Well, I'm going to begin by telling you about a trip that I took, and I was thinking about it. It was 25 years ago now. In England, Janelle and I, before we had kids, had the privilege to go over there, and we took a 2,000-mile road trip of Britain. And I don't know many people that have done that. But we got to stay with a guy up there. And he lived in a city called Leeds, which was probably only 15 miles from Scotland. He asked us where we're going to go next. We said, we're going to go to Edinburgh. He said, why would you go all the way up there? He lives like 40 minutes from it. He'd never been to Scotland in his life. So we took a 2,000 mile trip of this island. We began in London, made our way up to York. We crossed the border. We went to Edinburgh. We came to Glasgow. Then we went down to Wales. And then we turned back to London, and we stopped in Windsor, of course, and then back in London. And we happened to be there on Easter Sunday. And on all of these places that we went, we took a tour of the most famous cathedral in those big towns. Something struck me as a lifelong Baptist, and it stays with me to this day, that no matter where we went, Every hour on the hour over the intercom system came about a one minute long prayer. And that prayer was nearly always the same. I remember them praying for the people that were visiting the church, praying for their country, praying for the crown, especially for the queen. and they prayed for the spread of the gospel. And without fail, they also made sure in an announcement either before or after that all the visitors to these amazing cathedrals remembered that these were not just tourist destinations. These were active churches. Jesus, quoting from the words that he had long said before to Isaiah, had said, it is written, my house shall be a house of prayer. Now many Baptists, I have found, are rather proud of the fact that they never ever say rote prayers, or written prayers, or non-spontaneous prayers. I'm not really sure why this is. Maybe it's because they believe if it doesn't come from the heart that it can't be a real prayer, and they assume that if it's something that somebody else wrote or forces you to say together, it can't come from your heart. Whatever the case, England was my first personal exposure to something like this, and I found what they did meaningful. Not only did they pray regularly in those churches, but they prayed, as Paul tells us even in our passage, for all who are in high positions. As I've thought about this over the years, I've been struck by something. If saying rote prayers over and over is maybe the end of one spectrum, not praying anything has to be the other. Now a dozen years ago, Grant Osborne, who's a professor up at Trinity Divinity School, wrote a convicting article on the history of corporate prayer from Judaism to ancient Christianity on down to today. And at the end of his lengthy discussion where he demonstrates that corporate prayer was in many places the main staple of the service, he laments a troubling fact that you either already know far too well yourself, or it's never crossed your mind He said, it is sad that in the average church today, so little prayer is uttered in the service, and so little time is given over to corporate prayer in church life. The churches I grew up in never prayed anything out loud together. It's because you can't pray a rote prayer together, because it's somehow bad. And this is despite the fact that the Lord's Prayer, commanded by our Savior, is full of corporate rather than personal pronouns. Right? Our Father, not my Father. Give us, not give me. Lead us, not lead me. We never prayed the Lord's Prayer in a single service that I remember. First time I ever remember hearing it done was at college. Now, they still had time for some kind of pastoral prayer, which usually lasted about a minute or two, and often only asked God to heal a couple of sick people in the congregation and then help us understand the sermon. Rarely did we pray for other churches, for missionaries, for governors or presidents. Never did we pray together confession of sin or prayers of repentance. Sadly, corporate prayer itself is altogether void in the worship of God in far too many American churches. Now I want you to compare this to the old Puritans. Now here's a biographer writing in the late 1800s about things that took place about 100 years before that, who explains of one Lord, Dr. Lord of Norwich, that he, quote, always made a prayer which was one hour long. An early Dutch traveler who visited New England asserted that he had heard there on fast day a prayer which was two hours long. These long prayers were universal and most highly esteemed, a poor gift in prayer being a most deplored and even despised clerical shortcoming. In other words, if you couldn't pray, you didn't want him as your pastor. Had not the Puritans left the Church of England to escape stinted prayers, by which it means shortened prayers, everywhere in the Puritan church, precatory eloquence as invents in long prayers was felt to be the greatest glory of the minister and the highest tribute to God. So what in the world has happened? If, as some have said, worship is the only proper response to a sovereign God who is personally involved in our lives, and prayer is the primary means that we respond in worship, and if prayer is the central phenomenon of religion, the very hearthstone of all piety, as somebody has said, And if praying is the most important thing God's people