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| I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men.... |
Scripture Reading: 1 Timothy 2:1-7
I. Introduction: In this passage before us today, we have a call to prayer.
In the beginning, we are told to pray a specific prayer: For Kings. For Caesar.
That prayer is to have a particular result: So that God’s people can live quiet, peaceful lives pursuing godliness and reverence. So we can sit here safely, week after week.
Paul is writing this letter to Timothy somewhere in the vicinity of 62 A.D.
It will be the year 312 A.D. before Constantine the Emperor is converted to Christianity.
250 years between 2 events. On the one hand, Paul was not simply asking Timothy and the church in Ephesus to pray for the emperor to be saved.
This look at prayer reminds us of two things:
First, our prayers have the long term in mind: Thy Will Be Done. Our prayers have a 250 year plus range.
Second, we are the living answers to prayers reaching back 250 years. For Americans, that goes back roughly to the events known as the Great Awakening. A series of revivals that swept across the American colonies. Great preaching and preachers: George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. And great prayer.
Prayer is not subject to objective tests. Prayer is not subject to scientific study:
Group A prayed 3 times a day.
Group B prayed 10 times a day.
Group C was given a placebo. Their "prayer" was actually, a Dr. Suess story.
Group D did not pray at all.
And yet, prayer is a vital part of the Christian and the church’s life.
And are the results we see in life and history just coincidence?
In May 1989 at Leipzig, in the historic Nocolai Kirche (St. Nicholas Church) where the Reformation had been introduced 450 years earlier, a small group began to meet.
They were reading the Sermon on the Mount and praying for peace.
The group grew and had to move to larger and larger rooms.
They moved to the nave of the church, which filled up.
The Communist authorities got concerned. They began threatening attenders, jailing some, and blocking roads to the prayer meetings.
October 9, 1989, some 2000 crowded in to pray for peace, with another 10,000 outside.
Soon the Berlin Wall came down.
Right here in the central part of 1 Timothy is an exhortation to prayer. Largely a whole chapter devoted to prayer.
1 Timothy and 2nd Timothy are teacher manuals, seminary guides, doctrinal handbooks.
Teach, instruct, train are recurring words and themes. Doctrine and specifically SOUND Doctrine is the motif of these letters.
“Timothy, here is how you are to get into the minds of your congregation.”
And yet, this is a book calling for prayer.
As we look at these verses today, we will be able to look at the immensity, the greatness, the vastness of what our prayers are to focus on, and then we will look at Paul’s personal explanation of how he…and by extension, each of us, then tackles the world.
1. It is good for us to have the more local, individual prayers on our church prayer list. Jobs, marriages, babies, sicknesses, travel, and more are things to pray for.
2. Four words or phrases are used to expand upon what we more easily call prayer.
Supplications:
Prayers:
Intercessions:
Thanksgiving:
The Scriptures are a literary text. Rich in literary devices; not just barebones instruction.
Multiple words are used often for several reasons:
i. To show different aspects of a thing to be done. Housework: cleaning, cooking, ironing, dusting.
ii. To show the richness or multi-layered nature of a thing: You are my mentor, friend, guide, brother.
iii. Often it does both. Easy to see the difference between thanksgiving and supplication, but not so easy see the difference between prayers and supplications. To focus on definitions would be misguided. Rather we are to be hit by the richness of the fourfold testimony.
3. We are to pray for all men. At least 4 times in this text this word ALL appears. All men is not the same as all who are in authority.
All does not always mean every. Usually, it is better seen as all types.
As you think through the 4 alls (all men; all who are in authority; and the all who God desires to be saved and the all for whom Christ was a ransom), pray on the larger side of this.
If you are hung up in a theological struggle between this passage and verses from John 10, read Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God if you wish. Do the study of issues relating to predestination and the free offer of the Gospel,
But for now, for all times, pray expansively.
Children are often at best theologians in the church: Pray for God to heal all the sick people in the world.
Philip Graham Ryken tells of his experiences some years ago at the Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Every Saturday night—for 2 hours—the congregation gathered for prayer.
They had a large board listing the names and locations of ministers and missionaries sent out by the church.
They prayed their way around the city of Aberdeen. They prayed for Scotland and the British Isles.
Someone would mention a continent and prayers would follow for the countries of that continent.
They prayed for the whole world.
Pray expansively: World, US, Texarkana.
4. For kings and those in authority: Pagans, in their case. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Washington insiders, establishment figures, etc.
III. The Universal Reach of the Gospel
In the essay, “Epic as Cosmopoesis” by Louise Cowan, she talks about the characteristics of epic literature.
One of those characteristics of the great epics—like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost—is the penetrating of the veil between gods and men, immortals and mortals.
Right here: Paul gives us the easy answer to the epic question: Where is the veil separated between God and man:
In Jesus Christ, in Jesus Christ alone, in Jesus Christ only.
Prayer, Paul’s topic, becomes a focus on Jesus Christ.
Prayer focuses us on a Christ-centered life.
One Mediator between God and man: the Man Christ Jesus. The Man—Christ’s human nature. The Christ—the messiah, the one who is coming. Jesus—One who saves.
IV. The Specific Application
The universal prayer—All men, all the world
The universal answer—Jesus Christ
Specific application: Paul appointed to carry the truth to Gentiles.
GCC: appointed to proclaim the Gospel and minister in Texarkana.
Prayer focuses us on Christ. A focus on Christ sends us out to let people know.
2. Attend at least one of our prayer times this week.
3. Go through the shelves at home and pull out that book on prayer that you read years ago or never read or read and did not apply.
4. Pray in an uncomfortable or unfamiliar setting. Embarrass yourself if necessary. Pray spontaneously.
5. Pray bigger, more Christ centered, evangelism centered, and specific.
The world, the message of Christ, those, like Paul, who carry the message of Christ.
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