12 What James Really Teaches About Prayer, Spiritual Weakness, and Healing (James 5:12-20)

Speaker 1: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. This is the twelfth lesson in a series on the book of James. Join Krisan in looking at James 5, verses 13 through 20. Krisan Marotta: Well, it's hard to believe we are at the end of James today. Due to time constraints, I gave you most of my big wrap-up last week of the big themes and principles, so I'm not going to repeat that here. If you missed it, you can listen to last week's talk. And before we get to the passage itself, I want to make one more application on what we learned on James. And some of you may be old enough to remember the Lordship Salvation Debate that rocked the church a few years back. You may have heard of it, but maybe not under that name. But both sides in that debate appealed to the book of James to make their case. And the debate centered around the question, is there such a thing as a carnal Christian? So a carnal Christian is someone who is in fact a believer, but is living a sinful lifestyle. So a lifestyle that would be very acceptable to the secular culture. And one side of the debate claimed that wasn't possible, and the other side of the debate claimed, oh yes, it is, because there are two types of Christians. There are spirit-filled Christians and there are carnal Christians. And that spirit-filled Christians are those who have the Holy Spirit and they bring forth obedience, and then there are others who are truly converted but never show fruit. Now I'm not an expert on the debate, but I do think James settles it, and I think he settles it that there is no such thing as a carnal Christian. So let me just, this may be an oversimplification of the debate, but I want to give you the flavor of it. The people that argued use this image of a circle with a chair in it, and the circle is your life, and the chair is who's on the throne of your life. And they said the person sitting in that chair controls your life. So for a carnal Christian, I'm still sitting in that chair, so I'm on the throne of my life. But spirit-filled Christians are mature enough to know that Christ is not only their savior, he is also their Lord, which is why it was called the Lordship Savior debate. And so they have Christ sitting on the throne of their life. Now, all of us are going to struggle with who's in charge of our life at any given moment, and I think that's a helpful distinction to make from a pastoral or a counseling perspective, but I wouldn't build just a theory of justification on it. I would argue that James has been saying throughout that if you have faith, there will be a change. And if you don't see the change, you better wake up and draw near to God. So I think he would say that if you yourself is completely dominating your life and there is no change and there is no fruit, you're not a carnal Christian, you're not a Christian, and there's no such thing. That conversion requires change. Part of that change is the Holy Spirit taking up residence in your soul. And at whatever your level of maturity or understanding, you're still going to have that and you will begin to grow. So Jesus is not only your Savior, He is your Lord. Now, obviously, that doesn't mean that you're going to live a life of perfect obedience and cheerful obedience at every given moment. We're all going to still struggle. The reformers dealt with the same question and they answered it with the phrase, we are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. And that was, it was in Latin, but that's what it their kind of catchphrase for this same debate in their time was, we are justified by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. And that is the big issue of James. A faith that is devoid of works is not real faith. So that would be a faith that is alone, one that shows no fruit. Saving faith, if it is true, will inevitably bear fruit, and it will necessarily, it will happen. Luther pinned the phrase, I'm not going to say it in Latin. I was going to try, but I just changed my mind. But the phrase was, we are at the same time just and sinner. So at the same time we are just, we are forgiven, we are righteous in that sense, we are right before God, and we are also still sinful. So the seeds of sanctification are sown immediately at conversion and the process begins. And if you have saving faith, that change has begun and it will show fruit. So real faith inevitably produces works, and those works necessarily inevitably come from faith, but they contribute zero to our justification. So they the works that we do contribute zero merit to our justification. They are not the grounds by which we are justified, they are the result. And that's the big theme of the book of James. So we're going to try to put it all together and wrap it up today and deal with probably the hardest passage in the book. So as Betty Davis said, buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride. So remember, chapter one, James said, consider it joy when we encounter trials, because trials test our faith, and that process of testing brings us to maturity, makes us the kind of people we should be, and gives us real tangible evidence that we are, in fact, believers and we have faith. And then in chapter two, he argued that if we have saving faith, we will not be just hearers of the gospel, we will be doers. It will change the way we think, the way we live, the way what we value, who we are. In chapter three, he began focusing on the strife in the community, contrasting the wisdom from above with earthly wisdom, saying that these quarrels and strife and discord that he sees in the churches he's