Today we reach the end of The Letter of James. It has taken 13 sermons in all, and I have found it a great privilege and a very great challenge. James ends on the same note as he began. Please glance back to the beginning of the letter: ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything’ (James 1:2–4).
Now look at where we’re going to be tonight: ‘Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord’s coming … Brothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered’ (5:7a, 10). The Letter of James is a realistic, practical, gritty letter. That great heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, said of religion, “I don’t want no pie in the sky when I die; I want something real here on the ground while I’m still around.” James addresses reality here on the ground. It will be tough, he says. Human experience is always a mixture of sorrow and joy; and the Christian faith will not remove the sorrow. At times it may even increase it. But it will provide a reason for hope, a sense of purpose that will enable us to be patient in life, because it brings us into a relationship with the One Person who can make sense of it all: the God who made us all and who will judge us all. ‘Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him’ (1:12). That is James’ message to us: ‘In the trials and storms of life, persevere until you see the Lord, stick at it, work your faith out, look up, look on, be patient.’
Now, James always applies what he writes to the tongue. He knows that difficulties will make us misuse our tongues, maybe to grumble, maybe to swear. But the answer is not to bite our tongues. Silence, according to James, is not golden. The tongue is not to be silenced, it is to be harnessed.
In those verses at the end of chapter 5 he tells us: (a) Don’t grumble (v.9) – ‘Don’t grumble against each other, brothers, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door!’; but (b) Do witness (v. 10) – ‘Brothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.’ That’s what you and I are to do with our tongues, we’re to speak in the name of the Lord. We are to tell others about our faith, and to use our tongues for God. He says: (c) Don’t swear (v. 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’; but on the other hand, (d) Do Pray (vv. 13-20).
So there are 2 things we shouldn’t do with our tongues when we come under pressure: don’t grumble, don’t swear; and 2 things we should do with our tongues when under pressure: we should witness, and we should pray. So the letter ends with these eight verses (vv. 13-20) about prayer which will be our four headings: 1) Pray in all Circumstances; 2) Pray for each other; 3) Pray like Elijah ; 4) Pray for Souls.
1) Pray in all Circumstances (v. 13)
‘Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise’ (v. 13). Calvin commented, ‘There is no time in which God does not invite us to himself.’ As we know, sometimes it is easier to pray when we’re in trouble. That moment when you first survey an exam paper and realise that not one of the questions which you had expected or prepared for has appeared in recognisable form - it is a natural moment for prayer. The heart turns unbidden to Jeremiah 33:3, ‘Call upon me and I will tell you great and hidden things which you have not known.’ But it isn’t always so easy to turn to God in moments of unexpected triumph. We tend to take the credit to ourselves at those moments. But prayer is the Christian response to God’s providence whether good or bad.
Notice, from verse 13, that our singing is part of our praying: ‘Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.’ That’s why we need to think carefully about the words we sing. God is not honoured by meaningless mumbo-jumbo in our songs, or endless repetition, or out of date language that suggests to the outsider that God is ancient and irrelevant; or even by us singing half-truths or inaccuracies about Him. Here at St Andrew the Great we try to think very carefully about the words we sing in the services, and we try to make them fit what we know about God as closely as possible. Jonny, our Director of Music, showed me this last week some correspondence he’d had with the author of a particular song to whom we’d suggested an alteration to one of its lines. In fact a few years ago we got a letter back from the editor of one particular publishing house saying that God had given their authors the words of their songs, and so they shouldn’t ever be changed. I was tempted to write back to say that God might have given the authors their original words, but He’d given us the corrections. I didn’t, I may say!
Singing songs of praise is a wonderful foretaste of heaven; and so it should never be mindless. We need to ask ourselves as we sing, Do I mean this? Do I understand it? Do I want to sing it as often as this? It may be nice for my emotions to sing this, but does God want to hear it? Let’s be sure our singing is sincere and God-pleasing; and let’s bring all our circumstances to God: ‘Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise’ (v. 13).
While it may be easier sometimes to pray in hardship than in pleasure; in sickness there soon comes a moment when it can be very hard to pray at all. So James goes on to write of praying for each other.
2) Pray for each other (vv. 14-16)
‘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. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed’ (vv. 14-16a). We are going to keep those verses in the context of prayer, which is where they come, rather than trying to get them to answer questions about healing which we may want answered but which these verses are not primarily addressing.
Notice then first, we need others to pray for us when we are sick. All of us who have been seriously sick as Christians will know how true that is. There comes a moment when it is not possible to pray for ourselves. This happens at other times in life as well. The extremities of grief caused by bereavement or serious heartbreak are times when we need others to pray for us and with us, because at those moments we will find it very difficult to articulate our own prayers. And you may well have been there; and you may have been there recently.
And notice from verse 16 that where we’ve wronged a fellow Christian we will need to go to them and say sorry. We need to pray for each other in that context too.
