Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word podcast. In the book of James chapter 5, we get a better understanding of worldliness, accumulation, greed, love of money. Who do you idolize, money or God? But it’s all wrapped around the importance of prayer. So, let’s get started. James chapter 5: Prayer, Our Powerful Privilege.

I read this week that there are about 45,000 English surnames in use currently. I’m interested in last names. That’s what surnames are, and where they came from, so this article caught my eye. Some like Cook or Smith obviously came from occupations. So when it became popular to use a last name, a guy named John who worked on a farm became John Farmer. Many Englishmen adopted a surname from their father’s first name, like Richard’s son, John’s son, Peter’s son, and so on.

Others came from the location where someone lived, like Burton or Sutton, names of towns in England. Others from the type of place you lived, like Moor or Hill or Wood. You know that lass Elizabeth married John from the wood over near Dunmire, so they became Mr. and Mrs. John Wood. I think some of the most interesting last names came from physical characteristics of people, like Armstrong or Longfellow. Or how about Swift?

About a thousand years ago, one of Taylor Swift’s forebears must have been winning a lot of races in medieval England, so he became known as Harold Swift. As Margie shared in her lesson on James chapter 1, there is more than one New Testament character named James, which could be confusing. The author of the epistle we’ve been studying was James, who was the half-brother of Jesus, natural son of Joseph and Mary. Even in biblical times, characteristics were often attached to a person to differentiate them from others with the same name. This James, who became the principal leader of the Christians in Jerusalem in the first few decades after Jesus’ time, was called by early Christians James the Just because he was so respected, a truly godly man. But she also mentioned that he had another name, a second name, nickname, we might say, which might sound funny at first.

It was Camel Knees. That wasn’t just a lighthearted nod to a physical characteristic like calling a ginger-haired girl Red or a tall, lanky guy Slim. James got this nickname, an early Christian historian tells us, because he spent so much time in prayer that his knees were hardened with calluses, like a camel’s knees. It’s not surprising, then, that before James finishes his general epistle to the scattered early Christians, he exhorts them concerning prayer, as we’ll see in a few moments. Before that, though, let me comment on a few other ideas that come up in this last chapter. As I’ve mentioned before, chapter divisions were added to the Bible to make our study easier.

James used no chapter and verse divisions when he penned this epistle. So his condemnation of worldliness that we were focusing on last time in chapter four really continues and carries over to chapter five. Remember our discussion of James calling out worldliness among early Christians, calling it spiritual adultery. By worldliness, he meant when we Christians, who are eternal sons and daughters of God, adopt the same mindset and values as people who don’t even know Him. When believers are no different from others, just living for self without regard to God’s real interests. Well, at the beginning of chapter five, James goes off on those who had adopted another manifestation of worldliness, which is a huge trap in any era, and that is living for the accumulation of money and material things, riches.

Listen to how he addresses this at the beginning of this chapter. Look here, you rich people, weep and groan with anguish because of all the terrible trouble that’s ahead of you. Your wealth is going to rot away. Your fine clothes will be eaten by moths. Your gold and silver corrode. The very wealth that you’ve been counting on will eat away your flesh like fire.

These treasures you have hoarded will testify against you on the day of judgment. Just this past week, I watched a detailed biography of a famous pro athlete from my generation named O.J. Simpson. It was on TV because he had just passed away the week before at age 76. Although he was born poor and came from the projects in San Francisco, California, he was a phenomenal athlete and became one of the premier running backs ever to play in the NFL. He was also a very charismatic and driven individual and became much larger than football.

At his pinnacle, O.J. was an A-list celebrity hobnobbing with the rich and the famous in L.A. in 1970, 1980, and into the 1990s, until, of course, he was arrested for the shocking murder of his ex-wife and another man. As the whole country watched, he was amazingly acquitted of those crimes despite mountains of evidence against him. Remember the bloody glove? If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. After escaping responsibility, it seemed like he was going to change his life. Several clips in the series I watched showed him, in the aftermath of that trial, with spiritual leaders who became involved in his life.