writing to are the result of these selfish, ambitious, and jealous attitudes, and that wisdom from above is what's lacking. And that can be summed up as loving the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and loving your neighbor as yourself. So this growing single-minded pursuit of the gospel and a humble, merciful attitude toward others. And chapter 4, I think he begins the conclusion of the book where he calls to repentance. That's I think the rubber meets the road. He's saying, okay, if you've been listening to this, if you've been reading this and you recognize yourself, here's what you need to do. You need to repent. You need to draw near to God, submit yourself to him, flee from the devil. And then he wraps up his two big themes of the book, speech and wealth, with how those changes are come about. So we'll stop talking down to others because we'll see this fruit of humility, of knowing that I am in the same boat as my neighbor, and we will stop hanging so tightly to money. And we looked last week at the passage where he talked about three pieces of evidence that you are trusting in your wealth, hoarding, fraud, and self-indulgence. And that's the immediate context to our verses today. He gives his wrap-up on wealth, and then he calls for them to go to the distance, to wait patiently for through the trials, face them with this settled conviction that there is a purpose, they're not just random, it's a great, wonderful purpose of God, and we should just wait patiently as long as it takes. And that brings us to James 5 12. Let's look at twelve through fifteen. But above all, my brothers, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation. Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 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 one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Now at first glance, this passage seems kind of clear and straightforward. Um you only need to understand the details, but if I'm sure you, as your discussions you found that's not the case. And the key to the passage, the way you're going to understand sick in verse 14 is going to change how you understand everything else. So everyone that interprets it, that's the word and the idea on which the passage turns. So the Greek word you probably found in your word study literally means weak. It's used 37 times in the New Testament. It means weakness, and its field of meaning includes both physical illness and spiritual illness. So word study alone is not going to solve this issue. Just to give you, I'm not going to look at all of them, because you I know you did your homework, but I'm going to give you three places where it clearly means physically ill, either by the phrases that are added to it or the context. So this is Luke 4.40. While the sun was setting, all those who had any who had who were sick with various diseases were brought to him, and laying his hands on each one of them, he was healing them. So that sick with various diseases is our word. You can see it's modified by with various diseases. He's telling us clearly this is physical illness. John 5 3. And these laid a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, and withered. Again, got a context of physical illness. And then John 11, 3, speaking of Lazarus. So the sisters sent word to him saying, Lord, behold, the one whom you love is sick. Now we know Lazarus was physically ill. But here are three places where it clearly means weak in faith. Romans 4.19. Without becoming weak in faith, he modified weak in faith, that's our word. He contemplated his own body, now as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old, in the deadness of Sarah's womb. So he's talking about Abraham. Romans 14, 1. Now accept the one who is weak in faith, but not for the purpose of passing judgment on his opinions. Again, that's our word. And then 2 Corinthians 13, 3, since you are seeking proof of the Christ who speaks in me and who is not weak toward you, but mighty in you. So again, here it's weak is contrasted with mighty, and it's talking about spiritually weak. So, word study alone is not going to solve our issue. To add to the confusion, the word sick in verse 15 is a different word, not the same one. And it also means both physically ill and spiritually ill. But it only occurs three times in the New Testament. Hebrews 12 3, for consider him who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself, so that you shall not grow weary and lose heart. That grow weary is our word. Revelations 2, 3, and you have perseverance and have endured for my name's sake, and have not grown weary. Again, grown weary is our word. And the third usage is James. So both the other instances in the New Testament mean a failure to endure. So weakness in the sense of growing weary. And of course, one way to do that is to be physically ill. So we have neither word must necessarily mean sick, nor must it necessarily mean spiritually sick. Alright, so how do we decide this issue? And that's the big question of James 5. Are we praying for one who's physically ill or are we praying for one who is spiritually weak and weary? Well, I'll just tell you up front, I land on the spiritually weak and weary side. And I'm going to try to make my case for it, but I'm also going to try to give you a flavor of the other side. So James V by itself, I think, is apart from the larger context, is truly ambiguous. And it's perfectly reasonable to think that this is referring to sickness if you, especially if you look in the passage in isolation, or if you think James is a loosely organized collection of Proverbs. I think given the larger context, it makes much more sense to see him talking