Calvin’s Piety: Prayer, Providence and the Life of Faith

I thought just now about, oh, about moving ministers, you know, from one place to the other, which is always a, you feel like you’re meddling in the providence of God. But one thing that John Calvin was sure of was that if it looks like rain, you better take an umbrella. And so the rain’s not going to take God by surprise, but at the same time, there’s a certain prudence in taking an umbrella. And when it comes to the call of God to be a pastor of a particular church, well, God has friends, and his friends have friends, And so we work on these things when we have these conversations. And I’ve been, you know, some churches have done very well with conversations between my father and I about who ought to be there. I’ll tell you a story about that just in order to get us together.

I remember when I was pastor of a church in the greater Atlanta area, Conyers, Georgia. and my father was the chairman of a committee on ministry in another Presbyterian and the sort of flagship church we’ll call it for the sake of just calling it something first Presbyterian Church whether that was the real name of the church or not in a significant city had developed a reputation of chewing up and spitting out preachers. And my dad called me up and said we need a pastor who can take care of this church and who can help them put themselves back together and who won’t be afraid of them. And I had a friend from seminary who had sold, in order to go to seminary, had sold out his partnership in a law firm in knoxville and had made a lot of money and um wasn’t looking for any church to sort of pay his way in the world you know he didn’t not that he didn’t take a paycheck but because that would be hard on the church they’d teach them to expect something they couldn’t expect in the future but um he took his paycheck but he didn’t need it in another church and so i i told my dad about this guy.

And sure enough, he was called to that church and was there for about seven or eight years. Every time that they went to try to chew him up, he could just say to them, you know, I can just go back to my house in Fairhope. If y’all want to be this way, Let’s go back to, you know Fairhope, Alabama? You can watch the, you know, the sailboats sail by out front of Trinity Presbyterian Church there. And my friend just said, you know, I got a house in Fairhope. If y’all want to chew on me, I can go somewhere else. And he was there for, you know, eight, nine years. And that is a healthy church today. Well, John Calvin would say this is just what you could expect. Well, it’s partly what you could expect. Either somebody who’s got their own money is either going to be lazy and you don’t trust them for anything, and really probably that’s what Calvin mainly expects.

But if he had a pastor who could do that, Well, and a person who’s really committed to the cause of Christ, who doesn’t feel like they’ve got anything to lose, there’s a certain freedom there to serve the Lord. And this is how, this is the kind of attitude with which Calvin came back to Geneva in 1539. We talked about, over the last few weeks, about how Calvin had to leave town in 1542. He left town in 1539, came back in 1542, and really felt like, at this point, they needed him worse than he needed them. He had had the happiest, most productive period of his ministry in Strasbourg. You know, I wish I were so very clever that I could just say the chapter and verse right off the top of my head, and I can’t. But if you look in the book of Exodus, sometime after the actual Exodus, and some present company here have heard a sermon on this subject.

The Israelites come to a oasis. And I can’t remember the name of the oasis. They come to an oasis and everything is beautiful and everything is, there are palms and there’s water And in the midst of this difficult, painful business of getting out of Egypt and into the promised land, there’s this moment when the people of God are at rest at an oasis. And after, I don’t know, three days or something like that, the Lord commands them to get up and leave and to go. and then it’s tough from then on out uh well this is this is what Strasburg was to Calvin it was this moment three days in his case three three years two and a half years where he just has this time of rest whereas a Christian he senses the lord’s providence in his life this is this is uh it’s he’s happy he has enough money he meets his wife and marries her um he doesn’t have to fight battles with the city council other people are doing that and he just gets to be a Christian and a pastor and his soul is at peace this is what we always wanted to be able to study maybe pay the bills by preaching some but to able to write and to think.

You know, if you read the right websites and listen to the the right talk radio stations during the day, you can hear people being very angry about the fact that there are people who are paid to think. There are schools where the administration resents the fact that faculty teach, you know, three courses a semester instead of five or seven. Because those schools have decided at some level that it’s worthwhile for our society to have people who are paid a living wage to sit and think. I don’t do that anymore. I did for three years. I sat and thought and taught what I thought about for a period of time. Now I don’t do that. I pretty much talk to people all day long, and I’m grateful for that opportunity. But looking back, I also realize, and I have opportunities to talk to people during the day about the fact that it’s worthwhile for Americans to give of their resources to pay people, like some of my colleagues, to sit and think and reflect on what it is that God desires for his church and for this world.

