Verse of the day · October 7
What does effectual fervent prayer mean in James 5:16?
The confession goes to the man you wronged, who is to pray for you.
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Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
James 5:16
The letter is nearly over, and it is moving fast from one thing to the next. Three verses back it asked, is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Then, of a sick man: let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him. With this verse the chapter has all three kinds of praying in it — a man praying for himself, ministers praying over him, and ordinary Christians praying for one another. The last of the three has something that has to come first. Before the praying comes a confession, and it has somewhere particular to go.
The verse says faults, and in the Greek that is not the same word as sins. It means falls and offences in relation to one another — the things one person has done against another. So acts of injustice are to be confessed to the people they were committed against. Nothing here tells a man to confess a fault to somebody he has not injured at all. And nothing names an officer to hear it. One to another runs both ways: if the verse did require confession to a priest, a priest would be as much bound to confess to the people as the people to him.
It does not forbid telling a trusted minister or a praying friend; that can be a good thing to do, when a man wants help pleading with God for pardon, or counsel on how to stop. What it does require is the hard part: the offence goes back to the person who was hurt by it, and it goes there so that the two of them can be put right.
We all want the people we worship alongside to think well of us, and the offences this asks for are ones they would otherwise never have heard of. Saying one out loud humbles a man, keeps him from applauding himself, and puts him on his guard — both so as not to add to his offences before God, and because he would rather not go through that again. God pardons the sins people confess and acknowledge, and not the sins of people who justify themselves. Nobody but God can pardon a sin committed against God, and no third person can forgive a sin committed against a neighbour. No man is empowered to tell another that he is truly penitent, or to forgive sin; what the guilty may have is the evidence that by repentance and faith their sins are blotted out through the blood of the cross. Confessing often gets put off while a man is well, and nobody wants to die with something on his conscience that he could have put right while there was time.
That ye may be healed reaches the body and past it: the healing meant is bodily and spiritual both. The case supposed here is a sickness brought on by some particular sin — not that everybody who is ill is ill for some special sin of his. A sick man who knows he has injured somebody is to make his confession to them: the same confession, to the same person, made from a bed instead of put off again, and it is part of what may bring him back to health. Where guilt is what has the mind in an uproar — that, and the dread of a judgment to come — nothing contributes more directly to recovery than getting peace back into that soul, and confession may be what secures it: made to God first, and then to the person who was wronged.
None of it promises that the sick always recover. Taken flat, nobody who was prayed for would ever die; the recovery comes if God judges it best. There are often cases where faith and prayer do not get the recovery, because God sees it would be to the hurt of the man's soul to be restored — and so a prayer over a sick bed should be made on this ground: if it is most for your glory and for the eternal good of this man's soul, let him be restored; and if not, pardon him, make him clean, and take him to yourself.
Then the second half of the verse, and it opens by shutting people out. Not any man's prayer: not the prayer of somebody living in open sin, not a hypocrite's, going through the forms. The man it means is one careful about the very faults the first half of the verse has him confessing. And he is one justified by the righteousness of Christ, living soberly and righteously, and not a man without sin. It is not a rank. Whether the prayer prevails does not turn on the talent, learning, standing, wealth or office of the man praying.
Effectual fervent is two English words carrying one word of Greek. Effectual is a poor rendering: it hardly says more than that an effective prayer is effective. Energetic is nearer. It points at a prayer with life in it, fitted to produce an effect rather than certified to have produced one, and its opposite is the listless, cold, formal praying with no vitality in it at all. And not every reading of the word puts that energy in the asker. The phrase can be taken as energetic supplication — a prayer suggested to the soul and worked in it by a divine energy. And a long prayer is no particular evidence that God is in it — an old Jewish maxim had it that the prayers of the righteous are short.
James supplies his own example. Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, the letter says — Elias being how the New Testament writes Elijah, and like passions meaning of the same nature: a fellow mortal. He got hungry and tired, and was fed by ravens, then by the widow of Zarephath, then by an angel. He was blamed for the trouble Israel was in, his life was threatened, and he once asked God to let him die. He was not clear of impatience or fear or unbelief either.
He prayed that it might not rain, and it did not rain on the land of Israel — only there, not everywhere — for three years and six months. The older books do not record that prayer in so many words. It stands behind the words they do record: he announced that no rain would fall in those years unless he said so. There is no real doubt that prayer was in it. The drought was a judgment on the land for the idolatry that had filled it in Ahab's time, and Elijah asked for it because he was of one mind with God about that idolatry and jealous for God's honour. In that one particular — the asking for a judgment — he is not a pattern. He had God's order for it; nobody is to pray for judgments without one.
He prayed again, and the heaven gave rain. That was on the top of Carmel, and by then the famine was severe, the ground having given no fruit for years. They do not record the second one either; it is read off the way he was lying. He lay face down on the ground with his head bowed to his knees, which was the posture for praying. And he sent his servant out seven times to look toward the sea for the first sign of rain. Then clouds and wind came up, heavy rain fell, and the ground gave its fruit again. In prayer we are not to look at the merit of the man but at the grace of God; the one thing in Elijah held up to copy is that he prayed earnestly.
So being weak is no reason to leave off praying. But the strength was never in the praying itself, which has no power of its own at all. What it has is the grace of the Spirit who prompts it, and behind it the mediation of Christ — his pleading, his blood, his sacrifice — and God's own promise to hear the people who call on him, so that what no human strength can accomplish is done by his strength, in answer to being asked. Nobody directs God, or prescribes to him, or stops him doing what he has purposed. What a man may do is ask. Elijah's answer came as a miracle. Where ours carries less of the miracle, there may be as much of the grace — and whatever his prayer could do, surely the prayer of no righteous man returns empty.
Which puts the verse back where it began, with two people. The praying runs along the same line as the confessing: he prays for the one he wronged, and that man prays for him. That is the kind of prayer God receives most gladly, because it is the kind Christ makes as he pleads for his people now, and in that there is nothing asked for himself.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes, the Geneva Bible notes, B. W. Johnson and Charles Spurgeon. How these teachings are made