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"The Prayer of Faith"
James 5.13-20
Good News Translation (GNT)
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13 Are any among you in trouble? They should
pray. Are any among you happy? They should
sing praises.
14 Are any among you sick? They should send
for the church elders, who will pray for them
and rub olive oil on them in the name of the
Lord.
15 This prayer made in faith will heal the sick; the
Lord will restore them to health, and the sins
they have committed will be forgiven.
16 So then, confess your sins to one another and
pray for one another, so that you will be
healed. The prayer of a good person has a
powerful effect.
17 Elijah was the same kind of person as we are.
He prayed earnestly that there would be no
rain, and no rain fell on the land for three and
a half years.
18 Once again he prayed, and the sky poured out
its rain and the earth produced its crops.
19 My friends, if any of you wander away from the
truth and another one brings you back again,
20 remember this: whoever turns a sinner back
from the wrong way will save that sinner's
soul [a] from death and bring about the
forgiveness of many sins.
Footnotes
James 5:20 that sinner's soul; or his own soul.
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Taken from
'The Applied New Testament
Commentary' (Kingsway)
'The Prayer of Faith'
James 5:13-20
I don't think it's possible to read James and not rethink the way we care for each other in our churches.
The clear challenge here is to pray for, care for, and maybe (as the Salvation Army founder William Booth once said) weep for someone in your church community.
Who will it be?
'Who am I to expect much?' is the nervous question of those stuck on the sidelines; in prayer, for example, when we often struggle and are easily distracted.
Too troubled to pray, too happy to pray, too sick to pray (vs 13,14)?
Which of us hasn't felt that?
Reminders alone don't always bring us to our knees.
Who am I to be that spiritual?
We easily dismiss praying people as the 'super-saints'.
James won't let us escape that easily!
This is not advice for the big church with the specially gifted ones any more than it is for those Christians so spiritual that they are beyond the rest of us.
He doesn't suggest that the sick person calls for the 'healer', but for the elders (v 14).
For the power to restore lies with God, not with the gifted.
Similarly he does not speak of Elijah as the 'great prophet' beyond us all, but as 'a human being, even as we are' (v 17).
His secret did not lie in his special powers but in something that is within reach of all of us - he prayed!
(In a day of spiritual apostasy and moral vacuum with truly double-minded people! No excuses here either.)
Our relationship with the living God is our most urgent priority.
The phrase 'the Lord will raise them up' (v 15) can mean from the sick bed or from the grave.
The insistence on confession and forgiveness of sins spotlights the spiritual and not just the physical (vs 16,17).
Not even my health matters more than my walk with the Lord.
Sometimes we watch as a brother or sister wanders from the truth, and we wonder, 'Who am I to speak or act or say anything to them?'
Verses 19 and 20 are a powerful reminder that we cannot stay nervously on the sidelines.
Other versions are available here
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