5/17/26 - Prayer and the God of the Gospel | 1 Timothy 2:1–7 - Pastor Josh Rairdan

I’m excited to be with you this Sunday as we step back into 1 Timothy. We’ll be looking at 1 Timothy 2:1–7 this week, which begins a new section in the letter. Paul is moving on from dealing with false teachers (they’ll come back up later) to focus on the heart of the letter: “how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Timothy 3:15). Paul begins this long section by urging the church to pray, which is the passage we will be in this Sunday.

This passage has two emphases in it with the first being prayer. Paul calls the church to pray with urgency. How many of us feel this urgency in our prayer life today? As we struggle amid the busyness that modern life seems to amplify, it can be easy to lose sight of our prayer lives. Prayer, like many good things, can start to feel like a chore that we have to do instead of an incredible gift that God invites his people into. As you may have experienced, guilt tripping ourselves into praying more or trying to force ourselves into it through sheer will power usually doesn’t provide lasting change.

This brings us to the second emphases of our passage: the one God and the one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ. How are these two emphases related? The insight we get here is that our prayer lives dramatically change when we remember that we are praying to the God revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is what we will be exploring together on Sunday.