do, as someone has said, and if our Lord himself commands we are to pray corporate prayers together, and he even says, as he introduces the Lord's Prayer in Luke, he says, pray like this, what has gone wrong? So I suspect a couple of things. First, we have a bad theology of prayer. And second, more fundamentally, we have a bad theology of God. So that's kind of how I'm gonna break down the sermon today. So the passage that we're looking at is the meat of 1 Timothy, it begins it, and it specifically begins the instructions that the pastor of the church at Ephesus is to communicate and carry out in the church. As such, it's especially focused on corporate church life. We can ask a question as we begin. Is prayer really the most important thing God's people do? By this I mean do together. My thought is kind of ruminated over that this week is that it's difficult to answer because there's a lot of important things that we do. But I want you to notice that in his exhortation to the corporate church, the apostle begins in 1 Timothy 2.1 by saying, first of all. And then he launches into at least eight verses dealing with corporate prayer. So I think that would at least lend itself to making prayer at least a possible number one on that list. Now, I've chosen to look at the first seven verses, not the first eight, because verse eight is really kind of transitional to the next section, and I think it belongs better there. So just thinking about the structure of this thing, the entire chapter is chiastic, centering on verses five and six, which I'll come back to a little bit later. On the other hand, you can divide the chapter into two easy halves, focusing on really prayer, and then next time focusing on women and men. Men praying with holy hands is verse eight. So it kind of ends this section, begins the next section. But I might choose to leave it in the next section. Now, as we move into our passage, we begin answering the first problem about a bad theology of prayer. Prayer is the first thing Timothy's told to urge his church to practice together. And as such, a bad theology of prayer would put prayer down much lower on the importance scale, wouldn't it? Bad theology of prayer, I believe, would also include a stinted understanding of the kinds of prayers that there are, and even more important, the sorts of attitude a person should have when offering them to God. Now remember, the prayers of the saints are the spiritual equivalent of offering physical incense in the Old Testament temple. Therefore, clearly the heart has to be in prayer. So he goes and he mentions four terms here at the beginning in verse one, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings. So we're going to look at each of these in turn. Since I've mentioned this a couple of times already, it's worth beginning where Matthew Henry does. He notes that Paul does not send him any prescribed form of prayer. as we have reason to think he would have if he intended that ministers should be tied to that way of praying. Now, Henry's point goes back to the earliest reformers, and it's worth thinking about. Philip Schaff, who's the historian, the great historian of about 100 years ago, wrote about prayer in the Reformation liturgies of Zwingli and Farrell and Calvin, and this is what he says. He says that they adopted that simple and spiritual mode of worship which is well-adopted for intelligent devotion if it be animated by the quickening presence and power of the Spirit of God, but which becomes barren, cold, and chilly if that power is wanting. They opened the inexhaustible fountain of free prayer and public worship with its endless possibilities of application to varying circumstances and wants, and congregational singing, which is the true popular liturgy and more effective than reading of written forms of prayer. So earlier I said that many Baptists take pride in never saying rote prayers. And the point seems to be that prayer God desires should be spontaneous and from the heart. Now there's no question that liturgies with the same prayers every week, and don't think I don't know this as the pastor, okay? There's no question that these kinds of things can become monotonous. And people can lose their hearts and their lips and just mimic the words. God does not desire that. However, a written or often recited prayer is not bad anymore than the Lord's prayer is somehow bad because it was written down for us and Jesus told us to pray it together. See, the problem is not the prayer. The problem is us. In some ways, the liturgy forces you to pay attention and to care in ways that you don't often have to practice when everything is spontaneous. The true worship of God, including prayer, can only at best be modeled by other people. It is you yourself who have to put in the effort to worship God, the God who saved you. So that said, it's clear that these particular prayers here are in fact not written or memorized beforehand. So what are they? Well, my mind goes to a modern acronym that also contains four kinds of prayers that I've used to help people learn the different types of prayers. That acronym is the acronym ACTS, A-C-T-S. It stands for prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. Now, two of these overlap exactly with the four words that Paul gives here. Now many Christians are stuck on the first one. This is the word supplication. So it's not uncommon to go into prayer meeting and hear almost exclusively prayers of supplication. Supplication means to ask or beg