Praying About Your Problems

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

In almost every case, there is some kind of reproach, something you have to do to go before the deity. Sometimes you have to kneel, sometimes you have to meditate, sometimes you have to sacrifice something, sometimes in some cases, you have to take a drug. You always have to do something, but in the Bible, all you have to do to talk to the omnipotent God, the powerful creator of this entire universe, is to open your mouth, or direct your thoughts to Him. There’s also a tremendous power in prayer. Whatever prayer can do is what God can do, and yet at the same time, prayer is also something that we don’t do as much as we should. It is something we fail to do often. A lot of us are too satisfied with our lives, or things are going too well. In some cases, we just forget. How do we become better prayers? Perhaps part of that is learning when we should pray and how we should pray. In fact, over the next few weeks I’m going to be talking a lot about prayer. Today I’m finishing up a series of sermons through the book of James, and today we’re talking about praying about your problems. For the next three weeks after that, I’m going to be talking about worship, but I’m using the Lord’s Prayer. So I’ll be talking a lot about prayer because it is such an important thing for us as Christians. Let us hear what James has to say to us about this important subject.

James Chapter 5, beginning at verse 13:

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.

This is the reading of God’s holy word.

Thanks be to God

Let us pray:

Father in heaven, we pray to you now and ask that you would help us put aside all the distractions that we have, what we’re going to do in an hour, or two hours, or three hours from now, what problems we have in our own lives. We pray Lord that you would help us. Help us to learn how to pray better. I would ask of you Lord particularly to be with the one who preaches, a sinner saved by grace. Lord God, we ask your presence now as we hear your word. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

When should you pray? Well, the Bible says that in a broad sense, you should pray all the time. You should pray always, but particularly pray during tough times. Some of the things that James talks about, he says, “When you are in trouble, pray” the word there is distress. We might even be able to say when you’re emotionally distressed, pray. But when you are in trouble, pray. Now often pastors are tempted to put down this idea because we’ve all heard of the prayers in the foxhole, or sometimes people only pray when they get in trouble. Kind of like the man who was up on a roof and he started to slip and fall, and as he was going down, down, down, he said “Lord, help me!” Just then his belt loop got caught on a nail and he stopped just over the precipice. He looked up and said, “Never mind.”

Even a prayer when you’re in trouble is a prayer. You know some people don’t pray at all until they get into trouble. We should pray when we’re in distress, because God is a god of healing, not only physical healing but psychological healing, spiritual healing. Who else should we turn to when we’re in trouble? We also should pray when we’re happy, or when we’re joyful. You know the word praise appears in the bible over five hundred times. You know I really believe that deep in our hearts for many, not all but for many, we believe that God is basically a killjoy. That God kind of goes around watching for people who are happy and tries to put a stop to it. Or, on another hand, if you are too happy –it’s almost like we’re afraid to be happy because we think that God’s gonna figure out a way to make us unhappy. You’ve got to be serious – well, there’s some truth to that since life is serious, that is certainly true. But I believe the Bible tells us that the default mode for Christians is to be joyful. Certainly, life has sadness, heartache, and hurt, and there are ups and downs. Some of the most wonderful times I’ve had in my own Christian life is to be driving down the road listening to a hymn or some praise choruses and things are going good, and I’m singing at the top of my lungs – windows closed of course. Sometimes you’re sitting there singing and someone looks over at you and thinks What is wrong with him? It’s the joy of the Lord. James says if you’re happy, sing. If you’re happy, pray.

