Bill Bryant
TRANSCRIPT:
We are going to be in 1st Timothy 2 this morning for the message. If you want to turn your Bibles there, we are continuing our journey through the Bible and are almost there. I mean, we are marking it off, and we will be in Revelation very soon and, marching toward the end. I pray that it has been a good study, for you and that it’s been, challenging, but at the same time, just a real blessing to just kind of go through and see the Bible as it connects and relates and that it is truly one story of redemption, , that God has been planning since we blew it in the garden and, , he’s going to redeem it all.
And one day everything’s going to be made completely new. And, , there’s going to be a new heavens and a new earth, and we’re going to be a part of that reality. Um, but right now we live here, and here, it’s different. It’s not that reality. , and a dominating quality of humanity’s…
Pervasive and enduring evil, since Cain killed Abel, is hate. , we live, perhaps have always lived, , in an age of hate. Our families, our communities, states, nation, world, is polarized by the intruding and prevalent emotion And as disciples of Christ, we live in the world and we are part of the world and we are part of families and we are part of communities and we are part of states and we are part of nations and, and we are, if we do not embrace the radical teachings.
of our Savior and King, Christ Jesus, we are tempted to fall into a line, , or a group of hating other groups. And we have got to fight that every step of the way. Because here’s the reality, we are hardwired for love and belonging. In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s number three. Number three, we are hardwired, even the world realizes it, , for love and belonging.
We’re built for it. It’s part of our DNA to want to belong, to want to be loved, and to want to… Love. Brene Brown, I think, is right on target when she says hate is a symptom, fear is the problem.
And in that, we tend toward hate when we fear losing something. Losing people, or power, or control, or losing the upper hand. Whatever it is we fear, we find ourselves clinging. To our possessions and valuing our holdings above relationships. The son of God, ruler of the world, creator of everything, owner of all.
Gave up, gave up, Paul said. Emptied himself, Paul said. Became a servant, took on the form and heart, Paul said. of a servant. Why? You say, well, to die for us. Yes, but also to show us how. To live, to show us what to value and what to prioritize in our lives. And Paul tells Timothy that God has called us to live lives that prioritize love above everything.
And hasn’t he already said this over and over and over, in case you missed it. Give me a, give me a second to review. Galatians 5. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything but only faith working through love. That is what matters. Romans 13. Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt.
To love one another for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law, the commandments. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not covet whatever other command there may be summed up in this one command. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no harm to a neighbor.
Therefore, love is the fulfillment. And then the whole chapter of 1 Corinthians 13, right? It doesn’t, you can speak with the tongues of angels, you can have the gift of prophecy, you can have the gift of all knowledge, faith to move mountains, but if you don’t have love, you don’t have…
Follow God’s example, Ephesians, therefore, as dearly loved children, you are loved. So what do you need to do? Walk in the way of love. Just as Christ loved us, gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice. Therefore, Colossians, as God’s chosen people, holy and what are you? You are dearly loved.
Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other, forgive one another. If any of you has a grievance against someone, forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues, put on… Love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. First Thessalonians.
So this is my prayer that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much, but well learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent. Not sentimental gush, live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary a life Jesus will be proud of.
Bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive, getting everyone involved in the glory. And the praise of God. That’s Philippians 1, 9 through 11, according to the message. And then, 1 Thessalonians, May God, our Father, Himself, and our Master, Jesus, clear the road to you. And may the Master pour on the love so it fills your lives.
I love this. And splashes over. And splashes over on everyone around you. Just as it does from us to you. May God so fill your life with love that it splashes over to others. So in 1st Timothy 1, Paul tells Timothy to speak the truth, to flee from false ideas. And Miz, as we talked about in class this morning, and he said the goal of this command is love.
That’s the goal, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Now what does that have to do with 1 Timothy 2? Well, I’ll tell you. I think when you start 1 Timothy 2, Paul provides a way for us to keep our hearts pure and free from hate, and focus them… In love, and that is to prioritize prayer, to prioritize prayer, to pray, and in your praying and in your prayers, be very specific.
