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Part 1: Foundations

2 Thessalonians 1, 2 Thessalonians 1-3

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of prayer from 2 Thessalonians 1-2.


“Paul, Silas and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing.

Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.

This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.

With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

What would you say is the greatest need amongst Western Christians today? A lot of quite different answers might be given to that sort of question. First, some might say sexual purity. Some might say that because we do live in an age of astonishing declension. The raw facts are alarming.

A number of years ago in California, a check was made amongst singles’ groups in Christian churches. These are large churches with ministries to singles, divorced people, unmarried people, or abandoned people, and it was discovered more than 90 percent of both the men and the women either had engaged or were engaging in illicit sexual affairs. You say, “That’s California. What do you expect?”

A check was made last year of Christian churches across America, evangelical churches. Forty percent of the young people between the ages of 13 and 18 had already engaged in premarital sex as opposed to a national average of 54 percent. I’ve looked for similar studies in Britain, and I haven’t found any, but I doubt it’s very different here.

You don’t have to have a long memory to recognize Western societies, by and large, are a bit like the proverbial story of the frog that is gently cooked in a pan of water. If you heat the pan slowly enough, the frog doesn’t have the sense to jump out. You can boil him to death. Western society, in a sense, is heating up. The kind of porn that wouldn’t be shown in any neighborhood theater a few years ago is now freely available for our VCR units or piped in by satellite dish.

Yes, God knows we need more sexual purity in the West, but in all fairness, if you really want sexual purity, go to Saudi Arabia. In other words, you can have a society that clamps down tightly on such matters without having a society that knows the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Merely to reform sexual matters will guarantee nothing.

Others say what we need is a revolution in basic integrity. It used to be, in the Western world, most of our financial institutions were sufficiently secured that when a businessman gave his word it was his bond. Nowadays, major corporations and financial houses whose word was once their bond are now so corrupt that new legislation in most Western countries is on the way.

Business people know the high level of credit cards at their limit. The raw worship of mammon is really astonishing. One of the differences between the conservatism in the Western countries of the 50s, the so-called Eisenhower years or the McMillan years, after a world war preceded by international financial collapse preceded by another world war, one of the features of that conservatism was a kind of desire to build for the children.

People wanted to conserve and build and save so their children could have a better life than they had, but the conservatism of the Thatcher and the Reagan years is basically a selfish conservatism where we want everything today and our children come decidedly in second place. If we have to mortgage our futures to do it, we don’t mind that, either. The raw worship of mammon. Yet, in all fairness, you can have a society as tight and fiscally conservative as Japan and still not have a society that knows the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I can’t believe that’s what’s most urgently needed.

Let’s get a little more spiritual. Let’s think of evangelism, church planting. Maybe that’s what we need. Again, God knows there’s some truth to that, too. Although there have been some remarkable gains in evangelicalism, by and large, in the last 30 or 40 years, the fact of the matter is Western nations are still in remarkable decline in terms of all spiritual values.

With increasing urbanization in the Western world, with more and more world-class cities (cities of 1 million or more that are multi-cultural), the fact of the matter is evangelical Christianity in most Western countries is either rural or suburban. We have not basically tackled urban centers very well.

In this country, we also don’t tackle blue-collar workers very well. We haven’t tackled the new immigrant population very well. In North America in America, by the year 2,000, 47 percent of the population only (less than half) will be WASP, White Anglo Saxon Protestant. There is a major change coming, and we have not broken out of our own little cultural ghettos to face the remarkable challenges in world evangelism.

Yet, as much as we need evangelism to be renewed in the Western world, the fact remains that many current evangelistic teams freely confess, if you get to know them well enough and they own up to a few things, that the stick rate, the perseverance rate, amongst their converts in these massive evangelistic rallies.… I’m talking about good people. I’m not talking about Jimmy Swaggart. I’m talking about Luis Palau and Billy Graham and people like that.

The stick rate over five years is 2 to 4 percent compared, for example, with George Whitefield two and a half centuries ago in this country and in America (he traveled across the Atlantic 13 times). When he preached in Oneonta, New York, a check was made of 100,000 men and women who professed faith over the weeks and months he was there. Ten years after his crusade, the stick rate was 85 percent. Mere activism and more evangelism is clearly not what we need either.

