On Sunday mornings we are working our way through Paul’s first letter to Timothy. We come today to the opening seven verses of 1 Timothy chapter 2, to which I invite you now to turn with me. If you don’t have your own copy of God’s Word with you, you can find it on page 991 of the church Bibles.
Now you may recall a little later in the letter Paul tells Timothy his purpose in writing to him. He says in chapter 3, “I am writing to you so that you may know how to behave in the household of God.” First Timothy is a kind of pastoral manual written to guide young Timothy in his work. And as we’ve seen so far, chapter 1 has set the stage, facing directly the challenging context of a difficult ministry in Ephesus where false teachers have begun to trouble the church. Timothy is to “charge them not to teach different doctrine,” chapter 1 verse 3. He is to “wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience,” chapter 1 verse 18. But now, after that frankly rather sobering introduction, Paul turns his attention to the major components of the kind of ministry that he calls Timothy to pursue. He begins in the first seven verses of chapter 2, our passage for today, with the subject of prayer. Paul knows that healthy churches must be praying churches. Healthy churches must be praying churches. And so he tells us six things about prayer which, if we can grasp them, will greatly help us in our own corporate ministry of prayer here at First Presbyterian Church and will certainly help us in our own private lives of prayer as Christians and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We are going to consider first of all, in verse 1, the place of prayer. Then also in verse 1, the pattern of prayer. What does it look like? Then in verses 1 and 2, the priorities of prayer. What ought we to be praying about? For whom? Then the purposes of prayer, verses 3 and 4. What is our target, our goal? Then the power of prayer, verses 5 and 6. By what means can we come boldly to God’s throne and be confident that He will hear us. And then finally, the partner of prayer, verses 6 and 7. Along with the ministry of prayer for a church to bear fruit to the glory of God, there must also be the ministry of the Word. Alright? So these are the six things – the place, the pattern, the priorities, the purposes, the power and the partner of prayer. Before we look at each, let’s bow our heads and ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. Let us all pray.
We love You, O Lord, because You have heard our prayers and our cries. We thank You that You are a prayer hearing and prayer answering God. And so we lift our hearts and voices to You now, pleading with You, that the same Spirit by whom these words before us were inspired might grant us illumination, light, understanding and grace to believe and to obey all that He would say to the church. Do it now we pray, from this portion of Your Word, for Your glory, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
First Timothy chapter 2 at the first verse. This is the Word of God:
“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.”
Amen.
Let’s consider first of all the place of prayer. Imagine with me for a moment it’s a Monday morning, and like many a discouraged young pastor, Timothy is calling up his mentor, the apostle Paul, to talk things over. “These false teachers, they have amassed quite a following in the church here, you know, Paul. They’re pretty hostile to the message. And don’t get me started on the spiritual darkness of this great pagan city, dominated as it is by the worship of Artemis. Frankly, it all feels so very impenetrable. I don’t even know where to begin.” Well notice what Paul says in reply, as it were, in verse 1. “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made.” “First of all, first things first, Timothy, I want you to get busy praying and I want you to get the church busy praying together. That’s first.” Now isn’t that remarkable? Think about it, in verse 3 of chapter 1 he told Timothy, “I sent you to Ephesus, Timothy, to charge certain people not to teach any different doctrine.” In verse 18, as we said at the beginning, of chapter 1, he charged Timothy to “wage the good warfare.” That’s Timothy’s mandate arriving in Ephesus. That’s his job description. Confront error. Teach truth. Fight the good fight. It’s all very active, isn’t it? Very forceful.
But here, it’s as though Paul sees Timothy draw his sword and take his first eager steps forward in light of the charge he has received from the apostle to march into the battle to which he has been summoned, and Paul suddenly puts out his arm and stops him in his tracks and says, “Not so fast. Before you confront anyone, before you preach the truth to anyone, before you pastor a single soul, before you can have any prospect of success in the spiritual combat to which you have been called, there is something you must do first. There is a prior claim upon you. Without this you are wasting your time in everything else. This is faithful ministry 101. This is the secret of all church health and all church growth. First of all, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made.”
