James 5:13-18
The Prayer of a Righteous Man
13Is any one of you suffering? He should pray. Is anyone cheerful? He should sing praises.
14Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.
15And the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick. The Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.
16Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail.
17Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.
18Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth yielded its crops.
Berean Standard Bible
James ends the letter the way a pastor would, by telling his people what to do with every kind of day, and the answer, over and over, is to pray.
Is any one of you suffering? He should pray. Is anyone cheerful? He should sing praises.
Suffering turns into prayer, and gladness turns into song. There is no mood in the list that has nothing to say to God. James then turns to the sick, and the picture widens from private prayer to the elders of the church. He tells the sick person to call them, and they pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer offered in faith, he says, will restore the sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Prayer here is not a last resort but a first move, and it is not done alone.
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail.
Confess to one another, pray for one another. It is humbling, and it is where James locates healing. The confession he asks for is made to each other, the plain admission of sin among people who then carry it to God on one another's behalf. And to show that such ordinary prayer carries real weight, James points to Elijah.
Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.
A man just like us. That is the phrase to hold on to. Whatever else Elijah was, James says he was made of the same stuff we are. He prayed, and heaven answered. No rain fell for years, and then, when he prayed again, the rain returned and the ground came back to life. The power was never in Elijah. It was in the God who heard him, and that same God hears us. The prayer of an ordinary righteous person, James says, has great power, not because of the one praying but because of the One it reaches.
How We Know
The example is not a general memory of Elijah but a specific event, and it is in 1 Kings. 1 Kings 17:1 records Elijah announcing that there would be no rain, and 1 Kings 18 tells how, after a long drought, he prayed on Mount Carmel and the rain returned. 1 Kings 18:1 marks the rain coming in the third year of the drought, while the three-and-a-half-year span James gives is the same one Luke reports in Luke 4:25. Either way the point James draws sits on the surface of the story: Elijah was a man, and his prayers moved heaven because God heard them, which is exactly the confidence James wants his readers to pray with.
Questions
1 What does James tell believers to do in each condition he names?
AnswerTo pray when suffering, sing when cheerful, and call the elders to pray and anoint when sick. Every state of life turns toward God, and the sick person's prayer is not left private but brought to the elders of the church.
2 What does James say about confessing and praying for one another?
AnswerTo confess sins to each other and pray for each other, so that they may be healed. It is a humbling, mutual practice, and James makes it the place where healing happens, carried out among believers rather than alone.
3 Why does James call Elijah a man just like us?
AnswerTo keep the example from feeling out of reach. James insists Elijah was made of the same stuff we are, which is what lets his praying stand as a pattern ordinary believers can follow rather than admire from a distance.
4 Where does James locate the power in Elijah's praying?
AnswerNot in Elijah but in the God who heard him. The rain stopped and started at prayer, but the power belonged to God, so James's point is that an ordinary righteous person's prayer has weight because of the One it reaches.
What This Means for Us
Do the plain thing this passage asks and this family usually skips: pray together out loud about what is actually happening, the suffering named, the gladness sung, the sickness carried to God instead of only to the doctor. Then take the harder step this passage names and confess something real to one another, and pray for each other over it, rather than carrying it alone. James promises that ordinary prayer, from ordinary people, reaches the same God who answered Elijah, and that he still hears.
Prayer
Lord, we treat prayer as the thing we try when nothing else works, when you mean it to be the first thing we do. Teach us to bring you our suffering and our joy and our sickness. You heard Elijah, a man just like us, and you hear us. Give us the nerve to pray plainly and together, and to trust that you hear. Amen.