What God Wants
1 Timothy 2:1-10
Dr. Roger W. Thomas, Preaching Minister
First Christian Church, Vandalia, MO
Introduction: A guy was on a diet. His biggest temptation was donuts. As he drove down the street in front of his favorite donut shop, he prayed, “Lord, if you want me to have a donut this morning, let there be a parking place right in front of the bakery.” Later his wife asked him if had stopped at the donut shop. He told her about his prayer. “Well, what happened,” she persisted. “There was a parking place right in front of the door just like I prayed. I spotted it on my eighth trip around the block.”
We say want to know God’s will. What we really want to know too often is how to bend God’s will to ours. At other times, we pretend that God’s will is a great mystery. We can’t do what we don’t know. Most of the time our problem is a lack of obedience not lack of knowledge. What Mark Twain said of the Bible applies to God’s will in general. “It’s not those parts that I don’t understand that give me the biggest problem, it’s the parts that I do understand.”
So what is God’s will? What does he want? Our text makes it clear that a big chunk of God’s will has already been revealed. It is not a mystery. It is not complicated. It involves three interrelated objectives. Notice how our text fits them together. We will tackle them in reverse order.
First, God wants everyone to be saved. Note verses three and four, “This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” Can it be any clearer? God’s great desire is the salvation of lost people. The Christian message is not about making us feel better. It is not fundamentally about our earthly happiness. It is not about making us healthy, wealthy, and wise. Some of those things might be by products. The gospel is about how men and women who have messed up their lives by disobeying God can be made right with God now and for eternity.
The gospel is not about this political policy or that political program. It is not about social reform or caring for the poor and hungry. It is not about building hospitals or orphanages as good and important as those things are. The truth is Christians have always been the first people doing those things around the world. But the gospel is about what Jesus Christ did on the cross for us. It is not about what we do for God or for other people.
Jesus came to seek and save the lost. That’s how you became saved. Somewhere, sometime, somebody told you what Jesus had done for you. You heard it. You believed it. You accepted it. You obeyed the gospel and were saved. What was true for you can be true for anyone.
God wants all people saved. All means all. The gospel is not a white person’s, rich person’s, or an old person’s message. Jesus wants to save the up and out and the down and out. He want to save the person who has only broken one of the Ten Commandments just like he wants to save the person who has broken them all. He wants to save respectable people. He even wants to save the kind of people you don’t like. God wants all people to be saved.
That this is God’s will, however, doesn’t mean that all people will be saved. Jesus and the rest of the Bible make this clear. We don’t have to understand it all to accept the fact. God has so created humans that they have a choice. We can accept or reject God’s offer. God is ultimately in control, but we humans are still free and responsible. God does not play “eenie meanie minie moe”—you come in and you stay out of heaven. He truly and honestly wants all men to be saved. The Bible closes with the assurance, “Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Rev.22:17).
God’s will is truth based. God wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. Salvation comes from hearing and believing the Gospel. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6who gave himself as a ransom for all men…”
Some have wrongly concluded through the years that since it is God’s will that all men be saved, then he does that without human agency. Two hundred years ago, William Carey and other missionary pioneers had to argue that foreign missions was God’s will. Some religious leaders around them contended that if God wanted the heathen saved, he would do it himself. He didn’t need our help. Any human actions or planning was just that—human. If we trusted God’s wisdom, they insisted, we would do nothing. God alone picks and chooses those to be saved. Clearly that’s not the meaning of this passage. “And for this purpose I was appointed a herald and an apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not lying—and a teacher of the true faith to the Gentiles.” People become saved when those who are already saved speak the truth about what God has done in Jesus Christ and extend an invitation for lost people to come to Jesus. God will is our work.
God wants all men to be saved. That’s the first and most obvious lesson of our text. The second is related. God wants those who are saved to lead godly lives. Our lives are related to God’s desire for all to be saved because we are his best advertisement. People make judgments about God based on the conduct of God’s children.
That’s why in addition to wanting all men to be saved, God also wants us to live peaceful, quiet, godly, and holy lives. Listen to the way the Bible makes this claim. 1 Timothy 5 talks about living so that we “won’t be open to blame” (7). We are not to give the enemy “an opportunity for slander” (14). Titus 2, which parallels 1 Timothy 5, calls Christians to godly lives so that “no one will malign the word of God” (5), “that those who oppose you may be ashamed because they have nothing bad to say about us” (8), and “so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive” (10).