as spiritually weak. And ultimately, what we choose rests on our understanding of context. In my reading, and it I'm not an expert, but the more a commentator or a scholar saw James as a random collection of sayings, the more likely he was to say this means physically ill. The more the commentator or scholar saw a theme or an organization to the book of James, the more he cited with spiritually ill. And that makes sense because context is what's going to determine. If you can't decide it from the word and the grammar alone, you go to context, context rules, and how you understand the context is the big difference. Now I've argued through the course that there is a theme running through James, and that theme leads me to the conclusion that he's talking about weakened faith. But it's the minority view. I'll just have to tell you up front, at least in my reading, that is the minority view. Okay, so let me just give you a flavor of the debate. And I this is oversimplified, I'm probably not doing it justice, but just to give you an idea. So some the people that take it as physically ill, one of the pieces of evidence that's frequently cited is Mark 6. And this is Mark 6, 12, and 13, and they argue that when you call for the elders to anoint with oil, as we have in James, that that must be talking about physical illness. And they cite Mark 6 as an example. This is when Jesus is sending out the twelve in pairs, and it says Mark 6, 12, and 13, they went out and preached that men should repent, and they were casting out demons and were anointing with oil many sick people and healing them. Now, that fails to persuade me because as I understand it, anointing with oil was used for a number of reasons. There are cases where the person is physically ill, but there are places where it's just a symbol of the presence of God or His blessing or the Holy Spirit. So you see that in the anointing of kings and the anointing of prophets and so on. They weren't physically ill, but they were being anointed. They were being called, and that was a symbol of calling on the blessing of God. So I would say at best that evidence is ambiguous. It could be physical ill, but it doesn't have to be. Another piece of evidence that's frequently cited is the word healed in verse 16, where he says, Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. That word healed is very, very commonly used of physical illness. And that is true. That word is very, very commonly used of physical illness. However, I don't think that confers 16 is talking about confessing your sins, and my worthless opinion is that the Bible does not link physical illness to sin as a one-to-one causation. Now, some scholars would disagree with that, but I don't think that's true. I don't think the Bible says if you have a physical disease, it is because you committed some sin. But there are people that argue that. I think it's just as likely that verse 16 is talking about when someone's wrestling with a spiritual problem, confess your sins, pray for them, and they will be healed of that spiritual problem. And in fact, 1 Peter 2.24 uses this word healed in a very different context. You'll recognize it. 1 Peter 2.24, and he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness, for by his wounds you were healed. So by his wounds you were healed as our word. I don't think Peter's saying that we were physically healed because Jesus died on the cross. He's saying we were spiritually healed because of that. Now, the debate goes on and on, and I have oversimplified it. And there's a lot of people that would take who take this as physical illness who would say, you haven't given it a fair shot, and that is probably true. It's hard for me to give it a fair shot because it doesn't persuade me, and for time's sake, I don't really want to get into all of it. So I'm just going to make my case. Why would I think this is spiritual, a spiritual problem? Well, as I've already alluded to, the far context of the letter convinces me. From beginning to end, James has been talking about trials, suffering under trials, bearing up under trials. What kind of faith do you have? Are you living out the faith you claim to be have? You claim to believe. So these his readers are suffering at the hands of the rich, they're struggling to live, and he's calling them to persevere in the faith, put their hope in the promises, and act accordingly. So he said things like, don't stab each other in the back, don't grovel to the rich, don't speak against your neighbor. All of those are places where you can live differently based on what you believe. And he's been talking about how these trials confront us with the choice of what does my faith mean to me? How am I going to act and respond? Does the gospel make a difference in what I value, in how I treat others, how I speak about them, how I treat the rich? And in this situation, he's given us both an encouragement and a warning. So the warning is he's very troubled by their actions. He sees them compromising to the extent that he's worried they have no faith at all, and he's saying, having faith is not the same thing, saying you have faith is not the same thing as actually having faith. So remember chapter two, he talked about you can't just be a hearer, you have to be a doer. The encouragement he's been giving them is remember where true riches lie. Remember the promise. This is a journey. Draw near to God. If you recognize yourself in this situation, all you have to do is ask and you will receive faith. And as he's been nearing the end of the letter, he started making his strongest appeal to persevere in the faith. So remember last week's passage. He's reminded them the