2024-10-27 Covenant CRC - sermon only Joel Kok

 ​ Let's join in this prayer.

Gracious God, it's only in your light that we can see light, and we praise you as the Savior who is light, and we thank you that you share your light with us through the illumination of your Holy Spirit.

And Lord Jesus, we think of how your words always have so much mystery to them and yet always have, from your side, a saving purpose. And so we trust you to give us your spirit as we turn to your word and help us receive the salvation, the life, every gift and grace you want for us to receive through your word this morning.

We pray all this, Lord Jesus, and pray for your Holy Spirit in your name. Amen.

So our reading this morning is from the epistle of James, chapter 5. We'll read the final verses in this epistle because this is our final sermon from James in this series we've been doing for seven weeks now. James 5, beginning at verse 13 and reading through verse 20, page 1885 if you're still looking for it.

Hear God's word.

James asks, and the Lord Jesus asked through James, is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise. Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.

The Lord will raise him up. If he is sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.

Again, he prayed and the heavens gave rain and the Earth produced its crop. My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Well, friends, as we just heard in our worship today, our Lord is saving us from death, which means he's saving us into an everlasting resurrection life. Our Lord is also saving us from a multitude of sins. The book of Revelation reveals a multitude beyond numbering into a multitude of saints. We're going to be able to celebrate our salvation with a multitude of saints in a way that we better than we can ask. Or imagine all these good things are happening in our worship For today, our Lord is working salvation in those ways because we have such a Savior and to experience our Savior, to walk further into his salvation, we can notice that James really emphasizes the practice of prayer in our reading for this morning.

And James even specifies that sometimes, which is a very interesting and revealing teaching, our prayers can include prayer. Anointing with oil as a way to help us pray in the name of the Lord. This is what James says in verse 14. Is any one of you sick? Well, then call the elders of the church to pray over you and anoint you with oil because that anointing helps them reflect and pray the name, the character of the Lord.

So we are going to think about anointing this morning in various ways, and let's acknowledge right at the beginning here that when it comes to anointing with oil, That's a practice that is quite unfamiliar to many of us. And it's also, as you I'm sure would agree, it's not required in terms of being prayed for.

You're not required to get anointed with oil if you need the healing power of God. But I think if we pay some attention to that word anointing, And connect it to some of the other words in the whole story of God. We will, whether we ever decide to get anointed with oil or not, we will all be able to experience further the anointing with the Holy Spirit.

That Jesus does share with all of us as we follow him as Christians. And I think this anointing with oil is going to help us experience and explore the anointing with the Holy Spirit in fascinating ways that help us experience more of salvation. And to get all this good news coming to us, anointing with oil, anointing with the Holy Spirit, this healing salvation, to get all that, we can start with the word sick.

As in, again, James 5, verse 14, is any one of you sick? We'll then call the elders, get anointed with oil. And the good news for us here, and again, it might not sound like good news right at the beginning, but there's various meanings of the Greek word behind that word, sick, there. And one of the main alternative additional is meanings is the word weak.

So again, does that sound like good news? Is anyone here weak? Well, if we listen to Jesus speaking through that word, weak, as well as through anointed and other words in the whole story, we are going to receive anointing and salvation in a way in which we're going to be grateful. And so let's just start to think, well, in what ways am I weak?

Are we all weak? Do we all need anointing? And to explore that further, we will spend some time with that word, weak. And we can note here, I was able to look this up because I studied Greek a long time ago. I don't remember every word, obviously. But there is a Greek word behind this, which is the word, asthenia.

And that word for weak or sick or sick, That Asthenia word for weak that we're going to focus on. It comes up in some very revealing ways. I'll mention just three related passages here. And the first one is that word weak, Asthenia. That comes to us from Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Because as you may remember, when Jesus goes to the Garden of Gethsemane, He asks some disciples to pray for Him.

And Jesus asked for these prayers in a quite Urgent way because Jesus in the garden on his way to the cross. He says to them. I feel sorrowful even to the point of death so, please Pray for me Jesus says and then Jesus goes off by himself a little while to begin his prayers father If you can spare me from this, please spare me, but your will, not my will, your will, be done.

Jesus prays that the first time of three times, intense times that he's going to pray. And when he comes back from offering that personal prayer, what are his disciples doing? Are they praying urgently for him? Well, they've fallen asleep. And that's when Jesus calls on that word, weak. Jesus says, could you not watch over me for even one hour?

