I invite you to open your Bibles this morning to James' letter, the letter of James. Again, that's near the end of your Bible, tucked between Hebrews and 1 Peter. Returning to very nearly the last verses there of chapter 5. That's page 1291, 1291 in the Pew Bible. My goal this morning is to finish what we started last time, which has been several weeks, in our consideration of verses 13 through 18 of chapter 5. Just to get us back in line with what's going on here, these verses are the middle of James' conclusion to this letter, a conclusion he kicked off in verse 12 when he says, Above all, or as we might say, to cap things off, I have some things to say to you. And when he tipped his hand there, the people of God who received this letter were expecting three things from him. They expected to hear him make an oath so as to bolster his reputation. They were expecting him to pray for their well-being and they were expecting him to state in summary form why he'd written this letter in the first place. And James has been delivering on that expectation but with a twist. In verse 12, instead of swearing an oath, he exhorts them all to not swear oaths. The next time in verses 19 and 20, he's going to exhort everyone to take as their own purpose, his purpose. And in our verses today, verses 13 to 18, instead of James praying for the congregation, praying for them, James exhorts them to pray. To pray, pray, pray. And he specified three ways here. Pray in every situation. Pray over the sick, and pray for one another. With that in mind, let's read this word from God, authored by James 5, beginning in verse 13. Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he'll be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bores fruit. So far the reading of God's Word this morning. Verses 13 to 18, you hear it there three times James calls the church to pray. In verse 13, to pray in every situation. And as we saw last time, whatever our experience, whether it's suffering or cheerfulness, in Christ we've been equipped to pray and give praise. We are able in Christ, no matter our circumstance, to ask God for whatever it is we need, body and soul. To ask God to turn every circumstance in a way that's for our good, just as He's promised. And I think most importantly to ask God to change us through those circumstances and through our relationships and through those trials to respond more and more as his people would respond. That we would look more and more like Jesus as he takes us through these trials. And able to praise God, the giver of every good and perfect gift. That's easy in the good times, but James reminded us that even in the bad times, Even in the tough times. Even today, people of God, we are equipped to count it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds. Only because we have Christ as our Lord and our Savior can we do this. So it says pray in every circumstance. In verses 14 and 15, James called for the elders of the church to pray over the sick. And he brought out there in that section that because sickness and sin are so bound up together so often, he urges those who are physically sick, physically disabled, to call on the elders to come and pray over them for complete healing. That they'd be raised up in the body and they'd find forgiveness of sins for their soul. And he reminded the elders that you have been ordained and equipped to answer this need. You are ordained and equipped to answer in the name of the Lord, going in His power, authorized by His name. And to offer prayer of faith. And we saw last time that it's the prayer of faith, not the anointing of oil that the Lord has promised to answer. Prayers of faith offer not only trusting that God's promises are true and good, but trusting in the God who gives them. The God who is able to accomplish anything He chooses to accomplish. The God who has promised to work everything for our good. The God before whom we can rest and trust that in this circumstance that we don't understand, it's going to be okay. We don't go to the Lord with a prayer that is like a magic formula that we try to have Him conform His will to ours. Prayer is a means by which the Lord takes us to His throne of grace and conforms our wills to His. That we would wait for His perfect timing and that we would surrender to His perfect will. And then in verse 16, where we take up our text today, James turns again to the congregation, pivoting from this special call to the elders of the church to pray for individuals, to a general call to every member of the body to pray for the healing of the congregation. The healing of the congregation. He says, pray for one another. Pray for one another. He begins, therefore, keeping in mind what he's talked about, Therefore, because unconfessed sin will weaken not only an individual saint, but also an entire congregation, therefore, for your own good as well as the good of the congregation, do this. Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you, that is you all together, you, the congregation, may be healed. And that prayer just comes out of, that commandment comes out of nowhere and it took a lot of time to think about what's James doing here? Why is this here? And part of the reason is because even in that day as it is in our day, people by nature, we forget that the church isn't about me and Jesus. It's not just about me and Jesus. Yes, Jesus came to save you and he came to save me, but he came to save you and me by saving a church, a people, a family, a kingdom. And every one of us who has believed in Christ has been joined to that family, joined to that congregation, joined to that body through faith. And each one of us, wherever we live and move and have our being, are called to join ourselves to that body where it finds expression in the church. And here we are today. But our culture says that's not what we're doing here. We're not here as a body. the Bible says we are and James wants us to be mindful of that as we consider the life of the body he wants us to have in mind what Paul made very clear to the Corinthians we've heard it from Pastor Gordon Corinthians chapter 12 where Paul makes the comparison that just as the human body is one and has many members so it is with Christ for his body does not consist of one member but of many and then Paul in that letter turns to the congregation and he says now you you are the body of Christ and individually members of it that's our identity and we can forget it as quickly as we walk out this door but it doesn't change the fact that's who we are and on the night he was betrayed on his way to the cross one of the last things he taught his disciples and in fact I think he left this ringing in their ears he said it so many times he told them love one another just as I have loved you you are also to love one another and by this all people will know that you're my disciples if you have love for one another that's why Christ didn't save us as individual Christians to live on our individual islands someplace he called us as a people to live together that we might love one another as he has loved us. And James has written this letter to churches that are struggling to love one another. To members in these congregations not loving each other very well. Think back across this letter. He wrote to them to open their eyes to see what it was they were doing. To open their eyes to the sin in the body of Christ such as this, as speaking quickly and getting angry with one another instead of listening. For treating some members with more favor than others instead of showing grace to all for the sake of Christ. Judging one another as though we are God and that without mercy. Doing little to show actual love, demonstrate love to one another even though we're quick with words of well-wishing and good hope. Cursing one another with the very mouths we use to bless God. Quarreling and fighting with one another. Demanding what it is we want. All of that is in mind. We've taken months to go through this letter. This letter took minutes to read when it was first delivered. Pray for one another and confess your sins to one another. He wrote this letter to expose to the saints how their sin weakens the body of Christ. It hobbles our witness. It frustrates and puts a lid on the light that we're to have in this dark world. And in writing this letter, he called on them to confess their sins to one another, confess our sins to one another for the purpose that the church would be restored, that the church would be made whole, that the church would know good health and vitality and vibrancy. Now, as I thought about this, I have to say that it's one thing to admit this truth up here. It's not all that difficult to admit that there's sin in the church. I just got to look at myself. I know it's here. But it's quite another thing to be convinced that your sin and for me to be convinced that my sin actually handicaps the church, actually weakens the body of Christ, actually functions like a cancer to erode the church from within. Whether we see it or not, that's what James says is happening in the church that he wrote to. And as we've seen through these sermons, there's much that this says to us as well. We're not immune from this reality. But apart from this conviction that my sin contributes to the weakness of the body, and apart from your conviction that your sin contributes to the weakness of the body, you'll not be motivated to do what James is going to tell us to do. And I would dare say that that's probably why we don't do it nearly as much as we need to. We're really not convinced that our sins against one another are that serious. Are that deadly? well James is and he gives us a prescription for how we are to respond for the well being of the body for the good of the whole he says confess your sins to one another confess your sins to one another that's so easy to read on the page but experience at least my own experience and my experience with some of you trying to help you with this has shown that this can be one of the most difficult perhaps terrifying things that you are called to do as a Christian. Let me explain. We know, we know that it's right to confess every sin to God. We know with David that every sin is before him. Every sin is against him only. Every sin is measured according to his righteousness and found wanting. We know that. But too often, however, we stop there and we pray that admission, that confession in a very general way. But as I tried to point out this morning from the law and any place we find the law in the Bible, God names names. He calls sin, sin. He calls adultery, adultery. Sexual immorality, sexual immorality. Lying, lying. Thievery, thievery. Hatred, hatred. Not a mistake, not a shortcoming, not an oops. he reveals to us sin and he calls it by its name so that we can learn this vocabulary and we can use it to glorify him and to love our neighbor. You see, the sin itself is what brings guilt and shame. But sometimes I think we feel ashamed or guilty to even use the words. That's pure, that's Victorian. There's something wrong with that. When it comes to confessing particular sins, to be the call of names names before God, we find it really difficult. I find it very difficult. First of all, we're reluctant to admit it, specifically. We may pretend that it really never happened. We may deny that we did it. And when we can't deny any longer, when we find ourselves in the corner, we try to weasel out with an excuse or a redefinition or a minimization. Somehow, it's not