In the Season Two finale, Jane gives an emotional depiction of not only the posture of Elijah’s 1 Kings 18 praying, but the jaw-dropping correlation between the servants going-back and James’ talk of prayer in the final verses of James 5. She answers the raw and honest question: “If God’s going to do His will anyway, what’s the point of praying?” And we dig into the unrelenting power of James’ final power-punch of faith and works: the working of faith through prayer (and why fighting through every opposition to persevering prayer is worth every ounce of the war).

The Technicalities

Throughout this letter, James has outlined the hallmarks of faith. We have looked in detail at how faith endures trials and overcomes temptation. How it remains unswayed around important people, and it displays itself like a peacock’s feathers when we do God’s Word and put it to action. We’ve discussed how faith knows when to speak and when to stay quiet, when to share the sweet, living water, and how to stop the flow of the bitter. We learned how faith steadies the arrow of our prayers and is strongest when we are at our flattest posture in the throne room of the King of Kings, waiting eagerly and expectantly for His visible return.

We’ve seen how faith acts and produces and displays and waits. We’ve learned how it endures and understands and perseveres, always. But the one thing we haven’t seen, with all of the talk of faith and works and their mutual partnership and inseparable relationship, is the working of faith. James saved that one for the end, to wrap all of this up with a really beautiful golden ribbon that ties faith and works together in every way possible: that faith, in all of its acting and producing and displaying and enduring, all of that working is done in prayer.

I’m breaking this passage down a little bit differently by flipping it inside out because, in these final verses of James’ letter, if it were a sandwich, Elijah’s story is the meat. And I want to start with the meat.

“Elijah was a man with a nature like ours,” James wrote in James 5:17. He had the same feelings and emotions. He was affected by hardship as much as we are, experienced the same physical limitations, emotional shortcomings, and spiritual wearinesses. “And he prayed fervently that it would not rain, and it didn’t – for 3-1/2 years.”

Why? The impending drought that would result (and the famine that would go with it) would be as barren as the faith of God’s people and served as a physical punishment to usher in a spiritual revival in their hearts. But that’s not the point of James’ story. The point is that Elijah was a man just like you and me. His spiritual gift was prophecy. But there is no spiritual gift of prayer. That, like learning, is available to all of us. You and I can pray just like Elijah did, and if our prayers are right on the target of God’s will, He will do the thing we are asking Him to do. Elijah prayed for 42 months that it would not rain. And then, James 5:18 says, he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

You can read the full story of all of this in 1 Kings 17 and 18, but there’s a fascinating detail here that I want to point out before we even get to digging into the last eight verses of James’ letter. You’ll see it at the end of 1 Kings 18 when Elijah stops praying the rain away and starts pulling it down from heaven. There, in verses 42-43, it says that Elijah went to the top of the mountain with his servant, bowed onto the ground, and put his face between his knees. The text doesn’t outrightly say that Elijah was praying there in that bowed-down and tucked-in posture, but James does. As he stayed there like that, he sent his servant to search the sky for the slightest hint of a rain cloud seven times before it finally began to form.

In this passage at the tail end of James’ letter, it’s no accident that the word “prayer” or “praying” is also used seven times.

That said, let’s go back to the beginning of the passage. Picking up from the few verses before it (the prophets’ suffering and Job’s jaw-dropping perseverance), James asks: “Is anyone among you suffering?” Does any one of you see yourself in their experiences – trying so hard to do what you know God has told you to and only feeling opposition, adversity, and trouble from the very people to whom you are trying to serve?

“Pray,” James said. Jesus did, too, in Luke 18:1-8. “Always pray. Never lose heart. I will vindicate you.” When you persist in prayer, Luke 11:5-13 promises that God will answer you. Go read the verses. You’ll see: Keep praying throughout your suffering. Keep asking for His Spirit. He will give it to you.

