Take it to the Lord in Prayer

“Take it to the Lord in Prayer”

James 5:13-20

Preacher: Rev. Mark Bartsch

Kobe Union Church 

February 23, 2025

We finish our series on James this morning. I personally really enjoy doing book series, and I know that I have grown as I have let God speak into my life from James' letter. I hope it has been the same for you. We have covered themes like Faith and Works, Trials and Perseverance, Humility, The Power of the Tongue, and the need for prayer:

James ends his letter to the mostly Jewish Christians living scattered around the Mediterranean Sea by telling them that if anyone is in trouble, they should take it to the Lord in prayer. Then he goes on to say if or when anyone is joyful or happy, they should also offer their praise (Wait for it) yes take it to the Lord. James throughout his letter uses the bracketing approach of naming two extremes as a way of saying not just these two things but everything in between. He did in chapter 2 when he names Father Abraham (a person every Jewish person strives to live up to) and Rahab the brothel owner (a person no one wants to be) as two extremes and yet they both are commended for living out their faith. So should everyone in between be putting their faith into action.

James is bracketing the two major emotions of sorrow (take it to the Lord) and joy (take it to the Lord) and calls us to take everything, including what is in the middle, to the Lord. Paul tells us that 2 Cor 10:5, "We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." But it is not just every thought that Paul and James are calling us to take captive for Christ it is every emotion (from sadness to joy) and bring them to the Lord.When you are tired, take it to the Lord. When you wrestle with doubt and frustration, take it to the Lord. When you feel frustrated in this very frustrating world, take it to the Lord.

Too many think that our faith cuts us off from our emotions. That is a lie. God wants us to have the full range of emotions that he has given us, but we need to connect those thoughts and emotions to God. If the Psalms teach us anything they teach us that we can bring our full self (emotions and all) to the Lord, and he will not reject us but just the opposite love us.

Another reason for taking our emotions to the Lord is that sometimes (a lot of times) our emotions lie to us. Yes, they are real emotions, but they are not always accurate and when we take them to the Lord he leads us to find the truth in the emotions. I have a problem reading sadness. It usually comes out as anger (very common for men) sometime women interpret anger for sadness.

 There have been many times when I have taken my anger to the Lord in prayer and the Lord has told me, “Mark you are not really angry, your sad and need to cry.” And it helps me deal with my feelings by going into them instead of running away from them. If any of you have seen the movie Inside Out (Pixar) it has pretty good insight into how our emotions and our emotional responses to things can be helpful and also harmful. God does not want us to shove our emotions down and he does not want us to dump them on others that is why we need to take them to the Lord. Lord I am feeling angry, confused, embarrassed, or whatever and I need you to help me deal with them in a real way or I will take them out on people that shouldn’t have it dumped on them.

I heard a preacher say this about this passage: "Begin every day by opening a text thread/chat line with God." When you open a text thread with your friends, you are not continually texting them without stopping (at least I hope not), but there is an openness to giving and receiving communication throughout the day. God wants us to be open to that communication with him throughout our day.

I have started over the last 5 years of praying for my classes, "God bless this class and my students by name as I walk to class." I grew up thinking that I had to muscle through everything but have learned that when I walk with God, he walks with me. It makes me a better teacher (when I pray for my students). It makes me a better father (when I pray for my children). It makes me a better friend and spouse (when I pray for my wife and my friends). When you walk with the Lord, you never walk alone.

On the other side of the coin, too many of us have text threads/chat lines with spirits that are not of God. We open ourselves up to all kinds of garbage. Stop!

Just a week ago, I was walking to Ashiyagawa Station in the morning, going to work. I was walking in a normal straight line, and a guy ran into me hard. He bounced off me because I am bigger, but he hit me hard, and then he kept running up the stairs without even saying "Sorry" or "Excuse me." (Nothing). For a minute, I was really angry. Since I am working on this message, I realized that I needed to delete my text thread with my anger. It would do me no good in my day and only harm. I was also glad the guy was going to Osaka, not Sannomiya the opposite way I was going. But what text threads do you need to delete because they are unhealthy for you and your relationship with God?