What we need is disciplined biblical teaching, people to think God’s thoughts after him. We no longer live in a decidedly Christian intellectual environment where debates are inter-Christian debates. Now we live in a world that is foundationally secular with a lot of competing ideologies all around us. What we need is to regain and capture the popular mind. We aren’t engaging in the marketplace of ideas.

The kinds of things British people think about all day long have nothing to do with Christianity. They think about politics. They think about sex. They think about entertainment. They think about finances. They think about their mortgage. They think about their children. They think about education. They think about football. They think about page 3. They think about all kinds of things, but they don’t think about God. We have not engaged in the marketplace.

At the turn of the century, the Times, if you please, still published a sermon every Monday morning. Can you imagine that today? Because Christianity was perceived, at least, to be engaged in the marketplace of ideas in what Neuhaus calls The Naked Public Square, what I suppose in this country would be called the village green, in the marketplace of ideas. Of course, I’m engaged in this business of training people to think biblically, so I have to say it’s important, but I know a lot of people just the same who spend years and years and years studying the Bible who don’t really know God very well.

Let’s get very spiritual. What we need is worship. What we need is more worship. We need that kind of warm-hearted worship that is full of enthusiasm and life, full of love and adoration, and if you come from a liturgical background, that probably means a little more freedom, and if you come from a free background, that probably means a little more liturgy, because the grass on the other side of the fence always looks a little greener.

Yet, if you travel to enough different kinds of churches, what you discover very early is you can find some churches where things are pretty somber, pretty straight. Some churches in Scotland where they only sing metrical psalms and there’s no musical instrument accompaniment. You can find some churches where there is a profound sense of the presence of God even though it might not be your preferred style. The next Sunday, three blocks away, you can go to a similar church with a similar pattern, and it is as dull as cold porridge.

Then, you can go to a church the next week where, unless you hold up your hands while you’re singing, you’re clearly backslidden, and you really have a sense of the presence of God and then find another church of a similar background three weeks later and, frankly, it’s nothing but cheap show, honky-tonk entertainment. You don’t have to be a very mature Christian or travel very far to discover it’s not simply the organization of our worship services that is determinative.

No. What we need is the knowledge of God. We need to know God, for in truth, if we truly do know God all of these other things and many others beside will fall out of it. There will come our worship. There will come our evangelism. There will come profound incentive to know God’s thoughts after him and, therefore, to learn his Book. There will come sacrificial love for others. There will come a hatred of sin. There will come a love of purity.

If you merely pursue these things on their own without pursing a knowledge of God, you have nothing. Nothing. One of the foundational steps in knowing God and one of the basic demonstrations we do know God is prayer. Spiritual, persistent, biblically minded prayer. This I suggest to you is one of the most neglected disciplines in the Western church.

Recently, at a major theological college not in this country, 50 students volunteered themselves for overseas ministry during the summer. You have to understand that those who volunteer for this sort of thing are usually recognized to be the keynotes. When careful probing was done in their lives, only 3 of the 50 had regular disciplined time for intercessory prayer.

Where is our delight in praying, our sense that we wrestle with God and do business with God, interceding with unction for others? How much of our praying is largely formulaic, liberally larded with the clichÈs that remind us rather uncomfortably of the kind of hypocrites Jesus excoriated?

Brothers and sisters in Christ, you must understand I do not say these things to engender another guilt trip, but what shall we do? Do you not sense this is at heart the problem in Western Christianity? Is it not true, by and large, we are better at organizing than at agonizing? That’s Paul’s word for praying. Are we better at administering than interceding better at fellowship than at fasting, better at entertainment than at worship, better at theological articulation than spiritual adoration, better, may I say it, at preaching than at praying? What is wrong?

I am sure one of the things we need to do to reform our thinking and practices in this area is to examine the prayers of Scripture again, to see how biblical people prayed. What should we be praying for? How should we be praying? What kinds of arguments are used? What kind of passion is introduced? What kind of framework of thought?

We could properly examine a series of prayers by Moses or by David, but in this series we are going to examine seven of Paul’s prayers in the hope that by praying with Paul we will begin to reform our own prayer lives for the Lord’s glory and for our good. Along the line, I will give some theoretical frameworks, but I will also try to give some practical tips. In the third talk especially, I will try to give practical tips to help, but most of our time in these nights is going to be devoted to the lessons we may derive from Paul’s prayers.

