There is no better thing for us to regularly pray for ourselves, our pastors and for each other than successful delivery of the Gospel, deliverance from evil men, for the Lord to make us stable, protect us from evil, and guide us into obedience. Along with those things, we should pray that our love and endurance would blossom as we look at Christ.

As Christians we know that we are supposed to pray, but do you ever get stuck on exactly what to pray for? If you are looking for some prayer prompts that will take you beyond, “uh, Lord…uh… be with them today?” look no further than the four important prayer points that are found in 1 Thessalonians 3:1-5.
“(v1) Finally, brothers, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honored, as happened among you, (v2) and that we may be delivered from wicked and evil men. For not all have faith. (v3) But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one. (v4) And we have confidence in the Lord about you, that you are doing and will do the things that we command. (v5) May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.”

Pray for the Delivery of the Gospel

Paul asks the Thessalonian Christians to pray that the Gospel may “speed ahead” or literally “speed on.” In the same way that a marathon runner continues charging ahead, we are to pray that God’s glorious Gospel would keep going forward unhindered. They are to pray, not only that the Gospel would go forward, but that it would “be honored.” Paul has in mind here that the Gospel would be accepted and respected as saving truth. He reminds the Church that this is how the Gospel was received among them.
This kind of joyous reception of the Gospel is graphically displayed in Acts 13:47-48, “For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’ And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.”
Prayer Prompts: God embolden me, my pastors, and our church to be about spreading the Gospel message. Prepare the way for the Gospel to be received with great joy in my family, my workplace, my neighborhood, and my town.
Pray for Deliverance from Wicked Men
One of the most effective ways that Satan has devised to hinder the Gospel is through the works of wicked and evil men (and women). Here Paul asks the church to pray that they would be delivered from these wicked ones. There are several aspects of deliverance that are in mind here

Deliverance from those that are wicked (atopos) Lit: out of place ones. In the context of your local church, those that attend are a mixed crop of wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30).

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The goodness of God should stir us to grateful worship. For, in God, “infinite cheerfulness attends infinite goodness” (to quote Charnock one more time). “Who will show us some good?” the Psalmist asks. The answer is the Lord who shines the light of his face upon us. “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (Ps. 4:6-7). The God of infinite cheerfulness and infinite goodness is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the heavenly Father of all those who call upon him in the name of his Son.

One of the first things we learn about God is that he is good. “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.” Many of us grew up hearing this prayer at the dinner table. It’s good theology—simple and true.

It also highlights an attribute of God that is surprisingly hard to define. We think we know what it means for God to be good, until we try to explain it. Then we usually start listing other attributes (God is loving, God is gracious, God is kind) or resort to platitudes (God helps us). It takes some reflection to understand all that we mean—or should mean—when we confess that God is good.

Defining Our Terms

Before coming to a simple definition of what God’s goodness is, we must say what it is not.

By goodness we do not mean that God is relatively good. If we say, “That hotdog is good,” we mean, “Of all the hotdogs out there, this is one of the better ones.” This is not what God is like. God is not good because he compares favorably to other gods. There is none like the LORD; he alone is God (Ps. 86:8–10).

By goodness we do not mean that God is morally exemplary or ethically upright. Of course, that’s gloriously true. But “goodness” should not be confused with “holiness.”

Nor, by goodness, do we mean that God is merciful. We see in Exodus 33 that these two things—goodness and mercy—cannot be separated, but strictly speaking, God’s goodness extends further than his mercy. Mercy may be the ultimate expression of divine goodness, but it is not the only expression. God shows mercy to some, but his goodness extends to all.

So, what do we mean by God’s goodness? Divine goodness is the overflowing bounty of God by which he communicates blessing to his creation and to his creatures. God’s goodness is the opposite of harshness and cruelty. To experience divine goodness is to enjoy the sweetness, friendliness, benevolence, and generosity of God.

Goodness is the broader category encompassing several of God’s moral attributes. His goodness toward those in misery we call mercy. His goodness to forebear with those deserving judgment we call patience. And his goodness to those who are guilty we call grace.

Three Aspects of God’s Goodness

Theologians speak of God’s goodness as necessary, voluntary, and communicative.

God’s goodness is necessary in that God cannot be other than completely, perfectly, and unalterably good. Goodness is what God does, but it is also who he is. Good and upright is the LORD (Ps. 25:8). Good are you LORD, and you do good (Ps. 119:68). Jesus told the rich young man, “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Of course, Jesus didn’t mean that human beings are incapable of doing good things or possessing relative goodness. Jesus meant that only God in himself is originally, infinitely, and immutably good. God is good in the highest degree. His goodness can never increase nor decrease. He is all good and unmixedly good. He is like the sun—all light in whom there is no darkness. That’s what we mean when we say God is necessarily good.

God’s goodness is also voluntary. This may seem to contradict the previous point, but it does not. God’s eternal and intrinsic goodness is necessary, but his will to make known this goodness to others is voluntary. In other words, it was necessary that whatever God would create would be good, but it was not necessary that God create in the first place. As Stephen Charnock puts it in The Existence and Attributes of God, “God is necessarily good in his nature, but free in his communications of it.” God did not have to go outside of himself to be good, nor did he have to create the universe in order to be conscious of his own Trinitarian goodness. The fact that God willed to display divine goodness is a further expression of that goodness.

