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They admit us to his heart.

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While no one has written as much, many have written at length. Few, however, come close to him in sensitivity and profundity.

From the time of his conversion in until his death in Calvin was haunted by his awareness that he was a refugee. Like any refugee, he knew that life is precarious; political rulers are treacherous; betrayal at the hands of the church is ready-to-hand. Not speaking moralistically, Calvin everywhere speaks theologically: he denies that fallen humans are capable of the good, Kingdom-good, the righteousness that is nothing less than right relationship with God, which right relationship pleases God and glorifies him.


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Rather they are all the promises of God vouchsafed to believers, which promises are gathered up in the one, grand promise that comprehends them all and guarantees them all. While Calvin characteristically insists that Christ is the overflowing spring and therefore sheer gift, the fact that Christ is gift never diminishes our need to seek in him what we have learned through the gospel to be stored up in him.

Calvin is unyielding here. While Christ remains gift, prayer is anything but lackadaisical passivity or cavalier sleepiness. Prayer is grounded in the command of God. In addition, not to pray would also be the height of folly in light of our frailty and fragility in the midst of a turbulent world. Any slackness in prayer could only mean that we had stupidly imperilled ourselves. The peril of prayerlessness, then, is a peril sensed by the spiritually alert rather than a peril taught by the verbally adept.

Since God is omnipresent, could he ever be absent? Since God is indivisible, could he ever be partially present? What Calvin is struggling to say, however awkwardly, is that we may be assured that as we pray, God will become startlingly vivid to us, and more vivid to us through prayer than through any other means, however vivid. We have seen Calvin highlight the human frailty and fragility that renders slackness concerning prayer folly. At the same time, Calvin is never one to neglect the head.

And so now we turn to the six reasons Calvin brings forward concerning the place of prayer in the Christian life. And plainly there is but one anchor, the sacred anchor, despite the plethora of human needs. Reason Two: We are to pray in order that our hearts, preoccupied with the Kingdom and its righteousness, might never be distracted or deflected, might never be co-opted for anything less than the King himself.

As long as our hearts desire him , says Calvin, our hearts will desire nothing that would render us ashamed before God. Reason Four: We are to pray in order to enhance our spiritual alertness as we are increasingly enabled to recognize answers to prayer. Reason Five: We are to pray in order that we may delight still more in all that we know our praying has obtained for us.

Two hundred years after Calvin, John Wesley maintained that of all the privileges that unbelievers forfeit, one of the greatest privileges they renounce is sheer, simple, delight in God.

Rule One: When we pray we must be reverently single-minded. As we apprehend the grandeur of God we are taken out of ourselves, above ourselves.

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What Calvin has just stated we should linger over; we should savour its cumulative dynamic. As God answers prayer, we are moved to greater eagerness and ardour in seeking him. At no time, however, are we ever to think that we have God on a string, that prayer is a ready-to-hand means of manipulating God, that we have discovered the tool whereby we can render God the means to our end. God never confirms his people in those desires that are childish or ungodly. Calvin, we have seen already, always maintains prayer to be a vigorous human activity; he always deplores any suggestion of passivity, indolence or inertia.

Only the Holy Spirit can help them — even though the Holy Spirit never substitutes for them. Calvin is adamant on this point. The Holy Spirit is God; the saints are human; however Spirit-assisted prayer may be, prayer is always our activity. Rule Two: When we pray we must be aware of our insufficiency.

John Calvin’s Tips for Right and Worshipful Prayer - The Aquila Report

Supplication for pardon, with humble and ingenuous confession of guilt, forms both the preparation and commencement of right prayer. No heart will ever rise to genuine prayer that does not at the same time long for holiness. The best stimulus which the saints have to prayer is when, in consequence of their own necessities, they feel the greatest disquietude, and are all but driven to despair, until faith seasonably comes to their aid; because in such straits the goodness of God so shines upon them, that while they groan, burdened by the weight of present calamities, and tormented with the fear of greater, they yet trust to this goodness, and in this way both lighten the difficulty of endurance, and take comfort in the hope of final deliverance.

The only prayer acceptable to God is that which springs if I may so express it from this presumption of faith, and is founded on the full assurance of hope. Prayers are vainly poured out into the air unless accompanied with faith, in which, as from a watchtower, we may quietly wait for God. All the passages throughout Scripture in which we are commanded to pray, are set up before our eyes as so many banners, to inspire us with confidence.

A bold spirit in prayer well accords with fear, reverence, and anxiety, and that there is no inconsistency when God raises up those who had fallen prostrate. Since faith is founded on the word, and is the parent of right prayer, the moment we decline from the word, our prayers are impure. In regard to the office of intercession, we have also seen that it is peculiar to Christ, and that no prayer is agreeable to God which he as Mediator does not sanctify.

By prayer and supplication we pour out our desires before God, asking as well those things which tend to promote his glory and display his name, as the benefits which contribute to our advantage. By thanksgiving we duly celebrate his kindnesses toward us, ascribing to his liberality every blessing which enters into our lot. So great and widely diffused are the riches of his liberality towards us, so marvellous and wondrous the miracles which we behold on every side, that we never can want a subject and materials for praise and thanksgiving.

All wishes are vicious and perverse which are not accompanied with thanksgiving. Because many, under the influence of moroseness, weariness, impatience, bitter grief and fear, use murmuring in their prayers, he enjoins us so to regulate our feelings as cheerfully to bless God even before obtaining what we ask. Without the intervention of his priesthood our lips are not pure enough to celebrate the name of God.

“The Chief Exercise Of Faith”: John Calvin And The Practice Of Prayer -- By: John Aloisi

It was not without cause that our Lord himself, when he would engage more earnestly in prayer, withdrew into a retired spot beyond the bustle of the world, thus reminding us by his example that we are not to neglect those helps which enable the mind, in itself too much disposed to wander, to become sincerely intent on prayer.

We must hold that he who declines to pray in the public meeting of the saints, knows not what it is to pray apart, in retirement, or at home. On the other hand, he who neglects to pray alone and in private, however sedulously he frequents public meetings, there gives his prayers to the wind, because he defers more to the opinion of man than to the secret judgment of God. For he who promises to grant whatsoever two or three assembled in his name shall ask, Mat 20 , declares, that he by no means despises the prayers which are publicly offered up, provided there be no ostentation, or catching at human applause, and provided there be a true and sincere affection in the secret recesses of the heart.

Hence it is perfectly clear that neither words nor singing if used in prayer are of the least consequence, or avail one iota with God, unless they proceed from deep feeling in the heart. If singing is tempered to a gravity befitting the presence of God and angels, it both gives dignity and grace to sacred actions, and has a very powerful tendency to stir up the mind to true zeal and ardor in prayer.

We must, however, carefully beware, lest our ears be more intent on the music than our minds on the spiritual meaning of the words. It is also plain that the public prayers are not to be couched in Greek among the Latins, nor in Latin among the French or English, as hitherto has been every where practised , but in the vulgar tongue, so that all present may understand them, since they ought to be used for the edification of the whole Church, which cannot be in the least degree benefited by a sound not understood. The principle we must always hold is, that in all prayer, public and private, the tongue without the mind must be displeasing to God.

Moreover, the mind must be so incited, as in ardor of thought far to surpass what the tongue is able to express. Christ is not only the earnest and pledge of our adoption, but also gives us the Spirit as a witness of this adoption, that through him we may freely cry aloud, Abba, Father.