And then Jesus explains, well, your spirit can be strong. In other words, you can want to pray. You can want to come to a worship service. You can want all kinds of good things. Your spirit can be strong, but your flesh is weak, Jesus says to Peter, James, and John. And Jesus says that to all disciples, because when Jesus says your flesh is weak, he's not saying your body is weak.

He's not saying if you want to pray more, lift more weights, or something like that. What he's saying is your flesh, in the scriptures, it's another one of these biblical words with all kinds of meanings, when you're living by the flesh, that means you're living apart from the Spirit of God. You're trying to make it on your own.

And so Jesus is saying to those disciples, He's saying to us, if you're just gonna live on your flesh, on your own, your flesh is weak. You're going to be weak. And that is something that Paul explores. The Apostle Paul explores at great length in Romans 7, which leads to Romans 8. So if you want to know what it's like to try to live by the flesh, just look at Paul struggling with his own sins and how we're just helpless against the power of sin in us when we just try to live by the flesh.

We so need the Holy Spirit, as he goes on to claim in Romans chapter 8. So, that is one appearance of this word, weak. It's something that Jesus speaks to us in connection to our flesh, life on our own. He says that in the Garden of Gethsemane. And when Jesus says that we are weak, how do you think Jesus says that?

What do you think Jesus wants us to hear? When he says you are weak. Does he want us to feel ashamed and kind of walk away? Well, here's the thing about Jesus. When he speaks these unusual words, he speaks them with such amazing love. And we see that love, we see that grace in a couple more passages from Paul.

So when Jesus says to Peter, James, and John, when Peter says to all of us, your flesh is weak, you know how Jesus feels about weak people? And You know how Jesus feels about you and your weakness? He loves you so much that he's willing to die for you. That's what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 5, verse 6, where again he calls in that word asthenia, weak.

Paul says, when we were still weak, Christ died for us. Because He loves even the ungodly, and His Father loves us so much that He gives us His Son. Even when we are sinners and His enemies, that's how weak we are. But Christ, God in Christ, loves us so much that He dies for us in order to give us the life that comes from His rising from the dead.

So, we are all weak, but Christ, God in Christ, loves us. even when we are weak. And then just to call on one more teaching from Paul, Christ not only loves us when we are weak, our Lord also shows us a grace when we are weak, so that we can wind up celebrating, in a way, our weakness, because it opens us to the paradoxical but perfect power of God.

And the Apostle Paul teaches us that in 2 Corinthians 12. That's where we see Christ not only loving us, but Christ gracing us in a transforming way with respect to our weakness. Because in 2 Corinthians 12, Paul is talking to a church that has all kinds of, uh, divisions in it, a church that has various problems, including some other teachers who have been ripping Paul in various ways.

And so Paul goes on to say, Well, I tell you what. So, if I wanted to fight those other teachers, if I wanted to fight anyone in terms of some worldly abilities, in terms of some real accomplishments, I could probably take on most people. I would have strength in that way. But I'm not going to be crazy enough to focus on that kind of worldly strength, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12.

In effect, he says, you know what I'm going to do instead? I'm going to talk about how I'm weak, asthenia. I'm going to talk about how I have this weakness. In fact, I am going to boast in my weakness. I could brag about my accomplishments, but I'm going to brag, boast about my weakness. Because again, when we realize that weakness and like Paul, we get opened to the power of God, which comes to us in our weakness.

And there Paul explains a little bit further. He says, I have this thorn in my flesh and nobody knows exactly what it is. Paul has some kind of a condition. That he wished he didn't have, that like Jesus he prayed against it three times, but he was asked to, to bear with that pain. He has this thorn in his flesh that in some ways can make him weak, but in other ways it opens him to pray all the more urgently.

for the grace that he needs with this paradoxical power. So he winds up hearing Jesus say, My grace is sufficient for you. My power, Jesus says, is made perfect in your weakness. And Paul experiences that and expresses that in a way in which he can go to sinners needing a savior. You can go to people from all backgrounds.

And he can say, when I'm weak, when I know I can't do it on my own, then I'm strong because then spirit can come in and through me in a way that can lead you into that kind of salvation that our Lord wants for us. And so those are these wonderful gospel truths. Good news, we can hear through this word, Athenia, weak.