Take it to the Lord in prayer. The three most important lines of communication we have with God are studying his Word, going to him in prayer, and praise Him. How many times have we been like the nine lepers who were healed of leprosy by Jesus in Luke 17, and get this 9 of them listened to Jesus and did exactly as he told them to do. They ran with joy to show their clean bodies to the priests so that they could go home and rejoin society? How many times am I like those nine lepers instead of the tenth one, who, unlike the others, (didn’t really listen to Jesus) he returned to Jesus, full of gratitude, and thanked and praised God? To the tenth, he pronounces an even greater level of healing. The other nine’s skin was clean and remained clean, but the tenth got a cleaning, or healing, of his heart. You can only get that by praising Jesus and our Father. And we can only truly praise God by welcoming the Holy Spirit into our lives, emotions, hopes and concerns. The Holy Spirit has manners. It will wait to be welcomed into your life. Welcome him.

Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. The key word here is "call the elders," not "go to the elders." James is making it clear that we all have a personal line of communication with God. We do not need a priest, a pastor, or even a great woman of faith like Mary, the mother of Jesus, to go to God on our behalf. We are invited—called—to go to Him directly. But when James tells the sick person to call the elders, he is speaking about someone who, because of their illness or weakness, is unable to go to them. In these moments, the leaders of the church are to be called, to come alongside and lift up the one in need. Often, this happens in the last hours of a person’s life. And in those moments, we are not meant to muscle through it on our own.

I do not know about you, but as a lay leader and pastor, I have had the sacred privilege of being with people in their last days on earth. I remember visiting a woman in a nursing home who had lived a full life and was nearing the end. Her adult children met me in the hall, tears in their eyes, pleading, “Pray for her to get better.” But when I walked into the room, the first thing she said was, “Don’t you dare pray for me to get better. I am going to be with Jesus.” Instead, she asked me to pray for her family—that they would remain faithful to the Lord so that she could see them again in paradise. So that is what I prayed. The next day, she passed peacefully, surrounded by her loved ones singing hymns of praise for a life well lived.

That is my prayer too. I know that to live is Christ and to die is gain. But more than anything, I want those I love to be with me—with Jesus.

One important aspect of calling the elders is that it is part of God’s design. Long before sin entered the world, before the fall of man, the first problem God solved was loneliness. In Genesis 2:18, God saw that it was not good for man to be alone. From the very beginning, we were created for relationship, for community, for support. By design (God’s, not ours), we are not meant to suffer alone. When we are struggling, we should not call a stranger. We should call our brothers and sisters in Christ to come and pray for us. Because the prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective. I will say that in a different way the prayer of a person right with God are powerful and fruitful.There are a lot of people who have mistaken ideas about James’s statement, “Prayer of Faith.” I have heard a lot about this type of prayer. Once, someone asked me if I was a person who prayed the Prayer of Faith. Essentially, they believed that such a person could perform miracles through their prayers. I told them that, yes, things have happened when I prayed for them, but no, I am nothing special. And neither are you. Sorry, but if you are looking for a savior, you are looking in the wrong place if you are looking at me. I will only point you to Jesus who is our author and perfector of our faith.

There have been certain Christian circles where, through the movement of the Holy Spirit, amazing things have happened (praise God). But sometimes, the greatest attack on these people is pride—pride in thinking that they are the ones performing the miracles. People start looking to them instead of to the Lord. They follow the path of Gideon, who started with zeal for the Lord but, in the end, set up idols that glorified himself rather than the work that God did through him.

So how do we (all of us) become people who pray prayers of faith? It starts with the Starter (Alpha) and ends with the Ender (Omega). It begins by aligning yourself with God’s good and perfect will. Praying in faith is about seeking what the Lord wants you to pray rather than simply praying what someone else wants you to pray. It is hard.

I once knew a man who was going through a divorce. I met with his soon-to-be ex-wife, and it was not a good meeting. One thing was certain: she was moving on and moving out. He had stumbled upon some poor teaching on James 5 and asked me to pray the Prayer of Faith to override his wife free will. I prayed to God, and God clearly told me not to pray for his wife to come back because she was already gone. Instead, I was to pray for him as he went through this dark time and to reassure him that, as he came out of it, God would take care of him. That is what I heard from God.