prize is worth it. Go the distance, like the farmer, wait through those seasons of trials. Live your life with this confident, eager expectation that the Lord is coming back, the trial's going to end, he is compassionate and merciful, and he's going to make all things right. So are you suffering hardship? Are you facing persecution? Are you in spiritual despair? What should you do? Turn to God in prayer. I think that's basically what he's saying. So the context to me, both the far and the near, says this is someone who's in a spiritual battle. From the first to the last, I think he's been urging his readers to remain steadfast in their faith, no matter what trials you can face, no matter what the cost. And the issue he's been concerned with is who is doing that? Who is who is faith making a difference? So it seems strange to me that as he concludes, he'd say, Oh, and by the way, if you're physically ill, here's what you should do. Doesn't really fit. And we've seen evidence in the letter that his readers are responding wrongly. They've been quarreling, they've been fighting, they've been groveling to the rich, they've been seeking the wrong kinds of things, and he's just called on them to repent. To look at the way they're living, realize that's not compatible with what they say they believe. And along with that strong language to repent, he's given them this encouragement that God will forgive. Ask and you will receive. If you've been living foolishly, you can approach God without fear. If you lack wisdom, you can ask. He will give generously. God will welcome you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. So in the context, if that is the context, a statement about if you become physically ill just doesn't seem to fit. It is possible, but a statement about what to do if you are spiritually weak and spiritually struggling fits the flow of thought. And I think it's the main theme of the letter. Especially since in the immediate preceding verses, he's been exhorting them to persevere in the faith, to wait patiently in the hope of the gospel. Live like the farmer waiting for the harvest. Endure, remain steadfast, don't give up the fight because the Lord is coming. Okay, so let's look at the details. Look at 12 and 13. But above all, my brethren, do not swear either by heaven or by earth, or with any other oath, but your um but your yes is to be yes and your no no, so that you may not fall under judgment. Is anyone among you suffering, then he must pray. Is anyone cheerful? He's to sing praises. So again, remember, I think this is part of his call to repentance, to wait patiently for the Lord. And it I see verse 12 as essentially an exhortation to live what you claim to believe. If you say you have faith, live like it. If you let your yes be yes, yet your no be no. If you claim to be a believer, then you ought to see the fruit of that. So you say you have faith, live like it. You say you want the things of God, pursue it. In other words, live what you say you believe. And then he says, Are you suffering? Pray, as opposed to despair. Are you cheerful? Praise God. Don't get arrogant. Are you weak in faith? Call stronger believers to come and pray for you. I think that's the context. So, what should you do if you're weak in faith? If you've been reading this letter and you've said, Whoops, I see myself in that, ask the stronger believers to come and pray for you. Admit your struggle, and God will bless you. He will get you through. So is anyone 14. 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 one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. I just think he's saying, essentially, if you've been weak and weary, and this is not what you want, trust God, believe the promises of the gospel. So if you're in that position where you're saying, I want to be saved, but I am struggling, I believe, help my unbelief, God will answer that prayer. That is a guaranteed answer. God will forgive, He will bring strength, He will bring maturity, He will raise you up. And that I think makes a lot of sense. Continuing into sixteen, therefore, confess your sins to one another, pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. So God will forgive the one who is struggling spiritually. Those of you who are weak and weary, to whatever degree, pray for each other, encourage each other. There's forgiveness to be found. Confess your sins. Confess your struggle. This is not the time to be British and have that stiff upper lip and say, I've got it all together. Get help from the body. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain for three years and six months it did not rain. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit. That's 17 and 18. So why should I have such confidence that my prayer will be answered? Because look who's answering our prayer. So I don't see 16 through 18 as raising the question of how powerful is your prayer or how articulate is your prayer, because the answer doesn't depend on how nicely you ask or whether you ask in just the right way. The answer depends on the one who is answering. God is answering and he is generous. So Elijah was a man just like us. He was a sinner. He needed grace. And yet he prayed and this humanly impossible thing happened. It didn't rain. And then he prayed and it rained again. And the point is not what a great spiritual giant Elijah was. The point is the power of God to answer his prayer. So the point is not the power of Elijah's prayer. The point is the power of God who answers prayer. Now, Elijah just didn't decide on his own willy-nilly that it shouldn't rain. He was a prophet. He was called by God to give a message. God came to him and said, I'm not