1 Timothy 2:1-7: A Household at War: Praying for Peaceful and Pious Living, Proclaiming the Gospel to All People
1 Timothy: Living in the Household of God • Sermon • Submitted
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March 9, 2022 was easily one of the darkest days in the ongoing horror that is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The town of Mariupol had been under siege since February 24, but Russian and Ukrainian authorities had agreed to terms to allow civilians to flee from the town in a so-called humanitarian corridor on the 9th of March.
On a day that should have been a day of refuge for innocent civilians seeking to escape the warfare, however, the Russian Air Force had other plans.
In an attack that resulted in the deaths of at least five people, injuries to at least sixteen, and appropriate international outrage, Russia bombed Maternity Hospital No 3, which was functioning as both a children’s hospital and maternity ward.
Now, I share this brief snippet not in order to encourage a particular response to Russia or the general horrors of war, nor with the hopes you’ll write our senators and representatives to exhort them to officially declare war so we, the good guys, can come and save the day.
Rather, I think that this illustrates something concerning the church, especially as Paul describes her in 1 Timothy 2:1-7. Just as a hospital cannot carry out its life-saving mission very well while under attack from enemies in the middle of a war, likewise the church will have difficulties in carrying out its life-saving mission in the middle of a war while hampered by government persecution, especially when we remember Ephesians 6:12 and following.
12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
Additionally, in last week’s passage, we’ve just seen Paul exhort Timothy to “wage the good warfare” by remembering and carrying out the work he had specifically been set apart for by the church.
Make no mistake, brothers and sisters — we are a household at war, and far from seeking to escape to safe haven, we have been given the mission of serving on the front lines to rescue those who are enslaved to sin and Satan by proclaiming the gospel of our Lord, who has himself rescued us from the darkness in which we once walked. The great Healer, Jesus, has called us to join in his mission, is daily training us to be physicians and nurses to the sin sick souls both among us and around us, and, best of all, has promised to be present with us until he returns and brings an end to the warfare we now wage by destroying his enemies once and for all.
So, how do we live as a household at war? Today’s text divides into two sections, verses 1-4, and verses 5-7, in which we’ll see that our household must be a praying household and that our household must be a preaching household, respectively.
vv. 1-4: We must be a praying household.
vv. 1-4: We must be a praying household.
Explanation:
1 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
As we unpack these, we’re going to see two ways in which we ought to pray: first, we pray for those in power so that we might lead lives undisturbed by persecution, and second, we pray for all people so that we might see them saved.
But before we get to those two specific ways of prayer, we need to do a little groundwork. Let’s look at verse 1.
1 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people,
Somewhat unfortunately, in my opinion at least, the ESV’s “then” softens the force of the Greek particle which is often translated as “therefore” — and when you see a “therefore”, you should see if you can find what it’s there for!
Well, in this case, it’s there to point us back to verses 3-20, where we’ve seen Paul point out the urgency of stopping elders teaching errant doctrine, then the majesty of God’s grace to sinners in the gospel, and most recently the dangers of laying down our weapons of warfare: faith and good consciences. Effectively, at this point in the letter it’s right for Timothy and the Ephesian church to be asking, “Okay, Paul, we’re on board, except Alexander and Hymenaus, who have gone overboard, so what do we do?” and Paul says, “I’m glad you asked. Let’s get practical.”
Just as he did back in verse 3, Paul again urges something, and, just in case his audience might be tempted to slack off, he doubles down and emphasizes the urgency of what he’s going to talk about by adding in, “first of all”.
The most urgent and important thing for Timothy and the Ephesian church to do is precisely the very last thing many, if not all, of us do reflexively: pray. Pray. A lot.
