The Friendship of God

"Let it be of great comfort to the saints that God is their father and friend and is always present with them and in them; that they live and move and have their being in Him who loves them with a great and everlasting love. Our earthly friends cannot be with us always; we are often called to part with them. But God is a friend who is always at hand, always with and in those who are His. Let those, therefore, who have given themselves to God and have chosen God to be their God consider this: You are in Him and are favorable to Him. He delights in you and always consults your good and seeks your welfare. You are in Him and no one can separate you from Him; wherever you are, you are still with God. This is a matter of consolation to such persons, whatever dangers and difficulties they are brought into, that they are with God. He is nigh at hand, so that they need not be terrified with any amazement; for they are in Him who orders all things and who loves them, so that He will surely take care of them and order all things well for them. If they pray to Him in their difficulty and beg His help, He is present to hear their prayers. They need not go far to seek Him nor cry aloud to make Him hear, but He is in them and hears the silent petitions of their hearts. If they are in solitude and are very much left alone, yet God is with them. None can banish them from the presence and society of God. A Christian never needs to be lonesome as long as he is in the company of such a one."

— Jonathan Edwards, God Is Everywhere Present, pp. 217–18

The 3 Points of Mortification of Sin

We all know of the importance of the mortification of sin, but sometimes the concept floats off like a balloon up in the skies of abstraction. This is an attempt to put some particularization into a non-negotiable of the Christian life.

In my own words:

1. Faith in Christ in the efficacy of His death on the cross.

2. Relentless prayer.

3. Humility and broken sobriety.


In John Owen's words:

The Trinity in Everything

To be Christian is to be Trinitarian. To be anything otherwise and still claim Christianity is to be in a state of damnable error and deception. In fact, the whole of created reality bears the stamp of the-One-and-the-Many as evinced in the universal-particulars relationship inherent in every created object. God's Trinitarian "seal of approval" is emblazoned on creation as it is on redemption.

Robert Letham, a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and teacher of Systematic and Historical Theology at Wales Evangelical School of Theology, explains how our whole being must possess an utterly Trinitarian thrust in terms of the expressions of our piety—in prayer, preaching, the worship service, and the Sacraments:

The Perichoresis Between Study and Prayer

"As an ex-pietist one of the most vicious laws under which I was placed early on in my Christian life was the 'quiet time.' I was taught to carry a 'verse pack' and to keep a 'quiet time' journal. The younger Christians were to use the '9:59 Plan' and the more mature were to use the '29:59 Plan.' As you can see, a search reveals that it's back.

Recently, as I gathered with the student prayer group (I'm not against prayer!) and again today in Med-Ref, as I tried to explain the rise of monasticism and its appeal, I recounted my early Christian experience with pietism and the law of the quiet time. To have a quiet time, not attendance to the means of grace, was the mark of piety.

Divine Providence and the Confessionalism Vs. Pietism Debate

Michael Horton makes the case that if by pietism it is meant that the supposedly pious are those who seek after immediate incursions of the Holy Spirit apart from the ordinary means of grace, often, if not always, marked by private, individual exercises and methods, then it is a piety that finds no ground in the Reformed consensus. Adjacently, if by confessionalism it is meant that the inward working of the Spirit is downplayed in favor of external and mechanical "going through the motions," as it were, with a concomitant minimization of the seeking after of godliness and growth in Christlikeness, then it similarly finds no ground in catholic Reformed thought and practice.

I find this reference particularly helpful:

"Writers like Iain Murray who speak of revival as the Spirit's extraordinary blessing on his ordinary means of grace stand in a long line of 'experimental Calvinism.' If revivalism is antithetical to 'the system of the Catechism' (and I agree that it is), it is nevertheless true also that confessional Protestants have often prayed for special periods of awakening and revival. Pro-revival Calvinists include the Puritans and the great Princetonians (Alexander, Hodge, and Warfield), not just Edwards and Whitefield. So the debate over the meaning and legitimacy of 'revival' is in-house. There is no historical justification for pro-revival or anti-revival Calvinists to write each other out of this heritage."

One may dare to ask, "Does this mean that the Holy Spirit does not always attend the partaking of the means of grace with His blessing, which then is the warrant for revivalistic clamor?" The answer lies in the humble posture that the creature must always have before the Creator. The Lord has promised to provide all our needs, and yet we are admonished in the Lord's Prayer to unceasingly pray for our Benefactor's supplies. Scripture assures us that the Kingdom of God will be unalterably consummated, and yet in the same pattern of prayer set before us, we are commanded to pray for its coming. The certainty of providence never precludes humble, heartfelt prayer.

Perhaps this debacle over "confessionalism vs. pietism" can best be resolved by keeping ever before us the doctrine of providence, in that God works through ordinary means and that the Creator-creature distinction will never permit the outmoding of prayer.

Calvin on Fasting

"Let us, therefore, make some observations on fasting, since very many, not understanding what utility there can be in it, judge it not to be very necessary, while others reject it altogether as superfluous. Where its use is not well known it is easy to fall into superstition.