going to make it rain. And I Elijah had a choice. Do I believe the promises of God or not? And he believed and he acted on them. And then God came and said, Okay, I'm going to make it rain again. And Elijah had another choice. Do I believe him or not? And he believed him. So it wasn't wishful thinking. I think he knew the time was up for the drought because God told him the time was up. He knew that God had given him this role in speaking this word of truth. So he was a man just like us who trusted in the promises of God. And when God said, I'm going to do something that breaks the laws of nature, that's humanly impossible, Elijah said, Amen. I'm going to announce that word. I'm going to pray. So one way we know Elijah trusted in the promises of God is that he acted as if he did. He prayed for God's will to happen and trusted the word God gave him. And I think James is giving him that encouragement because that's the that he's encouraging us that the God we are praying to is incredibly powerful. So if you're looking at your life and you're looking at the trial before you, and you say, getting through that trial, that's as impossible as praying for no rain. That's just humanly speaking, I can't get through. There's nothing there. Getting through this trial is as impossible as asking for the rain to stop. What James is saying is God has spoken to you just like Elijah. He's promised He's going to get you through. He's promised there's a purpose for this trial. He's promised that this journey is taking you to wisdom and maturity, and that there's forgiveness and mercy for those who ask and perseverance for those who ask. So God has promised to get you through, and He is powerful to bring it about. So I don't think this is a blank check promise. It's not, I can get whatever I want from God if I ask in faith. He's reminding us that God gives normal, foolish, weak, immature folks like us faith. So sinners like us, just regular old folks, Elijah was a man just like us. He's promised to take foolish sinners like us and make us the people he intends for us to be, to give us faith, to give us wisdom, to give us maturity. So just like he promised to stop the rain for Elijah, he has promised that these trials have a point. He's promised that the prayer for faith will be answered. The confidence is the encouragement, is who you're praying to. Normal, ordinary sinners like us. We can pray and God will forgive and he will answer. And that I think is a powerful encouragement. 19 and 20. My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. So again, this is clearly dealing with spiritual issues, wandering from the truth. And he's basically saying, stronger believers, go to someone who's going the wrong way and encourage them to come back. Try to find out what's going on. God may give you the privilege of being the one who helps turn them around. I was speaking with a prodigal the other day, and he said something that broke my heart. He started wandering away from the truth when he was in high school. And at the time he'd grown up in a church, there were about 1,800 people in the church, and he said, one of the things that sealed the deal when he started wandering away was that no one came after him other than his parents. Not his youth leader, not his small group leader, not any of the high school leaders, not any man in the church, not the pastor, no one. No one called him and said, Where are you? What's going on? Why have you why aren't you showing up? Except his parents, and in his eyes they didn't count. And when that happened, he said, and I quote, I realize church people are all hypocrites. Now that breaks your heart, doesn't it? So I think this is an encouragement. Leave the 99, go after the one. This is important. When you see someone wandering away, give them a call and say, What's up? Where are you? What is happening? Yes, ultimately God's going to be the one to bring them back. But he chooses to work through us. He chooses to let our prayers, our feeble actions, our humble attempts and words of restoration be the difference. So just like Eliza was chosen to announce that the rain would stop and then start, so stronger believers, you may be the ones chosen to help those who are weak in faith. Now, remember all the things he said about speech. When we go, our job is not to ridicule them, to judge, to gossip, to complain, to mock, but we go as a humble sinner who has found grace, trying to call someone back who also needs grace, and believing that God is capable of bringing that about. Alright. I know that was a quick run through the passage, but I wanted to leave some time for some conclusions. So basically, context is what's going to decide this issue. How much you see as a theme running through James tends to be how where you land on this passage. And let me just make some observations about it. First, I think this passage teaches how important Bible study is. Now I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but this passage is so easy to misinterpret, and a lot of people do with the best of intentions and purest of motives. It's a good reminder that I need to study, that I need to use good skills, good methodology. You don't just open your Bible and point to the verse of the day and read it out of context and think it's, you know, whatever happens to strike my mind. The goal is to figure out what did the author mean to communicate in the context. So it's crucially important that we get that right because this is the word of God. And these two interpretations are strikingly different. We're gonna live our lives differently if we take this as physically ill versus we take this as spiritually ill. It matters. So we've