Tonight, then, we’re looking at 2 Thessalonians, especially chapter 1, verses 11 and 12. Paul writes, “With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith. We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Four things to observe in this prayer.

1. The framework of the prayer

He begins by saying, “With this in mind, we constantly pray …” With what in mind? What is in his mind as he gets down on his knees to pray? What is in mind, of course, is everything he said up to then from verse 3 on, and that can be divided into two parts.

A) Thankfulness for signs of grace

He begins in verse 3 by saying, “We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing. Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.” Paul has in mind how well they have done in the spiritual arena: the signs of multiplying love, perseverance under pressure, demonstrable faith. He has this in mind.

What we give thanks for often reflects our highest values. For example, if in your prayers what you do most often is thank God for the food you’re about to receive or a good night’s rest or that she said yes when you asked her on a date or that you made yet another calculus exam or whatever, there is nothing wrong to giving thanks for those things, but if that is the heart of what you give thanks for, then it reflects what is valuable to you. It reflects what you cherish the most.

Every once in a while, you ask parents, “How’s Hillary doing? How’s Jonathan doing?” You haven’t seen them for years and years and years. I’m now at the place where all my friends are sending their kids to college. I got married so late, when they were sending their kids to college, I started learning about nappies. I’m a little farther down the pike, so all my friends are sending their kids to college, or they’re graduated now and married.

You meet them again and you say, “How’s so-and-so doing?” The answers are very interesting. Sometimes the answer is, “Jonathan is doing post-doctoral work at MIT now. He’s doing exceedingly well. He’s one of the leading likes in computers they say. I don’t understand what he’s doing, but it’s terrific. He’s married. I’m really proud of him.”

“Mary? What’s she doing?”

“She’s terrific! She’s the first person in her company to be vice president of that corporation. You know, one of the Fortune 500? Her future is as wide open as you can imagine.”

“Do they still profess faith in Christ?”

“Well, they’re going through a bit of a time now. It’s a lot of work to get that far. I’m sure, eventually, as they mature a little, they’ll think about these things some more.” I don’t mind parents being proud of their children at MIT or even Cambridge (I came here, too, so I have to throw that in), but as I look at my children, so help me God, I’d rather they be dustbin collectors and know God all their days than they be post-docs at MIT.

For what you thank God for testifies to what you value. The question then is.… When was the last time in your thanks before God that you gave God praise for signs of faith and hope and love and perseverance amongst Christians you know? Because that is part of a framework of values that shapes Paul’s mind as he gets ready to pray.

B) Confidence in the prospect of vindication (verses 5 and following)

I don’t have time to give you a detailed exposition of this passage, but there are three basic elements in it.

First, there is the prospect of positive vindication. All this, the evidence of your Christian grace, is evidence that God’s judgment is right. That is, right in your case. As a result, you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God. On the last day, the Son will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

“All of this evidence of grace now in your life (the faith and the hope and the perseverance).… All of this is evidence that God’s judgment of you is right, and on the last day you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are now suffering. God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.”

In much of the Western world, there is not a lot of suffering associated with Christianity. Not a lot. Some. Some of you have faced it. You’ve come from homes where you faced quite a lot of flack when you first made a profession of faith. When I was at McGill, a Jewish fellow I knew became a Christian, and his parents held a funeral for him.

When I grew up in the province of Quebec, Baptist ministers alone in that province spent a total of 8 years in jail between ‘50 and ‘52 for preaching the gospel. I’ve seen many people beaten up, have their business torched, and that kind of thing because they became Christians. Increasingly, because the media are full of a kind of secular worldview of values, Christians are regarded as intellectual inferiors. Not quite twits, but definitely second-class. If you had a first-class mind, you couldn’t possibly be a Christian.

That can exert a certain kind of subtle pressure, not least in the university environment, but real suffering most of us haven’t faced much of. Do you realize how extraordinary that is? In the whole history of the church, it has been far more common to face some kind of flack. Do you realize there have been more Christian martyrs in this century than in the previous 19 combined? In that kind of framework, Christians start living with eternity’s values in view or they turn tail.