Notice also how reluctant the Bible is to distinguish sharply between the physical and the spiritual here. We’re going to need to look closely at those verses: ‘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. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; [interestingly, the Greek there is ‘will save the sick person’] the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.’ Oil was a very common medicine in the ancient world, and the oil James refers to in verse 14 may have been for medical as much as for sacramental (religious) purposes, because James wouldn’t have distinguished between those two things. His age did not possess the mechanical understanding of the way medicine works which modern medical science has instilled into us. They treated an ill person holistically, as a single psychosomatic whole (body, mind and spirit). For them all healing was from God, and as Christians I think we need to recapture that perspective. Some people think that if we are asking God to heal an illness, it might be somehow unspiritual to use conventional medicine. The Bible does not encourage us to think that way. What verse 14 is telling us is that the Christian thing to do is to pray as you take the pills, or undergo the surgery, or start the course of radio-therapy. All healing is from God, and God uses means. When the sick King Hezekiah came to the prophet Isaiah about his illness, the prophet told the king to put a poultice on the boil he had and to go and seek the Lord.
But there is another distinction here, important for us, but which the Bible scarcely acknowledges. Look again at verses 15-16: ‘The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.’ It’s that distinction between sickness (which needs healing), and sin (which needs forgiving). Psalm 103 praises the God who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases. Jesus made it clear that physical infirmity is not necessarily a direct punishment for sin. An incident about a blind man in the early verses of John 9 makes that very clear to us. But these verses in James do suggest that illness should make us think of our spiritual state. Human rebellion against God is the theological origin of all pain, suffering and illness on this earth. So when we encounter them, they should remind us of that. The sickness of the soul is never out of sight in the Bible, and God tirelessly wants to remind us of our sin so that He can deal with that. We want to get rid of our migraine, or our cancer. We are a lot less keen to have our sins brought out into the open and forgiven – but it’s at that level that God wants to deal with us. And that is why He sends illness to us from time to time: not as a punishment because we’ve done things wrong, but to bring us closer to Himself. What is this telling me about my relationship with God? That is the question you and I ought to be asking ourselves every time we suffer in any way at all. Suffering is only on this earth because that relationship with God has gone wrong. When we encounter it we need to ask that question: What is this telling me about my relationship with God, my walk with Him at the moment? We need to learn to handle illness holistically.
The gospel alone can minister to the whole person, and so we can’t leave healing in the hands of the medical profession alone. It is the business of the Church – and notice from these verses it is the business of the whole Church. Not just the business of members with some special gift of healing or of faith who are to be called, it is the elders (v. 15), the local leadership, not the vicar alone. It’s the local, corporate leadership. But notice it is at the initiative of the sick man (v. 14). The elders don’t go out looking for people to heal, prowling around to see if they can spot someone in the congregation to heal. There is no mandate here for public healing services, interestingly enough.
Notice also the firm promise in verse 15 that God will act: ‘And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven’ (the prayer offered in faith is literally the prayer of faith). And faith, you will remember, is not measured by quantity in the Bible (it can be as small as a tiny mustard seed and still be perfectly effective). It is measured by quality – and the quality of faith is determined by what it is exercised in. Is it exercised in the true nature of God, or something less (our own ideas of what God should be like, and might be like)? The God who is great enough to forgive all sin and to heal all disease, is also too great to be understood by the human mind. And so a verse like verse 15 does not allow us to pray with a stubborn insistence that we know what is best for any individual, and that our will must be done. That is not exercising faith in God as He really is – greater than any of our imaginings. Prayer is a commitment to the will of God – that’s what the prayer of faith is. All true prayer exercises its truest faith in patiently waiting to see what God has determined to do. ‘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. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed’ (vv. 14-16a). God will save, rescue, redeem, heal, restore – but in His way and at His time. Faith knows that.
Let us pick up now at the end of verse 16: ‘The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective’ (v. 16b). And that leads us on to the next two verses about Elijah.
3) Pray like Elijah (vv. 16b – 18)
‘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. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops’ (vv. 17, 18). Now the ‘righteous man’ of verse 16 does not mean the specially holy person; it just means the believer. James is using it in that sense. Powerful and effective prayer, like Elijah’s, is possible for every believer, for Elijah himself was a man just like us (v. 17). We need to remember that Elijah was also the man who prayed that he might die at once at one time in his life. And that God answered that prayer not only by keeping him alive then, but also by seeing to it that he never died at all: because (if you know your Old Testament) you will know that he was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind!
Elijah knew the answer, ‘No’ to his prayers. He was like us. But notice also that in the case of the incident referred to here he prayed according to the Bible. There was a promise back in the book of Deuteronomy that if God’s People, the Israelites, in the promised land that God had given to them, forgot God and turned away from Him, He would stop the rain on which the land depended. Palestine is a land that depends on rain, unlike Egypt (from which they had come) which depends on the River Nile. Faced with his people deserting God wholescale, Elijah dared to claim what God had said in Deuteronomy chapter 28 verse 23: ‘The sky over your head will be bronze and the ground beneath your feet iron.’ He prayed down judgment on his own people because they were forsaking God. Lest they should begin to think that God was not a God of His word, he prayed, “God, you have said this. You must keep your word or these people will never take you seriously.” It was an awful prayer to pray when you think what three and a half years of drought would do in the ancient Near East. Elijah was praying that members of his family would die; that his friends would die. He nearly died himself, and would have done but for God’s miraculous intervention. That was how Elijah prayed. He prayed down God’s judgment on his own people because they were disobeying God.