got to get it right, and we've got to learn to handle the word of truth accurately. And so it's important to do that work, to study, to figure out the options. It often seems academic and dry, but it pays big dividends. Alright, so that's you're all probably in agreement with that. But second, let's be clear what James is not saying. What he is not saying that every prayer I ever pray, I will get the answer I expect, in the timing I expect, in the way I want it to be. This is not a blank check. Sorry. He is saying that prayer works, that I can pray with great confidence that God will do the things he has promised to do. And we know he has promised to give faith to those who ask. He has promised to save sinners based on the blood of Christ. He's promised to give a strong, mature faith to those who are weak and weary and struggling. He has promised to give wisdom to fools like us who humble themselves before him based on the blood of Jesus. Now, personally, I don't think he has promised to heal every physical illness in this lifetime. Unless I have misunderstood chapter 5, which is of course possible. But I'm sure many of you know stories of people who went through this process and then the person died. And it's a what do you do with that? Now, brilliant minds have found all kinds of ways out of that dilemma, and you can read about them if you go researching, but it strikes me that the simplest, most elegant solution that fits the clues of the passage is that James is not claiming God will heal all physical illness in this lifetime. Throughout the letter, he has claimed that God gives faith to those who ask, that he gives spiritual strength to those who are spiritually weary. And I can pray for those things with great confidence because God always keeps his promises. Now, having said that, is it appropriate to pray for someone who's physically ill? Absolutely. I don't want you to misunderstand me and think that you shouldn't pray in those situations. We should pray in every situation, including physical illness. What I found is that prayer may not remove the affliction, but it really changes my attitude toward the affliction. And that's worth it for that alone. So prayer may not remove the affliction, but it changes my attitude toward it. So we can pray for people who are spiritually ill and physically ill because we care for them and because we're encouraged to cast all our anxiety on God, because we trust that He's the author and the creator of the universe, he numbers our days and the hairs on our head, that he has a plan, that he has a purpose, and his purpose is best. Now he may in fact heal a particular person of a physical illness, but I don't think he's promised that as a guarantee. So understanding that, I think, gives us confidence in our prayers. When I pray for someone who's physically ill, I can have utter confidence that God is good and that he knows better than me, and that what he's doing may not be what I expect or what I want at this moment. When I pray that God will save me or strengthen a friend who is spiritually struggling, I can have confidence that God will answer. Now he may not answer how I expect, but he will answer. So if I pray for someone who's sick and they pass away, it's not a threat to faith. It doesn't mean we failed. It just means God had a different plan. He had a different purpose. But I can continue to have confidence that he is in control and will bring that purpose about. And finally, and I hope this is the lesson, part of at least the big lesson you take away from James, is that God is committed to your best. You can expect him to raise you up spiritually. You can expect him to give you faith, encouraging wisdom. And the more you have a stable, solid understanding of where your hope lies, the better. The more accurately I see and understand who God is and what he's promised, and I set my eyes on that, and I lean into it, and I put my weight on it day by day and moment by moment, the easier it is to get through whatever's in my path. And that's what I really need. The assurance that I can turn to him and expect him to bring wisdom and maturity is a wonderful promise. I think that's the anchor that gets us through the storms. Because part of the promise is one day the trial's gonna end. One day our faith will be there, it will be strong, it will be mature, like an oak tree in full glory, we will have arrived and be there. And that on that day the purpose for the trial will be revealed. And like Job, as we looked at last week, we're gonna say, it was too wonderful for me to understand. I didn't get it then, but I see now. So the encouragement from James is stand firm, be strong, remain steadfast to the end. Because the day is coming, and the day is coming when God's gonna say to his son, it's time, go and bring my children home. Amen. Let's pray. Father, thank you that you are a God who loves us when we are unlovable, that you're committed to our best when we're foolish and rebellious. We just pray that you would take all the words of James, the study, the time we've spent in all our homework and small groups and discussion, and that you would write it on our hearts. That it wouldn't be words on a page or knowledge that we acquire, but it would be life-changing truth that you sow into our souls to make us more the people you intend us to be. In Jesus' name. Amen. Speaker 1: We're glad you've been with us at Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. We hope you've been encouraged and challenged to depend on the Lord. Please let us know if you have questions about this study. We are on the internet at wednesdayintheword.com, where you will find this and other Bible studies.