Well, we are continuing this morning in our series through the book of James.
And what we've seen is that James, the brother of Jesus, has given us seven more verses of strange, blunt, and interesting verses.
We've seen that this book is hard.
It's challenging, it's blunt, the grammar's weird, it doesn't flow beautifully.
But James is coming at us with a big underlying assumption throughout the whole book, chapters one through five, that we are beloved sons and daughters of Jesus.
Not because we hold it all together, not because we never doubt, not because we pray really well, but fully 100% in the finished work of the Son of God.
And that's the assumption that James goes at this book with.
In the book of James, we've seen it's really about the practical outworkings of the faith, which basically means if somebody is born of the Spirit, born again, blocked by the blood of Jesus, what will their life look like?
That's kind of the thing he's aiming at.
And as James closes this book, written to believers, what is his main driving force?
Well, it's built out of last week's sermon that Russ hit on that we are awaiting the coming of the Lord.
We are waiting for the return of Jesus.
And as we do that, how do we make sense of this life?
James knows life's gonna hurt.
You're going to go through trials, you're going to suffer.
And in that it's going to be tempting to doubt God's goodness.
In that it's going to be tempting to doubt that God even exists.
And James says, I get it.
But he says, Establish your hearts, not in your safety, not in your comfort, but in that the God of creation loves you and has not forsaken you and is coming back.
And one day, when he comes back, all sad things will be untrue, all hard things will be made right, and all of your tears will be wiped away.
And that's the good news.
That's what the return of Christ offers for us, not fear and trembling, but hope and joy and sadness being made untrue.
Now with that in mind, let's jump in.
Verses five or verse 13.
James says, This Is anyone among you suffering?
Let him pray.
Is anyone cheerful?
Let him sing praise.
So point number one is this in all circumstances of life, we are invited to step into God's presence.
A little over two months ago, I was riding in the car on the way home from school with Keel, and this is a little after 9 p.m., so late at night, and uh we were listening to music, tired, uh, we just sat in six hours of class, and I looked at my phone, I saw I had a missed call, and it was from a student of mine, and um that's when my kind of radar starts going off as a student pastor, if I get a call at night like that from a student, because he wasn't just calling to say, hey, what's up, man?
Right?
Like something's going on.
So my radar's up, and so I text him back, I'm like, hey man, I'm sorry I missed your call.
What's going on?
And he sends me kind of three broken up voice messages.
Um, and basically what he says, what I could make out, his voice is a little shaky.
All I could make out was, Teverino, not gonna make it.
I've said this constantly to students on Sunday nights and on Sunday mornings.
Any one of us at any given time could get a phone call like that.
Where the world falls from under our feet.
And that's one of those phone calls.
Maybe you've gotten a phone call like that.
What happened uh the next morning absolutely blows my mind and will, for the rest of my life, be something I will never forget.
Because what had happened the day before is a beloved student daughter friend lived Teverino, died in a car crash.
Girl that came regularly on Sunday nights that was an active part of our student ministry.
So several pastors and ministry leaders from around Marietta showed up to the high school the next morning just to kind of be an available voice, an available shoulder to cry on.
So we showed up early the next morning to pray for the staff first and then to be, again, just readily available.
And what started as a quiet, solemn gathering with certainly a lot of heartache and a lot of tears just slowly got louder and louder with weeping, and then it turned into praying and singing, which was interesting to me.
Because several ministry leaders in the area brought guitars and started singing songs and leading worship, and students that were at one point really quiet started singing.
And in the midst of such searing pain, singing about God's goodness.
One of the most impactful moments of the entire day was to me when several, thankfully, several women at Redeemer helped us open up the church, and we basically just said, hey, the church is open for anybody that wants to come, have a meal, we'll have sandwiches, come hang out, whatever you want to do.
Um we were just like, maybe 30 are gonna show up, maybe 10, maybe 50, we had no idea.
But about an hour later, 200 students just poured through our doors here.
Had a quick bite, and then they all just started going to the student chapel, unprompted.
We had candles lit up in there, and our worship pastor Sam led us for about an hour in worship in one of the most heaven-like moments I've ever experienced.
What we got to observe was hundreds of students jam-packed just down the hall in that tiny little student chapel that normally has about 70, had about 200 weeping, snot, and tears pouring out of their faces.
And in that crying that the King of Kings is still good.
So James says, Is anyone among you suffering?
Let him pray.
Is that moment not a testimony of what can happen when a student and a group of students are caught on fire by the love of God?
That in that moment of intense pain and intense grief, that was really real and really there in that moment, crying out that God is still good.
