Morning. We have a lot to cover this morning. This last passage in James, where we wrap up the book before going on into our next series titled, Grace Made Visible is very dense and extremely difficult. In fact, although it is not a departure from the rest of the book, this last portion of the Book of James makes you feel like you have a billion miles left to go before you ever really make any progress toward God. Heres what Im saying: it doesnt matter if youre 10, 20, 30, 40, or 110 years old, the next seven verses will unveil to us the truth of what it takes to follow Jesus. Lets go to James 5:13-20.
13?Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him?sing praise.?14?Is 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.?15?And 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.?16?Therefore,?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.?17?Elijah 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.?18?Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. 19?My brothers,?if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone?brings him back,?20?let 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 5:13-20)
Im sure youve all heard this saying, Pray Until Something Happens. Like in the 90s, all Christians were wearing bracelets with the acronym PUSH on their wrists. It was the hip counterculture of Christianity that became the battle cry of a generation of over privileged young people to obtain something they wanted. In reality, this movement started as a call for Y2K to bring Jesus back to the Earth for the rapture and the second coming because we, in western Christianity, believed that all of the ends of the earth was evangelized. So we knew about Muslims, but didnt really know that there were that many out there. We knew about the Buddhists, but didnt think there were so many of those. We actually knew that most of Europe was atheist, but gave up on most of that continent. Regardless of the cultural relevance of the battle cry, this passage has nothing to do with that and everything to do with it.
Verse 13: Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him?sing praise.?James is not saying pray until something happens. He is actually saying that if youre suffering, and if youre alive you are suffering, then you need pray until you pray. What? Yeah, I plagiarized that from a Puritan writer. What that means is as life gets tough, you just start to increase in our prayerfulness. Trust me, if your life is anything at all, then life is pretty tough and as such, you need to pray. You need to grow hungry to pray until there is a revival in your life. So you and I pray until all we want to do is pray about our circumstances.
Now, heres the second part of that verse because James captures all types of life here. If your life is actually quite cheerful because you have nice things in your life and its not that hard, then you need to sing praise. This is interesting because singing praise is just prayer put to music. Just think about when we sing praise songs on Sunday mornings. Havent you noticed that very often we will say, just think about the words. When we are singing songs on Sunday, we are not singing them because we all have the voice of Adele. No, were singing the words on the screen as praise to God because those words reflect a prayer that resonates within our souls that we long to proclaim to God. This is what praise is; prayer put to music. So here we have in the very first verse the reason why whenever we read James we feel like were not really living up to our calling in Christ. We dont pray until we pray and when we do, we dont sing praise in our lives when were cheerful. In fact, we only seem to pray enough to say that weve prayed like were checking off a box somewhere on a survey.
Moreover, it appears that when we are cheerful, we forget so quickly about God who provided for us so that we could be cheerful. Undoubtedly it is my prayer for all of you to sing praise often in your life, but I also pray that you pray until you pray. pray until you pray means spending the time and effort to open up and reach out to God. It means making a connection. If you call someone, but the call doesnt go through because of low reception, can you say you talked to the person? Of course not. The call dropped before the other side could answer. Its not just about the time you spend praying, either. There are many who put a great deal of time but so little heart into their praying that they do very little praying in the long time they spend at it, says R. A. Torrey in “The Power of Prayer.”On the other hand, there are others who may not put so much time into praying but put so much heart into praying that they accomplish vastly more by their praying in a short time than the others accomplish by praying in a long time. So heres the situation: pray like you mean it.
Dont go ring Gods door bell and then run off. At the same time, dont deliver a meaningless speech for an hour to impress your Bible study group or to fulfill some strange prayer minutes quota. Pray from your heart and wait for God to pick up. On this very last Sunday of May 2016, I want you all to pray that our lives would be marked by singing so that we can celebrate the salvation of Jesus Christ and the redemption we have through Jesus in our everyday lives. What Im saying if you didnt catch my not so subtle pretext is that I am praying for your life to be filled with cheerful things so that I can hear you sing praise to God about your life. This is what we need to do. Pray until we praise. Now that youve heard my outline and the whole point of the message this morning I want to go to verse 14, because I know what Ive said until now is all good, in theory, but how and why does it play out?