For example, pray for all people. You know, Jesus taught us to be very specific when we pray, did he not? He said when you pray, pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. He, he taught us to pray, give us today our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive. Those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
We’ve been taught to pray in very particular ways about very specific kinds of things. And when Paul requested prayer, he asked for the churches to pray very specifically. He said, pray 4, would open doors, , for the gospel to us. And he said, and pray for us to have courage. To be able to go through those doors and to be able to speak boldly, the good news of Jesus.
And so as we come to our text today in first Timothy two, the Holy Spirit is calling on us to get specific, to be real in our. And as you read first Timothy two, I want you to think about Paul’s circumstances. , this letter, there’s question as to whether he’s on his third missionary journey or whether he’s already been arrested.
Most likely he’s already been arrested and is, and is in jail. , he’s experienced the hatred and the anger of the unbelieving Jews multiple times in his journeys. , the businessmen of. Ephesus, where Timothy is, as we talked about this morning in class, the constant persecution of imprisonments and beatings and stoning’s and exiles and so much more.
And he writes to Timothy and he says in very bold and declarative ways, Timothy, when you pray. Push out the boundaries of your prayer concerns. Push out the boundaries of your prayer. Don’t let your prayers be limited to any group or any kind of people. Enlarge the circumference of your love. Timothy, don’t be provincial or sectarian or elitist or nationalistic or racist in your prayers.
Let your prayers embrace all kinds of people, people in high positions, people in low positions, white people, black people, brown people, Democrats, Republicans. Democrats, Republicans, Democrats and Republicans. I mean, they all need it. I thought I’d get an amen there. Russian dictators, Iranian, , told us enlarge the heart of your prayers.
Timothy go to school at Calvary and learn to hate. Learn to hate evil, learn to hate bigotry, and learn to hate racism, and learn to hate the actions of people like the Ku Klux Klan or the Neo Nazis, but at the same time pray earnestly for those men and women.
What is Paul’s main thought here? What is he really calling on Timothy and the disciples at Ephesus to do? Isn’t his point the same as Jesus? You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies. And do what? Pray. Pray for them. Pray for those who persecute you.
Pray for those who want to hurt you. Pray for those who want to harm you, that you might be like… Your heavenly father, because he sends his rain on the just and the, and he sends his sunshine on the just and, or to put it another way, Timothy, there is no category of people of whom it can be said you ought not to pray for those.
There’s none. And so here’s the message for our day, the 20 twenties. Are becoming, I think the decade of hate from the whole George Floyd thing back in 2020, the riots to the rise of racism and segregation that, that once more seeks to divide us from the war in the Ukraine to the war in Israel. I mean, it’s conflict after conflict and people pitting.
Themselves against each other and Democrats against Republicans and Republicans against Democrats and whole out Oh how easy it is for Christians to be sucked into one group and start Looking with disdain at the other group Jesus said many false prophets will arise and lead many astray and because lawlessness will be increased Because lawlessness will be increased the love of many will grow cold
it wears on you Amen. Evil wears on you. Evil without justice.
And Paul has reiterated these warnings against false prophets and false teachers that Jesus gave and the impact of their teachings. And one of those ideologies is that we must stand with Israel and destroy Hamas. Now, I’m all for standing with the victims of hatred and supporting those who are being threatened with extinction, which is what Hamas wants for Israel.
Let’s be real, and let’s be honest. But nowhere do we as disciples of Jesus see it written to hate the enemies of Israel, or to hate our own enemies for that matter.
I can tell you from experience that it is only in the power of the Holy Spirit with a changed heart and a renewed spirit can you love those who hate you. And those who want to see evil come upon you and want to see you fall and want to see you fail. But may it never be said that we’ve made any contribution to the destruction of the world through icy hate.
But let it be said of the Christians and of the disciples of Jesus everywhere. Behold how they love one another. Look how they do good to those who want what’s bad for them. Look how they do good to those who hate them. Look how they bless those who curse them. Look at how they pray for those who abuse them.
Look at how the parameters of their prayer, there’s no boundary. to the parameters of their prayer.
Isn’t that the point of 1st Timothy 2, 1? And if we pray like that and act like that, won’t people begin to say, Man, there must be a God of grace in the heavens, because he’s got a very peculiar people. They’re weird. I mean, those people are not conforming to this age and this decade. They don’t conform to the way other people think.
They don’t think that way. And so he instructs us in the broad and general pray for everyone and he turns and he gets very specific pray for those in authority. Now after he stressed the wideness of the circumference of our prayer, Paul focuses on kings and those in high positions. Why? Why? Did he narrow it to kings and those in high positions?
