James 5:12-16 Oct. 3, 1999
Living in Expectation of the Return of Jesus
Reacting to Life’s ups and downs
Main Thought: Whatever situation you are in – good, bad, or somewhere in between – you will only find what you’re looking for when you bring that situation to God.
INTRODUCTION
The verses that we are going to look at this morning are found in James 5:11-16. Please turn there, and let’s read those verses [read passage] I have struggled a great deal this week over how to present this portion of the Bible to you today. I studied the passage, I looked up many verses that talk about subjects that are spoken of in this passage, I looked in some different books to see what different authors had to say about the passage, I even called another pastor friend of mine to get some wisdom on what the passage means. From each source of information, I gained a little bit more wisdom, but I still don’t feel that I have all the answers as to how to accurately and once-and-for-all interpret and apply everything that is spoken of in these verses. There are some passages in the Bible that as a pastor, you wish that you could just skip over. Some pastors do skip passages because they don’t want to create controversy and don’t want to ruffle any feathers. That would be the easy way out though, and I’m not one who likes to take the easy way out when it comes to the Bible. It would be easy too to interpret this passage as many of the churches right here in Bridgeport and Clarksburg would. They would take it to mean that anyone who desires healing from any ailment, small or great, just needs to come before the church for the pastor to anoint them with oil, and that they will be healed. That would make me very popular to most people. We could put up on our sign “Healing services to be conducted on Sunday”, and we would have to put out all those extra chairs that we have on the back porch because there would be so many people here either desiring healing or wanting to see a healing happen. But I don’t believe that this kind of practice would fit with the teaching of the passage.
I debated too with the idea of doing two separate sermons on this passage. On one Sunday, I considered doing a sermon on what this passage means theologically. By theology, I mean simply that we would discuss what the passage says and means. Theology is what I believe about God and His world. We would take it apart piece by piece much like what we have been doing with the book of Genesis on Sunday nights. Then on the next Sunday, we would consider the same passage and see what it says to us practically. And by practically, I mean something that I can use in my everyday life. But then I reasoned that a theological message would be a message for your mind, and most people receive little encouragement from a message for the mind. A message that is solely theological in nature is something that is reserved for the classroom. Besides, it’s awfully hard to separate theology from practical living. My theology, my belief system, tells me that God is holy and that I am sinful. The way that that works itself out in my practical life is that I better get forgiveness for my sins and purification from my sins if I hope to live in the presence of a holy God for all eternity. What I believe about God and His world has an awful lot to do with how I live my life. Because of that, we will look this morning both at what the passage means – its theology – and how it applies in my life today – its practicality or application.
As we go through this passage, and once we conclude this morning, it would be easy for you to think that we are talking about healing as our main subject. In fact, tomorrow morning, when you go to work, a Christian friend may ask what you talked about in your service yesterday. The temptation will be to say that we talked about healing. But if you answer that way, you will only be partially correct, and you will have missed the more important point of this passage. As you listen today, and when you leave, here’s the main idea that I want you to consider: Whatever situation you are in – good, bad, or somewhere in between – you will only find what you’re looking for when you bring that situation to God. The natural way for us to deal with life’s situations, whether good or bad, is to deal with them on our own. James wants us to get in the habit of making our relationship with God something that is so intertwined in our lives that whatever happens on a daily basis, we talk to God about it first just like we would our best friend or our spouse.
1. The correct response to the good times is to praise the Lord. “Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing psalms”
- How do you respond when things are good? – Go shopping, have a party, go out to dinner, take the credit “What a smart guy I am!”
- “I don’t know what to say.” Psalms > pray the Psalms back to God [read one of the last 5 Psalms]
- Psalm 98:4-6 “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!”; NOT AN OPTION – A COMMAND!
