Today, we are finishing our series A Search for what is real. We have been looking at what a real faith, a real spirituality looks like. Let me ask you something, have you ever asked the question, does prayer really work? Maybe you know someone who always seems to have their prayers answered and you think, why doesn’t that work for me that way. I know countless people who always seem to have their prayers answered exactly like they want them to and I think, how do they do that?
Have you ever thought, is there a formula you need to follow when it comes to prayer? Maybe you have to say certain words or do something? What about unanswered prayer? What do you do with that?
If you have your bibles, you can open them to the book of Exodus chapter 40, which is on p. 69 if you grabbed a bible in the lobby. God is giving Moses the instructions for building the tabernacle, which is the place where God dwelled after the nation of Israel was taken out of slavery in the nation of Israel. God has specific instructions on how it was to be built and how everything was to be done in the tabernacle. The tabernacle was where the nation of Israel gathered for worship and to make sacrifices to God. So because it was God’s house, he was particularly about how it was to be built, what materials were to be used, etc.
After telling them how to construct it, this is what God said in verse 9 of chapter 40: 9"Then you shall take the anointing oil and anoint the tabernacle and all that is in it, and consecrate it and all its furniture, so that it may become holy. 10You shall also anoint the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils, and consecrate the altar, so that the altar may become most holy. 11You shall also anoint the basin and its stand, and consecrate it. 12Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons (they were the spiritual leaders of Israel) to the entrance of the tent of meeting and shall wash them with water 13and put on Aaron the holy garments. And you shall anoint him and consecrate him, that he may serve me as priest. 14You shall bring his sons also and put coats on them, 15and anoint them, as you anointed their father, that they may serve me as priests. And their anointing shall admit them to a perpetual priesthood throughout their generations."
Whenever someone or something is anointed with oil in the Bible, it is being set apart as something special. Kings were anointed, prophets, the first born son was anointed, and here God says after building the tabernacle, the place where people will meet with me, you are to anoint it with oil to set it apart. To say, something different is going on in this place. The words set apart, literally mean to make holy in the Bible, so God is saying, anoint the tabernacle with oil so that everyone knows, this is a holy place.
Flip over to 2 Corinthians chapter 12 which is on p. 830. The church in the city of Corinth who this letter is written to is a church that has its priorities messed up. In this part of the letter, Paul is talking to them about how to handle suffering, and how to handle when things are not going the way you expect them to go. He is using an example from his own life, which he refers to as a thorn in the flesh. By the time Paul has written this letter, he has been tormented for several years by a thing he calls his thorn. We are never told what it is, but we know it is something that caused him a great deal of pain. He says this in chapter 12, verse 7 of 2 Corinthians: 7So to keep me from being too elated by the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. 8Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
So, Paul is tormented by this thorn. In verse 8 he says that he pleaded with God. That is more than asking isn’t it? He asks God to take it, 3 times he asks. Here is the guy who wrote almost 25% of the Bible, being tormented, and asking for a way out and not finding it.
Hannah More wrote this about adversity: “If a surgeon were to put into the hand of a wounded patient the probe or the scalpel, how tenderly would he treat himself! How skin – deep would be the examination, how slight the incision! The patient would escape the pain, but the wound might prove fatal. The surgeon therefore wisely uses his instruments himself. He goes deep perhaps, but not deeper than the case demands. The pain may be acute, but the life is preserved…God graciously does this for us Himself because otherwise He knows it would never be done.”
Flip over to the book of James, chapter 5, verse 12, which is on p. 871. James, who was the brother of Jesus, wrote this short letter to Christians who were not acting like Christians. This is the very last thing he says to them. As with most letters and speeches, we can assume that what he ends with is very important to him, because it is what he is leaving them with. This is the last thing they will hear, and most likely the thing they will remember. This is what he says in verse 12 of chapter 5: 12But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.
13Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 14Is 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. 15And 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. 16Therefore, 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. 17Elijah 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. 18Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
19My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, 20let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
James starts in verse 12 talking about oaths. When you take an oath, you are taking control, saying you know for sure what is going on. There is a connection to prayer, because we “know” what is going on, we take God out of the equation. If we know what will happen, why pray?
Prayer is obviously the main idea in this passage because from verses 13 – 18, James mentions it in every verse.
He then asks, is anyone among you suffering, is anyone hurting? Is anyone happy? Is anyone sick? He covers all the emotions, he says, if you fit into those categories, which is everyone. The answer, pray. He is saying, in every setting of life, pray. In every situation, pray.
