June 25, 2017 PM Service: The First Priority Is Prayer by Pastor Josh Sheldon

First Priority in Responding to Church Error with Prayer

To 1 Timothy, as we continue our study there. We have proceeded now to the second chapter. We will put our focus and our attention upon the first four verses of this chapter. 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 position, 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.

The question is, how do we correct an erring church? And even if the church in Ephesus itself was not as a whole erring, but was at risk of falling into grave and corporate error, because of the teaching of the false professors, the false teachers, because of these things which Timothy is charged by Paul to withstand, to not let them teach anymore along these lines, to put an end to it, at whatever level, the cancer of heresy, of false teaching, of wrong or different gospels, whatever the case may be, what do we do?

What do we do here at Providence Bible Church in Sunnyvale? If such a thing began to infect us, now let us say that I had the insight to see it. Well, I would have to resist it, as Paul tells Timothy.

I would have to rebuke the teachers, as Paul tells Timothy. The duty of the pastor here and the congregation is very clear. But what is the first part of the process? Where do we go first? Where should your pastor first lead you?

And I would ask then, not only lead us when we have such an issue, should it ever come upon us, God willing, it will not. God willing, if it does, we will see it. I will be informed of it. I will perceive it.

We will know when it is happening or in advance. But should such a thing occur, where do we go first? And even as we are enjoying this period of peace and unity around the core doctrines around which we gather, even now while we have this unity in the faith together, where's the first place we go?

Well, as Paul is telling Timothy, as he's charging him to stop the false teaching, perhaps we could say we are just as much charged to maintain the right teaching. Insofar as from this pulpit flows the true gospel, rightly explained, rightly applied to us, true to what the scripture says, where do we go to maintain that?

I would suggest we go as much as what Paul tells Timothy and where he tells him to go in order to stop it. It's prayer. What is our first priority? It's prayer. When Jesus came into Jerusalem, your Bibles always have that subheading, the triumphal entry.

You have to cross out triumphal. He comes in triumph later. He came in peace. He came as a Davidic king riding on a donkey, which was a sign of peace. And yet, immediately, there was, if you will, violence of a sort.

As he overturned the money changers, and what did he say? What was his outrage? The son of God, seeing his father's name impugned in hell, said, my father's house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.

God willing, in this place, we err more on the side of prayer than thieves. How do we maintain that? And should something ever come in to put it at risk, what do we do about it? Where should I lead you in doing something about it?

The first priority is prayer. You notice here that when Paul finally goes from his charge to Timothy, telling him, this charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you that by them you wage the good warfare.

Earlier than that, in verse three of the first chapter, as I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at emphasis that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine. And you might expect Paul to now say, and what I want you to tell them, Timothy, is Deuteronomy 18 says false prophets are to be taken outside and killed.

I want you to tell them the penalty for changing one single word. Read to them from the book of Revelation, which of course wasn't written at the time. But you take the point. That you would expect at this point that Paul would give him a set of instructions, a set of verses, a set of passages, and say, here, Timothy, here's how you refute what they're saying.

And here's the truth on the other side. Here's how you knock them down, and here's how you put the truth back. But he doesn't do it that way. Notice that after giving him his charge in chapter one, he says to them, first of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people.

Different sorts of prayer maybe. Most of the commentators, the scholars would say yes, and we will deal with that a bit, but can't we put that all under this one rubric of prayer? Would it make just as good a sense if we looked at this verse and we sort of read into it this way?

First of all then, I urge that prayers characterize the church. What is Timothy's first line of defense? What is the first wrecking ball that he swings against this foundation beginning to be laid or perhaps at whatever level it's been raised up by the false teachers?

What is the first thing he's to do? Pray. Where to begin when troubles assail us from within, from without? Look to Paul and see where he had young Timothy go. He had so much to set in order. Where to begin?

The answer is clear. The answer is simple. The answer is very profound. And the answer is powerful and effective because the prayer of a righteous man avails much, says James. We go to prayer. There's so much Timothy has to set in order.

Conduct in the church, the relative places of men and women, qualifications for pastors and deacons and much more. And isn't it our way in this hard-charging Silicon Valley to wanna jump in and let's just get started and get it done.

Let's find out here's the problems and each problem can be taken care of this way. So we're gonna do problem number one and next week two people are gonna do this. One person's gonna do that. The pastor's gonna confirm it this way.