In one clip, I remember he was speaking in a church service that had embraced him, and he said all he really cared about now was getting himself fit for heaven. Those were his words. But he loved money and fame way too much. That was obvious when, later, found guilty in a separate civil case in order to pay restitution to the family of the two peoples who were murdered, O.J. spent the rest of his life figuring out ways to avoid that, hiding his assets in shell companies while continuing to live a very hedonistic lifestyle. Well, that all came to an end a couple of weeks ago when Orenthal James Simpson passed from this life. When he did, he took no money with him, no real estate with him, no expensive artwork or jewelry or any of the trappings of the good life he’d been hoarding.

And now he will face the ultimate judge. And that is James’ point exactly when he says, The treasures that you have hoarded will testify against you on the day of judgment. Money and material things and worldly status were O.J.’s gods. That’s what I was struck by anyway, watching his tragic life story. James’ point is not that Christians can’t be successful or wealthy. His point is that we must never make these things the point of our lives because greed is idolatry.

And certainly, we must never pursue riches to the point of hurting or taking advantage of other people, as James describes in his haunting warning at verse 4 when he says, Listen, hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The cries of the harvesters, they reached the ears of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. That verse brought back a memory for me that I haven’t thought about in years. When I was 16, I started working after school and in the summers to save money for college. One summer, I took on a particularly physically grueling job. Just a few blocks from my house, someone was putting up a small plaza.

It was to have a convenience store and a pharmacy and maybe some other small shops. I stopped by there one day to see if the construction company needed any help, and they did, and I got hired as a laborer. My main job was mixing cement and carrying it in concrete blocks to the masons who were building the walls. I was 16 years old, maybe 140 or 145 pounds at the time. The CMU 10-inch blocks weighed over 40 pounds each, and I was carrying two at a time and hoisting them up higher and higher as the walls went up. The cement mortar I mixed in a machine and then carried it in a big hod, a pail that had a deep trough on top, and I filled the trough with cement and then carried it over to the walls and hoisted it up higher and higher as the walls went up.

There were two or three masons on the walls, and they would yell when they needed blocks or mortar, Mud here! Hey kid, blocks over here! It was summertime too, and it was extremely hot. After a couple hours of this, my arms would be quivering. When I got home each afternoon, I would literally lie on the cold floor like a dead person. I was so sorry I took this job, but quitting wasn’t an acceptable thing in my family, so I took the job and I saw it through.

Plus, I wanted to get paid, and I wasn’t supposed to get paid till the block work was all done. When that phase of the project completed, the foreman told me to come in the next day around noon. And when I got there, no one was there from the company that hired me. I asked somebody who was from another crew. They said, Oh, those guys are done. They’re gone.

Did they leave anything here for me? Maybe an envelope or something? Not that we know of. Ugh, I felt sick inside. I knew the name of the company, though. It was in the city, not local.

So I put in a call to them, hoping it was just some kind of oversight, and I asked for Mark. That’s the foreman who had hired me. Oh, Mark’s not available right now. I explained who I was and why I was calling and asked, Can you have him call me back? Oh, sure, will do when I see him. You know what?

I’m still waiting for that call. The cries of the workers you have cheated reaches the ears of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, James wrote. The few hundred bucks Mark stole from me after that insanely hard summer job won’t seem worth it when Judgment Day comes, is James’ point. In the next few verses of chapter five, he exhorts his scattered flock to patient endurance. Remember, his first audience was believers from around Jerusalem and Judea who had to flee Israel because of persecution. He reminded them how God’s people in the past, even the best of them, also went through difficult times and suffered injustices.

Just as Paul told the Galatians in our lesson about the law of sowing and reaping, if you remember, James assures his readers here God’s keeping track. Not only will evildoers be judged, but those who are faithful to Christ and endure difficulties, endure injustices, we will be rewarded when he returns. He will more than make it up to us. He will make it worth our while, echoing what Jesus repeatedly promised his disciples. In verse 12, casual read-through of this chapter, verse 12 seemed odd to me. It says this, Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any oath.

Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no, so that you won’t fall under judgment. Now, what does that have to do with anything? Well, remember again, James has been pointing up examples of worldliness that Christians’ lives should not be marked by. As I’ve noted, his examples of worldliness, that is unfaithfulness to God, are kind of surprising, not the kind of things I was taught marked a Christian as being worldly, that’s for sure. James’ examples of worldliness in chapter 4, if you remember, were fighting with other people to get your own way, and criticizing and judging people’s motives, and making presumptuous plans about the future without taking God’s will into account. Then, as we just discussed here in chapter 5, living only for wealth and material goals.

And now I believe he’s bringing up one more, and it’s kind of interesting too. How often do you hear people say, when they’re trying to convince you they’re being truthful, I swear to God that’s what happened, or With God as my witness, as they solemnly place their hand in the air and tell you some story. Someone literally just made an oath like that to me yesterday. I asked them why they felt the need to use that oath. It gave them pause. Think about it.

If you have to preface a statement with an oath in order to make someone believe you, what does that really say? Doesn’t it say that you often don’t tell the truth? Isn’t it saying, in effect, I know I often shade the truth and I’m not completely honest sometimes, but this time, this time, I swear to God I’m telling you the truth here. So James’ exhortation is about personal integrity and honesty. He says, Let your yes always mean yes and your no always mean no. End of story.

Because your honesty and integrity as a Christian should be unquestioned by anybody who knows you. By the way, this verse and Jesus’ teaching on this very same subject back in Matthew chapter 5 is why to this day, in courts of law in America, they don’t require people to swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God, as you’ve heard on every courtroom drama you’ve ever watched. They now ask, Do you swear or affirm that you’re about to tell the truth? That’s just a semantical change, though, isn’t it? James’ point is that followers of Christ should never need oaths to be taken seriously. Our integrity and honesty should be beyond question because we’re different than other people in the world.

We’re children of the Father of Lights, as he said in chapter 1, who does not change like a shifting shadow. As I mentioned in my introduction to this lesson, James could not finish his exhortation to early Christians who looked up to him for leadership without exhorting them to prayer. It was too much a part of his personal spiritual life. So at verse 13 and following, he adds, Is any among you suffering? He should pray. Is any among you cheerful?

He should sing praises to God. Is any among you sick? He should call for the elders of his church, and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed.

The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. If you’re a Christian, just think of prayer as talking with your heavenly Father because that’s exactly what it is. I never get why some people sound completely different when they pray than when they speak normally, or why some churches teach that prayer is repeating memorized formulas. Of course, we should be reverent when we approach God in prayer, but there’s no special language you need or formulas you need. I certainly don’t consider myself a prayer warrior, and I can tell you for certain I don’t have any calluses on my knees. I’m sorry to admit that, but I’ll tell you a little bit about what I know on the subject of prayer since it comes up here.

As we examine prayers that are recorded for us in the Bible, we see different aspects. One component is often of worship or the adoration of God. Another is confession of sin. A third is being thankful for God’s blessings in our lives, and a fourth, bringing our needs up to Him. A helpful memory device many people know as Christians for this part of prayer, these four aspects, is ACTS, like the book in the New Testament. The A for adoration, the C for confession, the T for thanksgiving, and the S for supplication, which is just a big word that means humbly bringing up our requests to God.

In this section, near the end of James’ epistle, he encourages his flock to, in good times and bad times, stay in prayer. It’s an awesome privilege to be able to come to our heavenly Father anytime, day or night, any kind of situation we’re in, to ask for wisdom, to thank Him for undeserved blessings, to confess our sins and failures when we know we’ve failed Him, and to let Him know what concerns us, and to know that He hears us. James talks about confession in this section because when I say know that he hears us, actually God hears us when our willful sins are not in the way. King David wrote back in the 66th Psalm, When I cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord did not hear me.