This leads to the third point: God’s goodness is communicative. Whatever good we have or whatever good we enjoy is because God has willed for his goodness to be known and enjoyed. Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights (James 1:17). Food is good, marriage is good, friendship is good, health is good, peace is good, prosperity is good, work is good, recreation is good, rest is good—because God is good. He is a benevolent Creator, making his sun rise on the evil and on the good, sending rain on the just and on the unjust (Matt. 5:45). Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, every excellent thing is owing to the overflowing goodness of God (Phil 4:8). God communicates his goodness not with miserliness, but with great delight. God loves to make his goodness known. The supply of his goodness is inexhaustible, and the sharing of it knows no end.

Three Areas Where God Displays His Goodness

If the nature of God’s goodness is threefold, so is the manifestation of his goodness. We see the display of God’s goodness chiefly in three areas: in creation, in providence, and in redemption.

First, we see God’s goodness in creation.

Think of the constant refrain throughout the creation week: “And God saw that it was good.” We come to the climax of the sixth day, with the events of Genesis 2 already having taken place—with the creation of the man, and then the creation of the woman, fit for the man—and then we read: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).

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God’s Christ has conquered, and he will return to consummate his inaugurated kingdom. While we wait, the nations are raging, trying to burst his bonds and cast away his cords. It is ours to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors, to see the patterns in the narrative and then to align those with the patterns of our own experience: the seed of the woman could only come if women are saved through childbearing, and the human race will only continue if men and women embrace their created sexual identities, enter into marriage, and do together what God commanded in Genesis 1:28. The serpent hates the woman and her seed, and he hates Christ and his church.

To give an anecdotal illustration: Two girls in our church, an eleven-year-old and her fourteen-year-old sister, recently met girls their own ages in a public place. Both were asked by separate little girls on different occasions: “Do you like girls or boys?” These encounters took place, not in San Francisco or New York City, but in Louisville, Kentucky.
The loss of the givenness that, for instance, little girls will like little boys represents the successful destabilization of norms, or “hegemonic discourses,” as Antonio Gramsci terms them, whereby the assumption that little girls will like little boys can no longer be made. This “blurring of boundaries” is exactly what things like Drag Queen Story Hour are designed to achieve. The drag queens, by the way, have made it all the way to Jackson, Tennessee. The offensive and perverse sexualization of the public library is meant to call into question fixed categories of male and female. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explain, Queer theorists hold that “we should believe sex, gender, and sexuality to be social constructs, not because it’s necessarily true, but because it is easier to politicize them and demand change if they are social constructs than if they are biological.”[3]
The water in which we swim is a toxic brew of Marxism, postmodern philosophy, and expressive individualism. It is an alternative religion, a false gospel, as has been observed:
Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith . . . a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege and which sanctifies victimhood.[4]
We must take our thoughts and our tastes captive by the knowledge of Christ. Here are the strongholds that need destroying. These are the lofty opinions and arguments raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:4–5). We must bring taste into line with the truth. We must disciple people so that they know the difference between the worldview of Critical Theory and Christianity. The formation of a Christian worldview requires a biblical-theological understanding of who we are and where we live, and biblical theology will also equip us to notice the typological patterns in the way the serpent and his seed keep trying the same things in new ways.
Biblical theology is the attempt to understand and embrace the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors.[5] That interpretive perspective, or worldview, has an overarching master story, from which those authors derive (1) truths, doctrines, and dogmas, (2) symbols, imagery, and patterns, and (3) values, ethics, and culture. In the Psalms and other expressions of worship (Exod. 15, the hymns in the New Testament, etc.), the liturgical expressions of worship reinforce the truths by activating symbols to build culture.
In other words, the master narrative explains where the world came from, who human beings are, what has gone wrong, and what God has done, is doing, and has promised to do to set things right in the end. Thus the master narrative inspires faith in God and provokes those who believe to respond to him with thanks and praise. The master narrative also generates symbolism and imagery that summarize, interpret, and portend what has been and will be. In the narrative we find recurring patterns whose significance escalates with each new repetition.[6] And the explanation given in the Bible for why God began the project, how he has orchestrated it and to what telos, is that God seeks to set the fullness of his glory on display. He does this as he makes known his character as a righteous God who upholds his own word when he judges, setting the backdrop and context for the simultaneous display of his character as a merciful God when he forgives and saves the repentant who believe. That is to say, the center of biblical theology is the glory of God in salvation through judgment.[7]
I rehearse this definition of biblical theology and its central claim to be grounded in God’s revelation of his own character because I want to set the biblical worldview in contrast with what seems to be the predominant worldview that informs the rejection of the Bible’s teaching on how human beings have been created male and female with specified responsibilities. Paul speaks of those who “depart from the faith” to embrace alternative worldviews that inform alternative ways of living as “devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:1–2). Note that this comment follows hard on the heels of his statement that he does “not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (2:12), shortly after which he explains that he writes so that Timothy might “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth” (3:15).
Carl Trueman explains how the Marxist worldview works:
Take, for example, Christianity’s teaching, taught from myriad pulpits over the years, that husbands and wives should be faithful to each other, should not drink too much, and should work hard and honestly for their masters or employers. A Christian might see these as imperatives because they are the will of God and the means by which human beings, made in his image, can flourish.
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