- Sing in the shower where it drowns you out
- Ephesians 5:19; Col. 3:16
- Paul and Silas in jail (Acts 16:25-34)
2. The correct response to the bad times is to pray to the Lord. ”Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.”
a. Keep a good attitude “do not swear”
- talked about suffering last week
- what did Job’s wife say for him to do when her 10 children were killed in a freak tornado? “Curse God, and die!” She got mad at God.
- Mt. 5:34-37 > context there is that swearing by anything is the equivalent to taking God’s name in vain because God made and owns everything and that swearing can’t change anything anyway. If I swear on my mother’s grave, I’ve created two problems for myself. One, my mother isn’t dead, so she doesn’t have a grave. 2nd, what do I expect to happen if what I swear to doesn’’t come true? Is my mother going to come out of the grave that she doesn’t have yet and haunt me for the rest of my life?
- Swearing doesn’t add anymore confidence to a liar’s words, nor does it make the pain of suffering go away. All that it can do is show the attitude of your heart. I can accept the suffering that God allows into my life and let it work on me to accomplish what God is trying to do, or I can reject it and get mad at God and my circumstances.
- Little boy was watching the pastor of a small country church one day as he was doing some repair work on the outside of the church. All day long, the young boy sat there and intently watched the pastor hammer and paint. The pastor thought that the boy was admiring the level of skill with which the pastor was handling the job that he was doing. “That boy must be stunned that I can do more than just get up in the pulpit and talk a lot on Sunday morning”, thought the pastor. At the end of the day, the pastor went to the little boy and asked him why he had been watching him all day. The boy answered, “Oh, I was just trying to see what a preacher says when he hits his thumb instead of hitting the nail.”
- “Why talk about this? I don’t have a problem with this.” If the pressure is great enough, you never know what might come out of your mouth.
- Keep a good attitude toward the circumstances that you face. It’s awfully hard to pray to God when you are mad at Him.
b. Seek the prayers of others. “Call the elders”
Heal the sick
- “Call” > initiated by sick person not some healer
- “elders” > older men in the church; maturity in faith and emotions; proved themselves; prayer warriors
- “elders” > more than just one person; no one person is tempted to take the glory or that something special happened through their own abilities or spirituality; validates the actual occurrence
- “of the church” > this is a function of the church, not of the world or some other religious organization
- “pray” > not touch a cloth, or accept money
- “anointing with oil” > symbolic of the presence of the Holy Spirit; THERE IS NO POWER IN THE OIL! IT IS NOT MAGIC!
- “in the name of the Lord” > doing it in the place of Jesus and in His power; not in the name of the healer – all the glory goes to Jesus not to a person
- “prayer of faith” > medical science is learning the value of faith in bringing healing in person’s bodies. They are discovering that person’s who pray and believe in God recover from surgery much faster than persons who do not. They are trying to find some medical reason for this (i.e. faith releases certain hormones in your body that aid healing.)
What is the focus of this faith? The elders of the church? NO! Faith that I will get well? NO! The healers of today say that if you do not receive healing from one of their services, it is your fault because you did not have enough faith. The focus of the faith is in God! When I come to Him, I must believe that He exists, that He loves me, and that He is able to heal me. But my faith must be even greater than that. My faith needs to be to the point that whether or not God chooses to heal me, I will still faithfully serve Him. I won’t let God’s action or inaction shake my faith in the fact that He is God and that He loves me.
- “the sick” > Paul is talking here, I believe, about life-threatening illnesses. He’s not talking about migraine headaches, or hurt knees, or kidney stones. There are a couple of reasons that I say this. For one, in I Tim 5:23, Paul prescribes a course of treatment for stomach ailments that he was having. He did not tell him to go to the elders and seek healing; he told him to drink a little wine. The second reason is because of the next phrase of verse 15.
- “the Lord will raise Him up” > almost every time that raising someone up is spoken of in the New Testament, it’s talking about raising someone from the dead or rescuing someone from a situation in which they were about to face death.