Check, check, check, check, done. Okay, step number two. What are we going to do? Let's get it done, let's go. Let's AAA this thing. That's not what Timothy is told to do. First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for all people.

That's first. Prayer. Prayer answers falsehood. Prayer to God that he help those over us, protect us from such ravenous wolves as Ephesus had among them. Without prayer, we're nothing but a social gathering.

We have no purpose other than to meet as friends. Without prayer, the church is no different than a mosque or a synagogue or a Buddhist temple. We watch our divided Congress these days that can't get along on anything and all the votes seem to go right down the line on one side or the other side of the house.

Oh God, that the church should never be such an organization as that. That we be those gathered around this gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, be those who don't wait for the problems to happen, don't wait for the false teachers to take root, don't wait for a cancer to infect, but we be this house of prayer.

Paul says, first of all, top priority, the basics. It's Vince Lombardi with the Grain Bay Packers. That wonderful story about him when he took them over and they were like the keystone cops of all the football teams in professional football.

And he was watching a practice and they're bumping around in each other. They're going this way, going that way. One guy's hitting the tackle box, another guy's hitting the coach. Just everything happening.

He calls them all together. He's got a football in his hand. Points it out at the ground. He says, those are the grid lines. He says, this is a football. I'm the coach. He stops for a moment. He says, any questions?

Well, prayer is like that. This is the church. We are God's people. We approach God by prayer. Any questions? It's sort of like that. We need to appreciate the fact that the prayer Paul would have in the church is immediately on behalf of others.

Not against Timonius and Alexander, the false teachers, but for others. And we do have these four ways that prayer is described here. And I think it helps us because Paul is saying this is first. And the different words have different nuances of prayer, different reasons for coming to God, different ways of going to God on behalf of ourselves or others.

First is supplications. And the root of this word means to need or to be in need. Prayer is an expression of just that. Prayer is an expression of needs. The Psalms in so many places exemplify this. Just read one, Psalm 70.

It has parallel sentiments with the 40th Psalm, but Psalm 70 will get this idea across to us of the idea of prayer being an idea of confessing need, to be in need and confessing it to God. Make haste, O God, to deliver me.

O Lord, make haste to help me. Let them be put to shame and confusion who seek my life. Let them be turned back and brought to dishonor who desire my hurt. Let them turn back because of their shame. Excuse me, let them turn back because of their shame who say, aha, aha.

May all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. May those who love your salvation say forevermore, God is great, but I am poor and needy. Hasten to me, O God. You are my help and my deliverer. O Lord, do not delay.

That last line, but I am poor and needy, is really in many ways the key here. We come to God with supplications first because first of all, we do have needs. And second, because we have no other God to take credit for their supply.

If we don't ask God, then who's going to have the glory for what is supplied to us for our needs? Abraham, when he won against those kings, when he led his army successfully against the kings that had kidnapped his nephew Lot, he refused to take any of the spoils because he said, lest a man should say, he made me rich rather than God.

He refused it. He said, no, God is my helper. God is the one who supplies my need. When I have need, I go to God and God supplies. And if God doesn't supply, it's for my good to borrow from way ahead of Abraham in Romans 8.

Think of Ezra. When he was commissioned by Cyrus to go back to Jerusalem and begin to restore the temple and the priesthood and the proper worship of God, and Cyrus offered him a royal bodyguard, sealed team number six with green berets on the side to protect him, and he refused.

He says, I'm ashamed to take them, lest they should get credit for our safety, lest we get to Jerusalem in one piece and not have him been robbed or in any way harmed. And then Cyrus is the one who gets the credit because he's the one as king who gave us the guard.

No, I was ashamed to take that because God is my helper. God is the one we go to in our need. Now, as odious as it might be in today's climate, our God is our only God. Our God is our only helper. Our God is the only one we can go to to meet our needs.

Now, let us be a church that goes to him in prayer and confesses our need and thanks him for the supply of all that we have. It's so important that we understand this, that the fact that we get to wear clothes and so be protected from the weather, we have cars so we can drive and get to church on time and in relative comfort, all these things because of what?

Because God supplied our need. That's first. Supplication, a confession of our need. And second is prayers themselves. The word used here is just the general word for prayer. But as often as it's used, it is still a word that is restricted to that special brand of communication between our God as our creator and ourselves as the created.

