We are in James the 5th chapter tonight. James chapter 5. I don't even know if I want to go there of asking are there any questions about last Wednesday night. Dealing with the matter of the sick, calling for the elders to anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord and the prayer of faith shall save the sick. Y'all remember that. Tonight we go a little further and I hope this will shed a little more light on that subject. It is James the fifth chapter, and we'll look at just two verses, verses 17 through 18. And we really need to back up into that last sentence of verse 16. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. We touched on that last week, but I said really, What follows in the two verses we look at tonight is the illustration of that text. The effectual fervent prayer. In the Greek, it's not two words, it's just one. Ernegeo, the working. Ernegeo is where we get our term energy and things like that. And it's the working or the energetic prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Many have pointed out it's almost like a truism. It's like saying that the working prayer of a righteous man works. And there is somewhat of a truism in that statement. But what follows in our text tonight, I believe, is an illustration of what has just proceeded. We get a little more insight into what that prayer of faith actually looks like. So let's read our text. Elias, that's Elijah, was a man subject to like passions as we are. And he prayed earnestly that it might not rain. And it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit. I said last week that when we look at that phrase, the prayer of faith in verse 15, the prayer of faith shall save the sick, faith is not presumption. It's not putting words in God's mouth that I can believe that God will make me a millionaire. Well, the problem is God has never promised to make me a millionaire. God has promised a number of things, but He's never promised those things. And as far as I can tell, God has never made a promise to heal you of all your sicknesses. There are certainly, as we saw last week, certainly times that sickness comes through no fault of the person sick. We have the case of Job, very clearly, where that's made clear. And even more so the case of the man born blind. You remember the whole discussion in John nine is over who said, did he sin? Oh, wait a minute. He was born blind. Well, maybe it's his parents that sin and Jesus clears it up for us. Has nothing to do with sin. It has to do with the fact that he's this way for the glory of God. So there are certainly, there are those times where sin has nothing to do with whatever sickness is befalling us. On the other hand, there are times that sickness does come as a consequence of sin. The passage we read just a week or so ago out of 1 Corinthians 11, we often read it before we partake of the Lord's table, speaks of the disorders that were going on in the Corinthian church. And Paul writes that for this cause, many of you are weak, sickly, and some sleep. In other words, some of you are sick because of the sinful way you're partaking of the Lord's table. I believe because of the connection that James goes on to make with confession of sin and this healing, that James has in mind and in view that situation where the sickness has come as a result of sin, some specific sin. Therefore, once the sin is confessed and forsaken, Healing then follows. I mean, what's the point? If sickness came because of a specific sin in the first place, then it makes sense that once that sin is forsaken, forgiveness comes, healing then follows. But let me make it clear. Is that the case with every sickness that you endure? No. Clearly not. But in some cases, that seems to be what's going on. And so, back to this question of the prayer of faith. Faith has to have an object. It has to have a word. It has to have a promise. Or it's not faith, it's presumption. If I trust you to give me a new car, when you haven't promised to give me a new car, when you've not committed to do that for me, then that's not faith. Do you see what I'm saying? I've often said the difference between faith and presumption, if you get pushed off a roof, You have the warrant to believe that you can call out to God and cry out to Him for help. If you jump off the roof, that's another story. When you are forcing God's hand, that's presumption. And so it is that God has not promised to heal us of every affliction. We have cases in Paul's ministry where Epaphroditus, he said he was sick, he almost died, and God had mercy on him and me. In writing to Timothy, he said, Trophimus, have I left sick at Miletus? In every case, Paul did not heal these who were sick. So in some cases, it comes as a result of God's sovereign purpose. In other times, though, it may come as a result of sin. Well, you say, well, what does that have to do with Elijah? I believe that Elijah here is given to us as an example of this prayer of faith. So let's consider Elijah. First