- “If he has sinned” > the popular notion in Jesus’ day and in centuries prior to Jesus was that all suffering was a result of sin. When Jesus and his disciples encountered a man born blind, his disciples asked whose sin had caused this man’s blindness. Had the man sinned, or had his parents? Jesus replied that the blindness was not as a result of sin but an opportunity for God to receive glory to Himself. And in Job’s case, 3 men came to minister to Job but ended up accusing him of gross sin. They reasoned that only someone who was living in rebellion against God could be made to endure such suffering. In our day, suffering is equated with sin in a person’s life or an attack of Satan. Some personal sicknesses are a result of personal sin. As we have seen in Genesis, all sickness and death entered the world as a result of the original sin of Adam and Eve. So all sickness is a result of sin, but only some of my sicknesses are a result of my sin. And then too, Some sicknesses are a result of Satan’s attack on a person, but not all sicknesses are. If they were, Paul would have told Timothy to pray to alleviate his suffering rather than to change his diet to alleviate his suffering.
- “he will be forgiven” > the promise of God is that when we come to God and confess our own sinfulness, we will be forgiven (I John 1:9). On a day in the life of Jesus, four men brought a paralyzed friend to the foot of Jesus. The man was seeking for healing, but Jesus knew that his greater need was to receive forgiveness. So Jesus gave him forgiveness of his sins, and as icing on the cake and to prove that He alone had the power to actually perform whatever He said, He healed the man of his paralysis and sent him on his way.
Much that is done today in the name of the Lord to bring healing to people is not done according to biblical principles and is therefore a sham and ungodly. Just the other day, I heard of someone whose wife was experiencing a migraine headache and so he, the husband, anointed her with oil in the anticipation that God would take it away. That’s not biblical!
Is this promise here “the prayer of faith will save the sick” a blanket promise to all persons who are saved that they can receive healing from their life-threatening diseases? If that’s the case, then we could at the end of this service have all the persons here who are facing cancer or any other life-threatening disease come forward so that we could pray over them, and they could receive healing. I don’t believe that it is a blanket promise in the sense that you can receive healing by following this magic formula. But in another sense, it is a promise to us. All who place their faith in Jesus as their Savior and pray to Him in faith will receive complete healing when the ultimate healer comes upon them at death.
The point of what James is saying here is not to give us a way to get healing for all that ails us. The point is to tell us that the proper way to respond to sickness and other forms of suffering in our life is to pray to God about it and to seek others to pray with and for us. Pray and ask God if the suffering that you are going through is because of sin in your life. Ask Him what He is trying to teach you through the suffering. And ask for His strength that you might remain faithful to Him even through the midst of the suffering.
c. Make yourself accountable to others. “Confess your faults”
- back behind this door to my left, we are getting closer to completing work on two small rooms. But these rooms are not going to be confession booths. They are going to be bathrooms. James is not talking about establishing confessionals where people come to confess their sins to the priest. I don’t think either that he is saying that we have to get up in front of the church and confess before everyone all the sins that we have committed over the past week. You think we go long now – just see what time we would get out of here every Sunday if we spent our time confessing our sins.
- I heard of a young, married college student who thought that it was his responsibility to confess his sins to others. So he went to a female student in one of his classes and confessed to her that he had been having lustful thoughts about her. She then confessed to him that she had been having lustful thoughts about him. He ended up leaving his wife and living with this girl. What is James saying that we should be doing?