Here, Paul says, “You understand up the road at Philippi there was real persecution. There was some heat even in Thessalonica. What I thank God for are signs of perseverance. You’re standing up under flack. Listen. I want you to be assured on the last day you’ll be vindicated, and I pray with that kind of confidence in mind. It governs all my thinking. I look for Jesus to return, and on the last day, his people will be vindicated.”

There’s not only positive vindication; there’s negative vindication. The language is strong. “This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.”

Here is a doctrine of retribution. God will pay people back. That’s what the text says. Some find any notion of retribution to be sub-Christian. “Isn’t that bound up with the Old Testament? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, all that kind of old-fashioned retribution?” Even in the Old Testament, that eye-for-an-eye principle was not a principle of authorizing vendettas sanctioning the few; it was a principle designed to promote justice.

If you did something nasty, you got the same nasty thing back. It was meant, in fact, to curb evil, so instead of families taking justice into their own hands and starting a long feud, the judiciary was to exercise a certain kind of restraint. No vendettas. No nastiness. Rather, an eye for an eye. Simple justice.

There’s something to be said for that kind of system. After all, in this country only a few weeks ago, an army noncom shot his wife and infant child and was not judged to be mentally incompetent but was dismissed by the high court judge in this country on the grounds he had already suffered enough in remorse. Is that justice?

One of the saddest passages in Scripture is found in the last chapter of the Bible. There God says, “The time has come. Let him who is just be just still and let him who is filthy be filthy still.” Hell is not a place where people repent. It’s a place where there is still an endless cycle of rebellion and retribution and hatred and retribution and rebellion and retribution, and people are just filthy still. They still don’t repent. There’s no sign anywhere people repent just because of judgment. Retribution in Scripture is nothing more than a function of God’s holiness. That’s what it is.

There is not only positive vindication and negative vindication in these verses, but there is, above all, a sense of expectancy. Verse 7: “This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed …” Again, verse 10. “… the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.”

Most are not old enough to remember the kinds of struggles evangelicalism had over various details of eschatology 40 or 50 years ago. Eschatology, the doctrine of final things. In a lot of parts of the Western world, people fought over how they configured all the details at the end. Christians divided over these matters. They were so important, in fact, that some Christians would not talk barely with other Christians because they differed in their interpretation of pretribulational or midtribulational premillennialism. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

When we snicker at people 50 years ago, don’t you wonder every once in a while what people 50 years from now will snicker about us? We’re mature. We don’t fight over things like that anymore. In fact, we don’t worry about the Lord’s return at all. I’m not sure the gain has been entirely one way. Where are the thousands of congregations who sing deeply moved in profound expectation the following?

Lo! He comes with clouds descending,

Once for favored sinners slain;

Thousand thousand saints attending,

Swell the triumph of His train:

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

God appears on earth to reign.

Face to face with Christ, my Savior,

Face to face—what will it be,

When with rapture I behold Him,

Jesus Christ Who died for me?

Only faintly now I see Him,

With the darkened veil between,

But a blessËd day is coming,

When His glory shall be seen.

Biblical Christianity is irrefragably tied to the future. It is irremediably connected with the end. Christianity cuts its vital cord as soon as you lose that perspective. We live with eternity’s values in view. If your aim is to be pleasing to people here, you cannot please God. Those who fear men do not fear God, and if you fear God you will not fear human beings.

We live with eternity’s values in view. Biblical spirituality cannot survive where Christians are not oriented to the future, so this is the second element in Paul’s framework. He says, “With this in mind I pray …” What are the two elements? First, thankfulness for signs of spiritual values and, secondly, an orientation to the future.

2. The petitions in Paul’s prayer

A) That God might count us worthy of his calling

Verse 11: “With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling.” Calling means something different in different parts of the Bible. Different writers use the word differently. In the Synoptic Gospels, for example, calling has to do with invitation. “Many are called but few are chosen.” Many are invited but few are chosen.

In Paul, however, the call is always effective. If you’re called, you’re saved. Thus, for example, in Romans 8, we’re told, “All those who are called of God are justified, and those who are justified are sanctified, and those who are sanctified are glorified.” In other words, if you are called, in Paul’s language, you already know the Lord. You are saved.