A holy and lawful fast has three ends in view. We use it either to mortify and subdue the flesh, that it may not wanton, or to prepare the better for prayer and holy meditation; or to give evidence of humbling ourselves before God, when we would confess our guilt before him."

— John Calvin, Institutes, 4:12:14,15.

The Right and Wrong in Richard Foster

It is certainly a misconception by many who are vaguely aware of the meat and substance of Reformed theology, piety, and practice that we of the Reformed persuasion are lean on the area of private spiritual devotion. So you have the likes of Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Donald Whitney, et al. filling in the demand for more "instruction" on "spiritual formation," in the hopes of accelerating sanctification.

But whereas Scripture has laid out the three means of grace, i.e., the preaching of the Word, the Sacraments, and prayer, as the ways by which God has promised to meet us, build our faith, and hence produce the gratitude that is the ground of all God-pleasing obedience, gurus of "spiritual discipline" make much of introspection and obsessive "fruit-hunting" through devices that are really extrabiblical, taking more from mysticism than the catholic Christian faith.

VoV: Paradoxes

O Changeless God,

   Under the conviction of thy Spirit I learn that
   the more I do, the worse I am,
   the more I know, the less I know,
   the more holiness I have, the more sinful I am,
   the more I love, the more there is to love.
     O wretched man that I am!
O Lord,
   I have a wild heart,
     and cannot stand before thee;
I am like a bird before a man.
How little I love thy truth and ways!
I neglect prayer,
   by thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,
   by knowing thou hast saved my soul.
Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be
   an evangelical hypocrite,
   who sins more safely because grace abounds,
   who tells his lusts that Christ's blood
     cleanseth them,
   who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell,
     for he is saved,
   who loves evangelical preaching, churches,
     Christians, but lives unholily.
My mind is a bucket without a bottom,
   with no spiritual understanding,
   no desire for the Lord's Day,
   ever learning but never reaching the truth,
   always at the gospel-well but never holding water.
My conscience is without conviction or contrition,
   with nothing to repent of.
My will is without power of decision or resolution.
My heart is without affection, and full of leaks.
My memory has no retention,
   so I forget easily the lessons learned,
   and thy truths seep away.
Give me a broken heart that yet carries home
   the water of grace.

— The Valley of Vision, Edited by Arthur Bennett (Edinburgh, UK: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975).

Romans 8: The Greatest Chapter in Scripture

The late Dr. James Montgomery Boice agreed, and F. Godet, in his 'Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1969), 295', reports the German Lutheran Pietist, Philipp Jakob Spener, as having stated that, "If Holy Scripture was a ring, and the Epistle to the Romans a precious stone, chapter 8 would be the sparkling point of the jewel."

Do your soul an immense favor and go through this series on Romans 8 by Dr. Philip Graham Ryken.

Christomonism and Prayer

Do you find yourself praying almost exclusively to the Lord Jesus Christ? If so, then you are unwittingly committing the error of Christomonism.

What is Christomonism? It is a de facto denial of the Trinity by virtue of the ignorance of the distinct roles that each Person of the Godhead plays in the economy of redemption. In the area of prayer, it manifests in the ignorance of the ramifications of the biblical model of prayer as outlined by Christ in the aptly named "Lord's Prayer".

Scripture reveals in its hallowed pages that prayer is chiefly directed to God the Father, through God the Son, and enabled by God the Spirit. There are only three instances in the whole of the New Testament that prayer was addressed explicitly to the ascended Christ, and these were peculiar cases, namely: Stephen's response to the vision of Christ just before dying a martyr's death (Acts 7:55—60), Paul on the Damascus road (Acts 9:4—6), and John in an apocalyptic vision (Rev. 22:20).

Now, I'm not categorically stating that it is wrong to pray to Christ or to the Holy Spirit, for praying to One is also to be in touch with the Others since God is united. But if we are to be faithful to Scripture, we must pattern our prayers after its clear teaching on the matter. Consider this: every true believer is united to Christ by faith, is part of His body, and is even now seated with Him in the heavenlies. Christ, as the one and only mediator between God and man, intercedes for us, as this is part of His role as the Redeemer of the elect. It is then the Holy Spirit's role to enable us to pray and to do so in accordance with the will of God by leading us to Scripture and illuminating our spirits to its truths. And it is the Father, whose ultimate will it was to enact the plan of redemption, who receives the glory in all of this.

This puts into clearer focus the intercession of Christ as it makes us see that the only kind of prayer that is acceptable to the Father is the kind made by His Son, and since we are in Christ, it is as if our prayers are Christ's prayers, hence we pray "in His Name". Of course, it is plain enough to see how ludicrous it would be for Christ to pray to Himself. Such is the wonderful, magnificent and awesome nature of His identification with His people.