for something earnestly or humbly. We can define this as making requests for specific needs, or a prayer offered with entreaty to get something a person lacks, or a plea or petition made on account of present and past sin by someone who's moved by contrition to seek pardon. Now at its worst, this is treating God like a genie in a bottle. Rub three times and get your wish, right? At its best, it's trusting God to intervene in any number of ways that are important to you. As Jesus told us in the parable of the persistent widow, keep going before the Father in heaven, supplicating, telling him what you want, and Jesus says, pray and do not lose heart. Now, it seems that this kind of prayer is what comes most naturally to us, because we're like little children who constantly want our dad to give us stuff. Long ago, John Cassian, the church fathers wrote a wonderful treatise on prayer. And whatever else you may think of people like him, hermits, friars, monastics in the early church, these people wanted to master the art of prayer. The old monk made an astute observation about this verse, calling the first kind of prayer, quote, especially appropriate for beginnings. for they are still goaded by stings and by the memory of past sin." So I found that really interesting. He attaches, actually, confession of sin to supplication. I'm going to turn to that in a minute. Moving on, he sees a progression in growing in prayer in each word. So he calls the second type appropriate for those who are making progress in the acquisition of virtue and the exaltedness of their souls. In fact, he sees the next two after that as being higher levels of prayer in ascending order. He says the third is suitable for those who live as they have promised to do, who with the frailty of others and who speak out of them because of the charity that moves them. And then he says the fourth suits those who have pulled the painful thorn of penitence out of their hearts and who in quiet of their purified spirit contemplate the kindness and mercy that the Lord has shown them in the past, and that he gives them now, and that he makes ready for them in the future. So the second thing that he mentions here is just called prayers, and it's what Cassian calls offering or promising something to God. It's like a vow. Others have called it something nobler, offered by a person with praise for greater objects, or bringing those things in view before God. Now, Origen, who was even earlier than Cassian, wrote the very first systematic treatise on prayer in church history, and also saw an ascending order to prayer in this list. He called the next one, which is intercessions, a petition for certain things addressed to God by someone who has some greater boldness. with particular emphasis on the Holy Spirit interceding for us. And more simply, these intercessions are appealing boldly on someone else's behalf. Or as Cassian says, they are usually made when others and we ourselves are deeply moved in spirit. And then the last one is thanksgivings. That's the word that we get the word Eucharist from, to give thanks. These are, as the word says, prayers of thankfulness, either for them, that is for prayers that are answered, or when God holds out a future reward to those who love him and the mind give thanks for it. So there are all kinds of biblical examples of each word being used for prayer. And I think that enough people have at least an understanding of the concepts that I don't need to say much more about what these are. But I do want to point out something that Cassian more than others focuses on, which is the attitude that accompanies these prayers. Because you see, these are not just a bare list of ways to pray or types of prayer. Rather, they are the disposition of the heart in the prayer. He said that supplications come from those who are still goaded by the stings in the memory of past sin. He calls prayers promises that we offer or vows to God. In these we renounce the world, we undertake to die to all the world's deeds, to serve the Lord with all our heart's zeal, to despise worldly glory and earthly riches, to cling to the Lord with a contrite heart and spirit of poverty, to put on the purest bodily chastity and unswerving patience, to drag completely from our hearts the root of anger, our laziness, our sinful ways. He says in intercessions that we are, quote, deeply moved in spirit. And he says in thanksgivings that we are, quote, unspeakably moved by God's past kindness or the vision of what he now grants or will grant the future to those who love him. In fact, as all the reformers later knew far too well, prayers, including those in your private life, and especially those in church, have to be done from each individual heart desiring to unite their minds and desires with the triune God. Now, if this is the kinds of prayers and dispositions that the church must offer and have, the apostle wants Timothy to focus on a very specific content that each of these prayers must have. This is the specific types of people to be prayed for. See, it's quite natural to supplicate and make intercession for your family, for your friends, for your loved ones. Too many people stop here. There's a key word that begins our first verse. It says, first of all. The Greek literally reads, I beseech you, first of all. The word is all. All will become the dominating word of the entire passage. Of all the things Paul will talk about, this is the first. The word appears again at the end of the verse. These