How to Pray When… We Must Leave the Deep Societal Changes to God
August 10, 2025
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
1 Timothy 2:1-7
1 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior,4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 7 For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
All summer we’ve been preaching passages from the letters of Paul that deal with prayer. I have the final two sermons, this week and next. This week we’re talking about how to pray when we must leave the deep societal changes to God. In other words, we’re talking about how we talk to God and how we live in this world when we don’t agree with and don’t like—and maybe are even horrified by—the direction our country and this world are taking. And all that, I expect, should feel pretty relevant.
Let’s pray as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
The sermon has three points. But I’ll start with some show-and-tell and some audience participation around three trivia questions.
Four of us from the church recently visited some of the overseas missionaries our church supports. Before we visited them, we paid on our own for a few days in Greece. While there, we went to the ancient city of Corinth, which if you were here during the school year, we preached through the letter of 1 Corinthians.
This first picture is of us (Ron and Amy and my wife Brooke and I) in the ruins of the city of Corinth, which were much larger and more expansive than you can see. (I joked that if I could get some sermon illustrations out of this part of the trip, then maybe we could expense that part of the trip, so this is me trying.)
The next picture is me just being goofy in the museum in Corinth. The next picture is my wife, Brooke, being goofy in the museum. Both women have water bottles on their heads. In our jet-lagged state, that all seemed funny.
Final picture, and here’s the first of three trivia questions. Who is in this picture? The answer is Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who we just call Nero. You can put the picture down.
Second question. When was Nero the emperor? You can use a phone if needed. The answer is AD 54–68.
Now, the passage we read was from a letter written by Paul to a pastor named Timothy while he was pastoring the church in Ephesus. This is the first of two letters, hence the titles 1 and 2 Timothy. Here’s the last trivia question: When did Paul write 1 Timothy? This is harder and a bit of a best-guess situation. The answer is about AD 65.
That all should feel relevant for understanding the gravity of this passage. My friend Tim came to visit the other week and preached about lament and about clinging to the Lord when our hearts cry out “How long, o Lord, how long, o Lord?” And his message, if you heard it, had extra gravity because he’s a retired pastor who is dying of cancer.
When Paul writes Timothy about praying for kings and all in authority, he would have meant to include prayers for Nero, an emperor who became increasingly ruthless and crazy in his persecution of Christians. And those details about Paul and Timothy and their church and their leaders give the passage gravity.
To make it more real, follow this quick timeline. Jesus was born around AD 0 and died around AD 30. The early church grew over the next thirty years, including the time when Paul became a Christian and a missionary. We read about it in the book of Acts. The book of Acts ends with Paul in jail in Rome. It would seem that he was released from jail, and during his short release from jail, he engaged in ministry and wrote letters, including 1 Timothy. Paul then returned to jail, where he wrote 2 Timothy, his last letter before, according to tradition, he was executed under Nero. That’s heavy.
And if we think that America is so much better than being in Rome under Nero, then we’re right. America is certainly a country far more wonderful, safe, and just.
And yet all we must do is watch the news for five minutes to see stories of deep societal trends that do concern us and could overwhelm us.
What do you do when you look out and see a world too big and too broken for us to effect change in a meaningful way? On the one hand, there might be a kind of frantic fear that controls us, causing us to panic and race around until we exhaust ourselves and others. On the other hand, we might just try to turn it off and stop caring. The “not caring” approach may be where more of us are at. Neither is right.
Into this context, the context of temptations to frantic fear and temptation to indifference and apathy over where our culture is heading, Paul writes to Timothy and their church in Ephesus, and Paul writes to us and our one church in Harrisburg, giving us instructions about prayer and reminders about our God.
1. What are we told to do first?
The first question for us to explore is, what are we told to do first? The answer is right there in the passage in the first verse, but I’ll read the first four verses.
2 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Paul begins this chapter with the statement “first of all.” That statement likely connects with what he says later in the letter, when he tells Timothy that the reason he’s writing this letter is to teach churches how to function. I’ll read it in Paul’s own words. He says, “I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:14–15a).
And when he writes about how a church should function, he urges us, first of all, to pray all kinds of prayers for all kinds of people. See it again in his words. “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 positions” (1 Tim. 2:1–2).
I think the expansion of the different kinds of names for prayers (what he calls “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings”) is a way to indicate there are lots of ways to pray and lots of people to pray for and, given the varying circumstances and kinds of leaders, I’m not telling you exactly how to pray for each but figure it out and pray. Pray something for this person. And pray something for that person.
The idea from the rest of the verses is that Jesus died to ransom all people, so forgiveness and hope could be possible for everyone, and therefore we should not exclude anyone from our prayers, especially just because you don’t like them or agree with them. Find a way to pray for all. To quote Jesus on this point, he even commanded us, “Pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).
As we said, the sermon series is about how to pray. We’ve tried to title the sermons this way. (“How to pray when…”) Let me be really practical for a moment and give three suggestions about how to pray for any concern that is so big and so beyond you.