Covenant Theology and Prayer

All true prayer is predicated upon the unilateral and gracious purposes of God in establishing a covenant with man. Indeed, before time, the Triune God covenanted with Himself in the Covenant of Redemption, whereby it was determined that God the Son would descend (and condescend) upon the earth, to live, die, and rise again, to redeem a people for Himself, to the glory of the God the Father.

In the creation of man, God covenanted with him in the Covenant of Creation (Works), whereby God promised eternal life in His presence provided that perfect obedience was rendered. The Fall of Man is man's defaulting on this covenant, thereby ushering in death and alienation from God, with the whole of the created order subjected to the same curse. This Covenant of Works was republished in the Sinaitic Covenant, taking on a theocratic, geopolitical significance for the nation of Israel, promising prosperity in the land on the condition of obedience to the covenantal stipulations. Of course, after the Fall, failure was inevitable and the Exile was the aftermath.

This Old Testament covenantal economy consisted of types, shadows, and prefigures of the True Israelite, the Second Adam, God the Son, Jesus Christ, who was to come and fulfill all the requirements of the Covenant of Works, thereby bringing to the fore the Covenant of Grace. In this new economy, all the elect would be deemed as righteous in the sight of God—i.e., having perfectly fulfilled all the stipulations of the Covenant of Works—by virtue of the imputation of Christ's merits procured in the aforementioned obedience.

As you pray, therefore, remember all these things, taking to heart the truth that God is a covenant-making God, and that in Christ, united to Him in faith, we have all the promises and blessings of the covenant at our disposal, to the praise and glory of His wonderful Name.

"It perhaps needs to be said that knowledge of the God of the covenant can be quite minimal for some Christians. The covenant implications of the basics of the gospel may be little understood by a new convert, but it must never be said that such a newcomer has no true knowledge of God. To grasp the basic truth, 'Jesus died for my sins and I trust him for salvation,' is to grasp, without realizing it, the central truth of the covenant. The death and resurrection of Jesus fulfil the covenant promises and, thus, reveal the God of the covenant. But to remain at such a basic level without a growth in understanding, to deny oneself the richness of the revelation of the covenant in the Old Testament as well as in the New, is to stunt our knowledge of God and to deny ourselves the spiritual health of wisdom and assurance. Such a state of affairs will inevitably stifle prayer, leaving it undernourished and vulnerable. Above all, in this part of the Old Testament under consideration, we see the way prayer is a response to the covenant commitment of a gracious God. Even in the face of human failure, he is faithful and shows mercy to those who seek him and call upon his name."

- Graeme Goldsworthy, Prayer and the Knowledge of God, ch. 7, pp. 125—126.

Epistemological Certainty and Prayer

Secular philosophy has offered up various epistemologies that have sought to explain why and how the universe is what it is. Going about the task without a prior knowledge of God and His self-revelation, it is an understatement to assert that they have failed miserably, and culture is now left with the ruins of postmodernism—a not very good set of spectacles to look through at the world. The self-centered, pleasure-seeking, and despairing zombies that now walk the earth is a sufficient attestation to this fact.

"True knowledge is based on the revelation of God. The interpretation of every fact that mankind has discovered, or will discover, in this universe is dependent on this special revelation from God. The reason is simple. Only God has true and exhaustive knowledge of every fact in the universe and, consequently, only he can know the ultimate significance of every fact. This is not only because he knows everything, but because he determined and created every fact. The implication of the biblical view of the creation is that it is a unity within which all the diverse elements relate in some way to all others. They do so in accordance with the sovereign and creative will of God who is the Lord over all. He alone can interpret any given fact in relation to all other facts. The significance of this for prayer, as a response to the revelation of God in his word, should be obvious. If prayer is to be more than a groping in the darkness, it must be enlightened by God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. We must know the God to whom we pray, and be in fellowship with him."

- Graeme Goldsworthy, Prayer and the Knowledge of God, ch. 7, pp. 109—110.

Theology, Knowledge of Self, and Prayer

To define prayer as merely "talking to God" is deficient. To biblically plumb its depths, one must begin with God and how speech plays a key role in the interactions between the Persons of the Trinity, and how we as men made in God's image and likeness analogize these interactions in our communications with fellow men and God Himself.

To downplay theology is to shun prayer.

"     All speech originates with the Persons of the Trinity.
      God has made us persons in his image.
      Therefore God talks to us, and we talk to him.

Our knowledge of God as the Trinity, three Persons in one God, is the foundation for our understanding of ourselves as discoursing people and as praying people. The more we grasp what it is for God to be as he is, the more we will grasp what it is for us to be as we are. What God is and what we are will determine how the discourse between us is shaped. To the extent that our perceptions of either God or ourselves are distorted, so our perceptions of prayer will be similarly distorted."

- Graeme Goldsworthy, Prayer and the Knowledge of God, ch. 2, p. 37.

Where a Man Belongs

"A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign says, 'Where a man belongs'. That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for his family."

- John Piper, Desiring God, ch. 8, p. 218