When Paul says here, “I pray our God may count you worthy of his calling,” what he’s saying is, “My prayer for you is that God may count you worthy of what it means to be a Christian.” He is not saying here, “I pray God may make you worthy so as to be called.” He is not saying, “I pray you may be worthy of being a Christian.” He says, “Now that you are a Christian, I pray you may live up to it.”

What does it mean to be worthy of being Christian? To be worthy of being called a child of God and joint heir with Jesus Christ? To be worthy of being called to live in a new heaven and a new earth forever? To be worthy of having your sins forgiven? To be worthy of approaching the Most High God who is hidden in the glory of holiness? To be worthy of being the home of the Holy Spirit? To be worthy of that? “That’s what I pray for,” Paul says.

It’s not the only place he prays it. It’s not as if this was a one-stop prayer and he sort of thought this one up in the spur of the moment. This is a fairly constant theme in Paul. For example, in Ephesians 4, he says, “As prisoner for the Lord then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”

Then he spells out what he means in more concrete terms. He says, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” Then he gives a doctrinal summary of the kinds of things they ought to believe.

For Paul, in other words, he prays constantly that Christians might live up to what they are as Christians, to live worthy of what it means to be a Christian. The question we have to ask ourselves is.… When was the last time you prayed this prayer for yourself, for your fellow students, for your family, for your church?

2. That God by his power might bring to fruition the Christian’s good, faith-prompted purposes

Verse 11: “With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may count you worthy of his calling …” The first petition. Second petition: “… and that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith.”

What does that mean? That God might fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith? There are different ways in which the relationship between God and his power and we and our efforts are united in Scripture. For example, in Philippians, chapter 2, we are told we are to “work out our salvation because it is God working in us both to will and to do his good pleasure,” but here it’s different.

Here, the assumption is, because we are Christians, we will begin to have some good purposes of our own. We’ll start thinking up good ideas, things we think are good ideas, the good purposes. Paul’s prayer is that God will then fulfill these good things and bring them to pass so they won’t remain simply in the area of dream, desire, or purpose but will actually have some sandals put under them and they will become concrete actions, deeds, and works. That’s what Paul prays for, that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith.

In other words, Paul assumes if you’re a Christian you will have these sort of desires. You will talk with other Christians and you will think, “I wonder what I can do this year to serve Christ? Is there a Bible study group I could lead? Are there some old folks I should visit regularly? Are there some retarded students at a local high school I can help?

Are there particular ways of Christian witness I should give myself to? Perhaps there is some janitorial work at the church I could freely take on behind the scenes and do that as part of my devotion to Christ? What good thing can I do to please Jesus today and this week and this term and this year?”

He assumes we’ll have thoughts like that, and the older and more mature and more experienced we are, the greater potential we have for leadership, the greater the vision. We’ll start wondering what we can do. “I wonder how I can evangelize my college a little better.” The next year, “I wonder what we should be doing for evangelism in the university or in Cambridge or in Britain.”

Maybe you want to become a missionary, in fact, to Saudi Arabia. You begin to have desires for things that are impossible, things that are beyond any human being, but your heart pulsates to please Christ and to bring him glory and to strengthen the church and to do good for Jesus’ sake. Now Paul says, “I pray that by his power he may fulfill every good purpose of yours and every act prompted by your faith so we won’t just be a bunch of people with good intentions and nothing more.” That’s what Paul prays for.

I ask again, when was the last time we prayed like that? We need to reshape our prayers by the prayers of Scripture.

3. The goal of Paul’s prayers

Verse 12: He says, “We pray this so that …” The goal of the prayer. “… the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him.” What does that mean? The first part is pretty straightforward, but it’s challenging. There’s a possibility of praying this kind of prayer so we will be thought spiritual. “I pray that all my good intentions will be brought to fruition, Lord.” Then we don’t quite articulate it, but deep down, we’re thinking, “Then people will know just how godly and spiritual I am.”

We wouldn’t be so crass as to put it like that, but deep down we may be more interested in a reputation for spirituality than in spirituality, but this sort of goal in the prayer just wipes that out. Paul says, “I pray all of this, not so the church in Thessalonica might be thought to be really hot stuff. Still less, so people will say, ‘Do you know who planted that church? That was the apostle Paul.’ No. I pray this so that the Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.”