I told him what God had told me, so he went to another church where a preacher would pray exactly what he wanted to hear. But that prayer actually harmed him—it caused greater doubt and kept him stuck in the darkness longer.

Learn this. Hear this. Too many of us jump into praying for people before we first go to God and ask His Spirit to lead us in our prayers. No wonder so many people’s prayers sound like babbling nonsense. They do not go to the guide. If you were walking through a jungle you would call a guide to lead you. We have a guide in the Holy Spirit but many of us do not use it. When we ask the Lord to guide our conversation with Him, He leads us into the union of the Spirit, where we pray what God wants us to pray and those PRAYERS are AFFECTIVE. And we know that it is not our will being done but God's will, and we pray for that will to be manifested in a person’s life.

And when amazing things happen—and from time to time, they do—we know that it is not us. We have done nothing except listen to the Spirit of God.

The Prayer of Faith is not some magic bullet that overrides the Lord’s will. It is a prayer that gets us aligned with what He wants us to pray for—and to trust in that. And when we hear the voice of God speak to us as praying people, we need to approach the throne of grace with confidence not as a double minded man, "so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (Heb 4:16). We pray first to be aligned with God, and then we pray from that place of knowing what God wants us to pray.

Elijah—one of the great prophets of the Old Testament, a prophet alongside Moses, whom Jesus met on the Mount of Transfiguration when He was revealed in His true form to Peter, James, and John in pure light. Elijah—a prophet who confronted 850 prophets of Baal, who raised the widow’s son from death, who was taken up by God in a fiery chariot. This was quite a man.

But James tells the church that Elijah was just a man, but a man aligned with God. And James challenges the believers and the church to be aligned as Elijah was.

Elijah prayed—famously—because of the wickedness of the people, that God would withhold the rains. And God did, because it was in His will. For three and a half years, it did not rain (1 Kings 17–18). Then, when Elijah knew it was God’s timing to relent, he went up on a mountain, put his face to the ground, and prayed for God to send rain again. Why? Because in Hebrew culture, rain is synonymous with blessing. Question: was Elijah a prophet of Israel? No. No. He was a prophet of the Lord, who just happened to be from Israel. And because of the people’s wickedness, he prayed in line with God’s will that God would withhold His blessing in order to draw the people back into alignment with God’s love.

Finally, James calls us not to give up on those who wander away from the faith and the truth. He calls us as believers to draw people back to the way. Just as our Savior goes after the one sheep that has wandered, we, too, are called to go and bring them back.

My grandmother was a wonderful woman, but because of painful experiences, she and my grandfather stopped attending church and wandered away from God. They drank and smoked in a time when it was believed that Christians—especially Mennonites—did not do such things. She lived in a small town where some churchgoers would not even speak to her because she was not part of the church. One day, (as my grandfather told me), the wife of an elder or a pastor saw her in the supermarket. She asked after her talked to her and in the end said if you want to come to church I hope you know that you will be welcomed. My grandmother was nervous but accepted. She got dressed up and went, fully expecting to be rejected (My grandfather told me that he told her that she would be rejected and not to go) but found just the opposite. People greeted her warmly. So, she went back.

My grandfather did not go at first, believing they would reject him. But my grandmother found community with the people first, and then communion with God, and she received Him in baptism in her 60s. That elder’s or pastor’s wife (the details were unclear) received her reward from our Father in heaven. By simply being a person that welcomed a stranger that they knew. And my hardheaded grandfather (his words, not mine) had his heart softened by the love the community showed his wife. Eventually, he started attending and also received Christ.

The woman who invited my grandmother thought nothing of rewards—only of a woman in need of love. And we, too, see so many people in need of love.

My prayer is that any church I attend has the same ability as that small church in Yarrow, B.C.—to welcome and extend community so that people might sense a greater invitation from God.

Work with God, not against Him, in your prayer life and in your relationships, and you will experience a world opening up that you did not know.

I know I could get another seven sermons from James alone, but we will move on to Matthew Ch 8 next Sunday. My prayer is that your faith has been strengthened by the half-brother of Jesus in this series. If I could sum up the book of James in a nutshell, it is this: a life of faith is hard, but if you cling to God and truly trust in him, you will find a life of meaning and hope.

Let us pray.