kinds of prayers are to be made for, quote, all people. Now, the meaning here is clear. If you can think of a person, you cannot exclude them from these kinds of prayers. All people means all people. God does not give you permission not to pray for someone with supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings. Now, it was once communicated to me that a member of our church was angry at me. Someone else told her, well, why don't you pray for him? This particular woman used to pray for me very specifically in ways that I don't remember many others ever doing in prayer meetings. It was a blessing. But once she got angry, she told the other person, I couldn't do that. This is a direct violation of Paul's command here. She eventually ended up leaving the church. I pray she's gotten over her anger at this point. There's one particular group of people that many really do not want to pray for, unless it's imprecatory curses. And this is governors, politicians, kings, presidents, national leadership. Now, like much of the rest of this letter, we enter right now into a minefield that will not let up until we're finished with the passage. And then next week, we'll just enter more minefields, okay? What are the hidden bombs here? So Paul literally says to pray for kings and all who are in high positions. The first difficulty is peculiar to the modern world. In America, we don't have kings. The second difficulty can be brought in, brought out by the NIV translation. It says not those in high positions, but those in authority. Now in America, our government officials are not our authority. Unless they act in agreement and harmony with our constitution, only to that end do they have any authority legally speaking. That's just the way our government operates. And sadly, too many people are ignorant of their own country's inner workings. Our governing officials are technically not authorities at all. They are servants. Our authority is a legal document that guarantees the rights of all citizens and sets the limitations on those servants. Now is not the time to get too far afield and discuss the pertinent issues of the gross abuses of tyrannical presidents and senators and congressmen and governors and mayors, city council and school board members, as it regards their duties and usurpation of the rule of law, other than to say these things. First, our passage does not give excuse to tyrants, nor does it limit the kinds of prayers we may offer, including imprecatory prayers, if need be. Second, our passage is not dealing specifically with ways that we can combat tyrants while also praying for them and still acting faithfully to God's word. It simply focuses on praying for them. And finally, no matter how bad things are or get with the abuses in the current color revolution in our republic, kings of old were no better. Do not idolize the old days. Caesars and kings have been putting Christians to death for thousands of years. Calvin pointed out that in his day, all the rulers of his time were, quote, enemies of the gospel, persecutors of the poor Christians, murderers, and wicked men. Due only to God's kind hand of providence and the incredible foresight of a lot of smart men, we have not historically been on that more common side of the persecution equation. Now the point is, This made these people hard to pray for. Curiously, traditional prayers in Jewish synagogues did not include any prayers for authority, especially Gentiles. That makes prayer for such rulers a particularly Christian trait. And yet, given all this, this is precisely the command given to Timothy. Now Ambrosiaster, who had just lived through a persecution of Emperor Julian, in 361 A.D., has a fascinating take on these four words as it relates to this very theme. He says supplications are on behalf of secular rulers that they may have obedient subjects. Prayers are for those to whom power has been entrusted that they may govern with justice and truth. Intercessions are for those in dire necessity that they may find help, and thanksgivings refer to gratitude for God's daily providences. If I might restate, half of those prayers are for the unlovable leaders, and the other half are for us so that we might learn to pray for them. Now, example of a very early prayer obeying this very command is found in the apostolic father, Clement of Rome, who prayed perhaps as early as 70 AD, saying, grant to them, Lord, health, peace, harmony, and stability, that they may blamelessly administer the government which you have given to them. Lord, direct their plans according to what is good and pleasing in your sight, so that by devoutly administering in peace and gentleness the authority which you have given them, they may experience your mercy." And I think that's a pretty common way of praying for authorities. And yet, as Philip Ryken, and I think rightly so, says, the kind of prayer the Apostle Paul especially has in mind is evangelistic prayer. It is intercession for the salvation of souls. This is clear from the rest of the passage, which is about God's plan for the salvation of the world. We're going to come to that minefield in a minute. But first, the apostle gives us a reason. If we must pray for those who want to curse, we want to curse, it had better be a good reason. So he says, pray that we may lead peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good and pleasing in the sight of God, our Savior. This was exactly Ambrosiaster's point. I didn't read the whole thing to you. He