A note on the Scripture in this study: every verse is printed WHOLE. The words set in ordinary type are the ones this lesson leans on and emphasizes . . . the words in italics are the rest of the verse, printed so that nothing is ever handed to you as a fragment with the remainder missing.
Nobody asks this question who has never prayed.
I have never had a lost man walk up and ask me whether prayer works . . . but I have had church members ask me – and I have asked it myself. This is the question of a man who has knelt down beside a bed at two o'clock in the morning . . . and then got up and went to work and wondered on the drive over whether anything at all happened while he was down there.
So let us be honest about it . . . and let us start where the Bible starts – which is not with how we feel about prayer, but with what the Bible says prayer actually DOES.
James 5:16 — “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.”
Now I want us to take that last sentence apart a piece at a time . . . because there are three things sitting in it and most of us only ever notice one of them.
“EFFECTUAL FERVENT”
In our English Bible that looks like two words . . . but in the Greek it is only ONE word – energoumene – and we already own a piece of it, because our English word energy comes right out of it. It means in-working . . . operating . . . engaged . . . running. So this is not prayer that is recited out of habit while our mind is somewhere else . . . this is prayer that is turned ON.
“AVAILETH”
The word behind “availeth” means IS STRONG . . . it has force, it prevails – it is a wrestler's word. This is not the language of a wish that we send up and then hope over . . . this is the language of something that pushes against a thing and gets somewhere.
Put those two words back together and James is telling us that prayer which is actually engaged is prayer that actually prevails . . . and now notice what he did NOT say. He did not say that prayer helps . . . he did not say that prayer comforts . . . he did not say that prayer is mostly good for the man who is doing the praying – and every one of those three things is true, and not one of them is what James wrote down. What James wrote down is that it AVAILETH MUCH.
“OF A RIGHTEOUS MAN” — the piece we skip
Now here is the part of the verse that we quote right on past. I have preached “availeth much” for years . . . and I do not know that I have ever once stopped on the four words sitting in front of it.
Because James did not say that the effectual fervent prayer of anybody availeth much. He said the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much . . . and that ought to stop us cold, because of what the Bible has already told us about three chapters into Romans:
Romans 3:10 — “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:”
So how can James turn around and promise anything at all to the prayer of a righteous man . . . when the Bible has just finished telling us that there is not one of them anywhere on this earth?
The answer is that the Bible uses the word righteous in two different ways . . . and we have got to keep those two separate or we will get this wrong in one of two directions. We will either decide that prayer is really only for the spiritual giants and that we might as well not bother . . . or we will decide that how a man lives has nothing whatsoever to do with his praying. And both of those are wrong.
The righteousness that is GIVEN to us
The first one is the righteousness that gets put to our account. We did not work it up . . . and we could not have:
Isaiah 64:6 — “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”
2 Corinthians 5:21 — “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
Philippians 3:9 — “And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:”
Paul says it about as plain as it can be said – not having mine own righteousness. Whatever Paul is standing in, somebody handed it to him . . . and this is the righteousness that gives a man the right to open his mouth to God in the first place.
The blind man in John 9 had a hold of this before the scholars in the room did:
John 9:31 — “Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.”
A lost man is not standing on any ground at all at the throne of God . . . and he has exactly one prayer that God has promised to hear, and it is the publican's prayer:
Luke 18:13 — “And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.”
And God heard THAT one . . . the very next verse says that man went home justified. So let nobody read this and go away thinking the door is shut, because the door is NOT shut – but a man has to come in through it before he can start asking for things inside the house.
The righteousness that is LIVED
The second one is the righteousness of a man's walk . . . how he is living, today. And this one goes up and down:
Psalm 66:18 — “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me:”
Proverbs 15:8 — “The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD: but the prayer of the upright is his delight.”
1 John 3:22 — “And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.”
The first kind of righteousness never moves . . . it was settled at Calvary, and how we behaved on Tuesday does not add one thing to it and does not take one thing away from it. But the second kind moves all the time . . . and it is the second one that James has in mind here.
And we know that – because of the first half of the verse
Look at where James put this promise. He did not set it out by itself somewhere . . . he hung it on the back end of a verse that starts out like this:
James 5:16 — “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.”
Confess your faults. James put the confessing and the praying in the same breath . . . and he put the confessing FIRST. So the righteous man of James 5:16 is not a man who HAS no faults – he is a man who has DEALT with his faults . . . because if this promise had been written for men with no faults, James would not have opened the verse by telling us to go confess ours.
Then James settles it for us in the very next verse
And here is where this ought to quit being frightening to anybody, because James turns right around and gives us his own example of a righteous man . . . and he gives it in the next breath:
James 5:17 — “Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.”
Let the Bible define its own words. When James wrote “a righteous man” he did not have some rare saint in mind that none of us have ever met . . . he had ELIJAH in mind – and then he went out of his way to tell us that Elijah was subject to like passions as we are.
James knew exactly what we were going to do with Elijah. We were going to file him under “great men of faith” . . . admire him from a good safe distance . . . and then quietly decide that whatever that man had, we do not have any of it. So James shut that road off before we could get very far down it.
And if we doubt him, all we have to do is read what Elijah did about one chapter after he called fire down out of heaven. A woman sent him a threat and he ran for his life:
1 Kings 19:4 — “But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.”
The man who out-prayed the weather sat down under a juniper tree and asked God to kill him. Same man . . . very nearly the same week.
Now let me guard this
Because this will go bad in a hurry if we are not careful with it. Righteousness does not BUY the answer . . . because if our righteousness bought the answer then the answer would be wages and not a gift, and we already know better than that:
Titus 3:5 — “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;”
Righteousness does not purchase one thing from God. What righteousness does is CLEAR THE LINE.
