1. Corporate confession
2. Corporate prayer
I saw a sports headline a couple of weeks ago that really surprised me. It turns out that one of the freshmen for the University of Tennessee’s football team got into some trouble with the law. That’s not really the surprising part. It seems that Tennessee has players in trouble with the law all the time. At least WVU players wait till they get into the NFL before they make national headlines. So that wasn’t surprising with Tennessee. What was surprising was the article. The article was making a big deal about Coach Phil Fulmer punishing the entire team for it. He made the entire team get up at 5:00 and run. What’s surprising to me is that the writer seemed surprised. We live in a different day today, don’t we? A day when that kind of corporate punishment is considered unfair. I remember early on in basic training. We were getting ready to have our first inspection on our wall locker. It was a big deal because if you didn’t pass it, you couldn’t get a patio break. Patio breaks were the only time you could go outside and eat candy bars and make phone calls, so they were a big deal. But I remember how ready I was for this inspection. I had everything in my locker perfect. And then came time for the inspection. The sergeant looked in my locker for what seemed like an eternity. Then he stared real close at me. And then he moved on to my neighbor’s locker. I was safe—I had passed. Everything WAS perfect. But my neighbor’s wasn’t. I was sure glad that wasn’t me. He was ripping into him about how awful his locker looked. And then something wonderfully unexpected happened. He started bragging on my locker. He said something like, “How can such an awful locker be next to such a perfect one?” And then he surprised me again. He came back to my locker and threw everything out onto my bunk and onto the floor. And here’s what he said to my neighbor—as he was staring at me, “This time, you need to watch him. Apparently he only knows how to get things right for himself.” By the way, I got to put both of our lockers together while he was on his patio break. How unfair! Mine was right and his was wrong. So why did I have to bear the burden of his bad locker? Well, it seems obvious now. He was teaching us that we were a team. He was teaching us that when one of us stumbles or struggles, it affected us all. And the only way to overcome that is for those who aren’t struggling to come to the aid of those who are. Togetherness, teamwork, camaraderie, unity—whatever you want to call it. That was the lesson. We were no longer a group of individuals. We were a unit—a corporate body. Oh, that we as a church would learn that lesson. But here’s the difference. In the military or on a ball team—those are just made-up teams. They are corporate bodies only in the sense of temporarily uniting for a temporary cause. But the church is radically different than that kind of unity. Because the church IS a corporate body. 1 Corinthians 12:12-13 says, “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.” And on down in verse 27, God’s Word says; “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.” As this local church called Brushfork Baptist Church, we are members of Christ’s body. We’re not just some type of made-up team. We are a corporate body because we are Christ’s body and He is our head. So, doesn’t it stand to reason that we have a corporate responsibility to those among us who are going through affliction? Not just one or two among us, but all of us—unified, corporate. Just like the ball team that runs as a team because one of their teammates has stumbled, we have a corporate responsibility. In our passage this morning, we are in the middle of James’ final test of faith—the affliction test. Last week we saw our individual responsibility. We saw what each of us as individuals have to do to pass the affliction tests that come our way. But that’s not where it ends. Because God didn’t save us in isolation. Salvation isn’t solitary confinement. He saved us into a corporate body—the body of His Son. This body called the church. And as a saved part of this corporate body of Christ, we have a responsibility toward those among us who are going through affliction. We have a responsibility to get each other to pass the affliction test. The affliction test isn’t just an individual test. It’s a corporate test also. One person can’t pass unless the whole body passes. And the body can’t pass unless each of us passes. I want us as a church to pass the affliction test this morning. I want us to pass it by helping the afflicted among us pass their individual tests. And here’s how we’re going to do it. We’re going to do it by confessing and praying. The first step to corporately passing the affliction test is corporate confessing. We have to look at verse 15 and the first part of verse 16, so let’s read that.