of all if you didn't turn over to the Old Testament what could you tell me about Elijah? What's he called? Elijah the Tishbite. Not fishbite, but Tishbite. What's a Tishbite? Anybody have a clue? A Tishbite is a man from Tishba. That was his hometown. Tishba was a little village over in the area of Gilead. I remember growing up hearing Mario Lonza sing, there is a bomb in Gilead. And I kept hoping that bomb didn't go off, but it was B-A-L-M, bomb, a healing, soothing bomb. You know, the passage that said, is there no bomb in Gilead? The soothing salve. I was afraid of the bombs in Gilead. There's plenty of bombs there today. That is over, it's not the Golan Heights, but it is the highland just south of the Golan Heights. in what is today modern Jordan across over on the east side of the Jordan River. So to say that Elijah came from Tishbe in Gilead is like saying he came from Bahia. I mean this is nowhere. This has nothing to recommend it. He suddenly comes out of nowhere and what's the first thing he does? Anybody, can you recall? Just giving you a test here on your Elijah knowledge. What's the first thing? He goes to a king. I'm giving you all kinds of clues here. What was that king's name? All right. What's that? My wife got it. Yeah. Ahab. Ahab was king of what? No. You just lost all your credit right there. You blew it. He's king of Samaria, the northern kingdom of Israel. Remember that after Solomon's days, the nation divided into north and south. The capital of the north was at Samaria. Ahab was king over that northern kingdom, roughly 800 BC, that time frame, a couple hundred years after David. Elijah shows up and goes and delivers a message to King Ahab. That's the next question. What did he tell Ahab? Now, let's stop a minute. Was Ahab a good king or a bad king? Bad king. How did you know that? He's just bad, he just doesn't know things like that. Well, mainly because he was king of the northern kingdom. They didn't have one good king up there. So you can always guess bad king in the northern kingdom, and you're going to be right. In that northern kingdom of Israel, they didn't have one good one. Now in the south, in Judah, they had some bad ones, some good ones. You had men like Josiah, Hezekiah, those are good kings. Then you had rascals like Manasseh down there, but you had a mixture. Up north, not one good king. All right, so Elijah goes and confronts Ahab and delivers a message to him. What was the message? Go ahead, jump out there. Now, it's not going to rain till I say it's going to rain. That's the message. It will not rain except by my word. All right? And then he disappears. And it doesn't rain. for one year, for two years, for three years. And Ahab is desperate to find Elijah, but he can't find him. Where did Elijah go? Next question. Oh, so close, so close. The brook Kerith or Kirit, as the Hebrews would say, Kirit. It's a wadi that flows into the Jordan River. He is down at this brook. Who fed him? The ravens brought him food. You know the story that he is there at that brook. He stays there and you can imagine after three years, I mean Israel is a pretty dry place in the first place and then have no rain for three years. The brook, Kareth, finally dried up. Then where did he go? The widow's home. The widow of Zarephath. There you go. Zarephath was in what country? Sidon. Very good. Michael, you're just wiping it out here. You're acing the test. Sidon was to the north of Israel. So he goes to this country outside the borders of Israel where he lives with this widow in her home. And you remember, multiplies the food so they don't run out. Heals her son who dies and raises him from the dead. And he stays there. And then finally, when the time frame is up, He comes out of hiding. Rather humorous, Obadiah, this prophet that goes looking for him, Ahab sent him out to search for him, and sure enough, here's Elijah. They've been looking for this guy three years. Nobody knows where he's at. They've scoured the land. In fact, King Ahab has sent to other countries and asked the kings there if they knew where Elijah was and made them swear an oath that they didn't know. So here is Elijah hanging out in Zarephath at this widow's home. Nobody knows where he's at. And all of a sudden, here he is. And this prophet Obadiah, he says, you know, you're going to get me killed. I'm going to go back and tell Ahab that you're up here on top of this hill, and in the meanwhile, you're going to disappear. you know, do your famous disappearing act, and I'm going to get my head chopped off. And I want you to remember how I fed a hundred of the prophets with bread and water in a cave while all this has been going on. And anyway, Elijah says, no, you can go and tell him. I'll see him this day. And so he confronts Ahab and challenges Ahab's prophets to a duel, more or less. Now, Ahab had, well first of all, prophets of whom? Baal. Baal was the storm god, the Phoenician storm god, in control of the rain. He was one of the fertility