- “confess your faults” > your Bible might say “offenses, trespasses, sins”. Every year, our government crash tests hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars. They do this to find out where the stress points are on those cars. Where are they going to break when put under stress. If they find out that a car has a stress point where the gas tank is located, they know that that car is dangerous. When in an accident, it may explode because of the impact of another car. Think of yourself as having stress points. God puts you under a heavy load so that you can find out where your stress points are. Each of us has different stress points that will give way when the stress of our load gets too heavy to bear. When you get under financial pressure, your stress point may be that you are tempted to steal. There are some people in churches who should not be counters of the offering because they know that when put under financial stress, they are susceptible to taking money when it is available. Or maybe you steal from the gov’t when the taxes come due, or from the Lord by not giving Him what He requires. Or maybe your stress point has to do with alcohol, or with gambling, or with your language, or with sexual desires. You know what your weakness is – that thing that you can say “no” to when things are going well, but which seems to get the victory when you are tired and under stress. James says that you need to take that weakness and confess it to someone that you can trust. You establish a spirit of accountability with that person. You allow them to ask you the hard questions: “Have you been tempted to drink today? Have you had lustful thoughts today?” Now once someone shares that information with you, what do you do with it? Do you judge them? Do you gossip about it?
- “Pray for one another” > take that brother or sister in Christ, and you pray with them over the weakness that they have shared. You battle this thing together because neither of you is strong enough to battle it on your own.
- “you may be healed” > it does NOT say, “that you may be forgiven”. Confession of faults to another person cannot provide forgiveness. But it can aid in the process of healing and victory in your life.
d. Focus on someone other than yourself. “Pray for one another”
- prayer chain
- personal prayer list
- song that Tammy sang “Thank you for Praying”
- as bad as your situation might be, you can always find someone who is worse off than you are
- it is easy to fall into self-pity; turn your focus away from your problems
- binds you in love for one another
- whatever you sow is what you are going to reap > as you pray for others, there is probably someone praying for you
e. Never give up on God. “prayer is powerful and effective”
- “righteous man” > does that mean that I have to be perfectly sinless before my prayers will become powerful? When the Bible talks about someone being “righteous”, it is referring to someone who is in right standing with God. Someone who has received forgiveness from their sins because they have placed their faith in Jesus. The Bible refers to Abraham as a righteous man even though he lied and got outside of God’s will. In II Peter 2:8, Peter refers to Lot as righteous even though he lived and did business in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha. All who have Jesus as their Savior have direct access to God through Jesus.
- James calls our prayers “powerful and effective”. As a teacher of mine used to say, “Prayer changes things”. It may not always change things so that they are the way that we want them to be, but nothing will stay the same. Prayer, you see, is more about changing me than it is about changing my circumstances. In prayer, I learn dependence on God. I learn humility before God. I learn acceptance of God’s plan for my life. I learn to love other people. I am changed into what God wants me to be.
- Which is the more powerful result of prayer – for me to receive healing from my sickness today even though I’m going to get sick again in the near future or for me to receive a change in my character that lasts forever?
- When you are going through suffering, and when your prayers seem to get you no change in your situation no matter how much you get on your knees before God, don’t stop praying. God is working. He just may be working in a different way than we expect.
CONCLUSION
It would thrill me to no end to be able to provide healing for every disease and ailment that is represented in this room today. I don’t think that this is what God is offering us here today. But what He is offering us is a way to deal with the ups and downs of our everyday life. He says, when you are experiencing good times, and you are experiencing the joy of the Lord, then you sing from the bottom of your heart. Doesn’t matter if you can’t carry a tune – just sing! And then when times are tough, don’t get mad at God but turn to God. Pray to Him. Find out what He is doing in your life. Allow Him to have His way. Keep your focus on Him rather than focusing on alleviating your suffering.
Though I cannot offer a blanket promise of physical healing here this morning, I can offer a blanket promise of spiritual healing. As important as it is to bring physical health to your body, spiritual health is far more important. Physical health will last for a limited time. All of us must one day die. That is why we need spiritual health. Once I get my heart right before God by receiving His forgiveness, that will last forever. That will never change.
I can’t put an offer for physical healing out on that marqui, but I can put an offer for forgiveness out there. God freely offers forgiveness to all who will come to Him. But a marqui about forgiveness would not draw near as many people as a marqui about healing. Forgiveness requires that I admit my own sinfulness before God. Most men and women aren’t willing to do that. Are you?