JAMES 5:15-16a
Corporate confession. We need to back up here to get some context to what we’re learning here. What is the objective here? What are we trying to accomplish here in verse 16? “That ye may be healed.” That seems simple enough. The objective of what we’re trying to do is to be healed of the affliction that we’re going through. Think back to last week. The picture starting back in verse 13 is set with a question. James asks the rhetorical question, “Is any among you afflicted?” Then in verse 14 he asks the parallel question, “Is any sick among you?” In those verses, he is clearly speaking to the individual person’s responsibility when they’re experiencing affliction. Whether physical, emotional, spiritual—it doesn’t really matter. The individual response is the same. If you are experiencing severe personal affliction, your responsibility is to first pray. But that’s not all. You are to also call on a spiritually mature, godly Christian in the church to come along side you. They will pray with you and encourage you and support you. Praying and calling is your individual responsibility. Verse 15 transitions from the individual responsibility to the corporate responsibility. Notice that the prayer of faith is what does the saving here. Not the elders, not the church body as a whole. It is the work of the Lord. It is unfortunate that the words of translation have narrowed our picture of what this passage is talking about. Sick isn’t just physical sickness. It is affliction of all kinds. And many times it has a special connotation of sin-sickness rather than physical sickness. So, in reality, the sickness spoken of includes everything from persecution, to affliction, to actual sickness, to sin-sickness. And it only makes sense that if the sickness is that broad, so is the healing. It includes everything from physical healing of persecution beatings to spiritual healing of committed sin. That’s where the confessed and forgiven sins come into play. Scripture clearly teaches in 1 John 1:9 that, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” God is the only One who can forgive sins. And He only forgives sins through the blood of His Son Jesus Christ. Acts 4:12 says, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” Sins are only forgiven by the Father through the blood of the Son. But, verse 15 is saying that God works through the contrite, humble prayers of the afflicted to draw them to Him. It is through these humble, contrite prayers that we realize how helpless we are to deal with things on our own. And it is only through that kind of prayer that God will forgive sin through the blood of Christ. That kind of prayer raises up. That kind of prayer forgives sin. That kind of prayer restores unity and fellowship in the body of Christ. And that’s where the transition in the passage is. The transition from individual responsibility to corporate responsibility. Seeing the contrite, humble condition of one who is petitioning God in the face of affliction should drive the church to contrition as well. When one among us is suffering, we don’t know the reason why. It could be something they brought on themselves. It could be personal sin. But it could be something that had nothing to do with that. Like the blind man the disciples asked Jesus about. They asked Jesus if his blindness was caused by his sins or his parents. But what did Jesus say in John 9:3? “Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” When we see one among us suffering affliction, it should drive us to ask a question similar to what the disciples asked. We should ask, “Lord, do we have sin among us that is causing this affliction?” That almost sounds foreign to us, doesn’t it? How could our corporate sin bring affliction upon an individual in the church? Because we’re a body. The cancer of sin doesn’t care which part of the body displays the symptoms. That’s why we’re told to confess our faults one to another. Not as some sort of sordid gossip session. It’s not about publicly listing our personal sins and airing them out in front of everybody. It’s about being accountable to each other. And it’s about holding each other accountable. If you see your brother or sister engaging in sin, you need to confront them. And that won’t be easy. Do it in love and still expect to face their wrath. When you think about it, disease treatment isn’t easy either, is it? But it’s necessary. If you want to pass the affliction test, you have to pass it individually and corporately. And if you want to pass it corporately, the first step is corporate confession. The second step is corporate prayer. Let’s read all of verse 16 this time.