There's one moment in particular that this image just brings me to tears.
Sam, let us in the bridge of a song called Fear Is Not My Future.
And students screaming these lyrics just has pierced my heart.
Listen to these words.
Fear is not my future, you are.
Sickness is not my story, you are.
Heartbreak is not my home, you are.
Death is not the end, you are.
Hearing students sing that, last line, not 24 hours after their friend died in a car crash, is something I will never forget.
What James is getting at here is in light of the return of Christ, in light of our belovedness in Christ, in light of the fact that we who were once far off, the scriptures say, have been brought near by the blood of the Son.
He says, Hey, in whatever circumstance, suffering or joy, bring your hearts to God.
Here's what James Modire says about this verse.
He says, This then is the individual at prayer.
He or she is reflecting all of life upward, acknowledging the sufficiency and sovereignty of God, practicing the grace of acceptance, and rejecting the disgrace of stubbornness.
In this, the voice of prayer and the voice of praise are one, for alike they say that the will of God is good.
In times of suffering and in times of joy, we find a beautiful companion in Christ, a dear friend who wants to share with our joys and our sorrows.
Let's keep reading.
Fifteen, fourteen through sixteen.
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.
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.
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.
So, point number two for us is this God desires to heal both the physically sick and the spiritually sick.
So James moves from the sort of vague, ambiguous situation of suffering and joy to, he gets really practical.
He says, Hey, if somebody is sick, here's what you do.
And his instruction, the elders, the like what we say at this church, the men who are placed in a position of leadership over a body of believers, there to pray for them.
And the promise of this text is that the prayer of faith will raise this person up.
What's notable is that James doesn't say, hey, get the people who are really gifted in prayer, get the people who are gifted in healing, like 1 Corinthians would talk about.
He says, get the regular guys to come pray.
I think that's notable.
We have a few things to wrestle with, though.
He talks about oil, which is foreign to many of us.
The historical belief among Christians is that anointing oil, the oil that he's talking about here, is not magic.
But much like the waters of baptism or the bread and wine of communion are a symbol that point to a deeper reality.
So he's not saying, hey, throw some oil on this person and then your prayer is gonna work.
He's saying when you put the oil on the person as an act of consecration or meaning, hey, we're declaring this prayer in this moment to be holy, meaning we believe that God can answer it.
That's what he's getting at.
But sometimes, passages like this can feel exhausting and condemning.
And maybe they've been used in unhelpful ways to us.
Because the reality is, what if I pray and this person doesn't get healed?
What if I pray and this person gets worse?
What if I pray and this person dies?
Does that mean that I don't have enough faith?
Does that mean that my faith isn't strong enough that I don't believe hard enough?
Otherwise, God would have surely healed this person, right?
Here's what author Dan Doriani says about this that I think is very helpful.
The phrases the prayer of faith and the Lord will raise him up require careful thoughts.
There is a time for believers to die, to go be with the Lord.
So we cannot say that every prayer of faith will result in healing in this life.
So we should not think, if only we have enough faith, healing will come now.
Healing may come in the future.
In other words, prayers for healing are not the same as the appeals people made to Jesus in the Gospels.
He performed miracles that announced his deity and redeeming purposes, and he always fulfilled his purposes.
That said, in every church, elders should gather to pray, and we should expect God to act.
So here's there's four kind of points that I think are helpful for us to land on about this passage.
So number one is we should pray expecting that God can heal.
Amen.
Number two, we are free, though, in these prayers, to trust that God's plan is good and bigger than ours, but we don't see the whole picture.
And so we're free to believe that as we pray for healing.
Number three, God's ultimate desire is for spiritual healing.
So even if a person is not healed, we can trust that God is more interested in their soul than their body.
And then lastly, God does not respond to prayer based on how strong our faith is or is not.
And that's especially good news if you're anything like me.
Healing is something that is amazing, that we should seek, that we should ask the Lord for.
But sometimes our prayers aren't answered like we'd like for them to be, are they?
I'm sure many of you have prayed for healing for somebody, for yourself.
Perhaps for a long time.
Maybe the prayer hasn't even been for a physical healing.
Maybe it's been for your marriage to heal, for your relationship with your son or daughter or mother or brother to heal.
Maybe you've been praying for this addiction to break, or this mental illness you've been struggling with for years to just make it better.
And maybe in your prayers you're finding God frustratingly silent.
And if that's the case, then you find good company in the scriptures.
What I believe James, the brother of Jesus, is most interested in is not for you to feel condemned or like you don't have enough faith if God doesn't answer your prayers like you thought.