You should also pray when you’re physically not doing well. James says when you’re sick, call the elders when you pray. You know this idea of healing has been pretty hard over the years. You know I have found that people are very interested in being healed of their diseases. It really strikes at the core of our life in this world. If you gather even just ten of us here in a small group, and they would be able to tell you their concerns. In almost every case, at least five of the ten, sometimes all ten, would be able to tell you someone, if not themselves, someone in their family or friends who’s going through a serious illness and they would like you to pray for that. Buck just got a stack of blue cards. Sometimes we only get one or two, but today we got lots of blue cards. Some praises, some concerns and I suspect that all of you could write one, and that’s okay. It strikes at the heart of what we are. There’s been a lot of confusion about this kind of thing, you know there’s this idea that the “showmen” kind of people, they show up in theaters. It’s the “be healed” guys who hit you on the head and all that kind of thing. I remember going to see a fellow many, many years ago when I was at Seminary. I think his name was Derek Prince or something like that. That’s what he kind of was, he was a prince. He would walk out and the crowds would follow him. I was there as a curiosity seeker, and he would try to heal somebody, and that kind of thing. It’s interesting, and yes if you look in the Bible, there were big crowds. Jesus often shunned those crowds, they were just there sometimes, he couldn’t help it. A lot of his healings took place in private. He went to them, not having people come. I think that thing is often overblown. Then there’s this “name it, claim it” type of theology out there. You know if you just have enough faith, God will heal you, and if God didn’t heal you, you didn’t have enough faith. Certainly, we need to have faith, but I don’t think it works that way either. Then there’s this whole other group of Christians who believe that all the spiritual gifts don’t operate now. They only did that in the New Testament times. Those miracles don’t happen anymore. Well I’ve seen people healed, and the bright flashing lightening bolt kind of way. There have been people I’ve seen over my career that have walked out of the hospital that shouldn’t have. Was that a miracle, I don’t know. Maybe it was. God was certainly active. It’s been shown in some surveys that people who pray are healthier. God is active. Then of course, you have the denial crowd, folks who say “you’re only sick because you think you are.” You know that’s the Christian Science group or others, the Scientologists. You’re only sick because you think you are, it’s not real. Well I think the Bible is realistic, and what I have found in the scriptures over the years, is that God heals and has the capability of healing, but He doesn’t always have the purpose of healing.  God heals if it suits His purpose. I want to be careful in saying that you know, I’m not saying God is like a puppet master with strings, and there’s no personality in it, or personal-ness in it, but we have to remember that God is our father and his purpose for us is always loving and good. Even though we go through hard times, we still belong to Him. Paul puts it this way, he says “you know if we live, we live for the Lord, if we die we die for the Lord, so whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s!” and that’s the bottom line. At the same time, maybe sometimes we’re not healed because we don’t ask. When James says to go tell the elders and have them come pray, he’s not saying “Oh, this is your formula” or “You know if you just do this, you’ll get healed every time”.  But he is outlining something that is often missing in the church in our day.

You know in the twentieth century – in the Presbyterian Church – we adopted a sort of corporate, business method for our elders and we meet as a board, they make decisions and then they go home. Certainly elders make decisions in a church. Ninety-five percent of the decisions made in a Presbyterian church are made by the session, but we need to do more than that I think. I don’t want to scare people off from being on session – but I’m really hoping that as we move along in this process, we become, we add the more spiritual dimension to it, over time. In the word really there, he says, “If you’re sick”, he is saying if you’re really sick, not talking simply about the sniffles or even the flu. He’s talking about if you’re really sick, call the elders. Maybe we need to do more of that. When you’re sick – physically.

And finally when you should pray is when you’re sick spiritually as well. He talks about the idea of confession. You know we Protestants have gotten away from confession. Even Sigmund Freud said we should confess – of course it was a confession to the therapist – but you know I think the Catholic Church has something right in this idea of confession. Some of it was not something we’d want to do, but there are two truths that were operating in the Catholic Church about confession. One is that there is something powerful about confessing sins to one who loves you, who really understands. There’s something powerful in letting your soul bear forth, and I’m not talking about the whole church, but for a group of people who love you so much that it’s okay. Now it’s not that they tolerate the sin, or they don’t tell you the truth, but just that they love you. In the movie, Meet Joe Black, Joe Black is dead and he assumes a human body and goes around trying to figure out what love is. He meets a woman and all that kind of thing, but in one part, he is talking to one of the characters, a man who has a lot of problems. He asks the man, “What is love?” and the man looks at his wife, and says, “Love is when she knows everything about me and it’s still okay.”  Yes, that’s right. For a secular movie, they got that right. Love is often when somebody knows everything, all your warts and everything and it still doesn’t matter, it’s okay, they still love you. The other piece that the Catholic Church had right, is that they restricted it to the priests. Now here’s what I mean by that, most churches are not spiritually mature enough to hear peoples’ sins. Most people are not. You know often when we confess our sins, it’s kind of like little kids who get together and say, “Ooh, did you hear what they did, I can’t believe that they did that!” By spiritually mature, I don’t mean approval, but all of us have some kind of problems, if not many, multitudes. Steve Brown, one of my favorite writers and preachers, says that before he became a minister, he thought there were two kinds of people in the world. On one hand, there were the good people who didn’t smoke, drink, or cuss or work on Sundays and they went to church. On the other hand, there were the bad people who did smoke, drink, cuss, work on Sundays and never went to church. But after he became a pastor and was a pastor for a long time, he decided yes, indeed! There are two different kinds of people in the world. On the one hand, there are the bad people who know it, and who go to church to do something about it. On the other hand there are the bad people who don’t know it, and have very little to do with God and Christ and the Church. I believe largely that Steve Brown is right. We’re all in need of confession because we all have problems. The problem for us is that we tend to think that there is the good part of us that is the majority, and all the bad stuff is some other problem. You know if I just had better parents and a better upbringing, or if I had a better wife of husband. If it weren’t for my kids, or that job I’ve got, or the world, I would be a good person!

