What to make of the “Prayer offered in faith”
by Reed on Mar.14, 2008, under Thoughts
Warning: this is a a little longer post than usual but I needed to work through some thoughts on prayer. So if you’ve wondered about how prayer works and how to understand the difficult passage of James 5:14-18, then read on (and leave a comment).
In his epistle, James makes the following assertion:
14 Is 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. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. 17 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. 18 Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. James 5:14-18 (NIV)
Reading this passage at face value seems to imply that prayer can heal people. Not only that, but it can also shut and open the skies. This makes many uncomfortable (and not because they don’t believe in God’s ability to work through prayer of in God’s goodness). Rather, it makes many uncomfortable because they don’t understand why, if this is indeed the case, only some prayers change the weather and the health of our loved ones.
In light of this, some interpret this passage in purely spiritual terms; however, most scholars looking into the intricacies of the original language find this to stretch James’ words beyond a reasonable point. Their consensus is that James believes he’s talking about physical healing. For sure, the spiritual and physical are linked in this passage (and linked in reality), but to completely eliminate the possibility that James believes that prayers offered for the sick can be part of their physical healing seems inappropriate given the text.
Since this is arguably the case, what are we to make of the fact that many millions of prayers fail to produce the results that James discusses? Let me offer three main thoughts as to why this might be:
- It is not God’s will that everyone should be physically healed. The fact is that sometimes affliction reveals God to both the afflicted individual and to his or her community (consider John 9:1-4 and 2 Corinthians 12:6-12) and to heal that person prematurely (if at all) could short-circuit that revelatory expression.
- Sometimes the “righteous man” to which James refers doesn’t pray a prayer that leads to physical healing. It could go without saying that Paul could be nominated as a “righteous man.” It could also be said that he had prayed a healing prayer in faith and as a consequence healing did indeed occur (Acts 28:8). But there were also instances in Paul’s life where his prayers for another didn’t produce such results (Philippians 2:25-27 and 2 Timothy 4:20, if we assume that he prayed for them at all). Does this mean that Paul didn’t pray for them? No, I believe he most certainly would have, yet, he didn’t pray a prayer that led to physical healing for them. This brings me to my third thought.
- For James, a “prayer offered in faith” is a prayer offered in response to the revealed will of God. In this passage, James is in no way saying that every time that the elders are called to the bedside that they should pray a prayer of faith for the physical healing of that person. Rather, if the elders are fulfilling their God-given role in the community that is Christ’s Church, they will seek out God’s will and lead the people of that faithful community with thanksgiving into that will. That is, they are to first pray for wisdom and God’s will in the moment (James 1:5) and if they perceive together that God will reveal himself through a miraculous healing, then – and only then – should they pray a bold, convinced prayer of faith for healing (which will simultaneously be humble because they are praying in accord with God’s will rather than their own ideas or even hopes). As Barrier and Goetz, who have challenged my thinking here, suggest, “The prayer of faith can only be prayed after God reveals his intentions.”
This then is what a “prayer offered in faith” means in this passage: it is a prayer in response to the will of God revealed to his saints and that is why it produces healing. It doesn’t produce healing because the pray-er worked themselves up into “greater faith” or “stronger belief” or said the right words in the right way.
Does that mean that other prayers aren’t prayers offered in faith? No, rather, I believe James is using “a prayer offered in faith” as a sort of technical term in this context. In reality, all prayers that are willing to submit to God’s will are prayers of faith, the only difference is that sometimes we know that will and sometimes we don’t and we should pray differently in those two situations. When we know the will of God it takes faith to step out in that promise and pray what has been revealed; when we don’t have the wisdom to know God’s specific will in a situation, then it takes faith to pray for what we desire (James 4:2, Matthew 7:7-11) and then to close with “yet, not my will, but your’s, Father” (Mark 14:36). We do this because we are ready to submit to his will if it is different from what we wish.
What do I do if I don’t know God’s will for someone who is ill?
- First, pray for wisdom and for God to reveal his will in the situation (James 1:5).
- Then, if you still don’t have a sense of his specific will, which may be the vast majority of the time, pray for complete healing (in light of James 4:2) because sometimes we don’t have because we don’t ask. But we must be faithful in doing so, trusting in God’s will, whatever it is in light of the passage in Mark quoted above.
- However, if God does reveal to you that he will be working a miracle, pray with humble boldness – humble because it is in submission to God’s will and bold because in response to God’s will you will be praying for a miracle.
Okay, that’s my thinking so far on this passage. Let’s chat. Post a comment of question by following this link.
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I'm Reed Mueller, pastor of Columbia Ridge Community Church. Feel free to read what pops out of my head and onto the web, then join in the discussion if you want.
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March 15th, 2008 on 10:11 am
I, for one, must confess that I NEVER know God’s will, at least not in any specific sense.
I feel his will in scripture: in the parable of the Samaritan, “Go and do likewise;” in James, “…look after orphans and widows in their distress;” in John, “Love one another.” But determining his will in a specific situation is beyond me. Tonight I’ll sing words that remind me of this: “I am not skilled to understand… what God has willed what God has planned…”
That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that you, Reed, or anyone else, is not capable of discerning God’s will in specific situations. Someone once described you to me as “full of grace,” and though I often replace (in my mind only!) that noun with one that’s more scatological, I think they were probably right. But I’m not skilled to understand God’s will.
So when I pray it is always with the caveat, “yet not my will, but yours.”
But we still haven’t answered the crucial question in my mind: “Why are some prayers for healing answered and others not?” You seem to be saying that some reflect God’s will (so therefore he acts), while others do not (and so he chooses not to act). But I can’t believe God wills suffering for any of his children.
