James 5:13-20
13 Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 14 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. 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.17 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. 18 Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.
19 My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, 20 you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
We have this wonderful
promise in the New Testament Book of James.
”Are any among you suffering? They should pray … 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.”
It is a wonderful promise to
know that if we are sick, all we have to do is pray to God and the Lord will
give us a complete healing.
We have people who are sick
with cancer, people who struggle with lung or heart disease, people who have
diseases that are rare, and people with illnesses that are common. James says, “The prayer of faith will save
the sick.”
When I was a child one of my
sisters became very sick. She was
diagnosed with a brain tumor and had an operation. We lived in a small town at the time and
everyone knew us. So everyone was
praying for us, and no one prayed harder than our oldest sister, Shannon.
And no one had more faith
than our sister Shannon. She was
convinced that God was going to heal our sister, Missy. She clung to the promises of James, who says
very plainly, “The prayer of faith will save the sick.”
In August, 1959, my sister
Shannon was married and I remember seeing her and her husband leave for their
honeymoon, but before leaving, our younger sister was carried into the room to
say goodbye. By this time she was so
very, very sick and she could not walk.
She had not been able to be at the wedding service. When Missy was carried in room, the whole
house grew silent, because the whole town knew this 7 year old child was so
sick.
But Shannon
had such deep faith and she firmly believed that the “prayer of faith will save
the sick.”
So Shannon and her new
husband kissed Missy goodbye and left for their honeymoon – and while they were
gone - Missy died.
“The prayer of faith will
save the sick.” It’s right there in
black and white – in the Bible.
So what’s the deal? Did my sister Shannon not pray with enough
faith? Was there a flaw in her faith?
Forty years later, Shannon became sick with a rare liver disease. The family gathered in prayer and we were so
glad when she was finally going to have a liver transplant. But the transplant did not work out as we had
hoped. Shannon
died in the recovery room.
“The prayer of faith will
save the sick.” It’s right there in
black and white – in the Bible.
There was another case that
comes to mind. It was quite some time
ago. A child was born in a well-known
political family. The father, who loved
the child deeply, prayed to God for the baby.
He fasted and stayed in the house with the child, lying on the floor day
and night. The elders came to this man
and tried to get him off the floor, but he refused to get up or to eat. He was totally committed to prayer. After all, as James says, “The prayer of
faith will save the sick.”
And after seven days – the
baby died.
That story is straight from
the Bible, and the father was King David.
What is it about this promise
of healing?
Why doesn’t it work?
Well, here’s the thing – in
the Bible this word for healing is more than a physical healing.
It is sometimes a physical
healing, but it is always a spiritual healing as well.
This word that James uses
that is translated as healing, appears frequently in the New Testament, often
in ways that have nothing to do with physical illness.
Very often the word for
“healing” is synonymous with “salvation.”
Paul uses this same word in 1
Corinthians 15:1-2 when he says, “Now I would remind you, brothers and
sisters, of the good news] that I
proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved…” “saved” – “healed” – same word.
To be healed in the Bible is to be saved. It is to be made whole.
In fact, in John’s Gospel when Jesus encounters a
man who has been sick for decades, the question is asked by Jesus, “Do you want
to be made WHOLE.”
Isaiah 53:5 is a key verse on healing, but like the verse in James it is often
misunderstood and misapplied. Isaiah says this in a prophecy about Christ’s
death: “He was pierced for our
transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought
us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
The word
translated “healed” can mean either spiritual or physical healing. However, the
context of Isaiah 53 makes it clear that it is speaking of spiritual
healing. The verse is talking about sin
and righteousness, not sickness and disease. Therefore, being “healed” in the
Scriptures can often be a reference to being forgiven and saved, not physically
healed.
Mr. Sanders was an elder in a
church I served in Brunswick ,
Georgia . He
asked me and an elder to come to his home one day to have prayer with him,
which we did. He was going to have to
have surgery on his knee, but Mr. Sanders was so positive. He was looking forward to being healed and he
had great faith that God was going to answer his prayers and help him to walk
with without pain.
When the time came for the
surgery, he had to go to a specialist in Atlanta ,
and I drove him there – it was about a 4 hour drive and I asked him who was
going to pick him up.
He just smiled and said that God
was going to fix up his knee so well that after the surgery he would just walk
home.
Of course, he didn’t walk
from Atlanta to Brunswick – someone else gave him a
lift. It was, after all, a four hour
drive!
