not harm her. Her harm others. Now, harm might not just be physical harm. I might have to say, I'm going to have to withhold that from you because I know it will make you so proud.
Joel Brooks:I might have to withhold this from you because I know it's just gonna, you're no longer gonna have a thankful heart if you always have these things. I might have to withhold things for her for for maybe her spiritual harm or her emotional harm, but anything that I see is for her good. If I have the resources, I will not withhold her. Matter of fact, I'm dying to give her those things. And God is the same way.
Joel Brooks:He will give us every good thing, and he doesn't have any limits on his resources. But he's not going to give us anything that will harm us. Even though when we think I could do so much good for this, he's like, it is too powerful for you, or that would lead to pride, or that would not give you a thankful heart, and so he withholds these things. So God is always giving and God is always good as we just sang. So this prayer of faith here, what is it?
Joel Brooks:How is it that James can say the prayer and faith will heal somebody? Well, he seems to be indicating here that there are times that when we pray for something, God gives us an extraordinary gift of faith in that moment. That is different than our normal faith. We have our normal faith, but there are times when God can give us an extraordinary faith. This gift of faith lets us know that without a doubt it is the Lord's will to heal this person.
Joel Brooks:This isn't the kind of faith that we have to build up. We have to try to work in ourself. This is a faith that is a gift from god given to us. In 1st Corinthians 12, what we just read, faith is actually listed as a gift of the spirit. Now, this is written to people who already have faith.
Joel Brooks:Christians, you already have faith. But on top of that faith, there is another gift of faith, meaning an extraordinary faith that can come to people at different times. And I think that's what James is talking about here. James certainly understands that it is not always the Lord's will to heal. We know that too.
Joel Brooks:You know why? Because everybody dies. Everybody. You can believe in the prosperity gospel one one day, will only provide the ultimate healing for us with a new body in heaven, but not here on this earth. Paul didn't pray healing for everybody.
Joel Brooks:He actually left Epaphroditus. He he left Trophimus behind when they were sick. They were too sick to move and he didn't even heal them, he just left them behind. In those cases, Paul was not given the prayer of faith for healing. Another little hint I think we have from James as to what this prayer faith looks like comes when he gives us the example of Elijah.
Joel Brooks:Look at verse 17 18. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain. And for 3 years 6 months, it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. So James says we shouldn't look at Elijah like he's a superhero.
Joel Brooks:He's not. He is just like you and me. He had, you know, bad hair days. He probably had acne as a child. You know, he he was, he puts on his pants one leg at a time.
Joel Brooks:Okay. He's a normal guy, but God gave him an extraordinary prayer that did miraculous things, and we can pray just like Elijah. The thing that's interesting about this example though, I guess it's what James did not choose about Elijah's life. If you read through Elijah's life at the end of 1st Kings, you're gonna he did these amazing things. I mean, he called down fire from heaven, consumed the entire altar.
Joel Brooks:That's a pretty big prayer that was answered. James doesn't list that. Another time, he actually raises up the widows, a widow's son from the dead. I would have thought that would have gone right in line with what James is talking about here when he's saying elders go over to people, pray, and raise them up. I would have thought.
Joel Brooks:That naturally leads into what Elijah did, but James doesn't go there until instead he gives some little obscure miracle about god shutting up the heavens and there not being any rain. When I was studying through this, that was one of the first things I wrote down. It's like, why this miracle of all the other miracles to choose from? Why is this an example of a righteous man praying a prayer of faith? This is the best I could come up with.
Joel Brooks:When you look through all the other prayers of Elijah, and they're great prayers, but they're different than this one. Because this one, he actually had scripture that he could read that told him what he was doing was the exact will of god. In Deuteronomy 28, god says that the people of Israel disobey him. If the people of Israel follow other gods, he says, I will shut up the heavens. It will not rain.
Joel Brooks:I will bring a drought. And Elijah, because he's a righteous man, he knows the scripture, and he knows God's people have left him and have gone after other gods. And he simply prays the word, and God brings it about. He prayed God's revealed will and faith. And I think James gives us this example so that we would do the same.
Joel Brooks:Elijah's not just depending on his gut. He's not just getting a feeling that this is something he should pray for. He knows the word of God and he's praying it and he sees it happen. It's a prayer of faith. I bet there's a lot of people here who are like me who struggle in their prayer life.
Joel Brooks:Matter of fact, if I mentioned prayer when we were to do a word association, I bet one of the first things you would you would feel the first word that pops your mind is guilt or shame because you don't pray like you should. I'm with you. I'm with you there. I want to give you a word of hope. Jesus understands your frustration and prayer.
Joel Brooks:He understands it. He knows what it is like to pray and for it to feel like his prayers are just hitting a wall and bouncing back to him, that God is not listening to him at all. Jesus knows that. He has experienced that. He knows what it's like to give a request and to have it denied.
Joel Brooks:I When we see this in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus is pouring out his heart to his father and there is nothing, He's getting nothing in return. Jesus pours out his request, and you can't get more righteous than Jesus. Alright? He's saying, hey, if there's another way, if there's another way, come on. I really would like for something else to happen.
Joel Brooks:And the answer is no. No. Jesus, you will not be delivered from this. And so he was to go to the cross. Jesus was rejected, denied, cast away from his father's presence.
Joel Brooks:And the reason he was so so that we here in this room would never be. He was the righteous man who was cast out. We are the unrighteous who were brought in because of his act. He didn't see God's power so that we might feel and experience his power. Now though, on the other side of the cross, on the other side of the erection the resurrection, we see Jesus is risen.
Joel Brooks:Jesus has ascended. He is now seated at the right hand of God, the father almighty and power. And let me tell you, Jesus' requests now are never rejected. They're always yes. And scripture tells us that Jesus is interceding on our behalf.
Joel Brooks:We have the ultimate righteous person, the one who went through hell in order to have us. He is up now, and he is interceding for us. He's taking our jumbled mess of prayers. And he's taking them, and then he has taken them straight to the father, and he will never be rejected. And so there's our hope.
Joel Brooks:Our hope is not that we would muster up faith. Our hope isn't that we would just leave here and do better, maybe wake up an additional 10 minutes earlier, and this time, I'm really gonna pray. Our hope is in Jesus Christ who prays on our behalf, and that Christ would indeed change us, our hearts more and more making them hearts of prayer. Pray with me. God, we want to pray to you.
Joel Brooks:Not because we want your gifts, but because we want you, you. You are the treasure. You are the pearl of great price. We believe that you plus nothing is worth more than you plus something because we just want you alone Right now, I wanna thank you, God, that you are a God who still works in our lives, a God who still does the miraculous, a God who still heals, who does these things to the church. And I pray we would see that, that you would give us gifts of faith, that we would see you move in those ways.
Joel Brooks:Thank you that you love us, that you're good to us, and that you're always giving. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.