When my boys were small, we used to spend hours building Legos. I’m not sure if we bought the Legos for them or mainly for me, but we spent hours together, many happy hours building Lego. And inevitably somewhere along the way I would become overconfident and stop paying attention to the instructions, you know, and put the blocks in the wrong places. And the mistake would not show up until six or ten steps further into the instruction manual when we had to assemble the pieces and they didn’t fit. Paul is saying to Timothy, “Don’t miss this first step in the instruction manual for church health and church life and church growth and church vitality. If you want real health in Ephesus, real growth, this needs to be first. Prayer ought to be first. Not an afterthought; not a marginal thing to be squeezed in where we can. Without this piece in the right place, six or ten moves later on things in Ephesus just won’t fit. They just won’t work. Here is where to begin. Here’s where to begin. Without this, all your work, all your programming, all your busyness will be built on a foundation of fleshly self confidence.”
We must learn, we must learn to be a praying church. So come and join us Tuesdays, 12 o’clock, Patterson Hall, where our church gathers to pray. Come late if you must, leave early if you have to, but come and pray. Join the men on Saturday morning in Miller Hall in the men’s prayer breakfast. Come on Sunday night at 5 o’clock in the parlor just through that door to my right to pray for our missionaries around the world. Come and pray. We must learn to be a praying church. First of all, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made.” The place of prayer. First things first. If we wish to see the blessing of heaven on our efforts in the service of Jesus Christ, we must study and strive to be a praying church.
Then secondly, notice what Paul tells us not just about the place but about the pattern, the shape, the contours of faithful prayer. Look at the different terms that he uses for prayer in verse 1. He mentions four – supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving. Now these aren’t four entirely different kinds of prayer exactly. There is significant overlap. But each word does supply its own shade, its own color to the ministry of prayer. The first term is the word “supplications.” Now that Greek word has the connotation of deep need, of personal lack, of an intolerable absence so that we come to God as beggars, empty, pleading to be filled, which is, I think, a vital reminder to us about the nature and character of prayer. Isn’t it? You don’t bring your wisdom, your eloquence, your accomplishments to God and try to strike a bargain with Him. You come to Him in need knowing only He can fill it.
A friend was recently describing to me how alcoholics begin the process of recovery. They have to come to a place where they recognize the depth of their problem in all its pernicious power. They have to face themselves without any allusions before they can really begin to get the help they so badly need. And the same is true for prayer actually. You have to come to God in a recognition of your desperate need of Him. Don’t come to Him to cut a deal. Come to plead for necessary help. Supplication.
Secondly, “prayer,” that’s the most generic word for prayer in the New Testament. I do think it’s helpful to know that while the word “supplication” can also be used for an address to other people, the word for “prayer” here is only ever used in Scripture for an address to God. So a beggar might supplicate a wealthy benefactor for help. A condemned man might supplicate the judge for clemency. But when we pray, we come before the living God alone. There is a unique reverence, a prostration of the heart, a bowing down in holy awe before the throne of heaven that ought never to characterize our most passionate, urgent requests made to any mere human being. Prayer is reserved for the King of heaven and no other. Supplication. Prayer.
The third term is “intercession.” It means to speak on someone else’s behalf. You’ve been condemned under the law. You are languishing on death row. You are awaiting execution. But someone who has the ear of the President decides to take up your case and he can go into the Oval Office and plead for a pardon. You can’t go there, but your intercessor can go there. This is the word that Paul uses to describe the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf. Romans 8:34, Christ Jesus is at the right hand of God who indeed “is interceding for us.” He goes to the throne of heaven and pleads for your pardon. And Paul says now we who live in the blessed clemency that Christ’s intercession has won for us in the pardon that His prayers have secured for us, we too now must become intercessors in turn for others. Because Jesus Christ has prayed for you, you too now have the ear of the King. You now may go into the throne room and plead the cause of the lost and the least.