That we're all weak. Jesus loves us enough to die for us when we're weak. So that he can grace us with new life through his Holy Spirit. And to give just, um, a little bit of an angle on that that I hope can help all of you connect your weakness to the love and the grace of Christ that gives you the strength of God in you.

I'll pass on a somewhat, um, modest but I think related testimony that has to do with a weakness that I experienced. because it was a weakness in my life that I wound up sharing with some friends who in effect became my elders in a way that led me into a renewed life with Christ. And I've shared this story with some of you.

It happened about 20 years ago. I had a period about 20 years ago when I was serving what was already a small church in suburban Philadelphia. And yet, you know, Trish and I were grateful to be there. There were wonderful things about it. But this small church. started to get a lot smaller because from 2004 to the end of 2006 there was about a 30 month period where we lost 30 percent of our members and I started to be really afraid of sheer failure.

I thought it was just going to be so humiliating that there would be a article in the banner or something. The banner saying, we sort of recommend this pastor Joel, even though our church closed, maybe he could come and be a failure for you too. I mean, I was just having all kinds of fear about this and, and pain in it.

And what that did, when I realized how weak I was, it wound up in a way I didn't plan, opening me to an anointing with the Holy Spirit. And so again, it's an anointing that's not exactly the anointing with oil that James talks about, but does connect us to the anointing of the Holy Spirit with that oil.

for. And what happened here is during that low time, that struggling time, we had a little bit of vacation time. And, um, I wound up being able to meet with two friends who had been my friends way back in our student days and our seminary days. And now they were fellow pastors and we just met over lunch and we were talking about this and that.

And then they said, well, how are things going? How's your life? How's your church? And as I started to describe what was going on in my church and those losses, it wound up again. I didn't expect this. I didn't want it to happen, but some weeping started to come in with my words and also some of the bitterness I was feeling towards some of the people who I felt had not given me a chance or not.

Things like that. I mean, I had all kinds of, um, sorrow, anxiety, anxiety. all these things were going on and I was feeling really ashamed of being weak. And then as I was confessing all those feelings, my friends were led by the Holy Spirit to take me out of that restaurant and into a church just a little bit down the street that had open doors into which we could enter.

And they wound up praying with me. In a way, for me, really, in a way that opened me to the anointing of the Holy Spirit, in a way that bring me healing in my weakness. And even though they didn't anoint me with oil, they hadn't planned this, they didn't have any oil, they did lay their hands on me in their prayer for me and with me in a way that, again, that's a way, another way we, we symbolize and live out the anointing with the Holy Spirit.

We lay hands on. Council members and lay hands on various people in their callings. That's a way to experience the anointing with the Holy Spirit, that anointing with oil can stand for. And so here's, in terms of our reading from James, here's what I experienced, here's what I invite you to explore. As my friends were the church, uh, in effect, to me.

Two or three of us were gathered in Jesus name. Jesus was in our midst. They functioned, in effect, as elders. They were experiencing my sickness, my weakness, and they were knowing I needed prayer. So even though I didn't ask, I did need it, and they were giving me this prayer. They laid their hands on me, and they prayed in the name of the Lord, which means they prayed out of the character, this loving, grace, mercy of the Lord for me and my feeling of shame and failure, and that led the Lord coming to me in my weakness, you healing holiness that helped me continue in my calling and do work that my congregation did see as the kind of work that I was called to do so as an empowering new life in which the healing holiness of the anointing with the Holy Spirit gave me faith to continue hope to continue.

that my work would bear fruit, and a love that I received and could share in that church. So all these things from James were happening as these elders, so to speak, were praying for me in that way. And then just to add a couple more things from what James is describing as a way of prayer here, another thing that we did, we wound up confessing.

Because I had confessed my bitterness. My anger to them. And as I confessed these sins that I was, uh, expressing, they wound up confessing back to me. That's what James says. Confess to one another. Pray for one another. And so we wound up, I wasn't the only weak one needing healing there. They were as well.

We wound up being able to enter into that kind of healing, holiest seeking that anointing together. And that is the kind of anointing that all of us have received and can share with each other more. Because here I'll just say, this is a question I asked to my 11th and 12th graders in our Sunday school class.