But the surgery did not go
well. A few months later he was in the
hospital again – one morning I went to see him in the hospital and he looked at
me with tears in his eyes and said, “They are going to have to cut off my leg.”
After the loss of his leg and
confined to a wheel chair, Mr. Sanders kept up his positive attitude. He had been the volunteer gardener at the
church and he couldn’t wait to get back to his roses. I have a photograph of him, tending those
flowers while sitting in his wheel chair.
Big smile on his face.
That is what wholeness
is. A simple healing would have given
him his leg back, but wholeness meant he had his life back.
John Thompson was another
elder in a church I served years ago.
When I went to see him in the hospital he told me about the serious
surgery he was about to have. He said,
“The doctors tell me that after tomorrow there is a good chance that there
won’t be a John Thompson anymore.”
Then he smiled at me and
said, “I told the doctors that I knew where I would be if I died in the
surgery.”
That assurance of salvation
is wholeness, which is deeper than any physical healing.
As it happened, John Thompson
did die in surgery that day, but his faith was deep and as James teaches, “The prayer of
faith will save the sick.” Save – not as in physical cure, but as in
making one whole.
My Uncle Walter was a man of
great faith, and he prayed for a healing.
This was a man who had been in the Air Force. He was involved in the D-Day invasion. He was at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a combat veteran of World War II, the
Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He had
faced death many times with great courage.
And then at the age of 83 he
was diagnosed with cancer.
And worse – he was overcome
with fear.
He prayed desperately. He latched onto this text from James and
often reminded God that the Bible promised that the prayer of faith would
heal. Uncle Walter was like a man in a
court of law reminding God of his contractual obligations to heal him.
He ended up in a research
program and was taking a pill every day that made him quite sick to his
stomach, but it was extending his life.
Each single pill cost $10,000, and I told him I was not sure I could
swallow a pill that cost more than my used car.
Walter told me that the medical research program was paying for those
pills, but I still think it would have been hard for me to take a $10,000 pill
every day.
I began to worry more deeply about
Walter. Those pills were making him
extremely sick and he had given up any quality of life. Those pills added a mere 5 weeks to his life.
Walter died with no physical
cure. And worse, he died without
wholeness.
Had he been open to being
made whole, rather than so narrowly focused on being cured, Uncle Walter would
have found it possible to live his last days without fear, and to die with the
same courage he had on the battlefields.
Wholeness would have given
him a sense of gratitude for all the years of joyful living, rather than a
bitterness about his long life coming to an end.
Wholeness would have given
him a gentle acceptance that he was about to experience the promises of eternal
life.
Paul said in the New
Testament letter to the Thessalonians, “give thanks in all circumstances…”
He
said this having lived a hard life. He’d
been in prison. People had tried to kill
him. He had lived in poverty. He had a physical ailment that he called a
pain in his side. He wrote in
Corinthians about how he repeatedly prayed that God would remove that
pain. But according to Paul, God’s
message to him was, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power
is made perfect in weakness.”
Paul was not physically healed, but he was
spiritually healed and had a sense of wholeness. Even in his pain, Paul wrote, “I
am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities
for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
No one wants to live in pain. No one wants to lose the ability to walk or
to see or to hear. No one wants to
endure the hardship of lungs that strain for every breath, or to suffer with a
heart that beats with pain.
But wholeness helps us to move beyond the need
for physical healing and to see beyond this present pain. Wholeness gives us a spiritual health in
which we can give thanks in all circumstances.
Getting back to my sister, Missy. I remember many years later being with my
father and some others in our extended family.
The conversation turned to my sister’s
death. Someone in the small group asked
my father if he had ever been angry at God for not healing this little girl of
the brain tumor that took her life.
My Dad said that just the opposite was true.
He felt very grateful and very thankful.
-Missy had been adopted into our family and she
could have gone to any number of families, but God chose us to be her
family. Dad did not focus on her death,
but on her life. In the short time she
had on this earth, God had chosen us with a wonderful opportunity to be the family
that gave Missy the joy and love to make her life meaningful.
Of course, we all wanted Missy to be healed
physically, but for all of us in the family to be healed with a spiritual
wholeness was far more important.
Wholeness is more than healing.
In this world we may not be removed from
suffering or pain, but wholeness gives us the ability to see beyond what we
endure to see the blessing of God’s presence in our lives.
Dr. W. Maynard Pittendreigh
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