I’d suggest writing those concerns down. I’d suggest scheduling repeated times to pray. And I’d suggest involving a few others. Write it down. Schedule repeated times. And involve others.
If you’re really concerned about this issue or that issue (whether national debt or global wars or taxes or poverty or gun control or mental health or marriage or life or sexuality or whatever), I think that’s really really good that you are concerned. If you have no issues with anything, that’s an issue. But whether you feel most burdened by something in the national news or local news (what I’m calling “the deep societally change”) or just some dynamic of your life that feels unsettling, I’d say do those three things. Write it down; schedule times to pray; involve others.
I’ll make it concrete. This isn’t exactly deep societally concern, but I’ll give you an example. For a year, almost every Monday morning before we planted the church in the city, pastor Ben and I would get in the car at 10am, drive to some corner of the city, pray for twenty minutes, and drive back. I could give you lots of different situations when I’ve written something down, scheduled times to pray, and involved others. It’s been my helpful strategy to take something overwhelmingly huge and feel like I could approach it in a meaningful way.
2. What are we believing when we pray this way?
Let’s keep going to the second question. We’ve talked about what we are supposed to do. We’re supposed to pray big, expansive, and inclusive prayers for all people.
Now, if we were to go behind those prayers, so to speak, and ask, What are we believing when we pray for kings and all those in authority? What sort of beliefs do we have when we pray those prayers? This is where this starts to get good.
When we pray for all kings and all those in what the passage calls “high authority,” we declare and affirm our belief that the highest king, the one in highest authority, is King Jesus. When we pray this way, we might say we are going over the heads of those other kings and authorities, we’re talking to the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. We’re praying to the one who rules and reigns over them, whether they realize it or not.
When we pray this way, we affirm that we are part of the biblical story, the story where God is the true king. We affirm that God can send a prophet named Moses to a ruler named Pharaoh and tell him, “Let my people go.” And Pharaoh will—because God the King can make the most powerful man in the world crumble.
When we pray this way, we are reminded that the book of Daniel is our story too. We remind ourselves that when young men and young women of faith were ripped from their homeland and put in exile, they didn’t waver and didn’t cower in fear. Instead they served and loved and cared and also preached, and they also said, “No, that’s too far; we serve God, not you.” And they also prayed. And when we pray this way, we remind ourselves that we are in the same story they are in. And that the man named Daniel and his prayers and his defiance outlasted the reign of massively powerful rulers and massively powerful empires.
Listen to what Proverbs 21:1 says:
The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD;
he turns it wherever he will.
I’ll read it again.
The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD;
he turns it wherever he will.
Or consider the lines that Jesus said to Pilate in John 19. This is right before Pilate sentenced him to crucifixion.
10 So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.”
We think of the passage in Matthew’s Gospel, after his death and after his resurrection, he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:19).
So, when we pray these prayers that Paul tells us to pray in 1 Timothy for all kings and all in authority, we are believing that God is the one who can affect the deepest societal changes, God is the one who turns the hearts of kings like streams of water, and God is the one who has all authority in heaven and on earth. And those beliefs change us. This leads to the final question.
3. What do those beliefs produce?
We first asked what do we do? We pray for kings and leaders. And we asked what those prayers are believing. And we saw those prayers are believing that there is a leader higher than them all, namely, King Jesus.
Finally, what do these kinds of prayers and these kinds of beliefs produce? We’ll see it in the text, but I’ll say it now. These kinds of prayers and beliefs produce the peaceful and quiet lives that provide opportunities for the gospel to save people.
Look with me again at the first four verses.
2 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2 for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
I’ll slow down just for a minute.
There is a technical aspect to this verse that may be challenging to grasp. Paul is saying something that could be understood two different ways and we need to know which way he understands it.
Is Paul saying that we need to pray for kings so that, if the kings are good, then Christians can have peaceful and quiet lives and people will get saved? If the leaders are good, then we have peace, and the gospel can spread more advantageously.
Or is Paul saying something more like, pray for all kings to the only true King, the one who truly reigns, because when you pray to him—when you trust him to rule and reign—then you can rest in the knowledge that he is a good king and then, in that knowledge of God, you can have peace, and your peaceful lives help the gospel go forward to save all people, because people will ask us for the reason for the hope within us.
Certainly, it helps to have godly kings and godly rulers. At least it helps to have rulers with integrity and virtue. And that is great comfort. Evil dictators like Nero make it hard for the gospel to go forward. We should want men and women of integrity to lead our schools and government.
But do Christians need that to be at peace and spread the gospel? I don’t think so. This passage, I believe, offers us a more stable hope. We can have peace, we can live quiet lives, we can believe the gospel will go forward to all people, not because we have the perfect leaders (even though we would like that), but because we know the one who rules over everything.
This “quiet life” is not a cowardly, unconcerned life. It doesn’t mean you don’t speak up, especially when it might be required. Sometimes Christians must write open letters to local newspapers from a Birmingham jail about injustices. A quiet life does not mean a silent life. And some of us are too silent, either because you’re scared or don’t care.
