How to Change the World in Three Easy Steps: 2 – Dare in Prayer
As a student I led a Bible study on James 5:13-20.
Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he 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 man is powerful and effective.
Elijah was a man just like us. 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. My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.
I am actually quite ashamed of the way I led that Bible study, because the first question I asked was “So why don’t we always get what we ask for in prayer?” This is completely the wrong way to look at this passage.
Now, I live in the real world, I have prayed prayers and not seen them answered. I would be very surprised if you hadn’t had that same experience. However that is not how we are to read the Bible, so focused on what it doesn’t mean that we don’t look properly at what it does mean.
Look at what the passage says in verse 15:
And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up
Then in verses 17 and 18 it tells of Elijah, the Old Testament prophet, and how God answered the prophet’s prayers regarding the weather.
Surely this passage is telling us that God does amazing things in response to faithful prayers! Now I don’t want to get into discussing why God seems to answer some prayers but not others, that is for another time. What I do want to say is that this is an astounding promise: God, the God that we serve, will break the laws of nature for us if we ask him. God interrupted the weather cycle for Elijah. God created everything. He was there when it started. He can heal the sick, he can order the weather, he can harden a person’s heart, he can do supernatural things just as easily as he can do the slightly more boring things – he can make sure that the people sorting out the tea for a particular event get it right. He can make sure that a youth group goes away for a weekend without any serious injuries.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t pray for these ‘safe’ things; we should pray for safety, and pray for preachers and for tea arrangements. But let us not forget that God can do so much more than that, so let’s pray like we believe that.
This is something I know that I am guilty of. I sometimes find myself limiting God’s power in the way that I pray. I sometimes pray ’safe’ prayers. By ’safe’ I mean prayers that really aren’t putting much expectation on God, so that we know they will be answered pretty much before we pray them. God hardly needs to turn up and we will tick off our answered prayer tick list.
In the build up to our church mission I was praying a prayer somewhere along the lines of ‘Lord, if there are any people wondering about whether or not to come to this evening’s evangelistic talk please give them that extra push’. It’s not a bad thing to pray, but it doesn’t sound like I have that much confidence in God, a God who is all-powerful. A ‘better’ prayer may have looked like this:
‘Lord God, we pray for this evening, for all of those who are coming. Let us see a revival in this place. Lord please revive your church, melt hearts, changes lives, bring people into your family who are currently so lost. Please use our church to forward your Kingdom, not just during this mission week but until you come again’.
I am convinced that the only way that we will see revival in this country is if Christians start praying for it. And we need to start praying it as if we believe God might actually do it. Yes we can pray about the tea arrangements and the administrative things that go on, we can pray about speakers and leave all of that to God. That is a good thing to do. But if we leave it at that, all we will do is have a church that is very efficient at making sure we have enough tea at the events we run. I believe for God to powerfully be at work and to powerfully answer prayers, we need to give him the chance to let us down. Let’s pray some things which will only be answered if God does something, spectacular.
If we do this, then we can be praying for whole continents, for the world as a whole. How often do we pray a prayer about HIV and AIDS actually expecting God to wipe it out? How many of us prayed about Live8, that they would right off the debt, and actually believed that they might?
God can sort out any one of the things that get us angry. He could click his fingers and problems that this world has faced for hundreds and thousands of years could just disappear.
I know that what I’ve just said could be misinterpreted in a number of ways. I’m not saying that God only answers prayers when he does miracles, I’m not saying that small prayers are any less valid.
Brother Yun was one of China’s house church leaders, who was instrumental in the forming of the Chinese church amidst massive persecution. In his autobiography, The Heavenly Man, he says this:
Many Christians have asked me why miracles and signs and wonders are so prevalent in China, but not so evident in the West.
In the West you have so much. You have insurance for everything. In a way you don’t need God. When my father was dying of stomach cancer, we sold everything we had to cure him. When everything was gone we had no hope but God. We turned to him in desperation and saw him mercifully answer our prayers and heal my father. We reasoned that if God could do that then he could do anything, so our faith grew and we’ve seen many miracles.
In China, the greatest miracles we see are not the healings or other things, but lives transformed by the gospel. We believe we’re not called to follow signs and wonders but instead the signs and wonders follow us when the gospel is preached. We don’t keep our eyes on signs and wonders, we keep our eyes on Jesus.
Every house church pastor in China is ready to lay down his life for the gospel. When we live this way we’ll see God do great things by his grace.
God is amazingly powerful, and prayer is a tool for being open to this power.
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