It's a sacred sort of word. It's a word that means both worship and reverence. And this is the way we approach God. To pray to God is to worship God. And to pray to God properly is to show reverence for his name.

Third thing Paul tells Timothy is that prayers are to be intercessory in nature. Now, our ESV uses that word, intercessions, but it's really not an exact fit with the original. The cognate word of the original means to fall in with a person, to draw near so as to converse familiarly.

Familiar, familiar, familiarly. There it is. I think I got the contagious tongue tie from Conley from this morning. What was that word you couldn't say? Inviolable. Now I got it. But they are to be intercessory prayers.

But the word, again, meaning to fall in with a person, to be familiar with them. Intercessions properly included in that as the last part of verse one and then verse two indicate, where our prayers are for or on behalf of others.

But the main thrust here in what Paul gives as his third type of prayer, these intercessions according to our ESV, is simply coming to someone who we're familiar with. Coming to God as our father. Coming boldly to the throne of grace.

Coming to God as one who elected us from before the foundation of the world, who knows you personally. You're rising up and you're going down. He knows when you're up in the morning, he knows where you go and when you're walking along the way.

Every day for you was written in his book before it ever came about. It's a God with whom we're to be familiar. We're to know him. I like to picture it this way, that when we see Jesus as he is, we're gonna say, God, ah, I know him.

I've talked to him so often. I know what he's gonna say because he's said it to me so many times. And he knows what I'm gonna say because so often I've been like, I know him because he's heard from me and I from him.

We're coming to someone who's familiar. That's why we end our prayers in Jesus' name because the apostle says, praying everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. We follow that as a command and we pray in Jesus' name because we know him, we're familiar with him, we're comfortable with him, we're intimate with him.

God knows us. He loved us before we loved him. He loved us before we knew him. But to not come often to him, to not avail ourselves of the bold access that we have to the throne of grace, to not make ourselves familiar to God is a great error.

It's a great error. Now, God knows us, but what would our prayers be? How much more enlivened would our prayers be? How much more energetic would my prayer be if I came to God as if he didn't, as if I just had to empty my soul to him the way Hannah does in 1 Samuel 2?

What kind of prayer would that be? It's a weakness we all face at some level. We come to God when we have needs. But let that not be the only time that he hears from us. If there's no needs right now, pray to God in a familiar way and thank him that he knows you so well, to know that you don't at this moment need anything and thank him that you're in such a period of material and spiritual peace and blessing.

Thank God what you once needed you don't now because he met and supplied it. Pray with David even when the shells are full and the checking account is brimming and say, but I am poor and needy. And go to a God who knows this already and pray with him as if he didn't, as if he needed to hear your soul bared before him, which of course he does not, but as if.

He speaks of thanksgiving, supplications, prayers and intercession, and thanksgivings be made for all people. This just reminds us of Philippians 4, verse 6. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

With thanksgiving for what you have, with thanksgiving for what you need because God's gonna be glorified when he supplies it and we give him the credit, we give him the glory, we give him the thanks.

This covers all the movements of life here. Wherever and however we are, thanksgiving to God is appropriate. Thanks now are right and proper and logical and they're required of us. What God has done for us in Jesus Christ leaves us with no room for anything other than volume upon volume upon volume of inexhaustible material that will produce constant and fresh cause for thanksgiving in prayer.

Psalm 139, 17 and 18 say, "'How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! "'How vast is the sum of them! "'If I would count them, they are more than the sand. "'I wake and I am still with you.'". Thanksgiving be made to God.

There's not really four types of prayer there, though. Not really four types of prayer any more than they are to, by rote, be included each time. These four things that he tells Timothy to have at the church, to introduce to the church, to reintroduce to the church, we're not sure which way it is.

Supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings. They sort of bob and weave together. Sometimes help is at the forefront. Other times, the simple joy of speaking to God with whom we are familiar.

Sometimes the entreaty steps to the fore. Other times, a blessing has us glorying in the thanksgiving that he's given us cause for. You think of a beautiful rainbow. I mean, the colors are distinct. We can see each one.

You look at it and you say, well, there I see the yellow, the purple. Today, the blue is more prominent. They all together make a single rainbow. But if you look closely, the colors are distinct, but the borders are not.