said, supplications are on behalf of secular rulers that they may have obedient subjects and thus peace and tranquility. He said, prayers are for those to whom power has been entrusted so that they may govern with justice and truth so that all may prosper. Now, I find this a very interesting and powerful enticement to obey. You see, he's saying it's for your own well-being that you offer up such prayers. Now somebody might say, that's inherently selfish. To which I respond, oh well. The law and Jesus teach us to love our neighbor as we love our self. If you didn't love yourself, you would do terrible things to yourself. Self-esteem is not an invention of secular psychology. It's part of the proper understanding of the inherent dignity of man. Peaceful and quiet lives is put in context of godly and dignified lives. Here comes another potential mine. Reichen's comments, I think, are worth hearing. He says, Christians are not always known as peacemakers. This was true already during Paul's lifetime when Christians were blamed for the burning of Rome. It's also true during the Reformation. Calvin first wrote his Institutes to show that the reformers were not trying to undermine social order. The church's reputation is in need of almost continual defense for Christian involvement in public life is often greeted with skepticism and hostility. This is partially because the gospel is so radical that Christians are always potential revolutionaries. Yet in the face of opposition, God wants his people to keep it quiet. He wants them to lead orderly, dignified, reverent lives in all tranquility and serenity. In the words of the New English Bible, Christians are to maintain full observance of religion and high standards of morality. They are to be respectful and respectable. I'm going to make two qualifications to what he says here. First one is, Paul's is a comment on church worship, not the individual's obligation to justice in the face of tyranny. We're talking to a church. The Reformers did plenty of standing up to evil. Paul is writing to the church, not to individual Christians and their involvement in the world. Second thing, as the church carries out its quiet, dignified, orderly life, praying in such ways, part of that job is to speak God's truth when a society endangers its people because of gross sin. In fact, we're even to pray against it. Those are not in opposition. I think Zwingli understood the balance here. He said, if the two brightest luminaries of our faith, Jeremiah and Paul, both command us to pray to the Lord for the powers that be, that we may be enabled to live a godly life, how much more is it the duty of all people in the different kingdoms and peoples to attempt to accomplish all that they can to safeguard Christian quietness? We teach, therefore, that tributes, taxes, dues, tithes, pledges, loans, and all kinds of obligations should be paid, and that the common laws should be generally obeyed in such matters." Doesn't make it always, but he says generally. Now, Reichen continues. He says, the reason Paul insisted on good deportment is that it is essential to the witness of the church. Christians who do not pray for their political leaders tend to disturb the peace. They are cynical about their political opponents and rejoice when they fall into disgrace. But as John Chrysostom rightly claimed, no one can feel hatred towards those for whom he prays. Prayer replaces hostility with compassion. Point is, anyone, be it a king or an elected official or a school board official, anyone who's been charged with the duty to make and carry out law and govern a land is to be prayed for. Not just with the lips, but with the heart. You are to be fervently interceding for them, not just the ones you love, but those you don't. Not only for those who obey, but for those who do not. Not just in precaratory psalms, but psalms for their salvation, wisdom, well-being, obedience to God, and care for those they lead. And this is for your good. But there's a deeper motivation that is given And in it, we move from potential bad theology about prayer to potential bad theology about God. So now we enter into a second major minefield. It isn't just that this is pleasing in God's sight that we ourselves be dignified and godly in our conduct towards others. No. These prayers are directed at these people because it is pleasing in the sight of God, our Savior, quote, who desires all people to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. Now, I'm gonna spend some time on this because it just has to be done, okay? I want you to first note our word, all, again. This is its fourth appearance in four verses. It means the same thing in every instance. All without exception. We are to pray for all people without exception. We don't get to say, no, God told me not to pray for him. This includes all kings and all in high positions of authority, no exceptions. We aren't allowed to say, well, he committed a coup and isn't duly elected, so I'm off the hook. In like manner, God desires all people without exception to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. Now I want us to think about several different problems that bring deep confusion to people as they read this. The first one involves God's will. there may be no more badly misunderstood topic in the entire Bible than God's will. Because the word desires is the same word that is often used for God's will. The problem is the Bible speaks of God's will or desire in more than one sense. But it only uses one word to do it. So, consider these examples. Acts 18.21 It says, I will return to you if God wills. Or Colossians 1.1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God. Now in these instances, God's will here is a sovereign decree that cannot fail to come to pass. Theologians have called this many different things, but some of them are God's sovereign will, or his will of decree. Whenever God wills something in this sense, it happens. As Nebuchadnezzar said, no one can stay his hand or say to him, what have you done? He was the most powerful man on the earth. Now I want you to consider these, 1 John 2, 17. Whoever does the will of God abides forever. 