James concludes by moving to what we can do in times of trial and suffering. He challenges us to pray. It is as we pray that God brings hope, healing, and restoration to our lives. Suffering can move us to look beyond ourselves to God. The literal word that is translated here is ‘to suffer evil.’ Alec Motyer explains that suffering is a broader concept than simply sickness. “Jeremiah suffered opposition, Ezekiel bereavement, and Hosea marital breakdown.”[i]
In other words, it is in any trouble that we are facing in our lives that causes physical, emotional, and tormenting spiritual pain that we ought to pray. Douglas Moo speaks to the attitude we need to have while praying and waiting for God’s outcomes.
Because the verb [for prayer] is so general in its meaning and application, no certainty about the content of the prayer that James calls for here can be attained. Perhaps James would include a petition to God to remove the trial. But James’s concern when he deals with trials elsewhere (1:2–4, 12; 5:7–11) is to encourage believers to endure the suffering with the right spirit and with a divine perspective on history. Presumably, then, the prayer that he encourages here is for the spiritual strength to endure the trial with a godly spirit.[ii]
Yet, we also see that when God’s people start praying, they begin experiencing spiritual growth, healing, reconciliation, and restoration. Here, in the conclusion of his letter, James gives us direction in addressing two significant areas of our lives: physical and spiritual health.
JAMES DEALS WITH THE PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES.
James is dealing with those who are experiencing trouble in various ways, but primarily those who are experiencing physical sickness and emotional distress.
- The right response to life’s uncertainties.
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise.[iii]
Here, James moves from the high to the lows of life. There are moments when we are cheerful and life feels full, from a human point of view, which foster expressions of gratitude and thanksgiving to God for his mercy and grace. However, there are difficult and challenging moments of life, where we are in trouble of various kinds. Each season in our lives presents inherent dangers to our spiritual journey. Alec Motyer points out that God’s provision for life affects both the good and difficult times.
Here, then, in two words, are all life’s experiences, and each of them in turn can so easily be the occasion of spiritual upset. Trouble can give rise to an attitude of surly rebellion against God and the abandonment of spiritual practices. Equally, times of ease and affluence beget complacency, laziness, and the assumption that we are able of ourselves to cope with life, and God is forgotten.[iv]
So, when life is full of God’s graces, the right response is praise, adoration, and thanksgiving to God. We acknowledge that it is God’s goodness, not our human ingenuity, that has brought us to this point in our lives. In times of trouble, we should look to God for strength to sustain us, strengthen us, and help us walk through the experience trusting in God’s grace.
- Dealing with sickness.
One of the greatest gifts we receive in life is health. It is one that we often take for granted until we are sick. Sickness challenges us unlike other trials. We are in a weakened and dependent position. It strikes at our sense of self-sufficiency, like nothing else does. It reminds us of our frailty and mortality. So, how should we respond? It would seem like prayer would be an automatic response, but here James gives very specific directions on who should pray for us. This is designed to move us toward Christian community.
And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven.[v]
Who is to call the elders? The sick person is the one responsible for asking for this prayer assistance.
Since the elders are summoned to the sick person, we may assume that the sick person is serious enough to restrict the mobility of the sufferer. The same conclusion might be suggested by James’s use of the preposition over after the verb pray. Only here in the biblical Greek does this combination occur, and it might picture the elders standing over the sick person. However, it might also be shorthand for laying hands on the person while praying.[vi]
These elders are to be called not because they are invested with special powers, but because they represent the church as a whole, and their prayers are the expressions of the entire congregation or community.[vii]
We see from other NT texts that elders are those who have spiritual oversight over local congregations.
…the power to heal is invested in prayer, not the elder. And while it is appropriate that those charged with spiritual oversight of the community should be called to intercede for those seriously ill, James makes it clear that all believers have the privilege and responsibility to pray for healing.[viii]
As mentioned earlier, this call for the elders is meant to move us away from our individualistic approach to life, especially when we are sick and struggling. Many people fall into despair during the low points that illness brings. We are more fragile and more susceptible to pressures from our culture to bring our lives to an end. Why is this becoming so critical at this time? There is now a very real and almost silent threat in our nation, and if not checked, it will grow into a horrific evil. I’m speaking about Medical Assistance in Dying. In a stunning article from Sage Journals (specifically, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying), a research article published on February 28, 2025, is exposing a horrific evil that could easily come to pass. The article is entitled: “Government Economics of Expanding Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying to Vulnerable Populations and the Ethical Implications of Allowing the State to Control Death, ” which explores various studies regarding the potential economic savings from expanding MAID in Canada and the ethical issues involved.
MAID is currently the fifth leading cause of death in Canada, and there is a push to include vulnerable groups that currently cost the government more than they contribute to taxes. These groups include individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, elderly, and indigenous communities. Both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios were analyzed, projecting total savings of up to 1.273 trillion by 2047.[ix]
The concern, as outlined in this article, was that the dividing line between voluntary and involuntary end-of-life decisions would begin to occur because of economic pressures in our country. There is also a concern about outsourcing the ending of life away from the medical community as a cost-saving device.
