🌿WEB · James 5:15
What does James 5:15 mean?
"and the prayer of faith will heal him who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven."
— James 5:15 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
But above all things, my brothers, don’t swear— not by heaven, or by the earth, or by any other oath; but let your “yes” be “yes”, and your “no”, “no”; so that you don’t fall into hypocrisy.
Is any among you suffering? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praises.
Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the assembly, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord,
and the prayer of faith will heal him who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
Confess your offenses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The insistent prayer of a righteous person is powerfully effective.
Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it didn’t rain on the earth for three years and six months.
He prayed again, and the sky gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.
Explanation
James 5:15 comes in the middle of a passage where James instructs believers who are sick to call for the elders of the church, who are to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. This particular verse states the promised outcome of that act of faith-filled prayer: the sick person will be healed and raised up by the Lord, and if sin is involved, forgiveness will follow as well. In plain language, James is saying that when the leaders of a congregation pray in genuine faith on behalf of someone who is ill, God responds by restoring that person's health, and he also deals with any sin that may be tied up in the situation.
The letter of James was written by James, likely the brother of Jesus and a leader of the Jerusalem church, to Jewish Christians scattered outside Palestine. It is a intensely practical letter, concerned with how genuine faith expresses itself in real conduct — controlling the tongue, caring for the poor, resisting favoritism, and here, caring for the sick within the community. The instruction to call the elders reflects the early church's understanding that physical suffering was not to be handled in isolation; it was a communal and spiritual matter, addressed through the leadership and prayer life of the congregation rather than through private superstition or abandonment.
Theologically, the verse highlights several important truths. First, healing here is tied not to the power of the one praying, but to "the prayer of faith" and to the Lord who raises up the sick — God is the actor, and the elders are merely the means through which the community's faith is expressed. Second, the verse links physical and spiritual resto
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