1 Thessalonians 5.18, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Now this time God's will can be and very often is thwarted. People do not obey God's law as he wills. The Bible is not contradicting itself. It's speaking in different senses. This does not refer to God's sovereign will, but rather to what we call his prescriptive will, his will of command, his revealed will, or more simply, just his law. If you read our passage as teaching God's sovereign will to actually save whom he will, then you will be confused because you know that not all people are or will be saved. It's not teaching this. If you do this, this in turn might cause you to become a universalist. Because you'll say, well, if God really wills such a thing, then everyone will be saved, because nobody can thwart his will. Or you might deny that God actually wants all people to be saved. Because you'll say, if God wills all people to be saved, and they are saved, then clearly, all does not mean all without exception. Or you may deny the biblical truth that God's sovereign will is simply not thwartable. Because you'll say, obviously, people are thwarting it. And so therefore, his sovereign will is thwartable. Now, none of those are good options. But this minefield is very easily avoided. Paul is not talking about God's decree. He's talking about his desire that men obey him. We pray for their salvation, but how can they believe if they've not heard? Well, heard what? Heard the gospel. See, God desires that all men, without exception, hear the gospel and believe it, just like he desires all Christians hear the law and obey it. Very often, both of those are thwarted, not because God's sovereign will is thwarted, but because He isn't talking about that. He's talking about the will that people obey Him and be holy and know forgiveness. What does He tell Ezekiel? I do not delight in the death of the wicked, says the Lord. Rather, turn from your sin and live. All right, that's one minefield. There's so many more in this. We're gonna turn to a second bomb. This is the parallel in verse six. It says, he gave himself as a ransom for all. Now, before getting into this, I want you to remember the structure. The center of our passage is verse five. It's composed of two halves. The first half says there is one God. The second half says there is one mediator between God and men, the man, Christ Jesus. Now, in typical apostolic fashion, the chiasm centers on God and his work in Christ. They're always doing this. And it's confusing, or as much as people want to argue over some of the doctrines that are before us, Paul's focus on God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ is as a mediator. And this is so that God alone will be glorified. And any doctrine that does not do this misses the point and falls woefully short of the truth. But I want you to look at something here. Of whom is Christ the mediator in this verse? What does it say? It says men. He's the mediator between God and men. How do we understand this? Well, Jesus came as a man. He therefore mediates for men. Not some men, just men, humans. Now this is another bomb with the dust just covering the surface waiting to be stepped on in the blow. This verse is not talking about subjective personal salvation. It's talking about the office of Christ as priest. He is the intercessor. He's the second Adam. He's the great high priest. His intercession is not for types of men, as Jews thought. It's for the class of created beings called men. Any man or woman or child that would be saved, they must come through Christ. Whether or not anyone wants to come is a totally different question. Here the question is, through whom is salvation mediated? Jesus is the only mediator because he alone has offered the acceptable sacrifice and was himself the sacrifice that was pleasing to God on the cross. Men deserve death, not some men, all men. Jesus died taking that curse that men deserve, hence he's the mediator of men. All right, I've noted that mine here, hidden under the surface, so let's consider how the structure can help us avoid the next one. If God and Christ is the center, then the alls on either side are parallel to one another. As before, so now. The alls have not changed their meaning. Christ is still the ransom for all without exception. But you must understand properly what this means. Arminians have an easy time accepting that this means all without exception, because they just jettison the sovereign decree of God and they don't care. They believe Jesus is a ransom for all, but all do not use their free will to come to Christ. Somebody showed me this meme last night, right as I'm thinking about this. And they're seeing the picture of the woman, the angry, young Karen, yelling something. And then the cat responds, like cool cat. And she goes, I choose God with my free