And then the last term you’ll notice is “thanksgiving.” And at first sight that might seem like a bit of a surprise on this list. After all, the other three terms – supplications, prayers and intercessions – have considerable overlap in meaning don’t they? They all seek God, asking Him to act in some way. But thanksgiving goes to God not to ask for anything but to express deep, heartfelt gratitude for help already received, for prayers already answered. If I were to guess, I would say that of these four aspects of prayer, thanksgiving is by far in a way the most neglected. Statisticians tell us only about fifteen percent of Americans say they never pray. Apparently, despite our widespread ignorance of the Gospel, confusion about God, idolatrous ways and idolatrous lives, nevertheless there is a residual impulse in the vast majority of American hearts to cry out to God however He is understood in prayer. People still pray. There is an instinct to pray.
But very few, I would guess, give thanks. A thankless heart betrays the fact that when we pray we are really still seeking only to use God for the things we really want. A thankless heart. But a thankful heart reveals the fact that we love the Giver more than His gifts and we will not let His kindness to us go unthanked. A prayerless church cannot be a thankful church, but when a church lives in the wonder of answered prayer and gathers with a sense that God has heard our cries to sing praises to Him, her songs and her hymns and her psalms of praise will be qualitatively different – not the rote performance of a tired, old Sunday routine. No, now they become the joyous expression of heartfelt gratitude and thanksgiving and joy.
The place. The pattern. Now notice the priorities of prayer. Look again at verses 1 and 2. “I urge that prayers be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.” So let’s be clear. While prayer for our own personal needs isn’t being excluded here, these are nevertheless the main priorities of a praying church – “pray for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.” Now look at your prayer life. How many of your private prayers reach beyond yourself or perhaps your immediate household? Or think about our gatherings for prayer here at First Presbyterian Church. How often are our prayers dominated by the material and physical needs of our own congregation? But Paul wants Timothy to cultivate in the Ephesian church what we might call missionary prayer, evangelistic prayer, kingdom prayer.
Notice we are to pray “for all people” first of all. Paul doesn’t mean we should pray for all people without exception; that’s impossible. But he does mean that we should pray for all people without distinction. We can’t possibly pray for every single human being who has ever or will ever live everywhere. But we absolutely must not pray only for one class or type of people. Our prayers are to be as wide and prodigal and expansive as the Gospel itself. Last time we said, as we looked at the end of chapter 1, that the Gospel is for sinners. Do you remember? The only qualification anyone ever needs to be entitled to come and find mercy from the hand of Jesus Christ is that they are sinners. That means you are qualified to come to Christ. You are warranted, invited, commanded even to come and trust in Christ. And now Paul is saying the prayers of the church are to be extended as far and to as many as the Gospel offer is commanded to go. Pray for all people.
And then he singles out, notice this, “kings and all who are in high positions.” Now I don’t think Paul means there something like, “While we should pray for all sorts of people, kings and people in high positions should receive the lion’s share of our attention.” I think he means something more like, “Pray for everyone, and don’t stop short of praying even for the folks at the top of the social ladder.” He knows human nature well, doesn’t he? We see the desperate beggar on the street corner, our hearts are moved with compassion to help, and we instinctively pray for that person. We drive past the mansion of a multimillionaire and we assume that he doesn’t need our prayers. No, no, exclude no one, Paul says. The least to the greatest, from the gutter to the governor. You can’t reach the president whenever you want on the telephone. Most likely you just can’t call up the governor of our state when you have a bone to pick. Most of us don’t have privileged access to the mayor of our city. But even their closed doors and the rarified circles in which they move, listen now, they are no hindrance to the God of heaven. Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever He pleases.”
Your prayers invade the oval office. They reach into the White House situation room. They are more influential than lobbyists and political action committees. They are more powerful than Supreme Court justices on the bench and protestors in the street. Polls and pundits and politicians, multinational corporations, social influencers with millions of followers, warlords and landlords, the great and the strong and the elite and all the accumulated might of human influence cannot hold a candle to the power of a simple saint on her knees, beside her bed, pouring out her heart to God for the advancement of His kingdom and for the salvation of the lost. You may not have access to kings and presidents. You have the ear of the One to whom they all must answer. Every time you pray, you do an end around the greatest human powers. You go straight to the stop. At the command of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, regimes change, borders previously closed to the Gospel suddenly spring open, sinners pass from death into life, and nothing can stop it.