that bad. I really don't need to do anything with this. That's our nature. That's our habitual tendency. But praise God, He reaches into us, He reaches down to us, He accommodates to us by His Word, by His Spirit, to humble us again and again, that we would confess our sins. Lord willing, as we grow in grace and in maturity, more specifically, to reassure us that He still loves us for the sake of Christ, that this sin too can be forgiven and that we would ask Him for more grace and He will give us more grace to get back at it and work for the righteousness after the righteousness that He has called us to. That we would have more grace to exert ourselves as doers of the Word and not just hearers, as James says. And by God's grace we grow into that we're more able to confess our sins to God specifically and for many sins known only to God that's enough but when our sins are also known to people people that we've sinned against and those who've witnessed our sins against other people James says there's something more to do this is off the top of my head and so I hope I don't get it wrong but I know we had the murders in the church, what, two weeks ago. And we have two extremes out there, those that want vengeance to fall and those that are forgiving everything without calling it anything. And I think both are missing the boat of what James would have us see here, is that if we're the perpetrator of sin, we're called to confess that sin against those we sin against. It's not enough to just expect others or hope that others or wait for others to just, I forgive you. That's a wonderful thing when people can forgive us despite our need to repent. But we can short-circuit someone's need to repent by willy-nilly saying, I forgive you. James is after something here. He's after us facing what's difficult for us, and that is confessing our sins to God as hard as that is, it's confessing our sins to each other. That's hard. Why is it hard? Well, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Will you forgive me? God will remember my sins no more. Will you keep a record of my wrongs? Christ himself will restore and comfort me. He'll bring me close. Will you restore and comfort me? I dare say we're gun-shy. Confessing our sins to one another is so hard, and it's been so hard for so long, that Rome created the confessional. And the medical community created the doctor-patient relationship so that people can confess to someone, the wrong someone, in private. And the reason it's so hard is because it's impossible. It's impossible apart from knowing the grace of God that's ours in Christ Jesus. It's impossible apart from knowing that He has done all of this for us and for one another, that we dare to stand on Him and press this way. Apart from Him, we don't get the conviction of sin that we need to confess. Apart from Him, we don't have the drive to step out and do that scary thing and call that person, meet that person, speak to that person. Apart from Christ, we would not and could not confess our sins to one another. But in Christ, James is working within Christ, speaking to the body of Christ. There's a way to go. This isn't an empty commandment. There's a road to follow. Jesus has set it out for us. It's a two-way street that runs from sinner to the offended and from the offended to the sinner so that there's no way they can miss each other and to confess their sins to one another and be reconciled. I hope you know these passages. In Matthew 5, Jesus commands the sinner. If you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your altar, your gift at the altar, and go. First, be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. If you've sinned against someone, Jesus' will for your life is to go. Go and be reconciled. Go and confess your sin. Go and beg for forgiveness. Go and be reconciled. And while you're doing that, At the other end of the road is the one you offended, Matthew 18. God speaks to him and says, If your brother sins against you, go. Go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. And if he listens to you, you've gained your brother. Go. Go and be reconciled. Seek a confession that you'll be quick to forgive. Go. And in Matthew 7, Jesus gives this warning to both. whatever end of the road you're coming from, and usually you're coming from both, believe it or not. For the moment when you get together, he says, first take the log out of your own eye. And then you'll see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's. Confess your sins to one another, starting with your own. Starting with your own. And then be gentle with your brother or your sister. When do you go? When do you go? Both of these, all these texts say go. When do you go? Right now. James says the health of the body depends on it. This is a co-blue. To whom do you go? Well, of course, we go to God first each and every time. He's the one who's sinned against. We confess to Him. We ask for His forgiveness. And we can know we have it in Jesus. And that's to give us strength and motivation and courage to face each other. And then we return to the scene of the crime. And if that sin against my brother or my sister is in private, I go to them in private. And I call my sin what God calls my sin. I own it. I recognize how it hurt them. I ask them to forgive me. I ask them to encourage me and to pray for me and to trust me to pursue a different way. And if I've sinned against someone, in some measure public, in front of my children, in front of the church, wherever. I may still want to go to that offended party first and privately first, but in the end, I need to go and confess as publicly as I sin. Sometimes that means going to a lot of people. Sin is deadly. to the body of Christ. Now you might be, like I