One could argue that Brooke’s suffering and death (I’m referring to the previous post) served the purpose of bringing me and others to Christ… but the God I intuit (feel, imagine, sense) doesn’t work that way. There are many ways for a limitless God to urge me along without the pain of a child. In a recent book we read in group (The Shack by William P Young) God says to an anguished father, “I did not purpose Missy’s death, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it for good.”
With this understanding – that God creates healing and grace from the wreckage of our all-to-human lives – we don’t have to wrestle with James’ insistence that the “prayer offered in faith WILL make the sick person well.”
We can choose two variously heretical options instead:
1) James was wrong. In many respects Martin Luther, the founder of our church, thought as much : “However, to state my own opinion about it, though without prejudice to anyone, I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle…” (from Luther’s introduction to the Book of James). Full of grace, inspired by God, but perhaps wrong in his use of the word CAN, in the same sense that Luther thought he was wrong in his insistence on faith through works.
2) God does not supernaturally intervene – ever. God perhaps never heals, but instead removes from our presence those who OUR OWN prayers heal through the abundant grace he emptied into the world through Christ. Let me give an analogy:
We’re playing a football game. We (all the children of God, regardless of stripe or creed) are the team on the field and we’re winning crazily. It’s 500 – 5, the enemy’s team is back against the goal line with a hundred MILES to go rather than yards, and there are only 3 seconds (God-seconds, however) on the clock. God does not play. He coaches. (in fact, it’s illegal for God to enter the field of play – that’s why he did it through a star quarterback named Jesus a long time ago when the score was 0 -5.)
We’re going to win. The end is not in doubt. But it hasn’t been without pain and suffering. One of our star players – let’s call her Brooke – is seriously injured. Not by neglect or intent, but by the conditions on the field. God has given all his knowledge and love to the players, and he’s liberally poured his grace into their hands. These players love their star running back named Brooke, and have enough of Christ’s grace and wonder at their OWN disposal to prayer for her and make her well and keep her in the game.
But God sees in this a prolonging of suffering, or an end that might cause more pain and suffering. So God – against the will of the players on the field who are praying ferociously for her health – pulls her from the game. HIS will at the time is to comfort her and heal her spiritually and let her rejoice from the sidelines as the clock expires, comfortable in his arms. He never intervenes, he only adds players or removes them as needed.
This is a fanciful analogy and not very theologically grounded. Everyone is free to ignore it as heresy. But if we test the somewhat convoluted idea that God has a SPECIFIC will for every phase of every life, and that our prayers may change or impact his SPECIFIC INTERVENTION at every conjunction, against either of the two options above, then the principles of Occam’s Razor say that both of these choices are more logical.
Of course, we’re talking about faith and not logic. I’m not great at either.
Still, God does not often (ever, or maybe once in all my life) reveal his intentions to me. So maybe I only argue this way because I can’t sense what is so apparent to others?
March 18th, 2008 on 9:13 am
Michael, as always, good to discuss with you.
First, let me be clear: I want to reiterate my point that I, too, rarely (perhaps two times in my life) have a strong, unwaivering, other than myself sense of God’s specific will in a situation or plan. God’s specific will is quite literally – and experientially – beyond me…and all of us. That’s the reason why I’ve always prayed for healing tentatively, as a child not knowing what his Father is planning (yet, I hold the possibility out that one day, in the right place, time, and community God may reveal his will specifically and I must be ready to pray in that light; the mere possibility of this humbles me).
James’ description of the healing prayer of faith suggests that one should check one’s own perception of God’s will with a broader community of trusted, mature believers. That is, it was the group of elders who were to pray (and I believe not only to pray for healing but to pray first about God’s will in the situation).
So really, to pray a healing prayer of faith requires the utmost humility:
1) to believe that God can do the miraculous,
2) to seek God’s will, not one’s own,
3) to check one’s own perception through community and be ready to modify,
4) to pray for what has been revealed knowing that it is still all God’s will.
So, to sum up in a personal way, my actual experience is very much like yours. I pray like the child I am – “Please Father, will you…?” – and end with “Yet not my will, but yours.”
I often felt so inadequate earlier in my faith. In Christian community we read about the “heroes” of the faith who were healing people left and right and who’s prayers and actions were doing other miraculous things. I felt as if I must be a faithless, weak, inconsequential believer – “Why doesn’t that happen in my life?”
Then one day it hit me: the details we have in the biblical record are snapshots in the life of Moses, Paul, Peter, and the like. Because we don’t read the text with an eye to the fact that we’re missing much of their everyday life, we then make the mistake of thinking that they were always parting the red sea or healing the paralyzed – day in and day out every day of their life. But the truth is, they weren’t. Many days Paul probably just made tents, or traveled to another city, or preached on a corner without a convert.
That the miraculous, specific intervention of God happens I do not doubt. That it happened every day even in the apostles lives, I do.
Okay, with regard to your analogy, which is a great thought experiment, I have two questions. First, I don’t think I’ve communicated well my own thoughts… The point that you come to in characterizing my own (”that our prayers can change and impact his specific intervention at every conjunction”) is not what I think James is saying at all. As I read James (and I’m not as bold as Luther), I don’t think James is saying we impact his specific will, but rather respond to it as one who has been given insight into the next chapter of life before anyone else has. Now this itself is an specific intervention, but not of the kind we tend to think of.
Second, that he doesn’t intervene at all in The Game is something that I would take issue with on two points. First, every time he pulls a player (what a euphemism that is) it is a specific intervention – unless of course one believes that this isn’t up to him. Second, that he doesn’t break the rules of The Game (by staying on the sideline) doesn’t fit from a trinitarian perspective – he most definitely played on the field in Jesus and most definitely intervened specifically on many occasions.
Just some thoughts… let’s keep this going because I’m sure that I will benefit from your insights, my friend!
Over and out from the one who is full of something…