Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, 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 the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. James 5:13-18

A little boy was asked by his father to say grace at the table. While the rest of the family waited, the little guy eyed every dish of food his mother had prepared. After the examination, he bowed his head and honestly prayed, “Lord, I don’t like the looks of it, but I thank you for it, and I’ll eat it anyway. Amen.”

When our second son, Clinton, was a very small boy, I would tell him and his brother Cole bedtime stories from the Bible and Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I would tell a mash-upped story where King David kills a very large spider named Shelob with a slingshot and five smooth stones. (Forgive me, Lord.)

But after a time of storytelling, I would ask them to say their prayers so that I could hear them. One night Clinton, with his hands folded across his chest and eyes closed, began mumbling his prayers so that I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I said, “Clinton, speak up. I can’t hear you.”

He looked up at me and said, “Dad, I’m not talking to you.”

This is a passage that is written by the brother of Jesus—James. I think the fact that James wrote this book is powerful evidence of the veracity of Christianity. Because when I was a kid, I was never once tempted to ever think that my brother was somehow God among us or divine.

And yet here’s James—a follower of Jesus and a leader in the early church.

And in this letter, he’s inviting these early followers of Jesus to enter into a praying way of life.

So we’re going to listen to James’ wisdom this morning and I want us to listen with an ear for the posture of prayer, for the power of prayer, and then for some practicalities.

The Posture of Prayer

¹³ Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 

In other words, you can boldly go to God with everything that concerns you about your life and have the confidence that God is going to lean towards you and listen.

I am reminded of a beautifully gut-wrenching poem by Ted Loder (from Guerrillas of Grace):

“How shall I pray?
Are tears prayers, Lord?
Are screams prayers,
or groans
or sighs
or curses?

Can trembling hands be lifted to you,
or clenched fists
or the cold sweat that trickles down my back
or the cramps that knot my stomach?

Will you accept my prayers, Lord,
my real prayers,
rooted in the muck and the mud and the rock of my life,
and not just my pretty, cut-flower, gracefully arranged
bouquet of words?

Will you accept me, Lord,
as I really am,
messed up mixture of glory and grime?
Lord, help me!
Help me to trust that you do accept me as I am,
that I may be done with self-condemnation
and self-pity
and accept myself.

Help me to accept you as you are, Lord:
mysterious,
hidden,
strange,
unknowable;
and yet to trust
that your madness is wiser
than my timid, self-seeking sanities,
and that nothing you’ve ever done
has really been possible,
so I may dare to be a little mad, too.”

How can Ted Loder and James talk like this? Here’s how.

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. James 1:17

The point is that if you have a covenant relationship with Jesus and are living a life of repentance, then God isn’t a distant cosmic force for you. He isn’t just a wonderful philosophical idea for you. No, if you have placed your life in the nail-scarred hands of Jesus then God is your good Father.

So, if you’re a follower of Jesus, praying is not just something that you do when you’re about to eat dinner, it’s not something you do when you don’t have enough money to make it to the end of the month, it’s not something you do when a friend goes in for surgery…Praying is a posture for your whole life.

The goal of prayer is to live all of my life and speak all of my words in the joyful awareness of the presence of God.

That’s the posture that James invites us to take with God.

The Power of Prayer

¹⁵ The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. 

James does not say that prayer is powerful because Christian people are especially devout or perfect. Prayer is powerful, James says, because God is powerful.

And when you and I enter into a praying life with him, we participate in God’s purposes.

This is what the reference to the story of Elijah is about. (1 Kings 17-18)

The point of the story of Elijah is not that he was some kind of devout or perfect person. In fact, if you would read the story of Elijah, you’d realize that exactly the opposite is the case.

Elijah got angry.

Elijah got lost in life.

Elijah got depressed in life.

Elijah got lonely.

The point wasn’t that Elijah was perfect. The point is that he prayed in faith to a powerful God.

James says, when you and I address the same God in humble childlike dependence, in the name of Jesus, for things that God cares about—God answers.

Now, you don’t need to have been a Christian for a long time to wrestle with these words. Why does God not seem to answer when these words promise that God will answer?

Sometimes God doesn’t answer prayer because we ask for wrong or selfish things.

Chapter 4:3,

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. 

Sometimes in not answering our praying in the way that we’d want, God is helping us to be patient. Teaching us to trust him.

And sometimes…I don’t know. I just don’t know why God doesn’t give us what we ask.

I know what it’s like in my own life to pray for people that I love, who don’t get better.

