1 Timothy 6:15 – Protection Against Praying Like Pilate
13 I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things, and before Christ Jesus who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate, 14 that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ’s appearing, 15 which He will manifest in His own time…
"Taken out of the context of Creation," warns Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in 10,000 Places, "any prayer soon becomes an act of idolatry."
So it is, then, that Paul unfolds 1 Timothy 6:15 to admonish both Timothy and us against taking a spirit like Pontius Pilate's into prayer. As Paul armors his charges against the distractions of instant but ephemeral satisfaction around us, he knows how easy it would be to simply translate this consumer avatar from the face we present to the world to the faith we present to the Father.
Paul has told us how vulnerable we are to being consumed by a consumer spirit. In so doing, he has shown us the Divine sympathy with our distractible and wearying plight in this world. It is easy for us from the first century to the 21st to take this sympathy and distort it into the empowerment of our whining by which God in Christ becomes our genie.
Since He, as through Paul in 1 Timothy 6, has told us we are not to find our satisfaction is bartering with the world, we can all too easily take our shopping list and our demanding spirit to Him. This is prayer as idolatry, losing sight of His sovereignty as old as Genesis 1 and as recent as 1 Timothy 6:13. Admits Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus considering David's Psalm 89 assumption of a perpetual political dynasty, "Expectations control how we interpret experience. We listen to God's promises and read our own experience into them."
Christ's witness before Pilate is an interesting overlay. For Pilate perceived Christ's exceptionalism, much as we begin to. But he sought to enlist that exceptionalism on his own terms, to schedule demonstrations of it on his own timing. Don't you know, he pleaded and demanded both, that I have the power of judgment over You, Jesus, if you don't produce the evidence I need when I need it?
Perhaps for Timothy, serving at the vulnerable vanguard of Christ's movement in the company town of the goddess Diana only needed this as a just-in-case reminder. Perhaps he had progressed well beyond any similitude to Pilate's mercenary spirit, but I fear this motivation is not very far in our rearview mirror. Our satisfaction is indeed in Christ, but the timing of experiencing that satisfaction, insists Paul in 1 Timothy 6:15, remains with Him. We did not trade in our credit card of access to worldly baubles for a similar ability to make Him perform on our terms.
This is a blessing, although one that involves growing pains. Points out Tim Keller in another installment in the same text, "Nothing makes us dependent on God's sovereign love and wisdom like having to persevere in prayer and wait for the time of his favor." That is, getting what we want might be sweet, but more intimately experiencing the character of the Godhead behind satisfaction in Their timing is sweeter still.
"Taken out of the context of Creation," warns Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in 10,000 Places, "any prayer soon becomes an act of idolatry."
So it is, then, that Paul unfolds 1 Timothy 6:15 to admonish both Timothy and us against taking a spirit like Pontius Pilate's into prayer. As Paul armors his charges against the distractions of instant but ephemeral satisfaction around us, he knows how easy it would be to simply translate this consumer avatar from the face we present to the world to the faith we present to the Father.
Paul has told us how vulnerable we are to being consumed by a consumer spirit. In so doing, he has shown us the Divine sympathy with our distractible and wearying plight in this world. It is easy for us from the first century to the 21st to take this sympathy and distort it into the empowerment of our whining by which God in Christ becomes our genie.
Since He, as through Paul in 1 Timothy 6, has told us we are not to find our satisfaction is bartering with the world, we can all too easily take our shopping list and our demanding spirit to Him. This is prayer as idolatry, losing sight of His sovereignty as old as Genesis 1 and as recent as 1 Timothy 6:13. Admits Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus considering David's Psalm 89 assumption of a perpetual political dynasty, "Expectations control how we interpret experience. We listen to God's promises and read our own experience into them."
Christ's witness before Pilate is an interesting overlay. For Pilate perceived Christ's exceptionalism, much as we begin to. But he sought to enlist that exceptionalism on his own terms, to schedule demonstrations of it on his own timing. Don't you know, he pleaded and demanded both, that I have the power of judgment over You, Jesus, if you don't produce the evidence I need when I need it?
Perhaps for Timothy, serving at the vulnerable vanguard of Christ's movement in the company town of the goddess Diana only needed this as a just-in-case reminder. Perhaps he had progressed well beyond any similitude to Pilate's mercenary spirit, but I fear this motivation is not very far in our rearview mirror. Our satisfaction is indeed in Christ, but the timing of experiencing that satisfaction, insists Paul in 1 Timothy 6:15, remains with Him. We did not trade in our credit card of access to worldly baubles for a similar ability to make Him perform on our terms.
This is a blessing, although one that involves growing pains. Points out Tim Keller in another installment in the same text, "Nothing makes us dependent on God's sovereign love and wisdom like having to persevere in prayer and wait for the time of his favor." That is, getting what we want might be sweet, but more intimately experiencing the character of the Godhead behind satisfaction in Their timing is sweeter still.
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