will. And the cat says, you can't even motivate yourself to go to the gym. You can think about that one for a long time. Unbelievable. I don't even remember where I was at here. OK. So the alls have not changed meaning, it means all without exception. Armenians jettisoned this, okay, because they don't believe in the sovereign decree, they believe Jesus is a ransom for all, but they don't, people just don't use their free will to come to Christ. But this is not biblical, what they're thinking here. First, it presupposes too much about our human nature. It presupposes that we're basically good, and we want to come to Christ. If they were right about how we're saved and we just use our free will, it wouldn't be some who do not use their free will to come to Christ. It would be literally every human being and no one would ever be saved. See, Arminius himself uses this passage to quote, prove that the sovereign will of God predestination can be thwarted. But he isn't thinking clearly. The passage isn't talking about God's sovereign decree to save, as we've already seen. In like manner, many confuse the objective work of Christ on the cross as a ransom with the subjective work of the Holy Spirit in salvation. These are not the same thing. Jesus' work on the cross is not identical to you being saved by faith. Otherwise, you wouldn't have been born under God's wrath. This ransom happened outside of you 2,000 years ago, not in your heart. You need to think of this like we just did with God's will for all to be saved. You see, Christ's ransoming work on the cross is parallel here to both of these things in relation to the law, the revealed will, not to the decree of God, the secret will. That is, what does the law demand? It demands a ransom for guilty sinners. That ransom is a sacrifice that appeases God. If that ransom is given, then the law has been satisfied and justice has been served. And the due punishment the law requires for sin, whether it's the sin of one man or all men, it doesn't matter because it's been met by the sacrifice. The sacrifice died. Nothing more could be done than what was done. This is not about you. It's about Christ's work in satisfying the law of God. It's about justice being satisfied, not for sins, not individual sins, but for sin, for a violation, any violation of the law. See, God desires all people to be saved. That is to hear the gospel and not die, but to believe. That doesn't mean he decrees that. Jesus died as a ransom for all, but that doesn't mean he decrees all to be saved. For reasons that are often inscrutable and beyond our understanding, as a friend of mine says, God often wills what he knills. Parents can understand this. We always want our children to be protected and safe, but we do not decree this. Otherwise, they'd never grow up and leave the house. We will what we knill. The reasons here are God's and God's alone, but that he would save anyone is a miracle of absolute grace. And too many think God owes us that, and he doesn't. So Christ's death is a ransom that the law demands, and as such, it is wholly sufficient to save anyone who would believe in it. Sufficiently, it is for everyone. God didn't need another sacrifice to save those who won't come to him. Efficiently, God works that sufficient work on the cross in his elect, and thank God he does, because that work causes them to be saved. But unfortunately, there's been so much bad teaching about these things since Arminius, and then the reform knee-jerked from that heresy. There's almost no end to the confusion that it's caused so many people. It isn't easy to think through this, but it is important. Let me go to Arminius again here. He badly misunderstood this passage and taught that because of it, quote, predestination is in open hostility to the ministry of the gospel because it hinders public prayers from being offered to God. Now, I totally disagree with that. In reality, it's because God predestines that we can know that our prayers will be effectual and actually save sinners, because God's gracious and he works these prayers together with the sovereign will of his own inner workings so that they will be effectual. You know what I believe? I believe God puts somebody on your mind to pray for them. I believe it's because God wants to use that prayer to save them. I just choose to believe that. I think I have reason to do that. I pray for a lot of people that I don't, in my heart, really mean it. Just admit it. And that's, I'm preaching to myself here as much as I am to you guys. Others have just as badly misunderstood it on the other side, where they've justified anything from changing the plain meaning of the words to not praying for whomever they want to feel like not praying for. None of this is necessary. We don't need to change all to mean not all, but neither do we need to destroy God's sovereignty over his creatures by denying predestination to do it. Let's look at the last verse here. This is Paul's own experience. He says, for this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle. Then he says, I'm telling the truth. I'm not lying. A teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. See, Paul was so full of hatred for Gentiles being converted that he started to kill as many of them as he could in his foreign life. We talked about that a few weeks ago. But what happened? God changed the man's heart. God chose him, is the language Acts 9 uses. He uses the word here, appointed. God predestined him. See, he knows without this