Paul uses 3 pretty much synonymous terms: supplications, prayers, intercessions, and one different term, thanksgivings, to describe this most important and urgent action item on the church’s agenda. Paul’s intent in piling up different terms for prayer isn’t so much that the church ought to ensure each particular type of prayer is checked off in order to cover all the bases, but rather that the church cannot pray too much nor too fervently — there’s not a point at which we should really feel, “Yeah, we’ve probably prayed enough, so let’s get down to the real business”; instead, it’s perhaps good for us to have a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that we haven’t, in fact, prayed enough for the work we’re seeking to undertake and maybe it’d be good for us to stop for just one more prayer.
After all, not only are these prayers numerous in variety and of the utmost importance and urgency; they’re universal in scope! All of these prayers are to be made for all people first of all, and especially for people who are in positions of power within the government, not just at the highest echelons but down to the local town hall.
So first, let’s talk about praying for those in power, so that we might be undisturbed by persecution. 1 Timothy 2:2
2 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 becoming increasingly pertinent in our society that is increasingly not just apathetic, but rather antagonistic, towards biblical Christianity as a set of beliefs and, by proxy, the Christians who hold those beliefs, a society that more closely resembles the Ephesian church in which Timothy was serving — you may recall the near-riot when the Ephesian metalworkers gathered in the town square and shouted “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” for two hours, as recorded in Acts.
And I’d like to pose an idea to you: this increasing antipathy towards Christians could well be beneficial for us, albeit uncomfortable. This is because many of us have experienced the benefits of “peaceful and quiet living” without appreciating the end goal of that peace and quiet, and the peace and quiet we’re accustomed to may well be one of the causes of widespread slackness in prayer characteristic of American Christians, if I may paint with an exceedingly broad brush.
The difference between the sort of peace and quiet we desire by default and the peaceful and quiet life Paul has in mind is pretty stark: after all, one of the authorities Paul may have in mind is the madman Nero, famous for such great deeds as lighting the night in Rome using Christians as human torches.
Put another way, the difference between the peace and quiet we’d like and the peace and quiet we should pray for is the difference between a quiet, tranquil cabin in the mountains or on the beach, and a Ukrainian hospital not being actively bombed.
Just as the hospital is free to carry out its lifesaving work and devote resources to its patients and workers, Paul desires that the church would be free to live their lives publicly and proclaim the message of salvation through Christ Jesus alone without having to divert resources to supporting people in jail or supporting widows and orphans put in their position by governmental persecution — a freedom that we take for granted at our own peril today, and a freedom that enjoins on us the responsibility of seriously considering how we might lessen the suffering of our brothers and sisters who don’t have the freedom to live peaceful and quiet lives — a freedom that many of us have never had to ask for and yet have received, while those brothers and sisters plead daily and yet do not receive.
Second, let’s consider praying for all people, so that we might see them saved. 1 Timothy 2:3-4
3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Paul says that Christians living peaceful and quiet lives is good and pleasing in the sight of God, whom here he calls “our Savior”, not just because God delights in giving his children good gifts, but because he delights in seeing people saved from their sin and ignorance — ignorance which Paul knew all too well in his previous life as Saul.
Now, if you’re like me, grounding the urgency of prayer in God’s desire to see people saved is a little perplexing. After all, when we’re urgently and fervently praying for something, it’s usually because it’s some sort of emergency, likely one that we’ve tried to address by doing everything in our power first and then turning to the Lord when those efforts fail.
Likewise, we may, at our best, see the lost souls around us as an emergency — these people, we believe, are bound for eternal suffering in hell, after all — and so we feel an urgency to share the gospel with them in the hopes of seeing them turn from their sin to Christ. This impulse is good, but it’s very instructive that the first thing Paul is urging for the success of the mission of the church isn’t fervent evangelism, or solid teaching, or right polity, or really anything pertaining to human effort. The first priority in God’s household in 1 Timothy is connection with God through prayer.
I pose to you, brothers, and sisters, that we grossly undervalue just how important the act of prayer is to God. In our culture which continually drives us to more, better, faster, action, and given the fact that our hearts are so torn between the urgency of our own agendas and God’s agenda, it’s no wonder that prayerlessness comes so easily to us.