I also need to point out here that the word James uses for “pray” isn’t the primary Greek word for prayer. Instead, he uses a compound word that combines the primary Greek word for prayer with a preposition often translated as “to” or “into” that indicates the direction of something or the goal toward which a movement is directed. The clearest example I can give you of this is in one use of the same preposition in Mark 6:51, which finds the disciples caught in a horrendous storm in the middle of the night and the middle of the sea when they see Jesus walking on the sea. Verse 51 says that Jesus went up into the boat to them” (that’s our preposition), and the wind ceased. That said, go back to James’ one-word answer to suffering: Pray. Are you suffering? Pray to Jesus, turn your body toward His face. He will come into your suffering-boat and calm the waters on which it floats.

Remember, Elijah was bowed down and tucked up on that mountaintop the whole time he prayed for rain. He sent his servant to do the active looking in the sky for the earliest hint of the forming cloud. Do that. Pray in the perpetual state of looking toward God, right into His face – not the people causing you trouble, the crops that desperately need rain, or even the sky that will bring the clouds for the rain. Lock your eyes on God alone.

And then, in the same verse, James also adds: “Is anyone cheerful?” In good spirits? Finally having a good day after a long string of bad ones? Sing to God. Celebrate Him in lyric and melody. Be intentional in taking as much time to worship God in thankfulness as you cry to Him in desperation. Lock your eyes on His as intentionally and fervently when you don’t need anything from Him and as fervently in the answer to your prayer as you do when you’re crying out to Him in days of suffering and waiting, desperate for His strength to endure.

“Are you sick?” James asks in verse 14 or, as the Greek word more specifically describes, ill or diseased, weak or faint. Call for the elders of your church and have them pray over you with the same facing-Jesus kind of prayer from verse 13 while also anointing you with oil (that represents the Holy Spirit) in the name of the Lord. When they do that, they are speaking the name of Jesus over you, asking Him to step into your boat with you when you are too weak to ask yourself.

“The prayer of faith,” James says in James 5:15, “will save the sick.”  Because there is going-through-the-motions prayer, and then there’s the fresh and fervent, living and active kind of prayer that naturally springs out of your mouth from the faith that is rooted in your heart (the same pistis-faith that we have become intimately familiar with throughout this book). It’s prayed by the people who aren’t suffering, storm-battered, exhausted, and in desperate need of someone to hold up their arms for them. But the “sick” of verse 15 is not the same “sick” word from verse 14. This second “sick” that the prayer of faith heals is only used two other times in the Bible (in Hebrews 12:3 and Revelation 2:3) and it describes a deep, soul-weariness. The perpetual kind that keeps coming back up, keeps reminding you of the need to persevere.

That prayer of faith, the whispered name of Jesus over your weary spirit, and the anointing of the Holy Spirit oil over your tapped-out body will restore your faith to a place where it’s fresh and no longer tired from being used. It will pull your faith back from the edge of wanting to drop your hands (check out Exodus 17:8-16 for that reference). Any sin that has lingered will be forgiven, so confess it all out loud while you’re there, being prayed over and anointed (because we already know how unconfessed sin deafens God’s ears to prayer). And do it reciprocally because the time will come when the positions are flipped, when one of the elders needs facing-Jesus prayer. So, confess to each other reciprocally and pray for each other mutually to find the kind of healing that pulls the weak and feeble from danger and destruction. The kind that makes the ones without strength whole and complete. The prayer of the spiritually strong will restore the spiritual health of the physically and emotionally weak.

And the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous person yields so much more than you can ever imagine. Literally. Just take a look again at 1 Kings 18:1, where it says, “It came to pass after many days” (which the text also says was three years later). If you look at that verse in Blue Letter Bible, you can toggle it from the original Hebrew language over to see it in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament. When you do that, you’ll see that the Hebrew word for “many” is translated to the Greek word “polys,” which is the same word used for James 5:16’s “much.” James isn’t just talking hyperbole here. And he’s not saying your prayer can avail much. He’s saying that your prayer avails just as much as Elijah’s did – three years’ worth of holding back rain if that’s what the Spirit of God has told you in no uncertain terms to pray for.