gods. And so the idea was, is that if you're a Baal worshipper, you're worshipping the god who controls the rain, and you're in a agricultural country, that's heap big medicine, okay? If you've got the god who can control the rain. But obviously what is going on is that we're going to have a showdown between Baal and Jehovah. There's 450 prophets of Baal. There's one prophet of Jehovah. The question is, who controls the rain? And God is showing who controls the rain. And it's not Baal. So you know the story. They went up on Mount Carmel. They set up the altar and the prophets of Baal all day long are hollering and cutting themselves trying to get Baal to answer. And then Elijah goes and prays a prayer, and fire falls, consumes the offering, and then they take the 450 prophets of Baal down to Kidron, there you go, the one that you mentioned a moment ago, and slay them. And Elijah then goes where? Up on Mount Carmel. And what does he do? He prays. There you go. That's how we're fitting back into our text here. He prays that it rains. You remember the story? He told he would pray. Told the servant to go look out. Mount Carmel looks out over the Mediterranean Sea. Told his servant to go look and see if he sees anything. He says, no, nothing. He prays again. Go see if you see anything. No. Seven times finally the servant says there's a cloud out there about the size of a man's hand. And Elijah says, we've got to get out of here, because it's fixing to pour. And sure enough, it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Okay, that's the background. Now there's more to the story of Elijah, but for our purposes tonight, that'll give you the clue of what lies behind this matter. And I guess, here I'm forgetting all about my slides. Okay, he's from Tishbe. He goes to Kareth, then to Zarephath. and then three years he confronts the prophets, and then praise on Mount Carmel and rain comes. Now, I want you to realize that there is some new revelation found in our text that we do not find in the Old Testament. You find the story of Elijah that starts in 1 Kings about chapter 17, runs through 2 Kings about chapter 3 when he ascends to heaven in the fiery chariot. So there's a long swath of material there. But there's two facts that we are not aware of if it weren't for this section here in James. The first one is that Elijah prayed that it not rain. We have the account in 1 Kings of when he prayed on Mount Carmel that it rained. We do not see an account. All we see at the beginning of the story is Elijah showing up before King Ahab and said, it's not going to rain until I say it rains. He obviously had received that power from God, but we are not aware that he prayed for it not to rain. But James makes a point of cluing us in on that fact. He prayed that it not rain, then he prayed that it rain three and a half years later. The second thing is that this drought lasted three and a half years in 1 Kings. it simply says that in the third year he went to appear before King Ahab and confronted the prophets of Baal. But this gives us a more exact length of that drought, and it's significant in that three and a half is sort of symbolic of a time, a period of testing and trial. We had this situation, the length of the drought. We see three and a half years again in the prophecies of Daniel. You're familiar with the weeks of Daniel, the weeks of years, and in the middle of the week, you know, again, some mysterious stuff. You'll find it in the book of Revelation, time, times, and half a time, three and a half. You see it in the 42 months. If you're in a lunar calendar where your months are 30 days each, then 42 months is three and a half years. You see it in the length of days, 1,260 days mentioned in the book of Revelation. tends to depict a time of testing, a time of trial. By the way, Jesus' ministry, as best we can figure, was almost exactly three and a half years. And the Jewish war that ended in 70 A.D. with the destruction of Jerusalem lasted about three and a half years. So again, it's an important time frame that carries with it the idea of a time of trial, testing, and tribulation. And you can see sort of where that comes from. Now, Elijah then sort of illustrates what we've just talked about this teaching on prayer. First of all, Elijah was a righteous man, was he not? I mean, would you not call him that? And we could say that we, are we righteous? That's a sort of a trick question. Would you consider yourself a righteous person? What do you think? Well, we as Christians are righteous in the sight of God, correct? Because the righteousness of Christ has been imputed to us. So there is a righteousness that is not ours. In fact, that was one of the key points of the Protestant Reformation in Luther's day and Zwingli, Calvin, those that followed, they referred to this righteousness as an alien righteousness, meaning it's not ours. It comes to us as a gift through faith, an imputation of righteousness by faith. But then we could go on to