I want to offer a very brief point of application: consider you’re on your death bed. A friend asks you, “What’s your greatest regret in life?” Do you think you’re more likely to answer, “I wish I had done more,” or, “I wish I had prayed more”?
And for the mature among us, perhaps you have developed healthy habits of prayer, at least with respect to attitude and frequency, but I want to draw attention to one of the great benefits of biblical prayer: prayer attunes our hearts to God’s will so that our desires become more like his desires.
One thing I realized this week is that while I do reflexively go to the Lord in prayer, my prayers are often quite narrow in scope and primarily pertain to God’s will being done in my life, an unfortunate fault I hope I’m not alone in.
But that way of praying is, honestly, pretty pathetic compared to what is on God’s heart and what should be on mine much more frequently. You see, God desires all people to be saved, to come to know the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, in his inscrutable wisdom, the way he goes about having this desire met is through his Holy Spirit working in the persistent prayers and godly lives of his people to till the soil of a watching world’s hearts so that the gospel message might take root.
Application:
Now we’re prepared to ask ourselves two questions: first, how well do our individual prayer lives line up with what Paul urges as of the highest priority? Brother or sister, when is the last time you prayed for your leaders in government? Specifically, when is the last time you offered up a thanksgiving for those leaders? They are, after all, God’s ordained tool to bring about his perfect sovereign will. Remember, when Paul wrote Romans 13:1
1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.
he wasn’t exactly living under a government comprised of Christian brothers and sisters guiding society into greater conformity with God’s law.
Second: How well does our corporate prayer life line up with what Paul urges as of the highest priority? When we gather on Sundays, we do seek to prioritize prayer for this very reason — indeed, I hope our worship gathering is really quite boring for people who don’t genuinely believe that God answers his people’s cries to him.
And we are trying to be very intentional about how we pray Wednesday nights, a gathering I myself haven’t yet been able to attend, but not for lack of desire.
When you gather with your life group, I hope it’s a time saturated with prayer, not only good fellowship.
Do you see encouraging trends in GBC’s prayer life? Do you see room for growth? If so, please let your elders know! We would not be carrying out the work of our office very well if we failed to guide the flock entrusted to us in the most important works our Lord has set for us to do.
And as we evaluate our prayer habits, let’s not forget the end goal of them: not merely our own health in Christ, but the salvation of our fellow human beings — salvation from an eternity of torment in hell away from God’s presence, salvation from lives lived ignorant of God’s truth, lives which are a hell in and of themselves, salvation for eternal image-bearers of God, whom we have been called to snatch out of the fire through our fervent prayers, godly lives, and clear proclamation of the gospel. Speaking of clearly proclaiming the gospel, let’s turn to vv. 5-7.
vv. 5-7: We must be a preaching household.
vv. 5-7: We must be a preaching household.
Explanation:
5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 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.
In these verses, we see two big ideas: first, there is one God who has one, and only one, plan for salvation; second, this plan of salvation is for all peoples.
One of the things I love about 1 Timothy so far is the little bite-sized summaries Paul gives of the gospel message. First, in 1 Timothy 1:15,
15 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
And now Paul gives another great summary in verses 5-6.
5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.
In language that pretty much seems like a creed, or a formal statement of doctrine, Paul explains why devotion to prayer and godly, quiet living are pleasing to God — it’s because they lay the groundwork for the salvation of others, by the only God’s only salvation plan. There is one God who created heaven and earth, whose perfect law condemns everyone born in Adam’s family line as guilty and utterly deserving of death.
And there is one hope for salvation, one mediator and no other, between God and men — there is only one person who can stand between God’s perfectly righteous judgment and the sinners to whom that judgment is directed and ready to be carried out to the fullest. That mediator who stands in the line of fire is the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.
The testimony of Scripture is clear. There is one God, and only one. That God has given precisely one means of salvation, and only one: faith in his chosen king, Jesus of Nazareth, who was murdered on a Roman cross at the hands of the very government he instituted, whose death stands as the only payment for the price of sin, which is the death of the sinner.