They work together to present this unified whole, but they flow after each other so that they really can't be separated. Without each one, it's not really a rainbow. And I think this is sort of a picture of what prayer is like in what Paul is saying here.

I urge, and he gives all four, supplication, prayer, intercession, thanksgiving. All of it together, kind of melding together as needed, one taking prominence over the other. Do we not, in this place, give thanks to God when we go to him on behalf of someone who's terribly ill, including ourselves or another loved one who's asked for prayer in this place?

We said, we thank you, Father, that we go to you on behalf of this other person, this intercessory, because of this need that they have. And we, Father, have need to see you glorified in answering. That sort of thing, they all work together.

And we don't have to have each one every time as though God's gonna check and listen to all four and it's not a good prayer if we don't have all four. It's not like that at all. But they do work together in that way.

If you think of the prayers that we pray here on Wednesday nights, I can hardly think of a time when all four of these are not somehow, at some level, present at whatever prayer is needful at the moment.

The end of verse one, the first part of verse two give us clear targets of our prayer, don't they? Go to the last part of verse one in chapter two and then on into the first part of verse two. That all this, these prayers, be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.

Now, all people can be a bit of a controversial term, just like the world in John 3 .16. What does he mean? Does that mean every person everywhere without distinction, without discrimination? Did God so love the entire world, every human being of all times and all places, all borders, all kindred, no matter what?

But I think all people means just what it says. No one whose needs we know of are excluded. We come to a familiar Father who answers prayer. Sometimes we're far removed and we don't know those that we're praying for.

But God does. And for us, that should be enough. God will do what is right, and that too is enough to keep us in prayer. All people is all people. And in any event, the next group that we see there is one few of us are at all familiar with, isn't it?

Look who comes next. All people in verse one, but then verse two, kings and all who are in high positions. The first of those four definitions really comes to bear here. We prayed before in this place for President Obama, yet not one of us has ever met him, at least not that I know of.

We pray now for President Trump, who as far as I know, none of us knows. We can include the mayors of San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara, not one of whom I could name without checking my smartphone.

But the content of our prayers, which comes next, is very specific. It is not for their salvation. That comes everywhere, and that is always a God-honoring prayer, or that comes elsewhere, I should say.

Always a God-honoring prayer to pray for somebody's salvation. But here we pray to God in regards to them. We pray in regards to them. The preposition here is really important. The Greek language generally, prepositions are incredibly and vitally important, more so than in our English.

The preposition there, when we pray for these others, the preposition is huper. It leads the list for, or huper, kings and the rest. The lexicon says that in 1 Timothy 2 .1, huper means an activity or event is in some entity's interest, for in behalf of, for the sake of someone, or for something.

So why is it that I make a special point that our leader's salvation is not quite what's in view here? Because of this preposition, its meaning, and the context. I can explain with just a couple of rhetorical questions.

For whom do we especially need God's help? If we go to God for help, for whom do we especially need his help? The answer here, for those we don't know. Persecuted Christians we've never met, likely never will meet.

For our coworkers, cousins, stepdaughters, daughters, stepsisters, daughters, troubled pregnancy. We go to God on behalf of them. For God's intervention for us with people with great authority in high places, people who even if we met them, we'd have virtually no influence over.

So we go to them in regards to our needs, not for them particularly. Now as I said, that comes elsewhere in the scripture, and we do pray for them, and we do pray for their salvation. Here, we're actually praying for ourselves.

Praying for ourselves in regards to these people, these powerful people, kings and rulers in high places, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This may mean that we pray for some law to be enacted or another to be canceled.

You know the ancient Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times, you ever heard that? May you live in interesting times, and there's a follow-up to it, and may the authorities take notice of you.

It's something like that. Well, these others, that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but these others, these people that we don't have immediate access to. We're just one vote out of however many. In the day that Paul wrote this, democracy wasn't even in view.

We pray in regards to those who rule over us for ourselves in order that God works through them to ensure that we could lead peaceful, quiet lives, godly and dignified in every way. You know, a lot of expositors and commentators follow John Calvin, believing that we must pray first and most adamantly for those who would be most prone to hate.

I don't quite accept this. Christians can hate something. We can hate sin, ours and others. We can hate the devil and all his works, but nowhere do we have license to hate even a Nebuchadnezzar, whoever he may be in our day.