say that the Christian is not only to be righteous in the imputed sense, but he is to be righteous actually. And we would say, well certainly Elijah seemed to indicate that, though not perfectly so. Elijah was a flawed man in some ways. Give me an example. pity party. He was in the cave crying his eyes out because he said, God, it's just down to you and me and I'm not too sure about you. You know, I'm not sure what's going on. We're it, God. And Elijah, and God said to Elijah, you know, quit your whining. Get up. I've got 7,000 reserved unto me that have not bowed the knee to Baal. Okay? That's a good illustration. He was prone to depression, discouragement, You know, he faced 450 prophets and then one woman ran him out of town. Jezebel. She was quite a woman, you know. And so the fact that he was fearful of Jezebel after God had done this wonderful miracle. You understand, we're dealing here with a flawed individual just like we are. And that ought to be an encouragement to us and I think that's what he means when he says in verse 17, Or Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are. The word passions there means literally nature. He has the same nature we have. He has a fallen nature just like us. Which is meant to be somewhat of an encouragement. That if this guy with all his problems could pray and God would use him and answer his prayers, then maybe there's hope for me. You know? Maybe my prayers will be answered like his were. Okay? Secondly, I want you to realize that when he prayed, it was according to God's word and will. And this was my point about that prayer of faith last week. That faith has to have a word. It has to have a promise. Turn back to 1 Kings. I'm finally going to let you go back there if you hadn't gotten back there already. 1 Kings chapter 17. No, that's not right. 18. Let's look at verse 36. 1 Kings 18 verse 36. It came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice that Elijah the prophet came near and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel and that I am thy servant, and get this, that I have done all these things at thy word. And you say, well, what's significant about that? It's significant in that Elijah just didn't wake up one morning and say, you know, I think I'll go have a showdown with the prophets of Baal. That this was all happening as God was directing Elijah. Now, we don't have the specific message, the revelation that God gave Elijah, but here he lets us know that he is not shooting from the hip. He's not a lone ranger here, that he's doing what he's doing at the direction of God Almighty. We could ask ourselves, why don't we go down to the Catholic Church and have a standoff with them? Let's call down fire from heaven, or go down to the Mormon Church and do the same thing. Why don't we do that? We don't have that word from God that Elijah has. So in other words, notice that he has a specific revelation from God, being a prophet, that he is to go and do these things and all the things that he's mentioned. Like pouring all the water, the barrels of water on the sacrifice and so forth. Filling the trench around the altar. That is all at the direction of God Almighty. He's not making this up as he goes. He's following God's instruction. And so his prayer then, is in accordance with the direction, the revelation that God has given him. That's what I mean by prayer of faith. That you're praying in the will of God because God has revealed His will to you. You're not playing pin the tail on the donkey and hoping you hit something. You know, if I pray for enough stuff, maybe one of those things will be in the will of God. But no, he is doing these things as God has specifically revealed these things to him to do. You follow me in my drift? Faith has to have an object, a promise, a word. And therefore the prayer of faith is praying in accordance to the revealed will of God and coming back to sickness. So far as I know, we have no revelation that it is God's will to heal every sickness that you and I come down with. And so in the case of what we've been talking about in the elders, there must be some indication that there is a sickness that has come for a specific reason, for a specific cause, the cause of sin, and therefore, when we ask God to heal, if that sin is confessed, now that's the important part here, if that sin is confessed, then we have some credence to believe that God will heal. Let me stop there, and are you understanding what I'm saying? And you'd say, well, who would know that? In my mind, the only person that can possibly know that is the person that's sick. I can't look at you and say, well, you've got a cold because you did this or that. But if in your mind, You are, and by the way, if you come down with a cold and you say, I don't know why I've done that. Lord, what have I done? It means that's not a result of your sin, because if it's a result of your sin, you're going to know. You will know, and therefore that's the clue to the elders that