I think it is interesting that he says is anyone among you. He is saying that prayer, like our faith is a communal thing, it is not just a personal thing. Have you ever thought to yourself, I wish I had someone to walk with me through this pain? Or, I wish I had someone to celebrate with? James is saying, you should have someone, faith and prayer is not meant to be a lone ranger thing.
James is saying, no matter your situation, you should be praying. Often though, we only even think about prayer when things are going wrong, right? A major project comes up at work, we are having problems with our kids, our spouse, bills start to pile up, we pray. When things are going well, our need for God seems to diminish.
This I think leads to the question of unanswered prayer. I wonder if when we only pray about the tough stuff, the things that we think, “I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll pray” situations. I wonder if God thinks, you need me now. What about the good times, why don’t you need me then? If God asked us that, we would probably say, “I got the good stuff covered, I can handle that.” But James is saying, God wants to be a part of all of it.
I often get asked the question, “Prayer is a good thing, but what do you do about unanswered prayer. What happens when you pray and pray and God does nothing?” Almost like our prayers are just hitting the ceiling. Ever feel like that? Here is my thought, there is no such thing as unanswered prayer.
Think about it like this, when you were a teenager and asked your parents to stay out an extra hour and they said no. Did they answer you? Yes. Is it the answer you were looking for? Nope. I remember when I was a teenager, I would always ask my Dad for an extra hour that he stopped answering me. Now, did he give me answer? Yes. I knew it, he knew it, so I couldn’t come back after I stayed out too late and say, you didn’t answer me. I would get that, are you stupid look.
Just like we said last week, God is interested in what is happening in us, how we are changing. If we go to God in prayer and “nothing happens.” We keep praying and praying, we get other people to pray with us. But we don’t get the answer we wanted. What just happened? We started spending a lot more time with God than we usually do. God has started to change us. God has started to change those who are praying with us. Now it doesn’t always feel like that though does it? It can get frustrating.
When Katie was pregnant with Ava, Katie tested positive for Group B strep. This is common and the good news is that while it can be harmful to Katie, the doctor assured us she wasn’t in major danger, but in worst case scenarios it can cause death during childbirth to the child. I prayed more in that last month of pregnancy than I have for anything else. Did I change God’s mind? I don’t know. Ava was fine, but I was changed. I grew closer to God, just because I spent more time talking with him. Are we tracking?
In verse 14 James says that if anyone is sick, he should call the elders of the church, which is the leadership of the church. The sick person takes the initiative. They are the proactive ones. The Greek word for sick that he uses means “to be weak.” The word that James uses, is the same word that Paul used in 2 Corinthians when he called his thorn in the flesh a weakness. Which is important because Paul’s thorn in his flesh was never taken away, even after asking repeatedly. James is saying, it might be taken away. Your prayers might not be answered the way you want them to. James’ original readers would have seen this Greek word and made the connection to Paul. Because, many scholars believe that when Paul started having his thorn in the flesh, he was living in Jerusalem, which is where James lived and where the church that he wrote his letter to.
James also says that when you call the elders to pray over you, they should anoint you with oil. This is a call back to Exodus, the action of setting something apart. When something is set apart in the Bible, it is to show the glory of God. To say, something holy is going on here.
In verse 15 he says: 15And 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.
There is a belief among some Christians that is incredibly dangerous that comes out of this verse. I have had friends devastated by this idea. The idea goes like this, if you pray and are not healed, then you must not have had enough faith. Have you ever heard this?
This idea comes from this verse, but that is not even close to what is going on. First off, who is praying? The elders, the leaders of the church. What does James say, he says the prayers will save the sick and the Lord will raise him up. That phrase “the Lord will raise him up” is always connected to the return of Jesus. That means, our healing may not come in this life. Does James say if you pray you will be healed? No, he says you will be saved, which is different from healing in most cases.
One author (Douglas Moo) said, “The faith exercised in prayer is faith in the God who sovereignly accomplishes his will. When we pray, our faith recognizes, explicitly or implicitly, the overruling providential purposes of God. We may at times be given insight into that will, enabling us to pray with absolute confidence in God’s plan to answer as we ask. But surely these cases are rare – more rare even than our subjective, emotional desires would lead us to suspect. A prayer for healing, then, must usually be qualified by a recognition that God’s will in the matter is supreme. And it is clear in the NT that God does not always will to heal the believer.”