What Calvin misses is that preposition, and the direct subject of the prayer is that Paul considers the first priority, is the church. We pray to a God who helps us in our times of need. We pray when we need someone to stand between us, and in this immediate context, a government that has gone from nascent suspicion to possibly outright hostility.

In our times today, all over what was once a civilized Western world, Christians are derided, they're marginalized, denied making a living because of their faith. I saw Bernie Sanders said he would vote against Russell Vaught as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget because of Vaught's explicitly Christian faith.

That's just one recent confirmable example. You look at Canada, you look at England, wherever you go, the noose seems to be tightening. And so the encouragement here in the church is not to become afraid, not to shake at these powerful men, but to pray in regards to them, that God, through them, will continue to assure our ability to lead these quiet, dignified, godly lives.

And it's on behalf of ourselves that we go to them. We go to God because all the phone calls, all the emails, all the protest placards, none of this holds a candle against the blinding light and the blinding power of God.

And God approached in prayer. And the assumption made here is that we do or will lead quiet, godly, and dignified lives. It would make no sense to pray for these things and then to remove all constraints from ourselves.

Whenever we're able to conduct ourselves this way, to mind our own business as others mind theirs, it's a gift from God and is one worthy of thanks. And prayers that ask him to continue to supply that need, which we cannot supply for ourselves, are good prayers.

We're seeing in Braveheart, where William Wallace says he only wants to raise crops and his family. He doesn't want to get involved in what they call the troubles. Early in the movie, circumstances he didn't bring upon himself make it impossible for him to mind his own business or to live quietly or even to go back to his farm.

He lived in interesting times, I think the Chinese proverb would say. And the authorities to his ultimate demise took some notice of him. Paul's prayer here for us. Paul's prayer, they should be in the church, is quite the opposite, not that we hide.

We are that beacon on a hill that people can look and see our good works and give glory to our Father who is in heaven. And yet, pray God that we don't end up in the position that William Wallace, and it actually did, the movie's a good rendition of the history of William Wallace, that we're allowed to continue to worship God in peace and in freedom.

It is a gift from him. It's a need that we have that only God can supply to us. So this is the apostle's instruction to Timothy. As he's to begin to combat the false teachers and these heresies that have begun to infect the church that so alarmed the apostle, the first leg in refuting them, the first leg in beginning to repair the damage that they did, the first defense we have to prevent such a thing from coming into providence is prayer.

First of all then, I urge that prayers be made in regards to all these things on behalf of ourselves. Verse three says, this is good and 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.

Now here, as I said, we have sanction and license and warrant to pray for the salvation of those others. Some of you are waiting for that. No, we just pray for ourselves. We just say, God, make them do good things for us.

Yes, but read on. It's pleasing in the sight of God our Savior when we pray to him. And now we have more content to that prayer. He desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Now I don't have an exact format for prayer, but does this not teach us just here in these verses that our first priority of prayer can sound something like this? Lord, we thank you that we live in this land.

We thank you that we have the freedoms we have. May they continue through the leaders here. And God, can you, not can you, will you not save the mayor of San Jose? Oh, Father, we pray salvation to come to, and then fill in the name.

So let us please God by praying to him on behalf of ourselves. Let us unashamedly ask him to help us in our need, to intervene with the kings whose hearts are in his hands, and that as he turns mighty rivers where he will, so he would turn their hearts to be peaceful towards us.

This is first, that we can worship Jesus Christ, that we can continue to call out his praises. And let us not, as just a footnote, but with great fervency, pray God, and now, Father, save them. And may your gospel go forth to the good of your glory, and to the saving of many souls, for this is good and pleasing in his sight, amen.

Congregational Singing: O Sacred Head, Now Wounded

We'll turn, if you would, please, to number 178. Okay, number 178, stand with me, please, I'm sorry. Sorry for the hesitation. Number 178. Oh, sacred head, now wound and shame weighed down Now scornful be surrounded with thorns, thine only crown

Oh, sacred head, now wound and shame weighed down Now scornful be surrounded with thorns, thine only crown Yet thou, my strength and glory, thou be mine But thou, my Lord, hath suffered, was all for sinners gain

The deadly pain, lo, here I fall my savior, desire thy place Look on me with favor, vouchsafe thy grace What language shall I borrow To thank thee, dearest friend? For this, thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end, O make mine thine forever,.

And should I, fainting, be, Lord, let me never die.