he can pray in faith. That's the only sense I can make out of all this. Let me stop. You got a question? Do you think it's reasonable to say that if sickness has come as a result of your sin, that you will know that. Does that make sense? Because if that's not true, it's like spanking your kid when you never told him why. You're disciplining a child without his ever having any knowledge of what he's done wrong. In the same sense, my thinking is, if God sends sickness as a consequence of your sin, You will know that fact. All right, let me go on. If you go and look at then how he prays, not, we know that he is, if we ask what he's praying, he is praying, for instance, for rain. Is he praying according to the will of God? Is it God's will that it rain? Let's start there. Jodi's nodding her head. She's the only one awake, I think. Is it God's will that it rain? Yeah. The three and a half years are up. The prophets of Baal are all dead. Elijah has accomplished what God sent him to do. So now it's time for it to rain. Is it going to rain by itself? Or is somebody going to have to pray? You begin to see how predestination and human responsibility work hand in hand. On the one hand, it is God's purpose that it now rain. On the other hand, God has purposed a means by which the rain will come, and it's going to be by the means of Elijah praying. I've tried to use several illustrations from the Old Testament to show you that principle. Daniel understood 70 years are up, it's time for us to be free, but he has to pray that God will free him in Babylon. Here we see a similar thing. It's now time for it to rain, but Elijah's going to have to pray. The righteous man is going to have to pray for it to reign. Do you see that? Do you see how that works together? They asked Spurgeon one time, he said, why do I pray if all things are predestined? He said, because God is predestined the prayer as well as the thing he's predestined. In other words, he's predestined the means as well as the end. Here is how the end will come into play, into realization. It will be through his people asking. And here we see that in the case of Elijah. Secondly, notice the stance that Elijah took. Are you still in 1 Kings 18? Verse 42, so Ahab went up to eat and to drink. Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, and he cast himself down upon the earth and put his face between his knees. Now that's a very striking thing. I realize that anybody can take a posture and that humility is not found in, you know, you can stand on your head, I guess, trying to pray. But here is very interesting in that Elijah has just performed as an instrument of God one of the greatest miracles in all the Old Testament. And you would expect him to be up there, looky here everybody, here I am, look what I did. And instead, where is he? He's on the ground with his face between his knees. And the utter humiliation, that's the sense, the humility of Elijah is seen here. The utter throwing yourself on the power and the mercy of God Almighty. And I realize whether you're in the dust, in your head between your knees or not, that should be the stance of our heart in prayer. That we are utterly empty of any self, consciousness, self-worth, self-merit, self-ability and sufficiency. That all our sufficiency is God. We are crying out to God. And then notice the perseverance of his prayer. If ever there was a prayer that you would have thought would have gotten an easy answer, it would have been this prayer. We know it was God's will that it reign. Elijah now goes up and prays that it rain. He is praying in the will of God. And yet notice, not one time, two times, three times, he has to persevere in prayer. In other words, it is not always God's will to give us what we've asked for the first time we ask. Do you remember the two parables that Jesus gives in the New Testament about persevering in prayer? The widow who went to the unjust judge who didn't give a hoot about God nor man. And she keeps pestering him and pestering him and pestering him until he finally breaks down and says, I don't give a hoot about anybody, but I'm going to give her what she wants just to shut her up, get her out of here. Now, what do you think Jesus is telling us about God? Does He deal with us like that poor widow lady? No, what He's teaching us is that just like that widow lady, God may not answer when we first began to pray. And He's given you permission to pester God. It's quite a thing. Secondly, the man, the importune man. You remember the guy had guests show up at midnight. Now this is first century stuff, folks, and folks didn't really travel at midnight. If somebody shows up at your house at midnight, it's an emergency. and you're not expecting company at midnight. So here these guests show up at midnight and this guy has nothing to put on the table to feed them. So what does he do? He goes to the next door and begins to bang on the next door neighbor's door saying, get up and I need some food to serve these