A Gift to Be Enjoyed

Colin Smith:

A confession: Over the years I’ve found much of what I’ve read about prayer to be unhelpful. Last week I worked out why.

Prayer is usually considered under the heading of ‘spiritual disciplines’ which makes it the spiritual equivalent of running on a treadmill or flossing your teeth. Viewing prayer purely as a spiritual discipline drags the whole business back into the world of law, and law can never impart life.

I awakened to this by reading Calvin’s teaching on prayer and found as I read that my heart was being warmed with a fresh desire to pray. Calvin describes prayer as, “The chief exercise of faith by which we daily receive God’s benefits.” He uses the illustration of a field in which God has buried vast treasure. God points out the treasure in His Word, faith believes what God says, and prayer is the spade with which we dig the treasure up and make it our own. “We dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s Gospel, and which our faith has gazed upon.” (Institutes, Book 3, Chapter 20)

I’ve found Calvin’s description of prayer helpful because it delivers prayer from the world of law and brings it into the realm of Gospel where it belongs. Instead of a duty to be fulfilled, prayer is a gift to be enjoyed. Instead of being a means of giving to God through the discipline of our devotion, it becomes a means of receiving from God through the bounty of His grace. [...]

There’s a world of a difference between ‘having your quiet time’ as a spiritual discipline and drawing near to God to possess what He promises to you in Christ.