We were made for him. Isn’t that what Paul says in Colossians, chapter 1? “All things were made by him and for him.” We are in some measure perverted when we are still the center of our own world, when the center of our world is not Jesus so that he becomes the center of our goals and our hopes and our aims and our fears.

The second part of the goal is a bit surprising on first reading. Do you see what it says? “We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him …” In what sense are we praying these things so that we might be glorified in Jesus? Surely, this can’t be reciprocal exactly, so that I act in such a way as to glorify him, to praise him, and to honor him, and he acts in such a way, or I still act in such a way, that somehow the praise comes back to me. It’s sort of nice, isn’t it?

It’s not what it means. What is the glorification of believers in Scripture? What is the glorification of believers in Paul? When Paul goes through the string of the Christian’s progressive steps in Romans 8, do you remember how it runs? “And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

Christians are moving toward their glorification. To use Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians, he says, “Already we are being glorified. We are being changed from glory to glory.” We are being changed already to become a little bit more Christ-like somewhat reducing the amount of culture shock that will still be left when the Lord returns.

In other words, we’re getting ready for the great transformation, whether we die and go that way or he comes for us and we go that way. It doesn’t make much difference. We’re still reducing the culture shock. We’re being transformed from glory to glory so that the final glorification won’t be too much culture shock left.

Ultimately, the Christian’s end is to be glorified in Christ, for there is a sense in which he does praise us or return glory to us. Not in the sense that he simply says, “Boy! It’s all up to you. I really think you’re doing a wonderful job.” Rather, if by his grace, we learn lessons in fidelity and conformity to Christ and praise, then he says, “Now you’re ready for the next step, my child,” and we go from glory to glory.

“You have learned something about suffering. Now I’m going to give you some more suffering. You’re going to stretch this time. You’ll be really faithful by the time you get through this one, but I’ll be with you. Here’s a challenge you cannot possibly imagine you can take on. This one is a really hard case in evangelism, but I want you to take it.”

Gradually, we are transformed from glory to glory, in victory and in tears, in suffering and in freedom, until at the last when we step over on the other side it just seems like the natural process. It’s the next stage in glorification. We are made complete in him, and we too are glorified.

So Paul says, “We pray these sorts of prayers so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and so that you may be glorified in him.” On the last day, he will be glorified in them (in us) on account of what we have become by his grace. We will be glorified in him on account of what he has done for us.

4. The ground of Paul’s prayer

In the last clause, “We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” According to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Not according to the potential brilliance of us or the potential we have for world evangelism or according to the rich pool of genes we represent, but according to the grace of our God, according to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For at the end of the day, all of these things we pray for will either be the fruit of God’s grace working in us or they are just more self-effort and more show and more sham. When you became a Christian, you understood profoundly that God accepts you because of Christ Jesus. God accepts you because of his grace. Did you not? Isn’t that part of becoming a Christian?

But part of Christian maturation is the same lesson. We learn again and again and again everything we say and do that grows in grace and brings God glory is nothing more than the outworking of his grace in our lives and we receive it with faith. It’s according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The story is told of Florence Chadwick who was the first woman to swim the English Channel both ways. In 1952, she attempted to swim from Catalina Island off the coast of California to the mainland. She was experienced already. She had already done the double channel trip. She set off on a cold, wet, foggy day, so miserable she could scarcely see the boats that were accompanying her. Hour after hour she swam on.

She was fed a little bit of juice in the water, fed a little bit of food. Not much. She swam on and on and became tired and discouraged. She began to weep. Then she asked to be taken out of the water, and her trainer wouldn’t. “You can do it. You’re not that far off. You can manage.” She begged to be taken out. “You’re not far off. You can’t see the shore, but you’re not far off. Keep going.”

Finally, after 15 hours, she collapsed in the water and the trainer pulled her out. The boat chugged a mere half mile to shore. Two days later, she gave a press conference. She said, in effect, “I don’t want to make excuses, but I think if I could have seen the shore I would have made it.” Two months later, on a bright, clear day she jumped in from the same place and swam the whole distance because she could see the shore.

That’s what this passage teaches us. We will not reform our prayer lives unless we see what we’re doing in our praying, unless we understand the framework in which we pray, the kinds of things we’re properly to give thanks God for, rushing toward the end and final vindication on the last day, desiring with all of our being to be glorified in Christ and to bring Christ glory, concerned constantly to pray the kinds of things that have to do with Christian maturation. Unless we maintain those goals, there is no foundation to our prayer lives, and there will only be weakness. Let us pray.