people. And you'd say, oh the gall of that guy. It's called importunity is the King James word. It means shamelessness. This guy just has no shame, does he? I mean, it's not your company that showed up in the middle of the night. And notice, you remember the guy calls out, said, we're all in bed. All of us are in bed. Go away. Leave us alone. He just keeps banging and banging. And Jesus says, just because of his importunity, just the shamelessness of this guy, you're going to get up and give him what he's asking for. Now, again, what's Jesus's point? is that God looks at us like this guy that, you know, he doesn't give a hoot about. No, that's not the point. It's the fact that just like that situation, our prayers may have to persevere. And that's what we've been talking about, isn't it? Persevering through tribulations and trials, a prayer that perseveres to the end. And so, there's the conclusion I keep saying that we get so many prayer requests because we think if we gang up on God, He'll do what we want Him to do. And no, He said, the factual fervent prayer of a righteous man, singular. But then maybe that explains why we get so many prayer requests. If we ask enough people, maybe one of them will be a righteous man. I don't know. But we are to pray with clean hands and a pure heart. We are not perfect people. But if we have consciousness of sin, if we have some sense of something that separates us between us and our God, we need to make that right before we expect that God's going to answer our prayer. Remember, that's what Jesus said. You bring your gift to the altar and you remember somebody's got an altar against you. What do you do? Just stay there and keep praying? No. Go make it right. Then come back. Offer your offer. Pray earnestly. In the Greek, It says the, what does it say? Let me read that again in James. He prayed earnestly that it might not rain. In Greek, he prayed with prayer. It's a Hebrewism where you intensify the thing that you're talking about. Are you familiar with in the Garden of Eden when God says, surely the day you eat thereof thou shalt die? Literally in the Hebrew, dying thou shalt die. In other words, it's like emphasizing the intensity of this death. In the same sense, he prayed earnestly. He prayed with prayer, and it speaks of the intensity of his praying. And then, we are to pray according to God's promises, to what God has promised He will do for us. There's a lot of things He hadn't promised, but there's a lot of things He has. For instance, If we look at it this way, let's look at the big picture here. When drought comes on the nation of Israel for three and a half years, it's like the whole land was sick, right? You remember the promise in what, 2 Chronicles 7, 14? If my people, so forth, then I will hear and heal their land. Well, in this case, Israel, the land, was sick. Three and a half years of drought. What happens? Evil is excised. The cancer of Baal worship is cut out of the land. Then healing of the land takes place. Do you see how that connects back to what we were studying about sickness? If it has come as a consequence of sin, what is the remedy? Number one, the sin needs to be forsaken and confessed. Then healing comes upon the person. You have the same principle, except in the case of Elijah, it's nationwide. The land is sick. Healing takes place as evil is forsaken, confessed. I mean, do we have any promises from God about forgiveness? If we confess our sins, He's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness? So in other words, I'm of course tying this back to that strange situation of calling for the elders and they pray the prayer of faith. That what we don't have a promise that every sickness that we have will be healed. We do have a promise that sin confessed and forsaken will be forgiven. And so we can come to God in that light. Okay, I'm going to stop. Yeah, David? That's what I was saying, that we have new revelation here, that we have no record of that first prayer. I think it's referring to when the rain came up on Mount Carmel. As far as his words, yeah, that's the only prayer we have his content. Yeah, well, I think the implication is... Well, I'm sure he prayed more than once, but what James' point is, is that he prayed once and it didn't rain, he prayed again and it rained. Well, right, that last prayer was really seven times he prayed. Don't mess up the math here, David. Okay, any comments? It's a fascinating illustration, and the thing that ought to stick in our minds is the fact that Elijah was, we think of these men as heroes of the faith, and most of the time you look at the list of those heroes, and they have their warts, and they have their weakness, and they have exactly what we see in ourselves. They were not remarkable people, but they had a remarkable God that they were crying out to. That's the difference. Faith, it's not the faith per se, It's the God that faith hooks us up with. Faith makes the connection with the God of the universe.