was, going, really? I don't know. Maybe you've never done that. I hope that you have, because if you have, you know, you know the reconciliation that comes through that. It's one of the most beautiful pictures, demonstrations of the love of Christ. And though we don't go to get a warm fuzzy in our souls, I'll tell you what, it gives you a warm fuzzy in your soul. And Jesus would say that this is what we need to do, even if it means running to our brother seven times a day to say, I repent, please forgive me. You're probably going, that's not the story I remember. I remember being asked, how many times do I need to forgive him when he comes? That's important too. But the reality is, the brother, the sinner, may have to come to his brother seven times a day to confess the same sin over and over again. Will you do it? Will you go? When Jesus told his disciples, you must forgive that brother who comes to you seven times in a day, you must forgive him. The disciples said, increase our faith, Lord. I don't think we can do that. Do you remember what Jesus answered? In a nutshell, you don't need any more faith. If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you have enough faith to do your duty. And this, James says, is our duty. It's our duty to confess our sins to one another. And that's always for the purpose of being granted forgiveness from one another. This is a hard calling. It's a hard calling. And it's no wonder that James goes on to call us to pray for one another. We need support. It'd be easy in this text to go back and make this a general statement about praying. We could put anything we want in these words. Pray for one another. Well, we do pray for one another. We pray in the congregational prayer. We pray on the prayer postings. We pray around the table. We pray, we pray, we pray for one another. But do we pray for one another for this? Do we pray for one another that we would confess our sins to one another so that the body would be made well? While we were still sinners, when we were enemies of God, Jesus Christ came into this world and died for us. He came to us to reconcile us to Him. And He taught us when He was here on the earth that we are to love not only our friends, not only our family, to love our enemies, and we're to pray for those who persecute us. Now he had in mind clearly those who are outside the church in opposition to this body, but just if that's true, how much more true is it for the body of Christ to pray for one another and to love one another? Even those with whom we have a conflict. Even those with whom we've come to odds. So let's think about that for just a moment. What's it mean to pray with regard to the confession of sins to one another? Well, there's a lot more than I can say here, but here's a few things that we might think about. I think there's a lot we can pray for those who sin against us. Our instinct is to pray for the judgment of God to come down. Our instinct is to pray that God would set them right. Make them come. I'll be here when they get here. That's not what James is after. We can pray that the Lord will guard them from becoming hardened in their sin. That if He'd keep them sensitive to His Spirit, that He would keep them open to His Word. We can pray that the Lord would be merciful to humble them without breaking them. Have you ever prayed that for someone? Headed for a train wreck and you want to see them turn around, pray the Lord to be merciful to humble them before He wrecks them. For the purpose that they would confess their sin to Him and be restored by Him so that by the time I get there, He's ready for me to grant forgiveness as well. We can pray for those who have sinned against us that the Lord would in fact bring them to meet us on the way. All legitimate prayers for the glory of God and the good of our neighbor that serve the reconciliation of sinners to one another. And there's much we can pray for those we have sinned against. We can pray that the Lord will be gracious to heal the hearts that we've broken, to bind up the wounds we've caused. We can pray that the Lord will prepare them to receive us, to hear our full confession, no ifs, ands, or buts, to own sin, to name it as it is, without excuse, and to receive our earnest commitment to do otherwise, to pursue righteousness, and to ask for their help in their prayers toward that end. And we can pray that the Lord will give them grace to forgive us. And not only to forgive us today, but in every day ahead when the memory of our sin comes crashing into their mind, that they would remember the grace that they were given to give us grace, and that forgiveness would remain. This is a big task. It's a lifelong task. It's a body-wide task. It's an urgent task. And we're called to do it in the strength of His might. So James encourages us toward this end by saying that the prayer of the righteous person has great power as it is working. He's been asking us, he's been telling us to pray for one another. The subject matter has to do with our confession sins to one another for the purpose of binding us together in wellness and wholeness. And he says, the prayer of the righteous person is great in power as it's working. Well, being a good Calvinist, my first question is, who's the righteous person? That's not me. Well, yes it is. And it's you. Every believer, every believer through faith in Jesus Christ, the righteous one is a righteous person. That's what it means to be justified. That's what it means to be made right with God. That's what it means to be clothed with His righteousness, not your own. And so in the courtroom of God, in the offerings of prayers, it's the righteous person whose prayers are heard. Therefore, we are equipped to pray to God our Father with this unshakable confidence