14 Is 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. 15 And 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. 16 Therefore, 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. (James 5:14-16)
The reason we pray is because we have some type of suffering in our lives. So here James lists the various types of suffering and subsequently the types of praying styles and methods that we should employ to help us pray until we praise. First thing is in different times and different seasons, seek out people to pray with. If you want to call it prayer partners or something like that Just, I want to pray with people. I learn from them, and I pray more fervently when I’m with others who will agree with me in prayer. If you want to grow in prayer, maybe you gather with somebody to pray. Thats right, call the elders in verse 14 it says. Secondly, get around people who do pray, thats verse 15.
Arent people of faith people who do pray? Is this not the way you learn everything else? Just get around those who are better than you, not better than you in the spiritual sense, not varsity, but they just have more experience. They’ve been at it longer. Just get around them. Third, this comes from 15b through 16. Mingle praise, confession, and intercession, and tie as much of it as you can back to the Scriptures. Here’s what Tim Keller says on prayer. “We would never produce the full range of biblical prayer if we were initiating prayer according to our own inner needs and psychology. It can only be produced if we are responding in prayer according to who God is as revealed in the Scripture . We must not decide how to pray based on what types of prayer are the most effective for producing the experiences and feelings we want. We pray in response to God himself. The prayers in the Bible they are written by the only one who can be called righteous, that is God, himself. We need pray this way until were singing praises to God about our circumstance in life. I think the puritans were on to something because they know prayer leads to more prayer and that we have to ask God for prayer because that prayer becomes praise when we have the opportunity.
So we look at Elijah, who James says is no better than you or me, except that he was able to pray the prayer of the righteous person. I want to believe that based on what James is saying, Elijah was just having a conversation with God about the things God is telling him and showing him in his life. The only way to do this is through scripture. That is the only way it is possible for somebody to pray for no rain and get no rain. Likewise, it is only when youre in sync with God that you can ask God for rain in your suffering and get rain. Lastly, I want you to see verse 19 and 20 in context of what we just talked about in terms of prayer. Have you ever wondered why some of us are saved by Gods grace but others arent? Like, why hasnt God touched their lives like He touched ours? Its simple. Its because we havent been praying until they pray. Lets look at verse 19.
19My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, 20 let 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 5:19-20)
There is nothing that you can do to bring somebody back because you and I dont have that power, only Jesus does. So why in the world, if James knew this, would he tell us to bring back somebody to the truth? Moreover, why would he say that the person who brings back the sinner from wandering will cover a multitude of sins? Its simple, its because he knows that people around us desperately want Jesus in their lives but nobody is praying for them. Nobody is praying the prayer that needs to be prayed so that Jesus would save them. Are all your friends Christians, and I mean stellar Christians, like they are locked and loaded Christians that just unceasingly follow Christ? I dont think so. I know most of our friends will claim Christianity, fewer of them will actual claim the name of Jesus; but for the most part, even we, on some days would not overtly claim Christ, so how in the world do we expect our friends to do so?
Well, our goal, our priority, the way we take the book of James and functionality apply it is by praying until our friends praise. Jesus saves us so that we can sing praise to God and glorify God with our lives. The best way to glorify God in our lives is to pray. It is the pray like it is our job. It is to pray through every situation and circumstance that even in our cheerfulness our singing is praying in the form of praise. Let 2016 be full of prayer and praise here in the church. I believe that when we do pray until we pray, great voices and singing of praise will occur in our lives and in the lives of our friends and family. Lets pray. Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. Great is our Lord, and greatly to be praised because his greatness is unsearchable. Let us speak of your wondrous works and help us meditate on your awesome deeds as we push hard to praise you.
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