The point is that our lives should back up our words. But words are needed. The gospel is what is needed. None of us are perfect even on our best days. What we do never converted anyone. Only the good news about what Jesus did can do that.
Our text uses four terms to describe the quality of life that God wants from us. The first two speak to our relationship with man—peaceful and quiet. We should be the kind of people who get along with others to the degree that we have control over it. We aren’t trouble makers. We don’t look for arguments and quarrels. We should have a reputation for being kind, gracious, and peace loving.
The second two words refers to our relationship with God—godliness and holiness. Godliness refers to a spiritual reverence that is more than skin deep. Our love for God is genuine. We aren’t just going through the motions. We obey God from the inside, not just when it is easy and costs us nothing. Holiness describes a life that is set apart for God. We don’t just do what everyone else is doing. We live for and follow Christ because he has made a difference in us. That’s what God wants. That’s the kind of life that will impact a lost world and cause the people who know us to want to know more about our God.
God wants all people to be saved. That’s number one. That will not happen if we don’t live lives that back up the gospel. That’s why he wants people who live godly lives. But God wants a third thing. He wants us to pray. If we don’t pray, we might think it all depends on us, that we are the key to saving the world or that we can live a godly life under our own steam. God knows better. He wants us to know better. That’s why he wants us to pray. That’s step one.
Listen to the way our text starts—“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone.” God wants all men to be saved. That’s why we start by praying for all men. We pray for everyone without exception. Prayer is the heart of God’s plan for saving the lost. We pray for the Lord to send laborers into the harvest as Jesus taught us. We pray that the Lord will open doors and give wise words to say when the opportunity arises (Col. 4: 2-6).
Our text adds another topic to our prayer list. We are to pray “for kings and all those in authority.” I want to remind you that these words were written to believers who lived under the cruel boot of the Roman Empire. There rulers were evil, anti-Christian tyrants. Yet believers were called to pray for their pagan rulers.
We live in terribly partisan political times. I am not sure that it is any worse that it has ever been. It just seems that way because we are surrounded with so much more information that used to exist. It was pretty nasty a hundred years ago. But attitudes have certainly hardened in recent years. Republicans and Democrats are constantly at one another’s throats.
If we are not careful, Christians who are Democrats can think that have a responsibility to criticize Republican politicians just like Republicans think they are supposed to bad-mouth Democrats. You may or may not feel that way. But I know this, everyone of you who claim to be followers of Jesus have an even higher responsibility to pray for those in authority whether they belong to your party or not. Obviously, I am not talking about praying that they drop dead or get what we think is coming to them. Our text says to offer requests, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings for kings and those in authority.
Why do we pray for those in authority? Note how our text explains it. We pray so that we can live quiet, peaceful, holy and godly lives. The society we are in affects how we live. Those who govern affect our society. We want good leaders because that makes it easier for us to live good lives. Our good lives make it easier to get what God wants—the salvation of lost.
Can I make a radical suggestion? Whenever any one who claims to be a Christian (you can’t do this with your unbelieving neighbors) brings up politics in your presence (regardless of their party or position), don’t let them rant and rave and complain without asking them, “Have you been praying for George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton or you-fill-in-the-blank like the Bible tells us to?” You might even offer to have a spontaneous prayer meeting right then and there rather than continuing to roast your least favorite politician.
Why prayer for everyone—even kings and those in authority that you may not like? Because that what God wants.
Conclusion: God wants three things. They are all related. The order is important. We start by praying because we can’t do it on our own. We pray for our leaders because we want a world that enables us to live God-honoring lives. That’s not easy in the best of conditions. It is extremely difficult in a society gone wrong.
We pray that way so that we can live godly lives. We know that our lives must backup the Gospel. If we fail at this point, no one will give the message of Jesus a second notice. Our lives do matter.
But we don’t seek to live godly lives for our sakes. It’s not about our happiness or pleasure. It’s not just our reputation that is at stake. It is the Father’s. We live the way we do because most of all we want what God wants. He wants all people to be saved.
We pray and live and speak of Christ so that men and women around us will come to know Christ, be saved and share eternity with us and the Father. That’s what God wants.
***Dr. Roger W. Thomas is the preaching minister at First Christian Church, 205 W. Park St., Vandalia, MO 63382 and an adjunct professor of Bible and Preaching at Central Christian College of the Bible, 911 E. Urbandale, Moberly, MO. He is a graduate of Lincoln Christian College (BA) and Lincoln Christian Seminary (MA, MDiv), and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (DMin).