that he would have continued in blindness forever. But now he pleads before the throne day and night for the salvation of anyone he can think of. Then he goes out and he does everything he can to be God's chosen instrument in making their salvation effectual through his gospel, leaving the final act of grace to God that he might get all the glory. Now I want you to look at the word truth there. This is an important word. He wants them to come to the knowledge of the truth in verse four, Here, he's telling the truth in verse seven, they're parallel. Only the truth can set a person free. Only the truth can cause them to desire the salvation of even their worst enemy. Only the truth can cause someone to pray, not only for people they like, but to grow in their prayer life so that it becomes an inseparable link between them and the God who saved them. The truth comes through truth incarnate, through the Lord Jesus Christ. whom we worship and pray would change this church in days like ours. So yes, there are two things hampering our prayer lives, bad theology about prayer and bad theology about God. Together, these have caused people to come up with other excuses in prayer, and those often work their way out into corporate things in our churches. D.A. Carson lists several reasons people often give. I'm too busy to pray. I feel too spiritually dry to pray. I feel no need to pray. I'm too bitter to pray. I'm too ashamed to pray. I'm content with mediocrity. Does anybody actually say that one? I don't know. But these all have bad theology at their heart. Alice Earle, who wrote about that two-hour-long Puritan prayer, made an observation 130 years ago about something that is maybe even more dangerous than these excuses. She noted the changing times and the lessening of prayers and services, and she says this, at last, when other means of entertainment and recreation than churchgoing became common, and other forms of public addresses than sermons were frequently given, New England churchgoers became so restless and rebellious under the regime of hour-long prayers and infinitely protracted sermons that the long services were gradually condensed and curtailed to the relief of both preacher and hearers. So it's good to understand that in Puritan times, even they had motives that could be easily distracted. Entertainment is nothing new. It's a great bane to the true worship of God, including how we pray. I notice a direct correlation between the more entertaining a church is to the less prayer you find in it. I suspect few of us would be any more thrilled with two-hour prayers than they were, but I wonder, is that actually a good thing? Consider the words of E.M. Bounds, who said, spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. People complain about worship being hard and difficult. Let me read this again. Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. And it's your obligation, sitting there in the pew, to worship God. I can't do it for you. Praying, true praying costs an outlay of serious attention of time with flesh and blood, which flesh and blood do not relish. Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will pass as well in the market. Far too many Christians want cotton candy worship and think that it should be immediately easy and without much of anything that it's demanding on me. And the same goes for prayer. This is not so, and it's time now for us to grow up into maturity. Leonard Ravenhill, speaking of revival, but which could just as easily be said of True praying, more generally, especially in churches, and for our enemies, said this, we live in a generation that has never known revival God's way. True revival changes the moral climate of an entire area or nation. Without exception, all true revivals of the past began after years of agonizing, hell-robbing, earth-shaking, heaven-sent intercession. The secret of true revival in our own day is still the same, but where, oh where, are the intercessors? Let's pray together. Our Father, what's before us is truly profound and important stuff. And I would ask and plead for myself and for your people that you would use your word and that it would penetrate deeply into our hearts and our minds. We need to learn what it means to pray. I don't know what it is. Maybe in our theology somewhere, we justify not praying because we don't understand how it could work in your sovereign will. All I know, Lord, is that praying is the way I get to know you, and the way I talk to you, the way that my relationship happens to you, with you. And if I didn't have that, it would be like a friend that I haven't talked to in forever. It just, what would be the point? I would ask, Lord, that you would help each person in here that confesses Christ. Give them a relationship where they talk to you and supplicate and make intercession and have thanksgivings and make prayers. Pray that you would impress it on our hearts that you want us to be praying for the things we've looked at today. In days where it's really hard to pray and to know what to pray for and to pray for the people that have been put in control of this world by your providence. I pray, Lord, that you would, in fact, save many of these people and that you would do it for the well-being of your church, that we might live quiet, peaceable lives with all godliness and reverence and fear. And I'll ask you, hear our prayer here as we come to the Lord's table and we think about what it is Christ did for us. Hear our prayer in his name, we ask.