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One of the questions many people wrestle with is, “Does prayer work?” Many of us have prayed for something: healing, a wound to be taken away, a relationship to be restored, only to have it not answered.
We have also seen moments when we prayed for something, and that prayer wasn’t answered the way we expected it.
This leaves us to ask, “Does prayer work? Is prayer even worth the time and effort?”
In James 5:13 – 20, James lays out how to pray, the role of the unconfessed in prayers, and how a church should gather to pray together.
This passage is often used to pray for the sick, which it is about. But the word for sick in James 5 doesn’t just mean physically ill but also includes spiritual and emotional weakness. This is one reason James uses the example of Elijah because Elijah was spiritually and emotionally weak in 1 Kings. That idea completely changed my thoughts about this passage and my prayer life as I prepped this message.
In chapter 5, James gives us five questions to ask so that we can see prayer be more effective in our lives:
Are you self-made and have little need for God? Many of us are self-made, able to work hard, strategic thinkers, or people who can feel our way out of things.
Without realizing it, we create lives that have little need for the power of God.
This begs the question of when we start praying about something and how long it takes us to ask God for help.
Do you see the hard and good times as things God has allowed? In James 5, James talks about Job and Elijah as examples for us to understand his point. Job said, “God gives, and God takes; blessed be the name of the Lord.” James wants us to see how this interacts with our prayers. Do we see the good and the hard as from God? Or just the hard?
Do you pray for your will and not God’s? Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 6 that when they pray, they are to pray for God’s will, not their own.
But one of our frustrations with prayer is that God doesn’t answer us on our timetable or the way we want.
This is the crux of prayer. Because we will often ask for A, and God gives us B. The question we have to wrestle with is, do we believe God heard us? Do we believe God spoke to the other person? This is when we are reminded how little control we have in life, and that’s hard.
Do you pray specifically? I know it can be scary to pray specifically because I am opening myself up to being let down or opening myself up to potential doubts and struggles. What if I ask for this specific healing and don’t get it? What if I ask God to do this or that, and it doesn’t happen?
That’s hard.
But the example that James uses is Elijah, who was a man who prayed specifically. He was also a very flawed man, which is also incredibly encouraging.
Do you live in unconfessed sin? Unconfessed sin creates a barrier between you, God, and others. And James tells us it is a hindrance to our prayer lives. James connects the confession of sin to answered prayer and healing.
This is important because the healing we are promised is spiritual, physical, and emotional, but we aren’t promised when that healing will come, just that we will have it.