that even though we don't deserve it, God will hear and He will answer because of Christ our Lord. That's our confidence. And so James says that such prayer has great power as it's working, it is powerful in its effect. It will make things happen. What things happen? We're not talking about lots of different things. We're talking about reconciliation in the body of Christ. This is something to pray for. And this is something that will be powerfully answered. And the reason it will be powerfully answered is because it's according to the will of God. It's what He wants for us. It's what He calls us to. It's what He equips us for. It's what He wants His body to look like. And we can pray this and know that it will have great power. Not because of anything in ourselves. We have no power. We can't tell God what to do. And not because our prayers are so perfect or prescribed or detailed that we can give God a new agenda and say, run it this way. That doesn't work either. It's not about us or the prayer in itself. It's about who our prayer is tied to. Our prayers have great power because through faith they're anchored to Christ. The righteous. The only one who's worthy to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. The only one who's seated above every other power at the right hand of God our Father in heaven. And what is he doing there? He's praying. for us. The prayer of the righteous person, the prayer that's offered through faith in Christ, that prayer will be heard and be answered and it will be powerful and effective. And then James encourages us one time more, and as he often does in his letter, he gives us an example, he gives us an illustration, and he points us to Elijah. And he points us to Elijah not because he was such a great man of God, not because he worked so many powerful miracles, not because he was used to overthrow the prophets of Baal. He pointed us to Elijah because Elijah was a man, like us, who prayed and God answered. He's a sinner, just like me and just like you. He was saved by grace alone, through faith alone in the Christ he was looking to come. He was a man who prayed and a man who God answered. Now, James tells us of his prayers, but he doesn't tell us the rest of the story. And I think the rest of the story is important. There's a lot of things we can pray for that God will never give us because they have nothing to do with His will for us. They don't do anything to glorify Him or acknowledge His purposes or to advance his agenda. But we can pray those all we want and they go nowhere. They have no power. They'll not be answered. Elijah's prayers were answered and when we look back to the story, we recognize a connection that we need to see. James says that when Elijah prayed fervently that it might not rain and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. What he remembers and we need to remember is in 1 Kings 17, verse 1, Elijah finds himself in an interesting place. He speaks authoritative announcements as the prophet of God. This is what my will is. And he praises a believer. And he prays and asks God to accomplish that will. We see that more plainly when he prayed again and heaven gave rain and the earth bore its fruit. That prayer was offered after 1 Kings 18, verse 1, where again, speaking as a prophet, Elijah was told, go show yourself to Ahab and I will send rain upon the earth. The Lord promised, I'm going to send rain. You go to Ahab, I'm going to send rain. He went to Ahab, superintended the overthrow of the prophets of Baal and then he went and he prayed. And he prayed fervently. He prayed seven times before a little cloud appeared over the ocean that came in as a great storm. It's not just that we are to pray because Elijah prayed. We're to pray like Elijah prayed. We're called to pray according to what we know God wants. We don't know his time. We don't know his way. But we know what he wants when it comes to confessing our sins to one another and what it means to be reconciled to one another. and we can pray for that. And that prayer will be heard and the church will be strengthened and the body of Christ will be revitalized and our witness will shine brighter. That's his purpose. That's his goal. Elijah's prayer was powerful in its effect because it was raised in faith to the God who makes promises and keeps promises. And our prayers for one another with regard to the confession of sins, how we can get ourselves back together are likewise powerful in effect when we raise Him in faith to the God who promises to hear and will answer so that you, church, the body of Christ in this place may be healed. What a blessing He has in store for us as we follow Him according to His will. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, you've called us by your word today to a task that we find challenging. That everything in our being, our natural fiber, our old man, bristles against and heels dig in. We thank you for calling us out. We thank you for pointing us in the way. We thank you for the provision that is ours in Christ and by the power of your spirit to actually move this way. Help us, Lord, to pray for one another. Not only generally, but specifically. To pray for those we've sinned against. that we might be reconciled. To pray for those that have sinned against us, that we might be reconciled. To pray that this body of Christ would be a robust place of grace and forgiveness and restoration and life. And help us, Lord, to speak to you plainly, specifically, and to our neighbors as well, that we sin against, that we might call sin, sin. Own it as our own. Thank you that you take it from us for Jesus' sake and ask for your grace to move on in a new way. Thank you, Father, for your blessing. Thank you for your word. In Jesus' name, amen.