The Prayer of Faith – James 5:13-18

Do I have to believe that God will heal me if I pray, or is it enough to believe that God can heal me?  If I have a word from God that He is going to heal me, then I should believe He will heal me.  But I don’t always have that.  If Paul had had to believe that God would heal him from his thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12), he would have been sorely disappointed.  God chose not to heal him.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to convince God of your faith, or a particular kind of faith.

Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 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. 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. (James 5:13-18, ESV)

James started his letter with a charge to consider it all joy when we encounter various trials. Now he ends with the subject of suffering. If we suffer, we should pray (he urged us to pray for wisdom in 1:5). If we are not suffering, we should be full of praise and singing. But if we are sick, we should call for the elders of the church (there was always more than one elder leading the church), and when they pray in faith, we should expect healing from our sickness. In that process, if sin has been committed, we should confess it and so be healed.

Is James promising healing for all sickness when faith-filled elders anoint us and pray for us? If that were the case no one would ever need to die, so the answer must be no. And we see the example of Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 whom God told he would not be healed because the thorn in his flesh was being used to humble him. But there are times when God wants to heal us and use this process. The oil becomes a symbol of God’s ability and desire to heal.

Is sickness always the result of sin? It can’t be. Jesus clearly taught against this view in John 9, and James does not say here that all sickness comes from sin, but that IF one has sinned it will be forgiven. Some sickness comes from sin as a discipline from God (1 Corinthians 11:27-32). We must check for that as the cause and confess to one another our sins, if they be there. Confessing to one another is healing in and of itself and a path to physical healing in such cases.

And what about the faith of the one who is sick? James uses the example of Elijah and his faith in prayer and urges all believers to be full of such faith in prayer. Paul had faith to be healed but wasn’t (2 Corinthians 12), but, whether we are healed or not, we should have faith in God’s ability to heal and in His love for us and desire for us to be healed, even if in some cases He needs us to remain unhealed for spiritual purposes.

And healing is not to be a Lone Ranger affair but a community affair. We need others to be a part of our healing. We need to humble ourselves and include others as part of the solution to our suffering.