Well, it’s clear from verses four through seven that Paul wants to emphasize that nobody be excluded from our goodwill for nobody is beyond God’s grace. He wants not only us, but everyone saved, you know, everyone to get to know the truth that we. Have learned. He wants everybody to get that everybody. So why then do Kings and people in high position come in for special mention?
I think there are at least a couple of reasons, maybe more, but I’ll, I’m going to share with you a couple of reasons. First, there are characteristics. About leaders that make it hard. I think for us to pray for them, , at least hard for those early Christians, especially to pray for them. And I think it’s still in many ways for us to pray for them.
, for one, , they are distant and remote, whether by miles, , or just inaccessibility, right? They’re just not accessible and, and we’re not around them and we don’t know them. And so they’re so far away. Distant from us and remote. It’s hard to pray for somebody earnestly with heart yearning that you don’t know that you don’t ever see.
And yet Paul says that difficulty must be overcome. We must pray for the emperor, by the way, the emperor at this time, Nero, we must pray for the governor Galileo. We must pray for pro councils and we must pray for pilot inherit and the like. And the like would be president Biden, governor Beshear, the like would be anybody that we agree with, disagree with anybody that we don’t like.
Those people must be prayed for. If you don’t ever see them, if they are remote to you, they are not remote to God. And I’m going to tell you something. You can come closer to those people and influencing those people through your prayers to God than their closest advisors.
And if you don’t believe what I just said, you need to check your faith with God. But more to the point of why I think it’s difficult for us to sometimes pray for our leaders is because there are characteristics about them that makes them hard to pray for. They are often just godless people, corrupt people.
They seem not to be remotely sensitive to the promptings and leadings of the Holy Spirit at all. In fact, they are often full of corruption and deceit. They’ve been caught in lie after lie after lie, and nothing happens to them, and we get worn out with that. Do I get an amen and it’s so hard to trust anything they say and even harder to pray earnestly for them I mean, maybe the prayer of David break their teeth Oh God, you know, I mean, maybe that I can come in there with that prayer But I want to tell you that was I was universally true in Paul’s day I think in our day if you take all the countries of the world and let’s not just limit this sermon to the command to America, it’s probably still true today.
It doesn’t matter where or when you live If we’re, if we’re going to pray for those who are kings and in high positions, we’re going to wind up praying mostly for people who are hostile, at least indifferent to our faith, if not hostile to our faith. That seems to be a stumbling block for many people.
Why do I pray for them? Well, Paul says, don’t hesitate to pray. First of all, God can save them. I believe that God can change kings and those in high positions. And second, He can use unbelievers in high positions to accomplish His purposes anyway, whether they believe or not. Do you believe that? Well, let me give you a couple of examples.
In Isaiah 10, the Old Testament, God takes the wicked king of Assyria and turns him into a rod. Of his wrath to punish Israel, and as soon as he’s done using the King of Assyria, he punishes the king of Assyria for all of his wickedness, which tells me that the King of Assyria is not in charge. Or how about Nebuchadnezzar, the great proud king of Babylon, who once said, Is this not great Babylon, which I have built with my mighty power as a royal residence for the glory of my majesty?
And the next day, God had him doing what? Eating grass out in the field with the cows, and he lost all reason, all ability to think, except like an animal. And you know why God did that? To humble him. And Daniel 4 says, at the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored.
Then I… Praised the most high honored and glorified him who lives forever. His dominion is an eternal dominion. His kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing he does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him.
What have you done?
Nobody controls this God. And Nebuchadnezzar learned that. That this God is in complete and total control. And you know, he learned that not only because he was humbled to eat with the cows, he learned that because whatever the time period was, and I know it says seven times, you know, and that’s a…
Symbolic number in scripture, and, and we don’t have a clue whether it was a year, two years, or seven years, or ten years, or whatever it was. Whatever the time period was that lapsed between the time he started munching the grass with the cows, and the time that his sanity returned to him, nothing happened to his kingdom.
Which tells me Nebuchadnezzar was never in control to begin with. Hmm. Hmm. No king, no president, no prime minister, no president of Russia, Iranian, Ayatollah can stay his hand when God has purpose to do a thing. Nobody. The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord, and he turns it wherever he will.