What James is most interested in is for you and I to believe that God's ways are good.
Even Jesus, in a moment of intense suffering in Gethsemane, pouring his heart out of the Father in prayer just hours before his crucifixion, had cried out, Father, not my will, but yours be done.
If the Son of God prays something like that, man, is that not so often what prayer is?
Saying, Lord, I'd love for this to happen.
But at the end of the day, please align my heart to yours.
So let's keep reading.
Verses 17 and 18.
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.
Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
So point number three says this prayer can and does impact the world.
It's true.
James uses the example here of a man from the Old Testament named Elijah, and James again is writing to Jewish, specifically Christians who knew their Bibles well.
So the mention of Elijah would have sparked some lights for them.
And I'm sure for many of them and for many of us, we look at the people of the Bible like David, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and think, oh, those are the all-American five-star recruits right there.
You don't know me.
And what James is saying is, hey, Elijah, this man you've heard of, the man that was there on the Mount of Transfiguration, the man who prayed that rain would come and go, he says, hey, he's just like you and me.
He's sinful.
He doubts.
Yeah, he prayed fervently for three years, but maybe in the midst of that he thought God might not do it.
That's what James is saying.
And James is also saying that Elijah didn't have special access to God like you and I do.
He's not saying Elijah was some varsity believer who had a special line to God and we don't.
And so James lands the plane saying Elijah prayed and things happened.
So therefore, in Christ we can also pray and in our prayers believe that God can and does work.
I was talking to a student a couple weeks ago who asked me essentially if God is over all things, if God is sovereign, if there's no hair that falls from our head, then why pray?
And let me just say, what a great question.
What an amazing question.
Maybe one you've asked.
And I, as I was even thinking this week and praying this week, I just pray that we as a church and a student ministry welcome questions like that.
That we don't ever meet somebody with condemnation with a question like that.
And there's one thing before we go into the answer that we need to rest in is that God does not and will not change.
He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, which is good news because that means you'll never catch him on an off day.
You'll never catch him like he rolled off the wrong side of the bed and is grumpy with you.
He's the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that's good news.
So if that is good news, if he doesn't change, how does prayer fit in?
Why pray if God is over all things?
And R.
C.
Sproul, a theologian, he had an article that literally says, Does prayer change God's mind?
Great article title.
Here's what he says.
No human being, it's a long quote, but we can do it, no human being has ever had a more profound understanding of divine sovereignty than Jesus.
And yet no man has ever prayed more fiercely or more effectively.
Even in Gethsemane, he requested an option, not my will but yours, in a different way.
When the request was denied, he bowed to the Father's will.
The very reason we pray is because of God's sovereignty, because we believe that God has it within his power to order things according to his purpose.
That is what sovereignty is all about, ordering things according to God's purpose.
So then, does prayer change God's mind?
No.
Does prayer change things?
Yes, of course.
The promise of the scriptures is that the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
The problem is that we are not all that righteous.
What prayer most often changes is the wickedness and the hardness of our own hearts.
That alone would be reason enough to pray, even if none of the other reasons were valid or true.
God does not change, and that is good news.
God is over all things, and that is also good news.
What prayer does is it transforms our hearts more in humility to the will of God.
And God's will can sometimes be frustratingly painful and slow.
But prayer, above all else, invites us into communion with God.
Let's read the end of our passage in the book of James, the final words from the Brother of Jesus.
My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, 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.
So, point number four, our last point this morning says this the main driving force of the book of James is the forgiveness of sins under the blood of Christ.
On Monday this past week, uh I was I was sitting in hour five of class after being a hundred percent attentive and listening.
Of course, I decided I've earned it.
You get a break now, Sam.
Mid-lecture, I thought, okay, I'm gonna go find some Georgia Bulldogs highlights on YouTube, as one does.
I mean, it's Thanksgiving week.
I owe it to myself to have some Georgia Bulldogs highlight videos.
So I type in UGA football highlights into the search bar on YouTube, and the first thing that comes up is the playoff game from last year between Georgia and Ohio State.
Which, Georgia fan, Ohio State fan, any other fan that you are, we can all agree that was one of the best football games in a long time.
Like it was it was pretty crazy.
All the way to the last second.
As I was watching the highlights, um, and if any of my professors at RTS are somehow listening to this, I am sorry.
Uh, I was reminded uh back then I want to watch this game with some friends.
Now, if you watch this game, you know that it was stressful on both sides the entire time to the last play.
All the way to the last second.