The water is still on out there at the faucet . . . the hose is just kinked. And that is not God being stingy with us – that is us standing on our own hose and then wondering why nothing is coming out the far end of it.
So who is the righteous man whose prayer availeth much? A saved man . . . standing in a righteousness that was handed to him and not earned by him . . . who is keeping short accounts with God about his sin. That is the whole list. There is not one thing on it about how long a man has been saved, or how well he prays out loud in front of other people.
NOW LET US LOOK AT THREE PRAYERS THAT WORKED
The Bible does not make a claim like “availeth much” and then walk off and leave us to take it on faith. It hands us cases.
A prophet's weather
We have already met Elijah. Three and a half years of a whole nation's weather hung on one man's knees . . . and then he prayed again and the rain came back . . . and that man had the same passions we have.
A prisoner's chains
Acts 12:5 — “Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.”
Peter's execution was set for morning . . . sixteen soldiers were assigned to him . . . and he was sleeping between two of them, chained to both. That night the chains fell off.
Now do not miss the order that Luke wrote down, because he wrote it down on purpose. The church prayed – and THEN the angel came. Luke could have told that story either way . . . and he put the praying first.
But the part of this that ought to encourage us the most is the part we usually laugh at and go on past. Peter, free, walks over to the house where the prayer meeting is going on . . . and knocks on the gate:
Acts 12:13–16 — “And as Peter knocked at the door of the gate, a damsel came to hearken, named Rhoda. And when she knew Peter's voice, she opened not the gate for gladness, but ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate. And they said unto her, Thou art mad. But she constantly affirmed that it was even so. Then said they, It is his angel. But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened the door, and saw him, they were astonished.”
They were praying for Peter to be let out of prison . . . Peter's release knocked on their door . . . and they told the girl she had lost her mind and left the answer standing out in the street.
Now think about what that means for us. Their answer did not hang on how well they were expecting it. They prayed better than they believed – and God honored the praying anyway . . . because if God only answered prayers that were offered up with perfect faith, then Acts 12 would have ended at the execution. That is not permission to pray careless . . . but it is a good reason to keep on praying when our faith felt awful thin while we were doing it.
A church's missionaries
Acts 13:2–3 — “As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.”
The greatest missionary campaign in the history of this world did not get started in a business meeting . . . it got started in a worship service. They were not planning – they were MINISTERING TO THE LORD – and the call came while they were doing it.
WHAT “AVAILETH MUCH” DOES NOT PROMISE
Now I have to be careful right here, because a half-truth about prayer will wound somebody. “Availeth much” is a promise about the weight of praying . . . it is not a promise about the shape of the answer – and the same Bible that tells us prayer prevails tells us some other things just as plain.
It does not promise that we get what we name.
James 4:3 — “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.”
A father who hands a child every single thing that child names is not a good father.
It does not promise our timing.
Luke 18:7 — “And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?”
“Though he bear long.” The Lord put the waiting right into the promise . . . and Elijah himself sent his servant to go look toward that sea SEVEN times before there was ever a cloud out there the size of a man's hand.
It does not promise that we will understand it.
Isaiah 55:8–9 — “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
And sometimes the answer is a NO that turned out to be better than the yes would have been.
2 Corinthians 12:8–9 — “For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
Paul asked three times and God told him no three times . . . and then God told him why, and told him what he was getting instead of what he asked for. And Paul spent the rest of his life glad about it. Whatever that thorn was, the no was the better gift – and Paul could only see that afterward, looking back at it.
So we keep both halves of this thing together. Prayer prevails . . . and the One that it prevails with is a great deal wiser than we are. Take only the first half of that and the first answer that does not come our way is going to crush us . . . take only the second half of it and we will quit asking altogether.
Part Four of this series is given entirely over to the hardest form of that question – when the answer is no and the loss is real. It is not answered here because it deserves a great deal more than a paragraph.
WHY THIS ONE HAS TO BE SETTLED FIRST
Everything else in this study is leaning on the answer to this one question.
If prayer is mostly just something we do to look religious – something to settle our nerves down before we go handle the real problem ourselves – then we are going to keep right on doing exactly what most of us already do. We will work it ourselves . . . run clean out of options . . . and then pray about it when there is nothing left in this world to try.
But if prayer AVAILETH MUCH . . . then reaching for it last is not being humble. It is waste.
So before you go on to Part Two, sit with this one a minute. Not “do I believe prayer works” – every one of us would say yes to that one without even thinking about it. The better question is this one:
If prayer availeth that much . . . then why is it the last thing I reach for?
BEFORE YOU LEAVE
The Bible's answer to the question in the title is not that prayer works sometimes . . . and it is not that prayer mostly works on the man who is doing the praying. The Bible's answer is that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man AVAILETH MUCH – and then it hands us a man who wanted to die the week before, and a church that would not open the door when the answer knocked on it.
And the righteous man in that promise is not a better man than you are. He is a saved man who has kept his accounts short with God . . . and that is a door standing wide open. God has put the blessing on the other side of the asking.
TRY IT THIS WEEK
Two things.
ONE. Get the line clear before you ask for anything at all. Confess what you already know about . . . because James put that first for a reason.
TWO. Then pick out one thing you have been handling all by yourself – not the biggest thing, just one thing – and ask God for it out loud, by name, on purpose, before you do anything else about it.
Then write down the date somewhere. We are going to be at this for thirteen parts . . . and it helps to have a mark to look back at.
NEXT — Part Two: How Prayer Works, the Appointed Means. If God already knows what we need, and He has already made up His mind what He is going to do, then what is my praying actually doing? The plainest answer in the Bible comes out of God's own mouth in Ezekiel 36:37 . . . and it is not the answer most people expect.
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