At this point, we can deal with a question more important in our context than in Paul’s original context: if God desires all men to be saved, and Jesus gave himself as a ransom for all, is everybody saved so that all this fuss about prayer and godly living is kind of silly? Well, the answer is pretty obviously no — without even appealing to the overwhelming testimony of the rest of the Bible concerning God’s judgment against his enemies, simple common sense would tell us that Paul wouldn’t really care what happened to Hymenaeus and Alexander, nor would Timothy’s work be nearly as urgent, and honestly, we’d be wasting an awful lot of time, energy, and money on something pretty pointless.
So, universalism is out. So, then, if God doesn’t get what he desires, does that mean he’s not as sovereign as we’d like him to be? After all, an all-powerful God should be able to get everything he wants, right?
But this is to misunderstand God’s character as well as his intentions in creating anything, or anybody, in the first place.
Here’s just one way to think about it: if we were mere puppets, robotic characters on a stage simply doing what we were scripted to do with no input of our own, that would make our love towards God pretty meaningless. That sort of love would probably satisfy God about as much as dunking on a kindergartner would satisfy LeBron James. No, God’s glory and wisdom are far greater than that. So hard determinism is out, too.
On the flipside, the Bible is quite clear: God is in control of his universe, and no one can thwart his plans, especially when it comes to salvation. Jesus speaks quite clearly on this in John 10:24-30
24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
No, we must fully affirm God’s complete sovereignty as well as real human responsibility. Those who are not saved are not saved because they really do reject the knowledge of the truth and refuse to accept Christ’s ransom payment on their behalf, the only price of admission into God’s household, and a price which only Jesus, as fully God and fully man, was able to pay in his death.
Speaking of Jesus’s death, let’s not miss this opportunity to talk about what it means for Jesus to be the mediator between God and man.
The author of Hebrews writes in Hebrews 9:15
15 Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.
— but not only a death! Jesus is the mediator of this covenant, not was; as in Hebrews 7:22-25
22 This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant. 23 The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, 24 but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. 25 Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.
To think about Jesus’s mediation between God and men is to recall Jesus’s work as the great high priest over the household of God; that is, he is the one offering the sacrifice, namely himself, in order to cover the sins of all who put their trust in him. But, unlike all the sacrifices of the previous covenant which was a shadow of the heavenly realities, this sacrifice didn’t stay dead. He broke the chains of death and took his life back up in triumphant victory and still lives to this very day, standing as the only bridge between God and man and, as Paul might put it, making supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings on our behalf.
This Jesus is the center of the only God’s only salvation plan, which is for all people.
Note how Paul concludes this section — whereas the erring Ephesian elders wanted to be teachers of the law, Paul has striven hard for decades to carry out work as teacher of the Gentiles, a task that he didn’t exactly choose for himself, as he points out that he “was appointed”, or, as he said in the introduction to the letter, “by command of God our Savior” — a task, it’s worth noting, that most emphatically did not entail very much peaceful and quiet living on his part.
And this is the ministry Paul has invited Timothy into, the ministry of which we Gentiles have reaped countless benefits, the ministry of which we are now preachers and teachers. After all, the commission from our Lord includes Matthew 28:20
Matthew 28:20 (ESV)
20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
So, GBC, in obedience to our Lord and with hearts desiring what God desires — the salvation of all people — first, let us pray, and then we’ll take the Lord’s Supper together.
Pray
Lord’s Supper
Whom the Lord’s Supper is for.
You must 1) be born again; 2) be a member in good standing of a church that preaches the gospel we’ve proclaimed today, who will vouch that you give evidence of being born again; 3) have obeyed Christ’s command to be baptized as a believer. If those conditions are not true of you, we kindly ask that you refrain from joining us in the Supper today.
Serving the bread.
1 Cor. 11:23-24: “the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread. And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, ‘This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me.’”
Serving the cup.
1 Cor. 11:25-26: “In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