The place of prayer – it should be first. The pattern of prayer – supplication, intercession, thanksgiving. The priorities of prayer – pray for all kinds of people from the least to the greatest. And now look at verses 2 through 4 and notice the purposes of prayer. Paul has told us for whom we are to pray in the first part of verse 2. Now he tells us for what, with what end in view the church is to pray. What are we to look for most when we pray? Well you’ll notice there is an ascending scale of priorities here, each building on the last. The nearest you can see at the end of verse 2. Pray for all sorts of people, and don’t shrink from praying for the decision making just because they seem to enjoy all the privileges and hold all the power. Pray even “for kings and those in high positions,” Paul says – look at the text – so that ‘we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified.” Now don’t you find the modesty of that really quite striking? Often we hear well-meaning Christians become terribly excited about this or that Christian who has found his or her way into the corridors of power. “That’s what we really need,” we are told. “If Christians would just take over the institutions of government and gain control of the levers of power, then all will be well. The church will flourish. The kingdom of God will dawn upon the earth and we’ll all live happily ever after.”
And let me be clear, it is a good and godly thing when Christians are elected to public office and they gain influence in the corridors of power, and we should be thankful and we should pray for them. But let’s be equally clear – the New Testament scriptures never locate Christian hope for the welfare of the church or the advancement of the kingdom of God in political power. No, pray for kings and all in high positions, Paul says, so that the people of God will be free to get on with basic godliness at home, at work, at school, without fear of molestation or hindrance. That’s it. Work as a Christnan for the civic welfare of your neighbors. Serve as gifts and circumstance allow in the civil sphere. And make sure when you do that your faith in Jesus Christ and the teaching of God’s Word informs all your decisions and all your conduct, but do not hitch your hopes for revival and spiritual renewal in America to the machinery of civil power. Pray for those who make our laws, Paul says, so that the church can get about the business of living for Jesus, quietly, modestly, faithfully, with dignity.
But notice there is an even higher purpose to our prayers than that. Why should we want these freedoms and liberties? We should want them because, verse 4, God “desires all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.” How will more and more people in the United States or in Jackson, Mississippi or here in Belhaven for that matter, how will more and more people get saved and come to a knowledge of the truth? By Christians, leading peaceful and quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way. That’s how. Be the real thing, Paul is saying – all the time, out in the open, in front of your neighbors. Show them what the Gospel of grace does in a human heart by the way you live and act and speak, faithful, godly, humble, servant-hearted, evangelistically-minded Christians, loving their neighbors, sharing the Good News – that’s how it gets done, and that is to be a major burden of our prayers, personally and corporately as a church. When last did you pray for someone to be saved? Not just for an opportunity to have an influence or say a word here or there – pray for those things. But pray that God would do in their hearts what He did for Lydia. Do you remember Lydia? The seller of purple cloth who Paul met at the river in Philippi, and the Lord opened her heart to believe Paul’s message. Pray, “O God, for my loved and wayward son. Open his heart. Save him!” When last did you pray for someone earnestly, consistently, to pass from death into life?
Derek Thomas famously describes most church prayer meetings as organ recitals. We are praying for Mrs. Jones’ heart surgery and Mr. Smith’s kidney disease. It’s an organ recital, right? And we absolutely should pray for the sick. We’ve already been praying for the sick today in our service. It’s right and good. We are commanded to do so and ask for the Lord to heal them, and He often does in answer to the prayers of His people. Praise God for that. But what, according to Paul, ought to occupy the preponderance and the burden of our prayers? Pray for all people, for kings and all in high places, so that we can live godly lives and more and more people might come to know Jesus. Pray for the holiness of the church and the effectiveness of its witness. And pray for conversions. Pray for the lost to be found.
But there’s actually an even more ultimate priority for our prayers in this text that we mustn’t skip over. Can you see it at the end of verse 2? Pray for all people so that we can be godly because, “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior.” Here’s the greatest priority of our prayers. We want to please God our Savior. Prayer is good and it pleases Him. The holiness that is the answer to our cries is good and it pleases Him. The salvation of the lost, as we plead with God and seek to be faithful witnesses is good and it pleases Him. So pray. If you’re a real Christian, don’t you want to please your God who has saved you? He’s saved you. Why aren’t you talking to Him? What has He ever done but love you and give His Son for you, forgiven your sin, adopted you into His family, taken away your heart of stone and given you a heart of flesh, put His Spirit within you and borne long and patience with you. Every single day, though you betray Him and fail Him and grieve Him with your sin, He has loved you with an everlasting love and Paul says He is pleased when you pray. Isn’t that amazing? If I can put it a little crassly, God likes it when you talk to Him. He likes it. He loves to hear you. You please Him when you come running to Him. You grieve Him when you stay away.