The question comes up, why wouldn’t God want to heal us now? In this life? I mean, if we have faith, why doesn’t God always heal us and answer our prayers the way we want? One author (Daniel M. Doriani) said, “If God healed people because he saw their faith, then God should have healed Paul and his associates of all their illnesses. They had faith and were not healed; therefore, we cannot ascribe lack of healing to lack of faith. Healing is a gift, not a reward. God does not owe healing to someone simply because she has strong faith.”
He then says that there sins will be forgiven. A common idea in the 1st century, when James was written was that if you were sick, you had sinned. So, in order to be cured, your sins would have to be forgiven. And to be forgiven, one must confess their sins.
Daniel Doriani said, “This reminds us that healing has a spiritual dimension. We should confess our sins because sin can lead to illness. This idea sounds antiquated, even offensive, but Scripture does draw a connection between sin and sickness…In Jesus’ day, people overspiritualized illness. Many assumed that all tragedy and disease were direct consequences of sin. Today, we despiritualize illness. We believe microbes and defective genes cause all illness. We deny a link between sin and illness except in obvious cases such as cirrhosis of the liver and sexually transmitted diseases.
In fact, we need to respiritualize illness, for Scripture often links sin and illness:
• Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven,” then healed a paralytic (Luke 5:20).
• Jesus healed another crippled man by the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem and said, “Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you” (John 5:14).
• Paul told the Corinthians that some of them had become sick and even died because they abused Communion (1 Corinthians 11:30).
James is not saying that because someone is sick and in need of prayer that they sinned, but he does bring up that we need to consider the possibility. He is also saying, prayer and healing need to be more holistic than what we think. Usually, we pray about physical things. But prayer needs to encompass not only physical needs, but emotional, mental, and spiritual.
So James says, confess your sins to each other so that you may be forgiven. When you confess sins in a group of trusted friends or to a spouse, it brings a practice to light that we shy away from and that is the practice of vulnerability. It says, here is all of me, scars and all. It makes us take the face off. I have often found that when I say to people who know me best, “I am sorry, I have a tendency to do this, fill in the blank.” Their response is a loving, duh. But when we confess to others and to God in prayer, we take off the mask and God is able to work with who we really are, not what we want others to see. When we are able to be known by others, to be truly known and to know others, that is when healing comes in our life. Again, that communal aspect to prayer.
Can we stop God from answering prayer? Richard Foster who has written a lot of books on the topic of spiritual practices said, “I cannot make the flow of heavenly life happen, but I can stop it. If I resist or refuse to be an open conduit for God’s power to come into a person, it will stop.” When we have unconfessed sin, we can stop God’s work. God hears the prayers of sinful people, but when we have sin in our lives, it dulls our sensitivity to God and the rhythms of God. We become less in tune with God and what he wants to do. And prayer is about changing us and brining glory to God.
So James says in verse 16: The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. So the question has to be asked, how righteous do you have to be for your prayers to be effective?
In verse 17 & 18 James uses the example of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. The reason being, because Elijah was just a person. In the book of Acts, Elijah is called a man just like us. Yet, he was able to pray for God to start and end a drought in the book of 1 Kings.
Many scholars think this is an odd choice for James to make as there were plenty of people in the Old Testament that were considered great men and women of prayer. One author (Douglas Moo) said, “One explanation for the unusual choice might be that James intends us to see an analogy between the sickness of a believer restored to health and the deadness of the land brought back to life and fruitfulness.”
In verse 19 & 20 James closes his letter by talking about bringing people back into your community who have wandered away and are living outside of the plans of God. The same thing is going on as with prayer, when we live outside of God’s plan, nothing good comes from that. There is this wall between us and God that affects every aspect of our lives. It affects our interaction with others, our worship, and our prayer lives. It also brings the communal aspect of prayer back to mind. One author (Daniel M. Doriani) said, “If the family of God prays together when physical illness wounds a member, they should certainly work together if spiritual troubles threaten.”
What if, when God doesn’t answer prayer the way we want him to, he is protecting us. As we were looking for a job before coming to Beginnings, we were interviewing with a church in Phoenix and a church in Vegas. Both were decent churches from the outside. Either one would have been a good fit for us. We were excited about both, but both of them said, you aren’t what we are looking for. Which was very devastating. We got an answer to our prayers, but not the answer we were hoping for.
After moving here, I got a call from someone at the church in Phoenix and he said, “God protected you.” He went on to tell me how things are falling apart at that church. The one in Vegas, the lead pastor left a month after hiring a guy for the position I was interviewing for. Often, when we don’t get the answer we seek, God is protecting us.
