Keys To Answered Prayer - James 5:14-15 Series

James 5:12 Above all, my brothers, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your “Yes” be yes, and your “No,” no, or you will be condemned. 13 Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. 14 Is any one of you weak? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the weary person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. 17 Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. 18 Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. 19 My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, 20 remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.

Introduction

How would your life be different if God answered more of your prayers? If God said yes to your prayers, say, three or four times more often than He does now, how would your life be different? The answer to that question is this: your life would be better. I say that because there are many, many times in Scripture when God teaches us how to get our prayers answered more. That is something God wants, and so it is something we should strive for. If more of your prayers were answered, that would mean that you are on the same page with God more often, and that would definitely be a good thing. (The one exception is if you pray for something that you know is sinful, and God punishes you by saying yes - like when Israel prayed for a king like all the other nations, and so God punished them by giving them Saul.) But aside from that, generally speaking, Scripture teaches that we ought to have the goal of getting more and more of our prayers answered. And so we are always excited when we come across a passage like the closing section of the book of James that teaches us principles about how to pray more effectively so that God says, “yes” more often.

Conditional or Unconditional?

I mentioned last time that this is a difficult and controversial passage. There are several reasons – probably the biggest is the fact that James seems to make such an absolute promise for healing.

14 Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the weary person well; the Lord will raise him up.

That sounds pretty absolute, doesn’t it? Just anoint with oil and pray and he will be healed – just like that. So why are there sick people in every church, and there have been for 2000 years? Even in the ministry of the Apostle Paul, who performed miraculous healings, not everyone got healed.

2 Timothy 4:20 …I left Trophimus sick in Miletus.

Why did he leave him sick? Why not just have the elders come pray for him? When all those people were sick and dying in 1 Corinthians 11, why didn’t Paul tell them, “You need to get the elders praying”? When Timothy had frequent illnesses, why did Paul tell him to use wine as medicine, rather than just anointing him with oil and praying for healing (1 Tim.5:23)? The classic answer of the faith healers when they can’t heal someone is that it is the sick person’s fault – they don’t have enough faith. But when Epaphroditus was with Paul and got so sick that he almost died, instead of accusing him of lacking faith, Paul commanded us to honor men like him (Php.2:27-30). Disease, sickness, injury, weakness – all these things are part of this life, and every human being will finally succumb to the ultimate human weakness, which is death. So what are we to make of James’ absolute-sounding promise?

Some have suggested that James is referring here only to spiritual weakness, not physical sickness. We saw last week that the wording James uses won’t allow for that. But even if it did, that still wouldn’t solve the problem. Many times the elders have prayed for people who are spiritually struggling, and they haven’t recovered. So that’s not really a guarantee either.