Calvin's Insights on the Power of Prayer

He believed that prayer was genuine communion with God through the triune God Himself coming from the decretal Father through the merits of Jesus by the Holy Spirit worked in the soul with groanings unutterable and then ascending back through Jesus and His intercessions to the Father and so for Calvin, prayer was actually going into the very throne room of God to have familiar conversation with Him. [00:49:12]

Prayer is a communication between God and us whereby we expound to Him our desires, our joys, our size in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts. For Calvin, prayer then is this familiar, may I say family conversation, covenantal language conversation with the Father confiding in God as His child, adopted by Him for Christ's sake. [00:40:00]

Prayer is the outpouring of the soul, the deepest root of piety, the bedrock of assurance. Calvin says prayer is the life blood for every true believer. Now for Calvin, prayer was not designed for God as much as it was designed for man. Prayer is a means so that we might reach those riches he says that are laid up for us with our heavenly Father. [00:58:32]

Prayer allows us as believers to appeal to the providence, predestination, omnipotence, and omniscience of God our Father. Prayer calls down from heaven God's tender mercy upon us and cares for us as His children and so having prayed, we have a sense of peace with God knowing He has both the will to take the best care of us and the power to do so. [01:06:40]

Calvin responds our prayers never get in the way of God's providence because God not only ordains what will happen but He also ordains our prayers as the means which form the continuum along which these things will happen. And whenever we think of God as a decretal God without thinking of the means of prayer and the means of grace and implement His decree, we're thinking wrongly says Calvin. [01:21:04]

Calvin says God feels drawn to us and He wants to help us and not to disappoint us in His grace so God's response to prayer ultimately is as Calvin puts it a divine response to a divine initiative. The God who decrees our prayer puts it into our hearts and we return it to Him and He's grateful to receive it. [01:29:04]

The first is we pray so as to fly to God with every need and gain from Him what we lack in ourselves for living the Christian life. Second, we pray to desire to wholeheartedly do that which is right and live to His glory as we place our petitions before Him. Third, we pray to prepare us to receive His benefits and responses with humble gratitude. [01:44:32]

The method of prayer he includes three very important things the first is faith, faith and prayer are inseparable you need faith in order to pray, faith nourishes and compels prayer and prayer nourishes and confirms faith says Calvin. The second is God's word, we pray best said Calvin when we use God's own word, the content of our prayers ought to be shaped and controlled and restrained by scripture. [01:55:04]

Calvin stresses prayer must come from the heart, now he acknowledges that none of us have this gift by nature, he acknowledges that we come short all the time he says, most of our prayers get carried on in a babbling manner, our checkered prayer life is often shackled by doubts, attacked by struggles we need our spirits lifted up by the very word of God to cling to the throne of God. [02:03:28]

Calvin has a wonderful trinitarian focus to prayer, prayer is given by the Father, it's the very sweetness of the Father to give answers to prayer, he keeps using the word sweetness and sweet when he speaks about the Father in relationship to prayer, God delights to give it, God delights to hear it, God delights to answer it but also it's the work of Christ that enables prayer to be effectual. [02:14:37]

Christ is the nexus between the believer and God, the junction where the believer's sinful prayers are purified by sprinkled blood and presented acceptable to the Father therefore says Calvin, learn to wash your every prayer in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and to that end Christ is also our intercessor in heaven, He's the one way the only way of excess Calvin says we come through Christ and with Christ to the Father. [02:21:04]

The Holy Spirit who groans within us groanings that are unutterable, Calvin takes it up in a two-fold way, Romans 8:26 he says is both negative and positive, negatively Calvin emphasizes our weaknesses in prayer we try the best we can to live life the best we can to God's glory but we're even blind to know what we need to ask for we're so weak we need the Spirit so badly. [02:30:32]