The place. The pattern. The priorities. The purposes. Notice now what Paul says about the power of prayer. What makes you think you can go marching right into the throne room of heaven and pour out your heart to God and be confident that Your prayers will please Him? Isn’t that the height of arrogance? I mean, look at your heart! Don’t you see the pride and the lust and the resentments and the petty jealousies hiding in those dark corners that you have allowed to fester and grow? And not just your heart – look at your behavior. Yesterday you lied to your spouse. You gossipped about your colleague. You ignored the cries of someone you could have helped. How dare you presume to pray! What a wretched failure of a Christian you are! How can you pray?
Here’s how you can do it. Here’s the power that takes the cries of the least and the last child of God, unworthy though she may be, wretched though he may be, and yet makes those cries eloquent and mighty in the ears of the Lord of heaven, here’s how – verse 5. “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” Jesus is the mediator between you and the thrice holy God. And He has paid in full for all His people. Yes, you did those things. You failed in your duty. Like Isaiah, you are a man or a woman of unclean lips and you live in the midst of a people of unclean lips and you feel, if you were to come suddenly into this moment of the presence of the Lord on the throne, like the prophet, you too would be undone. And that’s true, unless a live coal from the altar is pressed to your sin and procures your pardon and makes you clean. And that is, what Paul says, has happened for you, repenting, believing, child of God. Jesus has given Himself on the altar of the cross to pay your ransom. Your guilt is atoned for and your sin taken away.
So yes, yes you’ve sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Repent and cry for mercy. But if you will, if you are clinging today to Christ for pardon, Jesus the mediator brings you to God. He brings you to God. That’s what a mediator does. He reaches out his hand to you. Will you hang back in the shadows, ashamed, reluctant, unsure that you will receive a welcome before the gaze of God? He takes you by the hand and He brings you with Him into the throne room and He says, “Father, this dear one, this is one of Mine whom You gave Me. I died for her. I shed My blood for him. Their debts are paid in full. Her sin is forgiven. He is clean.” And the Father, if I can picture it this way, turns to you and says, “Welcome. My dear child, won’t you come closer to My throne? Let Me hear your voice. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you are here.”
The place. The pattern. The priorities. The purposes. The power. And finally, the partner of prayer. “Now Timothy, as you develop your strategy for church revitalization in Ephesus, please don’t think for a moment, not for a moment, that if you build a robust culture of prayer in your own pastoral life and in the life of the church that that will somehow lead into quietism and inactivity, waiting around for the answers. Not at all. Not at all. This Gospel that opens the way for us to go boldly to the throne of grace and to pray for the salvation of the lost is the same Gospel with which I have been entrusted to be a preacher to the nations.” Verse 7, “For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.” Prayer and preaching are necessary partners. They must always go together. Mission and intercession are married, and what God has joined together, let not anyone separate. Faithful evangelism and earnest supplications, they are twins, and like twins they are always found together. You never find one without the other.
Brothers and sisters, in view of Christ’s crucified love for us, His ever living at the right hand of God to plead our cause, may the Lord help us to go to God for the lost and then to rise from our knees and go to the lost for God. The place. The pattern. The priorities. The purposes. The power. And the partner of prayer. Let us pray together.
O Lord our God, we bow before You and we confess our astonishment at the thought that our feeble cries and our wicked hearts should ever be welcomed in Your presence, much less that You are pleased when we come to You. Help us to believe Your Word and in the wonder and joy of it to come running and to pour out our hearts, singly and together as a church. O God, make me a praying minister, make us a praying church, that You might be magnified in our growing likeness to Christ and in the many who might yet come to know Jesus through our witness. For Your honor and glory, in Jesus’ name, amen.