Even David, who is called in the Old Testament a man after God’s own heart, went through periods when he let sin get the best of him, and he held on to cherished sins, which he realized were blocking his relationship with God. He had to come to a place of repentance, being sorry for those sins, confessing them to God, asking for forgiveness in order to be restored into a right relationship with God so his prayers would be heard again. James has already mentioned another reason here that our prayers might not be effective. It’s back in chapter 4, you remember? He said, Sometimes we ask with wrong motives. God’s not our personal genie.

He’s not going to answer our selfish, wrong-headed prayers. But even when things to us seem to line up to God’s desires, they may in fact not, because God’s desires are not always known to us. Or just the timing might not be right because there are factors involved that we do not see. Sometimes God is doing stuff in us, in or around us, that is more important than Him taking the problem we are praying about off of us. I often think about the apostle Paul, who had physical limitations of one kind and another that plagued him. He said in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 that he pleaded with the Lord three times to take away one particular thing that he called a thorn in his flesh, which sounds to me like a nagging physical problem.

Yet God did not. Paul concluded, because of his confidence in God’s love and wisdom, that it must be because God knew that when he was weak, he relied more on the strength that God could give him. Man, I wish I had that perspective all the time. But it’s very instructive to me to realize that if God did not answer someone seemingly as indispensable to his plans as the Apostle Paul when he pleaded for physical healing, then it’s clearly not always God’s will to do that. Speaking of healing, James mentions here that when we are down and out physically and emotionally, either one or both, the word he uses is a general one that suggests times when we are seriously weakened. He says we should call for our church’s leaders to come pray over us.

The anointing with oil is likely symbolic of the Holy Spirit’s presence. The confession of sin to one another, he mentions, is again because cherished sin blocks God from hearing us. Or in some cases, the sin itself may be the actual cause of our problem, maybe in fact God’s chastening. So confessing and forsaking those things may be the key to being restored to wholeness emotionally, physically. The church I’m a member of practices what James instructs here regularly. Whenever someone requests it, that is, calling for church leaders to pray over you.

Elders here just means your church’s spiritual leaders. We’ve seen people physically healed of things that medically seemed impossible, and we have seen people restored emotionally and spiritually too. I can’t say that’s always the result. Again, God is not our genie. Physical healing may not always be in his plan for us. No Christian would ever die if it was.

But when we pray in faith from clean hearts, James says, the power of prayer is effective. As someone suggested to me when I was a young man preparing for ministry, why not give God the opportunity, if He chooses, to intervene in a supernatural way? Why turn to a doctor first, or to a psychologist or counselor first? Why not turn to God first? You know, I’ll be honest with you, prayer to me is often a perplexing mystery. I can’t fully explain it.

I don’t think anyone else can either. It’s better to just realize, as the Bible tells us here, that prayer is a powerful tool. It’s an invitation to communicate directly with God in heaven. So, we’re told, tell Him what’s on your mind. Ask Him for wisdom for issues you face. Confess things you know are wrong and have come between you.

Thank Him for His many blessings. Let your requests be made known. And then trust in His wisdom and rest in His will, because God’s will is always preferable to ours. We’re out of time for our look into James’ practical letter urging believers to live out their faith in difficult times. Though it was very dangerous, James himself did just that, staying on in Jerusalem, leading the early Christian church from there for 30 years until his own martyrdom around 62 A.D. The early Christians were blessed to have such a godly and wise leader to teach them, to intercede in prayer for them, and to model what it meant to follow Jesus to them.

And we are blessed to have this challenging letter from James preserved for us in the New Testament canon of Scripture. This has been Paul for Share the Word. It’s truly a blessing to listen to those like Paul who sit behind this microphone and bring you the Word of God in such a way that it opens our hearts, our minds, and brings a greater understanding as well as a love for our Lord Jesus Christ. Don’t stop now. Check out more of the podcasts and blog at sharetheword.org. Help us share the word and be a part of this Great Commission project.

From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.