And watching a game like that when you don't know the ending is not that fun, honestly.
It's fun in moments, it's mostly stressful.
The game almost ended me.
Um my heart really couldn't handle it.
But here's a picture of some of us at the game.
I don't know where, I don't know when in the game that is.
Uh it could be first play, it could be third quarter, fourth quarter.
I really don't know.
Um, but that's those were the vibes for about four hours right there.
It wasn't great.
Um that night watching the game did end well.
Uh it certainly did end well, but for 98% of it, it was pretty stressful.
Now, thinking back to Monday in class as I was watching the highlights, I knew how the game ended, and I still was panicking in my seat whenever I watched certain plays.
I'm a Georgia fan, I'm a Braves fan, I'm a Falcons fan.
I've seen some things turn around, I've had some tears shed.
Now I know that the game's not over until it's over.
I've learned that in my life.
So even while I knew the ending of this game, I was still a little stressed.
I was like, man, maybe did Georgia even win?
Like, am I remembering it right?
But I did have a level of peace deep down, knowing that the story did end how it did.
There's one thing we've been making the point of every single week as we've been reading James.
The driving force of the book of James is the end of James.
In the Bible, there's no verses or chapters, and so it was one long stream of thought.
This is like his conclusion.
This is where everything in the whole book points to.
And this is the promise of James that in Christ we are fully, freely, and forever forgiven and covered by the blood of the Son.
We sing the song, full forgiveness meets my gaze.
I stand redeem my grace alone.
So is it 99% forgiveness from the cross?
And then, man, I need to add that 1% to maybe make sure that God's really happy with me?
No.
Full forgiveness.
Found how?
By faith in the Son of God.
So, what is our point here at the end of James?
Is the point of every scripture in the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation?
Look to Jesus.
You hurting?
Look to Jesus.
You're cheerful?
Look to Jesus.
You need a friend?
Look to Jesus.
You need healing?
Look to Jesus.
You need this addiction to break, or this marriage to heal, or this addiction to go back to, or to for the shame to find love?
Look to Jesus.
Maybe this morning a lot of thoughts are coming from the end there.
James talks about the one who wanders.
Maybe someone is coming to mind for you.
Maybe your son or your daughter is falling away from their faith.
Maybe you're terrified in your seat right now because you're having doubts about the Bible and about your faith that you never thought you'd have.
Maybe you've been struggling with a hidden sin that no one knows about.
And you're wondering if anybody found out about this, if God found out about this, could I still be lovable?
Maybe you wish your spouse or your boyfriend or your mom or dad or friend or whatever was farther along in their faith.
Or maybe you've come in here this morning and you've been the wanderer.
Maybe you've orbited church for a long time, maybe you've never walked in before.
And maybe you know some Bible stories, maybe you don't, but you've just never found faith to be something that's feasible to you.
And the invitation from James and from the scriptures to all of us is, hey, do you want to find life?
Do you want your shame to be met with joy?
Do you want your suffering to be met with a friend, no matter the circumstance?
He says, collapse into the Son of God.
The one who didn't see the sins of this world and back off in fear and anger.
But the one who actually stepped in and said, Hey, I'm the remedy.
I'll fix it.
He says, your brokenness, your shame, your addictions, your broken marriage, your messed up relationship with your mom or sister.
He says, all of it is met with love and grace and the forgiveness of Christ.
And that's the driving force of the book of James.
I want to close with a reading from the book of Hebrews.
This is chapter 12, verses 1 and 2.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside also every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Let's pray together.
Father, um, I thank you that when Adam and Eve fell, you did not shy away.
You didn't just send a religious system for all of us to figure it out.
But Lord, you promised even all those years ago that you would yourself become the remedy.
No other faith system in the world promises that.
No other moralistic teaching promises that.
Christianity is the only faith system where the God who created is the God who redeems.
So, Father, thank you that that's true.
Thank you for the book of James, that even though it's hard, even though it presses on us a little bit, even though we wrestle with it, thank you that it ultimately points us to you.
That it ultimately points us to our forgiveness in Christ.
There's nothing we can add to it, there's nothing we can take away from it.
But the invitation from James, Lord, I'm grateful for it is that we can just come and rest with you.
In every circumstance, we can come to you.
Thank you that you are accessible no more to Elijah than to us.
That we have full access to the Creator of the universe who loves us and gave himself up for us.
I pray that all of us will be met with grace, and that all of our shame would be met with joy, all of our addictions will be meet will be met with freedom, and then in all of it we define the love and grace of Jesus.
I pray this all in Jesus' name.
Amen.