JAMES 5:16-18
Corporate prayer. Once again, this is a command for the whole body. When we have someone in our midst who is going through affliction, we are commanded to corporately pray for them. Now, how do we pray for them? Well, remember that James is a pastor. And as a pastor, he always knows how to give a good illustration when it’s necessary. So that’s what he does here. He gives us the illustration of Elijah from 1 Kings 17-18. Our verse in James describes Elijah as a man “subject to like passions as we are.” Do you know what that means? It means he was human just like us. They didn’t have comic book heroes like Superman and Batman back in James’ day. But what the Jews and Jewish Christians did, was to make heroes of the men of the Old Testament. That was great except for the fact that they tended to look at them the same way we look a Superman. They were mythical, superhuman people. James refutes that. He says that Elijah was just an ordinary man who happened to have an extraordinary call. Or should I say an extraordinary burden. He was a prophet in Israel during a time when it seemed as if everybody else in the nation worshipped other gods. Including King Ahab and his wife Jezebel. So, in the face of that kind of affliction, what did Elijah do? He prayed. But he didn’t pray that everything would go well for Israel in order for them to turn to God. He prayed that it would stop raining. And it did—for three and ½ years. As you go through 1 Kings 17-18, you can see that lack of rain only brought a very few opportunities to Elijah. But it mostly brought him much personal hardship. He had to get food from ravens and water from the trickle of a stream. When that ran out, he had to depend on the faith of a poor widow woman. Elijah’s effectual fervent prayer didn’t make life easy for him. That’s not what it was designed for. It was designed for the benefit of the whole nation. It was designed to show God’s power and glory to Israel so they would turn back to Him. And, for an ever so brief moment in their history, that’s what it did. You know the story of what happened on Mount Carmel. Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to see whose God could consume the offering. The prophets of Baal spent all day crying out to their gods—even to the point of drawing their own blood to try and get a response. But there was no response. Then it was Elijah’s turn. He rebuilt the altar of the Lord and placed the sacrifice on it according to the requirements of the Law. And then he soaked it with water—three times. What a waste of water in a time of drought! And then he prayed. This is his prayer in 1 Kings 18:36-37: “And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O LORD, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the LORD God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.” A simple, two sentence prayer. And look what happened in verses 38-39: “Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God.” God was glorified. The name of God was lifted up in the midst of Israel. And immediately after that, Elijah prayed that God would bring back the rain. And He did. James tells us that when we go through periods of affliction, we are to pray. We’re to pray individually when we’re the one going through affliction. And we’re to pray corporately as a body when one of our members is going through affliction. And then he uses the effectual fervent example of the righteous man Elijah to tell us how. Elijah prayed, not for his personal comfort. He prayed that God would be magnified, no matter what. And guess what? God was magnified.
How do you handle your personal affliction? Do you see it as an opportunity to focus in only on yourself and your wants and needs? Or do you see it as an opportunity to pray that God be magnified and glorified in your affliction? Church body, how do we see the affliction of one of our members? Do we see it only as their problem—it’s a shame, but it doesn’t really affect me that much. Do we see their affliction only as an interruption to the easy life that God’s supposed to give us? Like some sort of inconvenience? Or do we see it for what it can be. Do we see affliction the way that Elijah did? Do we see it as a way that God’s glory can be magnified through our lives—individually and corporately. The only way for each of us to pass the affliction test when it comes is to do it individually and corporately. God gave us each other because we need each other. We need each other just like one part of our human body needs the other parts. That’s why it should break our hearts when we see these pews anything less than full. We need each other. We need each other for accountability. And we need each other for prayer. And when we do those things, all the false prophets of the world will fall before us. Why? Because when we hold each other accountable and pray for each other, God is glorified. The name of Jesus is lifted up before a watching world. Are you going through a time of affliction this morning? If you are, now is the time you need to pray. Because of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ—if you know Him as your Lord and Savior—you have a mediator. He is your high priest who will carry your prayers to the Father and allow you to boldly approach His throne of grace. He is the One who will make your prayers fervent and effectual. Because if you’re saved, it is only His righteousness that makes you righteous. It is only His Spirit that makes you fervent. It is only His blood that makes you effectual. As we sing the hymn of invitation in just a moment, if you are experiencing affliction—I encourage you to come to the altar and pray. And as you do, I encourage your brothers and sisters in Christ to come and pray with you. Is any among you afflicted? The prayer of faith shall save the sick—the physically sick, the spiritually sick, the sin-sick and the afflicted—and the Lord shall raise him up.