There are some threads in the story of redemption that we just won’t see where they lead in this life. There are some people that you and I pray for, and we need to trust that God will raise them up at the end, if not now.

However, a life shaped by Jesus can bring all the pain, desperation, dirtiness, and ugliness of life to God’s presence and know that God is there, and God is at work even when we don’t understand how.

The Practice of Prayer

¹³ Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 

Pray the Psalms.

When he speaks of songs of praise in verse 13, many scholars believe he is referring to the Jewish prayer book—the Book of Psalms.

James is telling us, “You can use the words that God gives us to learn how to speak to him.”

I’ve been praying the Psalms back to God for years. Often when I don’t know what to pray, or even feel like praying, I pray God’s words back to him.

If you want to use the reading plan that I use, I have copies of that down here at the front.

That’s why God gives us his words so that we can learn how to talk to God.

Wordless Prayers

I have come to appreciate the value of silence.

We are inundated with words. I love how Henri Nouwen talks about this,

Words, words, words. Our society is full of words: on billboards, on television screens, in newspapers and books. Words whispered, shouted, and sung. Words that move, dance, and change in size and color. Words that say, “Taste me, smell me, eat me, drink me, sleep with me,” but most of all, “buy me.” With so many words around us, we quickly say: “Well, they’re just words.” Thus, words have lost much of their power.

Sometimes is altogether appropriate to sit in silence before the Lord.

This morning I was reading in my Psalm reading plan these words from Psalm 63:5-6

For God alone my soul waits in silence,
    for my hope is from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
    my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

The Psalmist reminds us, “Be still, and know that I am God!” (46:10)

In 1654, scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

There was a time when an old preacher was feeling sorry for himself. He felt he was fighting the good fight all alone. He had no support from his congregation. He had no support from his family. He was depressed and desperate. So, he went out into the wilderness (probably above timberline) to get away from everyone to seek God.

While there, a messenger said,

“Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:11-13)

Every morning I spend a couple of hours reading God’s word and listening to the day awaken. A sign of deep love is when two people can spend long periods of time together in silence.

Intercessory Prayer

Every morning I pray in three areas:

Personal

Church

World

Long Wandering Prayer

My friend David Hansen wrote a book called Long Wandering Prayer about this practice,

Long wandering prayer happens on the inside like it happens on the outside. It is mental wandering in the presence of God, corresponding to physical wandering in the presence of God. Long wandering prayer involves leaving our normal environment for the express purpose of spending many hours alone with God. It involves walking, or at least moving, and stopping whenever we want, to consider a lily for as long as we desire. Long wandering prayer uses the fact that our minds wander as an advantage to prayer rather than a disadvantage. In long wandering prayer we recognize that what we want to pray about may not be what God wants us to pray about. Our obsessive drive to control our minds in the presence of God, that is, to pray about one thing or stick to one list, maybe a form of hiding from God. In this kind of prayer, we recognize the wandering mind as a precious resource for complex and startling dialogue with God.

Sometimes we might question if we are doing prayer correctly. There is no wrong way to pray. Find your way to be in the presence of God and let him sort it. Pray, as Eugene Peterson has said, the way we can instead of trying to pray the way we can’t.

When I was a young pastor, I had an office manager named Martha King. She was an extraordinary administrator and could really boss me around. One day, she and I were talking about her past church experience, and she was telling me about her pastor. Said she really respected him and admired him. I asked her what she admired about him.

She said, “He was a man of prayer. He would spend a great deal of his time in solitude and prayer.”

To my deep shame, I remember thinking what a waste of time and talent. I would go nuts doing that. I needed to measure progress. How do you do that in prayer?

I feel differently about things now. I spend a big portion of my time praying. But sadly, I have come to this value late in life. I have a devotional book in the process of being printed and should be available in September. In it, I describe much of what I have shared with you today. At the beginning of the book, I wrote a poem that expresses where I am in my devotional life in my mid 60’s. Most of my life has been focused on doing, in my latter years I have focused more on being. That awakening has left me with some regrets.

Late have I learned to listen,
to weep,
to be still,
to be.
Almost gone are moments to slow down,
to reflect,
to wonder,
to day-sleep.
Fleeting is the day for wordless prayers,
to pause,
to sing,
to remember.
Late have I learned to turn up the quiet,
to speak low,
to be small,
to love well.
“Late have I loved you, beauty, so old and so new: late have I loved you.”

And so, dear reader, may you learn to love the Lord deeply enough to sit still with him and lift words and silence to the God who wants to be with you.