But a quiet life does mean we are not frantic and panicked. It means you can sleep knowing God rules and reigns in heaven and that one day his kingdom will come and his will will be done on earth as it is right now in heaven. And until then we can pray that many, many people would come to a saving knowledge of Jesus.
As one pastor put it, this makes Christians both submissive and subversive (TJ Tims at Immanuel Nashville). We are submissive in the sense that as much as we can, Christians will try to be citizens who are easy to govern and generally helpful and prayerful for all. If you have a Christian boss, they should say, She’s a great boss. If you have Christian employees, you should say, Those are great employees. If a country has Christian citizens, those in government should say, Those are great citizens. If a church is in a neighborhood, the neighbors should say, Those are great neighbors.
But we’ll also be subversive because we affirm the most politically charged statement in all the world: Jesus is Lord. And we follow him. That was the most politically charged statement anyone could make in the first century. And it still is. Jesus is king, not any president or any ruler. Indeed, when we say Jesus is Lord, we’re saying, “I’m not even the highest ruler of my own life,” which is highly political today.
And this focus on Jesus as Lord makes it no surprise to me that Paul follows all that he says about prayer in this section of Scripture by exalting the power, beauty, and lordship of Jesus. Look at what he writes in vv. 3–6. I’ll read it, we’ll go into prayer and communion.
3 This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.
That line about “the testimony at the proper time,” gets at the idea that King Jesus, the ransom for all, the savior and mediator, the one who is both fully God and fully human, is the one who controls history and does everything that he does at the proper time. He’s never late. And when our savior returns, he’ll be right on time.
Now, some of you, as you look out at the world and the deep societal change that is yet to take place, or you look at your own life and see things that deeply concern you, what do you do? You can be frantic and fearful. You can stop caring. Or you can write it down, schedule times to pray, and you can involve a few others. And when we do that, it might not solve everything the way we want or think it should. But it might let us live quiet and peaceful lives that reminds the world and us, that Jesus is our Lord, and our Lord loves us.
Next week, we’ll have our final sermon in the series. We’ll try to tackle the question of when the answer to our prayers is no. Let’s pray and then we’ll talk about the Lord’s Supper.
“Dear Heavenly Father, we think of those leaders you have placed in roles of authority over our nation, leaders such as President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. We think of the many others in their administration who serve, many in civilian roles and others in military roles. We think of Supreme Court justices, we think of the many legislators at the national level. We think of those overseeing the Federal Reserve and Central Intelligence Agencies, and FBI and a hundred other programs. May they lead with courage and integrity. And whether they recognize you as Lord or not, may they exercise the authority you have given them with humility and do so for the good of humanity.
We pray the same for the leaders of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, leaders such as our governor, Josh Shapiro and his wife Lori. Thank you for the way you protected them from the violent assault on their home in our city earlier this summer. Help them and their four children return to a sense of safety. Give Governor Shapiro the ability to lead the 14 million people in Pennsylvania, with all our diversity and all our problems and all our challenges.
And at the more local level, we pray for Wanda Williams, the Mayor of Harrisburg. And we pray for the many schools in our area, specifically we pray for your blessing on the nine members of the Susquehanna Township school district. I can’t imagine the many challenges and competing interests that they have to navigate. Help them to train up young men and young women to be people of character and virtue and truth, as well as excellence in academics, preparing them for a good, productive life.
And to widen back out to the very big world. We think of other nations like Israel and the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, and Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, names we hear so often in the news and yet struggle to comprehend the pressures put upon them. Some of the world leaders are godless and know nothing of you. Others speak of you but do so with hypocrisy. This grieves us. It grieves us for the damage and death that sweeps across countries.
And, so Lord, these are but the fringes. There are so many more issues and leaders and men and women. There are 54 countries in the continent of Africa alone, and most of us can’t name a third of the countries, let alone the leaders, let alone the administrative and economic struggles before them.
But you, O Lord, know the hairs on the head of every person, great and small. You know the days of our lives. You know the cause and concerns hidden from everyone but you.
So, as we turn to your gospel-reminding, unity-building meal, as we begin to try to comprehend the enormity of the issues and magnitude of suffering as compared with the tiny ability even the most powerful here among us have to make any difference by ourselves, we ask that you help your people rest in you. We come to your table hungry, looking for you to feed us with the gospel. All this we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.”
Sermon Discussion Questions
What are a few of the deep societal concerns that you have? What are some of the more important ones to our church?
Do you tend to think you (or our church) is more likely to be frantic and fearful or indifferent to the concerns of this world?
How does praying for kings remind us that we have a true king that is higher than all earthly kings?
Benjamin mentioned the book of Daniel. What are some ways that the stories from that book can be encouraging to us?
What does this passage have to say about Jesus? Try to list at least 5 or 6 things. How do these truths help us live peaceful and quiet lives?