When's the last time you got anointed? What comes to your mind about being anointed? And there, as many of you know, you are anointed. Because what does the word anoint mean? It means Christ. The word Christ means an anointed one. The word Messiah, which is Hebrew for the Greek word Christ. All of this is about anointing.

So as a Christian, you are anointed. And when you get anointed by the Holy Spirit, you're anointed to be a prophet of God. And a royal priest. That's the kind of community, the kind of people we're anointed to be. And I think what that does is it can really encourage us to not only receive, but also to share that anointing.

And so let's just move on to one final aspect of we're recognizing our weakness, but we have such a loving God. We know we get anointed in that weakness to share in the strength, the life that God in Christ wants for us. We'll add one more word. We've got weakness, we've got anointing, and this isn't exactly a biblical word.

Well, maybe in the Bible, but we're going to work with the word connect. Because this is an emphasis that we want to have at Covenant Church over the next year and beyond. Something we're going to talk about at our council meeting tomorrow night. And that's another thing, James, in his, uh, chapter here, I could have said, well, we've got weak, we've got anoint, and then we've got church.

And for us to be the church that James, that Jesus, through James, wants us to be, we can talk again about connecting. Which is really, again, what my friends who became my elders did with me. They connected with me. And it wound up being just a great healing gift. And here, when we think about, well, the Council at Covenant is going to encourage all members, and really anyone here in whatever community you're in, we're going to encourage you to connect with other people.

And as we do that, we can call on some teachings and some truths of the gospel. And here's one way to us to think about, well, I'm already busy. I've got so many things going on. Can I really give more emphasis to connecting with other people? Well, one person who helps us here, who helps us so often is our friend CS Lewis in his amazing sermon called the weight of glory, where he talks about What the glory that God shares with us and our weakness.

He shares that glory with us. You know what that means? That means that every person you're sitting next to right now every person you can see at any time in your life in Christ They're going to have a glory That is going to amaze you in a way that makes it just a good news to want to connect with people In some fitting way, as C.

S. Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, there is no ordinary person in the world. Every person is heading towards either an immense glory forever with God or a separation from God that is terrible. And what he wants us to do is to recognize that as we connect with one each other, with one another, we can encourage each other, either in the right direction, That's James talks about, you know, help someone get away from sin, back into truth.

Put them in the right direction for this amazing glory. And what he says is, if we could see the eventual glory that's going to come with the whole new creation, if we saw what we're going to look like, In the whole glory of the new creation. If we saw that right now, we'd be tempted to worship one another because it's going to be so godlike, so amazing, such a glory.

That's what CS Lewis encourages to do is to encourage that glory right now. And I'll just add one thing from my work as a pastor. I'll say when I am able to connect with people in a way that includes getting to know them a little better, getting to know some of their struggles and troubles, getting to know how we are.

Weak together. It is also fascinating. There is nothing more fascinating than to get to know the story of a fellow person because here I would also add every person here has more troubles in suffering than you can see right now. Every person's story includes troubles and suffering that we don't learn about, but we can share.

The love and the grace of Christ with and that is a thing that makes, um, connecting with one another, not just a duty. That the council is laying on you, but as a good news calling from our Lord, as we connect to one another, we're going to begin to experience the glory. We're going to find it fascinating to find out what's really going on in other people's lives.

And that'll be just a wonderful way in which we can come out of our weakness through the anointing of the Holy Spirit into this glorious life through that connections. Making us into the church our father wants us to be the church that is the embodiment of Jesus Christ through the anointing with the Holy Spirit and to help that happen.

Let's join now in prayer.

Lord Jesus, we praise you as a priestly savior who knows what it's like for us to suffer with our troubles, who knows that we are weak, and yet you love us so much. Amen. We praise you as a priestly savior who has compassion in us in our weakness. We praise you as a royal savior who shares your glory with us in a way that inspires us to sing songs of praise, to praise you in all kinds of ways.

So for such healing holiness coming to us in our sicknesses, for such strong grace coming to us in our weaknesses, We praise and thank you for that. And we pray and thank you and pray even more for the transforming love that enables us to connect with one another in a way that expresses us coming more and more connected to you.

So Lord, as we consider different ways to connect, as different ways to confess to one another, to pray for one another, to be anointed in one way or another, we all pray. For the anointing of your Holy Spirit to help us share more and more in your fascinating life and Lord Jesus We offer this prayer in your name Amen