Our Father, we confess with shame sometimes we have wanted formulaic answers that would simply give us great power in prayer, but we have not pursued the framework, the foundations of praying that are everywhere on the surface of your Word. Forgive us, Lord, for how frequently we are prayerless, for how frequently we pray amiss.

Work in us by your Spirit that we will learn to think with eternity’s values in view, learn to pray for the things that are important for all eternity, learn to seek your face as you have taught us to seek your face in your Word in the models and examples of those who have prayed before us. This we ask to Jesus’ praise and for our good, amen.

Are there two or three questions you would like to raise before I sit down?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: Did you hear the question? I said something about the Christian having desires to do what is good. “How does that square with what the Scriptures say about not getting into heaven by good works?” It’s true we don’t get to heaven by good works. In other words, I’m not going to be able to stand before the Lord on the last day and say, “Look at this wonderful Christian vitae I have,” but if the Lord has forgiven us, if the Lord has renewed us by the new birth by giving us his Spirit, then we will want to do things that please him.

The fact that we want to is not meritorious in itself because, after all, it’s the result of our being Christians. On the other hand, Christianity is so powerful (real Christianity), if it doesn’t transform us so that we want to do good works, the reality of the pretensions may be justly challenged.

Thus, Paul everywhere assumes, although good works do not themselves save us, they will inevitably characterize us, or else we may put question marks around the reality of our pretensions in the first place. We’ll come back to this question of Christian rewards in a couple of weeks. Does that scratch where you itch?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: This question, “What is the will of God, and how can you know the will of God?” we’ll come to a little later. The truth of the matter is the Bible uses language functionally. It doesn’t talk in theoretical terms about which part is your desire and which part is God’s will. We’ll be coming to that more a bit later. We deal a little bit, too, with the mystery of prayer where you’re asking for things when you know God knows what we ask for before we ask him. Does prayer change God’s mind or does it not?

We’ll try and struggle with some of those things a little later. All I’m saying is, in the different models that are used to talk about the exchange between God and ourselves, in some cases, as in the Philippians 2 passage, verses 12 and 13, it speaks of, “Work hard because you know it is God working in you to do will and to do of his good pleasure,” but in this passage, the model is functional, and it works a little differently.

It’s assumed God’s Spirit in you will give you good desires. Now Paul says, “I pray you might get some sandals under them.” There are different models that are being used, and we’ll try and work them out theoretically fourth or fifth down the line. It’s exceedingly important we don’t get so hung up about the mystery of providence that we don’t pray, for whatever the mystery of providence means or the mystery of God’s will means in Scripture, it surely doesn’t mean we should sort of become Christian fatalists when there are so many models that incite us to pray. We will come back to that one a little bit more, but it’s a very important point you raised.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: The question is, “I’m not quite sure what glory means.” Entire dissertations have been written on that one again and again. I won’t give you a whole one tonight. I was going to say the word in Hebrew means, but.… Then I was going to tell you what the word in Greek means.… In its function, it has to do with a range of ideas that talk about praising or honoring and sometimes in a metaphoric connected with light, so that the Lord’s glory shines on the earth.

You give God glory and, in that context, it’s almost equivalent to praise, but that is not giving him something that adds something to him. When you give God glory, you’re ascribing to him the worth that is properly his due, but when glorification is applied to us, when we move from glory to glory, we’re moving into the sphere where we are more and more like God, so we are being transformed from glory to glory.

We are already now children of God if we become Christians. We are at a certain stage of glory, but in the final analysis, in the new heaven and the new earth when Jesus himself comes back, then we are glorified. Reflecting God’s nature, and insofar as finite human beings can, it means actually taking it on, but when we glorify God, what we are doing is ascribing to him the praise that is rightly his due.

Do you remember what Jesus says in John 17, when he’s praying to the Father? He says, “Glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world began.” What he means is, “Take me back to the glory I shared with you.” He has been stripped of the glory. He laid aside the glory to become a human being. Now he’s going back to the glory. “Glorify me with the glory I had with you.” There’s a sense in which as we move into the Father’s presence in that way, then we, too, are glorified. Does that make sense? One more? No more.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.