Speaking of the Spirit, that “effective, fervent” word to describe the prayer that avails much? The Greek word is energeō, which, in its simplest translation, literally means “to work in,” and, according to scholars in the earliest papyri manuscripts of the New Testament, it’s always used in the context of effective working. Most notably, it’s used to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:6 and 11, and it’s also used for the filling of the Spirit.

You see it in Ephesians 3:20, “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that energeō-works in us…” And Philippians 2:13, “It is God who energeō-works in you both to will and to energeō-do for His good pleasure.” And again in Galatians 3:5, “Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and energeō-works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law or the hearing of faith?”

Because there are ergon-works, we’ve seen those throughout this entire book. And then there is Holy-Spirit-filled, energeō-working. The crossover? God puts the ball in our court. We get to energeō-pray by the direction and power of the Spirit, launching our prayer arrows directly at that James 4 target He’s holding up high for us, where we can’t possibly miss – as long as we keep our head down, our eyes locked on Him, our posture humbled, or hearts cleansed.

The working-in-prayer of the righteous is an intense force that does not fail as long as you do not quit.

Do you need wisdom? Work in prayer.
Strength? Work in prayer.
Called to teach? Work in prayer.
Feel your pride creeping up? Work in prayer.
Know what you need to do and still haven’t done it? Work it out in prayer. Work in prayer. Work in prayer. Work in prayer. And God will energeō-work it all out, according to His will (Ephesians 1:11). Because faith without works is dead. And works, without energeō, working-in-prayer? It’s fruitless. What a gift God has given us to partner with Him in prayer to accomplish His purpose for His glory. What a gift.

And then, there is one last note from James. It’s a sign-off that feels heavy with intimate awareness and understanding, as if James is giving one last knowing glance as a man who once got it wrong – a man who, at one point in his adult life, didn’t see Jesus, his brother, as Jesus the Messiah when He was standing right there before his face. That day, in John 7, Jesus remained there in Galilee as his brothers (James included) turned to leave Him behind and go to the feast. And then, in 1 Corinthians 15:7, Jesus intentionally sought James out and allowed Himself to be seen by him as the risen Christ with his eyes wide open to His divinity. From that moment, James’ faith was entirely turned around. Jesus turned him back. He saved James, a sinner, from the error of his way, saved his soul from death, and covered his multitude of sins.

Because He gives more grace, always. And He will receive all of the glory, forever and ever, amen.

 

Making it Personal

I was 28 when I tripped faith-first, right into a waiting-wall. We had been trying for a family for three years. I hadn’t seen one positive pregnancy test, ever, and it had been a full 36 months.

“What’s the use of praying?” I wrote the words in my prayer journal one Wednesday afternoon in early spring. “If Your will is going to be done anyway, does my praying really affect Your timeline?”

My eyes Wednesday wandered to Psalm 25 and David’s waiting words. I picked up a commentary and thumbed through its pages. “Many lose the benefit of their earnest prayers because they do not persevere in them,” Adam Clarke wrote in response to David’s “Show me Your ways” prayer. They pray for awhile, get lax in the habit, forget about it or, discouraged, abandon it altogether, and “lose all that was already wrought for and in them.”

“But if we can lose the benefit of prayer by not praying,” I prayer-wondered, “it begs the question: what is the benefit of prayer?”

I wasn’t sure which was hurting more – my brain from the question or my heart from the waiting, and I quietly tucked my Scripture-digging things away, the words hanging in the air, unanswered.

The next morning, I read that New Testament story about that Old Testament prophet, still thinking about whether or not it was really all that important to keep praying and asking God for a baby after three years without one. I read James’ account of Elijah, traced my finger over his story in 1 Kings and God caught my spirit in the details at the tail-end of it all. He pointed me to the going-back. With his body down and his face between his knees, Elijah told his servant to go look out to the sea, full of faith that the rain he was praying down was coming. But the servant saw nothing. Seven times, Elijah sent him back. And each time, the servant strained his eyes, searching desperately for the earliest indication of a rain cloud, but saw nothing.

