“The effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5:16)

When the heavens are made of brass

I often wonder, as I’m sure you do, why so many prayers just don’t seem to be answered. We can, and do, find all sorts of ways to justify the lack of change in our circumstances, or in the circumstances of those we prayed for even when we spent a long time on our knees (or however, you pray – I hardly ever actually get onto my knees . Perhaps I should do more often…) But the fact is it often doesn’t appear that heaven is manifesting on earth, or the Kingdom of God is coming  as a result of our prayers. Sometimes it is a matter of timing, and there are many powerful testimonies of long period of time elapsing before the prayer and the answer: years, and even decades. God dwells outside of time, and we know that His timing is always perfect, and our timing very often leads to disappointment and frustration. And sometimes there’s a battle to be fought in the heavenlies, such as we see at work in the book of Daniel and the opposition of the “Prince of Persia“ to Daniel’s prayers being answered. These are not the situations I am talking about. And I’m not talking about the times when we console ourselves with the thought that the answer is “No,” or that it comes gradually. I am referring to those specific needs that arise within a specified timeframe, outside of which they cease to exist, and yet where God does not appear to do anything. I’m talking about the times when the heavens seem to be “made of brass.“

Yet we know they aren’t, we know our God of Love does not ignore his children, and we know that He is faithful. As Smith Wigglesworth famously put it, our God loves to answer our prayers more than we love to ask. James 5: 16 tells us “the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.“ If this is what the Bible says, it must be true. So if our prayers don’t seem to avail anything (let alone much) it must be either because they aren’t effective and fervent, or because we aren’t righteous. And since we are “the righteousness of God in Christ,” (2 Cor 5:21) that can’t be the issue; so it has to be to do with whether or not our prayers are effective and fervent.

The Electric Current

Actually it all comes down to one word, because the phrase “effective fervent” (This is the new King James translation: NIV says “powerful and effective.”) is only one word in Greek, which is energeo, meaning operative, putting forth power. Our word energy – think of an electric current – obviously comes from it. If we want to know why some of our prayers don’t “avail much,“ I think we need to ask ourselves what it means for a prayer to have energeo.

We can get some light on this by seeing where else it’s used. In Ephesians 4:16, Paul says that the body (the Church) grows in Christ according to the “effective working“ by which every part does it share. It’s the same word: “effective working” is what enables all the joints in the body to work together and grow in love.  And here’s what struck me: energeo is what enables every part – that is each member of the body – to do its share. The word for share  is metros. Effective working is something that is meted out to each one of us, so that we can function in the power of the Spirit and the life of Christ can flow in His body. What do we all have a share (metros) of?  

 Paul writes: “For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.” (Romans 12:3. My underlining.)

What God measures out to us is faith. I think that this is the key to energeo. A prayer isn’t “fervent and effective” because we have spent hours in crying out to God fervently, or because we have used words that we think are effective because other people have used them effectively: a prayer has energeo when we know that we know that God has given us the answer. Not because of our theology, and not even because it’s written in the Bible, but because He has told us personally. We might still have to cry out for hours to see that answer manifest, but we cry out in faith because the powers of darkness may need to be cleared out of the way, not in desperation because we think we need to get God’s attention. The full context of  James 5:16 is this:

“Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5: 14-16)

The effective fervent prayer is the prayer of faith. Churches that apply James 5: 14-16 to prayer for healing tend to focus on the oil and the eldership, and hope that these two will carry the faith. But 2 out of 3 won’t work. In the time of James, the elders of a church will have been people who knew what it was to pray with energeo, and so it was safe to assume that their prayers would be answered, and the body of Christ built up in love (Ephesians 4:16) as a result. Unfortunately that is not necessarily the case today. Without energeo, the elders and the oil avail nothing.

Seeing and Hearing

We all know Hebrews 11:1 “ Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The evidence of things that are seen is what our eyes have witnessed. When we say “I saw it with my own eyes,” it is not my eyes or the thing that I saw which are the evidence, but the fact that I saw it. My sense of that reality tells me and tells others that it exists. In the same way, faith is the sense by which our spirit experiences the unseen dimension. We also know that “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of God.”  (Rom 10:17) How do we hear the word of God? From the Good Shepherd, whose voice we hear, and whom we have decided to follow. (John 10:27) We can’t follow Him, unless we’re close to Him, so being close to Him must be our first priority. And when we are close to Him our sense of faith is sharpened, and it is in His proximity that we can hear His voice, sometimes through and always agreeing with the word of God.  Biblical hope is not a wish; it’s a destination. When we hear Him speak and our spiritual sense of faith perceives the substance of the answered prayer that we are hoping for, we have that Mark 11:22  mover of  mountains; the faith of God.

“So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.” (Mark 11:22-23. The Greek translated “in God” is actually the genitive case “of God.”)

Faith is always a gift of God: we can’t draw it out of our own thinking, our own understanding. Jesus tells us that faith as a grain of mustard seed is enough to uproot and move a tree. The Bible is a whole sack full of seeds in lots of different packets – seeds for healing, seeds for provision, for victory and so on. I believe we can only see which seeds to sow when the Holy Spirit shows us the life that they contain. We need to see the mustard tree in the Spirit and not just read about it on the packet, and that can only come from God, and not by leaning on our understanding – even if it’s our understanding of the Bible. When God has shown us the tree inside the seed and we have evidence of it with our spiritual sense of faith, that is the faith of God that Jesus tells us will move mountains.

So it is in that place of mustard seed faith, granted by the Holy Spirit through a word from the Shepherd, that we can pray the effective fervent prayers that avail much. We are so often like people going into a dark room and groping around to we find the light switch. There can be a lot of hidden wires carrying electricity (energeo) in the cavity of a wall, but there is only one switch that activates their power. The power is there: it’s been given to us. The entire circuit is the gift of God’s grace, and Jesus flipped the mains to a permanent “ON” at Calvary. But in the dark rooms where we can find ourselves we need to learn to seek and find the switches, instead of just tapping at the blank wall blindly and wondering why the light doesn’t come on.