To pray like Elijah is to plead with God that He will act according to His word, that He will do what He has said He will do, even as far as judgment. I wonder if you and I turn our Bible reading into prayer. I suspect most of us here in this building sometimes pray. I suspect rather fewer of us read our Bibles regularly. We pray because we want things from God and we want His help. But I wonder if we spend much of our prayer time asking God to do things that He has never promised that He would do for us. If we would read our Bibles with more care and attention we would find the things that He has said He will do, and we could pray with the same power that Elijah prayed with.
That is what it is to offer prayer in faith (as back in verse 15). Prayer shaped by what we know of the character and will of God as revealed to us by Him in His word.
God has not promised us material success. He has not promised us health; He has not promised us prosperity if we follow Him. He has promised spiritual blessing; a knowledge of His will; that you and I may be able to tell the difference between good and evil in our lives; that we may understand how we are meant to live on this earth; that we may understand what we are on this earth for in the first place. He has promised growth into the likeness of His Son Jesus. Elijah’s prayer may have worked a nature miracle, but don’t miss the point that it was all to do with spiritual concern. It was to do with people turning back to God. ‘The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.’
And so we come to the last two verses of the letter.
4) Pray for Souls (vv. 19, 20)
‘My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins’ (vv. 19, 20). It’s interesting that in such a practical and comparatively non-doctrinal book, as we’ve discovered this letter of James to be, that he ends on this note of wandering, or erring, from the truth. The whole letter has been about a belief that behaves. Abandon the belief, and the behaviour will soon stray all over the place. Notice that these verses come in the context of prayer. Another thing that we have discovered as we have made our way through this letter is that all the time we need to keep saying to ourselves, Why is James saying this here? and What’s the connection with what comes just before? We need to remember that the Bible establishes its own logic. Verses 19 and 20 are logically linked to what goes before because they follow what goes before, and we need to tease out what the lesson from that is for us. And I think therefore that prayer is still on James’ mind. This bringing back of a sinner from the error of his ways is a prayer task. It is something that we do in prayer.
Notice that it’s not about moral correction. You might think it was from verse 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.’ But it’s only at the Cross that people are saved from death and that sins are covered. Our loving concern for a brother or sister who’s going astray can’t forgive their sins or save them from death. Nor can their own moral reformation, the fact that they’ve turned from the things they are doing wrong. That can’t cover their sins. The death of Christ on the cross alone can do that: what Jesus did at Calvary – there’s no other place. So we need to pray for one another in the light of the Cross, and speak to one another about the Cross. We never get beyond that point in the Christian life: never beyond preaching the Cross and having the Cross preached to us.
And what a lovely note to end on! The note of sin covered. What are your sins and mine covered from? Not from you and me – we’re all too aware of them, aren’t we? Not from other people, they’re very aware of them, too. Who is sin covered from? It’s covered from God; He is the one who has said that for the sake of His Son Jesus He will forget sins, He will bury them, He will put them behind His back, He will remove them as far from us as the East is from the West.
Some of us will remember a wonderful luxury car called the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, one of the finest British cars ever made. One owner was touring a remote area of France when a rear half-shaft broke, and the local garage couldn’t cope with the repair. So the owner rang the Rolls Royce factory in Derby and explained the position and they agreed they would fly out a mechanic with a spare rear half-shaft and they would fit it on the spot. The man was able to continue his holiday and returned to the UK expecting to be met by an enormous bill. Nothing came. Eventually he wrote to Rolls Royce, and in due course he received this reply: ‘Dear Sir, Thank you for your enquiry concerning an invoice for the replacement of a rear half-shaft on a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. We have searched our records carefully and we can assure you that there is absolutely no record of the rear half-shaft ever having broken on any Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. Yours faithfully, …’
God keeps no record of our sin because He has covered them Himself and saved us from death. But at what cost, and what a price! And this is where this sermon is going to end and our Communion is going to begin. What a price He paid for that!
I stood once in a church building in South Africa where in a terrorist attack the congregation had been machine-gunned, and two hand grenades had been thrown in among them, leaving 12 people dead and 57 injured. You could still see the bullet marks in the ceiling and in the curtain behind the platform. One young man present had flung his body across the two girls sitting beside him, saving their lives while taking a fatal bullet in the head himself. What a cost! The person showing me the church building had himself been involved in leading the service on that fateful day. He said the most shocking thing for him was the sheer volume of human blood on the floor of the building afterwards. He said it was in pools inches deep.
You know there has been a cost when blood has been shed, don’t you? But what about the blood of God’s own Son?
That’s where this letter of James ends. It ends with the covering of sin, at that stupendous cost. It has the same message for us as our Communion Service now: it says, be patient, persevere, wait for the Lord, because He has shed His blood for you, in order that you may be with Him for ever. That’s what covers our sins, and that’s what tells us that it’s worth going on in the Christian life, because that is how much God loves us.
So be patient until you see Him. Amen.