Can you imagine if Elijah gave up? He could have gotten frustrated after the third return with nothing in sight. Persevering in prayer isn’t the easiest thing to do – especially when the thing you’re persevering in prayer for is typically close to your heart, let alone the fact that disappointed hope is not only discouraging, it can also be embarrassing when other people are watching and straining their own eyes, looking for that miracle you’re convinced that God would do.

Elijah’s servant strained his eyes, looking for the rain that the prophet was praying for, over three years into a drought. And there I sat, straining my eyes, looking for the first miracle babe that I had been praying for over three years into our wait. My faith wavered when I saw no visible results of God moving, stirring, or even barely beginning to answer my prayer. Elijah’s didn’t.

Seven times, his servant returned with news of clear blue skies. And seven times, Elijah sent him back to look again. Quietly. Confidently. And patiently. Persevering in prayer.

“Go again,” Elijah said.

“There is nothing,” his servant reported, breathless.
“Go again.”

“… there is nothing.”
“Go again.”

“… still nothing.”
“Go again.”

“Sir, there still isn’t anything there.”
“Go again.”

“I’m sorry … nothing.”
“Go again.”

“Elijah … it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain today.”
“Go again.”

And finally, with one last look, his servant did a double take. There it was, out on the horizon – a cloud so small it was hardly larger than his own hand. But it was there. The rain was coming. And Elijah had prayed it down.

If either of them had given up – if Elijah had stopped praying, or his servant had grown tired of looking, they wouldn’t have experienced the power of God manifested before their eyes. Or the wonder of watching a miracle unfold in real time that they, at God’s prompting, had prayed into existence.

That morning, though my eyes saw nothing, my spirit felt His Spirit prompting me: Keep praying. Keep asking. Keep coming to Me. Go again.

It’s amazing, right? Elijah prayed intensely for a day (maybe not even a full day, the text doesn’t tell us), and the rains came. We like those kinds of stories. We like to see the answers given, the prayer-targets hit – the prophet praying, and God bringing the rain and performing the miracle all in one tidy little paragraph.

I’m 44 now, on the other side of ten years of persevering prayer. Our three babes are tucked up in their morning beds while I rush to push out the words before they wake up needing breakfast and morning snuggles, and I’m struck by the first part of the story – the 1 Kings 17 part and the 3-1/2 years of persistent, persevering prayer against rain that the Bible doesn’t show.

James had just mentioned the prophets as examples of suffering and patience in James 5:8 – we talked about them in the last passage. We looked at Isaiah and Jeremiah, who were hated so much for the words that God spoke through them that their lives were in real and imminent danger. But Elijah was a prophet, too, but his suffering was brought on by his own persevering, obedient prayer. He brought it on himself. His persistent prayer led to severe famine and his own lack of water. We see him in 1 Kings 17:10 begging for the smallest cup of water at a city gate just to have a drink. But still, despite his own suffering as a direct result of his prayer, he kept praying. Day after day, year after year, until God came to him in the third year of the drought to say, “I will send the rain.”

Elijah worked in prayer. And I mean, he worked – through his own thirst, watching daily as the brook by which he camped and the source from which he pulled his own drinking water slowly dried up as a result of his consistent praying. But then, when the drought finally ended, and the rain finally came, there was no celebration. No reward. No parties in the streets or widespread revival outbreaks. Elijah himself had no time to bask in the glory of the answered prayer. Instead, he ran for his life. But, when he did? He ran to the well (1 Kings 18:3).

From the well, he went to the wilderness, where he collapsed beneath a tree, and he prayed again. And the angel of the Lord met him there. Touched him there. Fed him there. And he went in the strength of that meeting and came to a cave where the word of the Lord came to him in the smallest voice because Elijah had trained his ear to know God’s voice through years of persevering prayer.

Elijah and James both knew: working in prayer isn’t a one-time experience. It’s an entire lifestyle.

“Faith without works cannot be called faith,” the introduction to the book reads in my Bible. And works without working-in-prayer cannot work. So, friend, let’s get to work in our working-in-prayer and create an Elijah-level lifestyle of persevering prayer. When we do, we will see the 1 Kings 17:38 fire of God fall in response. And that is worth every single ounce of the work.

Thanks so much for listening!