Many are the plans in the mind of a man or a king or president, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. Therefore we have strong encouragement to pray because God rules over the kingdoms of men whether they believe him or not. God reigns and none can stay his hand. Not only does God reign, not only does he rule over the kingdoms of men, but he works through wicked kings.
Now one implication of that is that our… prayers for these kings and these people in high positions will not only be for their conversion or their sanctification but we will go beyond that and we will pray that God’s good saving purposes would be accomplished through them whether they ever repent or turn to God or not.
And that’s the second reason why I think Paul mentions the need to pray for Kings and those in high positions because God is able to do so much good in the world through people in high positions. I want you to pray for Kings and all those in authority that we may live peaceful and quiet lives and all godliness and holiness.
This is good and pleases God, our Savior, who wants all.
Even a bad king Paul thinks is better than anarchy. Paul tells Timothy to have the church praying for kings, and the reigning king, as I mentioned a minute ago at the time, was who? Nero. Nero’s vanity and cruelty and hostility to the Christian faith were widely known, and I’m not going to go into all the horrific things that Nero did.
to Christians. The persecution of the disciples was soon to become very systematic with Nero, and yet they had recourse to pray. Even as Jeremiah told the exiles to pray for Babylon’s peace and prosperity, you remember that? They went into Babylonian captivity and Jeremiah said, you’re going to be there 70 years, go ahead and set up shop and, and set up houses and get married and have babies and settle down.
And by the way, pray for the King of Babylon and for the prosperity of this country. Cause that’s going to directly affect you and pray for Cyrus, king of Persia, who ordered the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem and pray for Xerxes who ordered the rebuilding of the walls in Jerusalem. In a couple of years, Nero is going to put Paul to death.
Probably he died in the lion’s arena. And Paul is saying under those conditions, listen, I want you to understand Paul’s not naive. He understands who Nero is. And he says, make thanksgivings. For all men for kings and all in high positions. Thank God for Nero. Why how can he say that at least for this reason?
Paul’s perspective on the world is so good. It’s so big mine gets so narrow and so small His is so big it goes it goes above and beyond his own little life and even his own little We might look at it and say, great. He would look at it and say, little ministry, the emperor who puts Paul to death in Rome, keeps peace in the provinces where the gospel is spreading like wildfire and for that Paul is thankful.
So our prayers for Kings and for leaders and for all men should be seasoned. with Thanksgiving, but the main thing Paul says to pray for is that we might lead a peaceful and quiet life Godly and dignified in every way that the basic benefit of good government is peace meaning Freedom from both war and internal and civil strife now taken by itself that might seem to fly right in the face of Some of the things I’ve said, is it really the case that in the last analysis, the only reason we pray for leaders is so that we might have a good life, that we might live in peace so that we might have a peaceful and tranquil life and build our homes and build our states and build our houses and build our futures.
Listen, I think a lot of Christians think that, but that is not what Paul’s after.
Paul is after so much more in this text. This is good, and pleases God our Savior. He wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind. The man cries, there’s only one way to heaven. And that’s through Jesus Christ. If you don’t believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.
I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
So why pray that we have peace and tranquility? This is good. It pleases God. Because He wants people to be saved. He wants us to have free course to go out there and share our faith. faith. God approves of peaceful times at times of tranquility for the advancement of the gospel. Peace is not the main thing.
Salvation is the main thing. Everybody getting that? Peace is not the main. Tranquility is not the main goal that I can live in tranquility and not be bothered by people. No. That’s not the goal. The goal is the knowledge of the gospel of truth getting out there. That’s the goal. And so wait, may we never forget brothers and sisters in Christ that we are exiles here in America.
And if I were preaching in Brazil or Russia or Iran or Mexico or anywhere else in the world today, I’d preach the same message. We are exiles in this world. We are not at home here. America is not my home. Russia, not somebody’s home. Iran, not somebody’s home. Anywhere on earth. Our commonwealth is in heaven.
Our citizenship, Philippians Our citizenship. Citizenship is in heaven. That’s our citizenship. And I pray, not simply for the prosperity of America, but for the magnificent spreading of the saving purposes of God, not only in this country, but throughout the world. That’s what Paul wants us to pray about.