“The Prayer of Faith Shall Save the Sick”

This is the passage people bring to a hospital bed, and it deserves to be handled with care, because it makes promises about the sick and joins them to forgiveness in a way that has comforted and confused in equal measure.

The Instruction

Is any sick among you? 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 shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

James 5:14–15

Hē euchē tēs pisteōs sōsei ton kamnonta — the prayer of faith shall save the sick. The frame is the sickroom. A sick believer calls the elders; they pray over him and anoint him with oil in the Lord’s name; and James promises that the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.

The near sense of the saving word here is bodily. Save the sick is paired with the Lord shall raise him up — restore him, lift him from the sickbed. James is speaking, first and plainly, of physical healing in answer to believing prayer. That is the high-confidence meaning, and a study should not spiritualize it away. James really does say that the prayer of faith heals the sick.

The Forgiveness Joined to It

But James does not stop at the body. He adds a clause that layers forgiveness into the scene:

And if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

James 5:15

The if is important. James does not say all sickness is caused by sin — the conditional guards against that cruel misreading. He allows that the sick person may have sins bound up with his condition, and he promises that these too will be forgiven. Healing and forgiveness are held together in the sickroom, without one being collapsed into the other. The body is raised up; and where sin is present, it is forgiven.

This is why the passage is layered rather than simple. The saving word points primarily at bodily restoration, but James immediately joins to it the deeper restoration of forgiveness, so that the whole person — body and conscience — is in view. He then encourages mutual confession: confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The healing James envisions is not merely physical; it reaches the sins a person may be carrying, and it happens in a community that prays and confesses together.

Handling the Promise Honestly

A study here carries a pastoral duty, because the promise — the prayer of faith shall save the sick — is easily turned into a weapon against the suffering. If a sick person is not healed, was the prayer not faith-full enough? Is the sickness their unconfessed sin? James’s own words guard against both cruelties.

The if he have committed sins is conditional, not diagnostic: James does not license anyone to read a sickbed as evidence of secret sin. And the whole New Testament, including this gateway, knows of godly sufferers not delivered from their afflictions — Paul’s thorn left in place, Timothy’s frequent infirmities, believers who die in faith. James is giving the church its ordinary practice with the sick — call the elders, pray, anoint, confess, trust the Lord to raise up — not a formula that obligates God or blames the sick when healing does not come. The prayer of faith is real and God answers it; but James is describing the believing community’s posture toward sickness, not handing anyone a lever to pull or a verdict to pronounce over the ill.

Elijah, and the Prayer of an Ordinary Man

James grounds the confidence of such prayer in an example: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain … and again he prayed, and the heaven gave rain.”

The point is deliberately leveling. Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are — not a superhuman, but an ordinary man who prayed. If his prayer shut and opened the heavens, then the prayers of ordinary believers over the sick are not empty. James is not exalting a spiritual elite; he is telling a plain congregation that its prayers, offered in faith, avail much. The prayer of faith that saves the sick is the prayer of people like Elijah — which is to say, people like us.

What the Word Means Here

The near sense is bodily: save the sick means heal them, raise them from the sickbed, in answer to believing prayer. Joined to it, layered in by James’s own next clause, is forgiveness — the deeper restoration of the person where sin is present. The agent is the Lord, who raises the sick up; the means is the prayer of faith, offered by the elders and by the confessing community.

Its contribution to the gateway is the joining of healing and forgiveness in one act of prayer, and the pastoral care the joining requires. James promises that the prayer of faith heals — and he refuses to make sickness a verdict on the sick or healing a reward for sufficient faith. In the sickroom, body and conscience are both brought to the Lord: the sick are raised up, and where there is sin, it is forgiven. That is the whole-person restoration James has in view, offered through the ordinary prayers of an ordinary church.

This study is part of What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, an examination of every New Testament use of saving language in context, within Resource Cluster 3: Life in Christ. 91 of 91 passage studies are complete — see every occurrence.