Have you ever thought what your life would be like if God answered all of your prayers exactly the way you prayed them? C.S. Lewis said, “Heaven help us if God were to answer all of our prayers the way we ask them.”
It is the forest and the trees idea. We see the trees, we know what we want. God sees the forest and says, “You don’t want that.”
What if you pray and pray and God doesn’t give you the answer you want? What is the point of that?
My sophomore year of high school, a friend of mine named Scott was diagnosed with cancer. Before he was diagnosed, he was the guy that everyone wanted to be. Good grades, good athlete, good looking, got all the girls kind of guy. He was also a dynamic follower of Jesus. He told everyone he met about God. Not in an annoying way, but in a natural, “did you know there is something better out there” kind of way.
Scott’s church followed the instructions laid out in James and had the elders anoint him with oil, did everything to the letter. A few days before hand, I was talking with him and his parents. And his Mom said, “Either Scott will not be healed or God will get the glory.” His dad said, “No. Either Scott will be healed or he won’t be. But either way, God will get the glory.” That is the view we are to have when it comes to prayer. I sat there stunned. I had never heard anyone ever say, if it doesn’t go my way, God will get the glory and I will be okay with that.
A few months after the service where they prayed for Scott, I remembered that conversation while standing at his graveside service. I have thought about him a lot since then. He is one of the reasons I am here today. I was so taken by his life and how he lived out his faith.
I think that God wants us to have that view, to have the view that it is more about how we are changed and the glory of God than whether or not our prayers are answered the way we want them to be.
O. Hallesby, who was a Norwegian Theologian during World War 2 said, “To pray is to let Jesus into our hearts…It is not our prayer which moves the Lord Jesus. It is Jesus who moves us to pray. He knocks. Our prayers are always a result of Jesus knocking at our heart’s doors. This throws light upon the old prophetic passages: “Before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear” (Isaiah 65:24)…To pray is nothing more involved than to let Jesus into our needs. To pray is to give Jesus permission to employ His powers in the alleviation of our distress. To pray is to let Jesus glorify His name in the midst of our needs…To pray is nothing more than to open the door, giving Jesus access to our needs and permitting Him to exercise His own power in dealing with them.”
So how do you start? What if you have never really prayed, where do you begin? I have always been intimidated by listening to others pray. Often, they sound so spiritual, they speak in a way that doesn’t sound natural to me, so for most of my life I was very intimidated.
I had a mentor that described praying like I was talking to a friend sitting next to me in the car. Praying is simply having a conversation. Talking and listening to God. It is simply telling God what is on your mind, what you are thinking. Not just the big things, but the little things as well. Not just the physical, but the emotional, relational, spiritual and mental things.
Let me say this to couples. I get asked by couples going through hard times what they can do to strengthen their marriages. They ask what book they can read, what trick of the trade they can follow. My first question is, do you pray together. Every couple I have ever talked to that is struggling in their marriage answers no to that question. Katie and I made a commitment when we first got married, that we would pray together before we went to bed, whether we were in the same state or not, whether we felt like it or not. Here is one thing that it does; it is hard to go to bed mad when you pray with someone.
Also, it is a chance for Katie to hear me thank God for her and what she does and for me to hear her do the same. I can honestly tell you, I notice a difference in our relationship if we do this.
Bring others into your life. Share with others how they can pray for you. We have a section on our weekly e-newsletter where we share prayer requests. Let this community lift you up.
As we close today, there are large sheets of paper around the room. You also have a post – it note in your program. Here is what I want you to do with that, if you feel comfortable. Write down a time when God answered your prayer, big or small. Write down a time that God came through for you, whether you prayed for it or not. Maybe it was a new job, a raise, a child, acceptance to college, getting that car, that house, a friendship rekindled, I prayed really hard 2 years ago when the Steelers won the super bowl. Whatever it is.
Maybe you prayed for something and God didn’t answer the way you wanted him to, but you are able to now look back and see what God was up to. You are able to see what God did in you and others. Write that down.
Write it on that piece of paper and when you come up for communion, put them on the paper. You can put your name if you want or leave it anonymous.
We want to be able to see how God has answered the prayers of those in our community, because it will be a visual reminder of the power of God, which is what our next series is all about. So we will leave these papers up for a few weeks just to be reminded of how God has moved in our lives.
This is a good practice for your family or in your own life. Throughout the scriptures, when God did something somewhere, people built an altar so that when others passed by or they went by again, they would remember what God did. This will kind of be like that.