I remember many years ago, a friend of mine, who is still my friend, came to me and said, “We’ve got to fix my wife.”  Well, she needed to be fixed up – she still has problems, but I kind of looked at him and said, “what about you?” The only person we can work on here is you. We tend to put the problem outside of us. Everybody has warts. We need to confess. We need to be healed spiritually, which leads into the second subject really, which is: Who can pray? I think sometimes some folks have the impression that in order to really pray well, we have to be somebody who is really good. This passage is sometimes misunderstood because Elijah is used as the example and we think “okay, Elijah was a prophet, he had all this power, was a righteous man, he did this and this and this.” You should go read Elijah’s story. I love the Elijah story. He’s so human. There’s a story where he’s up on a mountain with all the prophets of Baal, and he says, “Okay you guys, we’ll see who answers by fire” and the prophets of Baal cut themselves and their god doesn’t show up and then Elijah has them pour water on the sacrifice, and the fire comes down. It’s a great victory for Elijah, but then what happens? It isn’t but a few hours later that Jezibel, the wife of Ahab says, “if I find you I’m going to kill you.” He takes off running, he runs all the way from Northern Israel down as far south as you can go and hides in a cave. He’s full of bitterness, anger, and fear. He’s had a victory but then forgets it all. He sounds pretty human to me. You should really read that story. It’s a wonderful story of grace. Elijah was just like us. Anyone can pray. Anyone can pray. Well how should you pray? Well James, I love James, James is very simple. He says, “ask, you must ask”. Jesus says this: Ask and it will be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. I quote someone, I forget who it is, but I do it all the time. It goes, “you don’t get if you don’t ask,” and I really believe that. That’s true in our personal life, it’s true in the church. We don’t get if we don’t ask. Often we say, “Oh, we can’t ask for that” well, yes we can. We may not get it but we can ask. You see we ask for things and we know that God is in control and God knows what’s best and we wait for the right answer. Sometimes we don’t get what we ask for because we don’t know the situation, we don’t know the consequences of all that. Sometimes God brings us something else that is better. We need to ask. We should have right motives. God gives in abundance but we should really check our motives in our asking. Sometimes we treat God like a clerk at K-mart. Give me this and give me that, make me comfortable. Help me live as long as possible Lord, as comfortably as possible, and oh by the way, I’ll only call on you when I get into trouble. Or I just want this because it’s just for me. Now I really do believe that God does give us stuff just for us. God gives in abundance, but we ought to check our motives. James says, “You don’t get when you ask because you ask with the wrong motives” because you just do it selfishly. He does say also that we ought to be righteous. I don’t want to contradict what I just said, because righteousness in the bible is given to us through Christ, we’re not righteous in ourselves. There is a sense in which, if we are living a lifestyle and have ways and do things that are really far away from what the Lord wants us to do, we are not in connection with God, and our prayers won’t be powerful because we won’t really know what God wants. You know sometimes the most powerful prayers are said in conjunction with what we know God wants. If we’re only praying and living a lifestyle way out there, it’s not that God doesn’t hear it, it’s just that they’re not very effective, they’re not powerful prayers because they’re just done in ignorance. Last but not least, we need to ask in faith. This may be the thing you need to walk away with: Remember in the beginning of the book, we talked about how James said, if you ask, you have to ask in faith with no doubting. Now, James is not saying that doubt is necessarily a bad thing, we all have doubts. In fact, often learning happens because we doubt something, we’re questioning it. This is more personal. When we ask in faith, it’s not simply the intellectual belief that God can do it, that’s part of it, but faith equals trust in the Bible, and when faith is in someone and if we have confidence in God, and know God, and know who He is, we have confidence He’s going to take care of us no matter what happens. So we ask in trust of this good God, who loves us. We ask in trust of this God who cares for us, who has the best for us in mind. That’s what it means to ask in faith. It’s God who is with us all the time and has our lives before Him. He’s not capricious. He’s loving and just and righteous, and He is our father.

This isn’t all there is to say about prayer, but I hope you found it helpful. Prayer is a very practical thing. James is very practical. We pray in confidence in God, who is the lord of life and death, and eternal life and all that there is, particularly in your life.