James series – “The Litmus Test for life”

James 5:15-18

¹⁵ Such a prayer offered in faith will heal the sick, and the Lord will make you well. And if you have committed any sins, you will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results. ¹⁷ Elijah was as human as we are, and yet when he prayed earnestly that no rain would fall, none fell for three and a half years! ¹⁸ Then, when he prayed again, the sky sent down rain and the earth began to yield its crops.

When I was in school one of the guys on our rugby team got in trouble and the coach punished the entire team for it. He made all of us get up at 5:00am and run. Today we live in a society that would call that unfair. So why did I have to bear the burden of his bad behavior? The coach was teaching us a critical and lifelong lesson, that we were a team. He was teaching us that when one of us stumbles or struggles, it affected us all. And the only way to overcome that is for those who aren’t struggling to come to the aid of those who are. Togetherness, teamwork, camaraderie, unity that was the lesson. We were no longer a group of individuals we were a corporate body. This is a lesson that the church needs to learn. Sadly sports has become about show boating, its no longer about the team but about the individual. When it comes to pro sports we put the name of the athlete not the team on the back of the shirt. We keep individual stats, the focus is on self first and serving second.  But when it comes to being a corporate body here’s the difference, sports teams and most teams are just made-up teams. They are corporate bodies only in the sense of temporarily uniting for a temporary cause. But the church is radically different than that kind of unity. Because the church IS a corporate body. 1 Corinthians 12:12-13 says, “The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. ¹³ Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit” And on down in verse 27, God’s Word says; “All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it. We’re not just some type of made-up team. We are a corporate body because we are Christ’s body and He is our head. So, doesn’t it stand to reason that we have a corporate responsibility to those among us who are going through affliction? Just like the rugby team that runs as a team because one of their teammates has stumbled, so we also have a corporate responsibility. In our passage today, we are in the middle of the 12^th test of faith the affliction test. Last time we saw our individual responsibility. That each of us is personally responsible to pray, praise and petition the Elders of the church to come and pray over us. But that’s not where it ends, because God didn’t save us in isolation, Salvation isn’t solitary confinement. He saved you to serve, calling you into a corporate body, the body of His Son. This body called the church. And as a saved part of this corporate body of Christ, we have a responsibility toward those among us who are going through affliction. Today we are letting a lot of worldly ideas influence the church. One of the worldly ideologies that we are bringing into the church is the ideology of individualism. That it’s all about me. That is why there are many who claim Christ but don’t claim the church. It’s what I call the doctrine of decapitation. We love Christ the head but loath his body the church. So, we cut of contact with his body, the church, which leads to not just lone ranger Christians, but lonely Christians. But James here teaches us that we are part of the body, and as such we have a responsibility to get each other to pass the affliction test. The affliction test isn’t just an individual test, it’s also a corporate test and it’s here that James reveals the second key the corporate key. Not only do we need to engage the individual key of prayer, praise and petitioning the Elders to come and pray over us, but we also need the corporate key of confession and prayer. For many this is a scary scripture because James calls us to corporate confession, to come clean and get real with each other. This is a call to accountability, to recognize that our individual sin affects the whole body. My prayer as we go through part 2 of the Affliction test is that we will not only care enough about the church to publicly confess our sin, but that we would be a people of prayer who constantly seek the face of God.