The safeguards to prevent this from happening cannot be made effective. For instance, in the Netherlands, by the 1990s, more than 50% of euthanasia cases were reported as non-voluntary. This killing of people without their consent has occurred with almost complete absence of oversight regarding euthanasia practices in the Netherlands.[x]
When we develop a strictly utilitarian view of life, the sanctity or sacredness of life disappears, and people are seen as expendable for the “good of society.” Remember, when people are sick, they are vulnerable. They suffer with feelings of uselessness, fear of being a burden, and are often reluctant to confront the challenges that aging brings. People who are struggling in a weakened mental, emotional, and physical condition will not be able to bear the pressures that will be put upon them. This is why it is so important to be part of the church community. We need to be part of a loving, caring, encouraging, and healing community where God’s grace and hope will help to sustain us through the various trials of life. When we are a part of a biblically based church family, we learn God’s value on life. We can be encouraged and supported as we grow together by becoming more loving and caring toward others and more courageous to challenge these directions coming from our culture.
James now continues to describe the prayer offered on behalf of the sick. They are to be anointed with oil.
- Anointing with Oil and the Prayer of Faith.
Why anoint with oil? Oil was both symbolic and used medicinally in the ancient world of Scripture. Though there are a number of viewpoints regarding the “anointing with oil,”
James probably views the anointing as a physical action symbolizing consecration. …As the elders pray, they are to anoint the sick person in order to symbolize that that person is being set apart for God’s special attention and care.[xi]
The point being made by James is that “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well (v. 15).”
What does James mean by the prayer of faith or believing prayer? He is making a distinction between a simply ritualistic approach to prayer. What I mean by ritualistic prayer is that elders come, anoint people with oil, and a prayer is said with the expectation that these actions are the cause of healing. However, what James is saying is there must be a condition of heart in the lives of the elders that when they pray, God will heal. Often the issue of a lack of faith is placed squarely on the sick person, but that is not what is being communicated here. This just adds to the suffering, by adding the guilt of a “lack of faith” upon the sufferer. This raises the question, if after a reasonable amount of time a person is not well, is this a lack of faith on the elders’ part?
Douglas Moo brings out this aspect regarding the mystery of God’s sovereignty and our prayers.
The faith exercised in prayer is faith in the God who sovereignly accomplishes his will. When we pray, our faith recognizes, explicitly or implicitly, the overruling providential purposes of God.[xii]
What he is saying is that God, for his own reasons, answers our prayers differently than what we may want. Paul, a man of great faith who exercised the gift of healing in prayer, suffered a “thorn in the flesh.” I know that some would argue that this thorn was the persecution he was experiencing, but there are other texts to suggest that he may have been suffering physically.
As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you, and even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Christ Jesus himself. Where, then, is your blessing of me now? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me.[xiii]
We may not know what specifically Paul’s thorn in the flesh was, but one thing we do know is that Paul prayed three times for God to remove it. But God responded by denying Paul’s request, giving a specific reason and a purpose for this affliction.
Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.[xiv]
JAMES DEALS WITH THE SPIRITUAL AND ETERNAL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES.
James now connects the physical world to that which affects not only our relationship with God, but also the created world in which we live. He also moves into the spiritual and eternal world of how our prayer affects those realms. He begins by acknowledging that our physical world is intertwined in some way with the unseen, spiritual world and its effects upon us physically.
He ties the idea of unconfessed sin and how it impacts not only the spiritual part of our being but also has an impact on our emotions and material parts of our bodies. This is not to say that all sin is the cause of our individual sickness, but there are times when our sin does affect us in a physical way.
And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.[xv]
For sin and sickness were often closely associated in the ancient world. Certainly, the book of Job, as well as Jesus (cf. John 9:2–3), makes it clear that drawing a direct relationship between illness and sin is impossible. But the NT continues to recognize that some illnesses are, in fact, the product of sin (Mark 2:1–12; 1 Cor. 5:5 [?]; 11:27–30). Recognizing this possible connection, James encourages the sick person to deal with any potential spiritual causes of the illness that he is experiencing. The “if” (kan) is therefore doubly important: it shows that James by no means assumes that sickness is caused by sin…[xvi]
B. The Power and Effectiveness of a righteous person’s prayer.
The issue is that to pray powerful and effective prayers, our lives must be in right relationship with God. It is not our righteousness, but Christ’s righteousness that has been imputed to us by faith and then lived out in this world. Often, when we think of righteous people, we forget their humanity. James now brings us to the example of Elijah, who was noted for extraordinary answers to prayer, but he also reminds us of his humanity and struggle. He uses the example of God answering Elijah’s prayer for rain.
Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.[xvii]
We find the story in 1 Kings 18, where, after this great confrontation with the false prophets, God’s amazing answer is then followed by his despair, fear, and depression. Why did Elijah pray for drought and then for restoration? We need to remember that the Northern Kingdom of Israel was in an apostate condition. They followed the sin of Jeroboam and the golden calves in the two shrine cities of Bethel and Dan. Under Ahab, the worship of Baal was intensified, and evil multiplied (1 Kings 16:30). Elijah was God’s spokesperson and was reminding the people of their covenant obligations, that if they disobeyed the Lord, drought conditions would occur.
However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you: The Lord will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him. The Lord will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish. The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.[xviii]
Elijah was praying for the nation to awaken to God’s word and return to obedience. After the repentance on Mount Carmel, Elijah prayed that God would now bless his people with rain. What we learn from Elijah is that we need to pray according to God’s will, and when we do, God responds in answer to prayer. The prayer was really to bring a wayward nation back to God. James now picks up on this idea and explains the power of prayer and helping wayward people back to God.
C. Restoration of the wayward soul.
In James’ example, we find that a nation returned to God because Elijah was used by God to bring them back.
My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.[xix]
The idea here is someone who has either been led astray or deceived. However, the action is willful, and the person is in danger. The death here is not just a physical death, but an eternal separation from God, which is the second death.
The nature of sin is unbelief; we do not act on God’s word. In the YouVersion Classic devotional reading plan with Nicky Gumbel, he points out: “You always swallow a lie about God before you swallow forbidden fruit.”[xx]
How many people in times of great trouble have turned away from the faith because they misunderstood and blamed God for their misfortune? Rather than trusting God to see them through, they turned their backs on God and became angry and bitter in their souls. It is amazing when God’s people can help a troubled soul back to God and experience God’s restoring grace. God generally uses concerned people to help the wayward back to God.
CONCLUSION:
I had the privilege of attending Seattle Bible College, where Roy Johnson, the pastor of the Philadelphia church, served for 30 years and was the founder of the school. I wrote a research paper chronicling his life. I listened to many of his recorded messages, as he related his story of his life. One was this amazing testimony he shared.
I [Roy Johnson] suppose the greatest miracle I witnessed in my life was a healing of a woman with a crushed back and broken legs. I have repeated it many times. I was traveling in a quartet, and we ministered in El Campo, Texas. Dad Richie was there and gave his testimony about how God healed him while he lay dying. God called him to the ministry and sent him out to preach at 55 years of age.
After the service they started praying for the sick. When we started across the room to pray for a woman who had been carried into the meeting, we were singing, ‘And the power of God is just the same today. It doesn’t matter what the people say. Whatever God has promised He’s able to perform, the power of God is just the same today.’
When Dad Richie was possibly ten feet from her, she suddenly leaped out of that chair, looked down, and said, ‘My God! I’m healed!’ She ran down one aisle, across the back and up to the front and took over the meeting. I mean she preached, testified, exhorted, rejoiced, skipped, jumped (that’s all right to dance around a little bit, if you’ve been crippled like that). Then she told this amazing story.
She said ‘My husband and I were youth leaders in this church, an Assembly of God church and on our way home from a youth meeting one night, we were in a terrible car accident. My husband was killed, my child was crippled, and my back was crushed, and left with two broken legs. There was absolutely no hope that I would ever be able to walk again. No one visited me from church and I became very bitter toward God and the church. I was living with one desire in my life, which was to seek revenge for the pain that the driver that smashed into our vehicle had caused. If I could only get strength enough to get to him somehow and to bring the same kind of agony and sorrow that I had known.’
People approached me about attending this special meeting and brought me into the service. While I sat listening all of a sudden something started to break within me. I said, “Lord Jesus, from my heart, I forgive that man.” “The moment I did, I felt the healing power of Almighty God come over my body.”[xxi]
What we have is a powerful example of the restoration of both the spiritual and the physical in a moment of repentant prayer.
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2024/08/19/13/56/ai-generated-8980827_1280.png
[i] Alec Motyer, The Message of James: The Tests of Faith, The Bible Speaks Today, (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1985), 187.
[ii] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 299.
[iii] James 5:13, The New International Version of the Bible, Zondervan, 2011.
[iv] Alec Motyer, The Message of James: The Tests of Faith, 187.
[v] James 5:14-15.
[vi] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James, 303-304.
[vii] Dan McCartney, James, Baker Exegetical Commentary of the New Testament, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 253.
[viii] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James, 314.
[ix] Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, Government Economics of Expanding Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying to Vulnerable Populations and the Ethical Implications of Allowing the State to Control Death, February 28, 2025.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00302228251323299
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James, 307-308.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Galatians 4:13-15.
[xiv] 2 Corinthians 12:7b-10.
[xv] James 5:15-16.
[xvi] Douglas Moo, The Letter of James, 310.
[xvii] James 5:17-18.
[xviii] Deuteronomy 28:15, 20-24.
[xix] James 5:19-20.
[xx] Nicky Gumbel, The Bible, Classic Version 2025, November 1, 2025.
[xxi] Sermon tape from Roy Johnson, Philadelphia Church, Seattle, Washington, January 2, 1977.