Well, Calvin had that opportunity in Strasbourg. He’s, for two and a half years, he had the opportunity to think almost full time and to talk to people, to preach, but also Those were writing an enormous number of letters, also to receive an enormous number of visitors, also to go out and visit an enormous number of people himself, and to share with them the product of his thinking, of his study of scripture, to hear from them what they also had learned from their study of scripture and from their thinking and from their prayer life. If you’re determined to measure in gross national product what a person like that contributes to the economy, you know, it’s going to be hard to calculate. But if you think about what difference does it make that you’ve got someone like a John Calvin in the 1540s. thinking with enormous care about what marriage means in your society.

If you’ve got someone like, with the ability of Calvin, thinking with enormous care about what a good government is, and no one was better in late medieval Europe on that question of Calvin. What’s that worth to you? How much do you pay for that? It’s tremendously important. Calvin was, if we come to talk, as I promised, about his personal piety, Calvin was, not unlike Luther, like many of those who led the Reformation in Europe, deeply engaged in personal prayer. It’s hard to keep sight of that in light of the constant… constant, well, the constant work that he did outside, that he’s constantly writing letters, constantly preaching, constantly working with other people, and he doesn’t like to talk about himself, and so it’s hard to notice what it is that is going on inside his own heart and inside his own personal life.

But in many places, Calvin talks in a general way about what the life of a Christian is like. And, well, after a while, I suppose you read enough of this stuff and it begins to dawn on you. How does he know this? How does he know that a Christian is constantly, constantly sensing the presence of God? How does he know that a mature Christian always realizes that, excuse me, that though you choose to do the least important things in life, the most important things are always under God’s command and that he’s always watching. Well, he knows it because he senses this in his own life. He knows that the Lord is watching him. More than one person has read Calvin on these kinds of issues and felt that it was oppressive. anybody ever felt you had that sense that it’s just a little bit oppressive that someone is always watching that the Lord is always watching does that worry you at all some people find it very very worrisome that there’s this power always looking over them and so over the history of reformed and Christian thinking there are people who will write these books.

Well, I had a friend when I was a seminary student who’s now a professor of New Testament at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, wrote a, what by now, a rather famous book, Why I Am Not a Calvinist. Anybody ever seen this? Published by Asbury, Why I Am Not a Calvinist. It’s, it basically is where he is, that God is looking over his shoulder all the time. Well, Calvin found the idea that God was always watching to be enormously liberating, not oppressive, because the Lord who is always watching is not, you know, somebody who’s out to get you. Isn’t this what your worry is about predestination? That’s what a lot of people’s worry about predestination is, that there is this God up there who has chosen some to be free and to be holy and to be rewarded and some to be damned and the ones who think that there’s at least some chance that they might be among the elect who are going to be rewarded. among those folks there’s some worry that God might catch me thinking something that he’s not going to like which he you know that’s going to happen happens to me every day, happens to you but the worry is that that’s going to prove him that I’m not among the elect, well Calvin’s not worried about that, he thinks that if you have faith in Christ, you’re going to be elect, and even those bad thoughts are, you know, they’re going to be fine.

So Calvin thinks it’s crucially important that Christians pray even though he knows you’re never going to take God by surprise. Every week you pray for your forgiveness even though having been forgiven is a once for all thing. Nevertheless, Christians pray every week and perhaps in every prayer. Calvin would find it difficult not to pray for the forgiveness of sins in every prayer. At a minimum, in public worship, we prayed every week for the forgiveness of sins. he always prayed that God would provide it’s not that he doubted that God would provide but he always prayed that the rain would fall and we’re glad of that lately aren’t we how long has it been since you’ve heard anyone worried about the fact that there’s no water in Lake Greenwood.

Six months ago, that was a big word. You know, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and the Lord provides. That doesn’t mean we don’t pray for it. Calvin always prayed for those kinds of things. Do you think that it’s appropriate to pray for rain? Who thinks you can pray for rain? Yeah, sure, I agree. Why would you not pray for rain? I mean to put yourself in the position of somebody who says you’re not why would you not pray for rain anybody grow up on a farm what would be bad about praying for rain yeah huh no no they’re not that’s right But, you know, my father told me when I was in seminary, and John Leith put this question to us, would you pray for rain or not? And my father told me when I was born, a deep, dark secret in my life that I don’t like to admit to because, you know, I just prefer everybody know that I’m from Kentucky. that the deep, dark secret of my life is that I was born within the state lines of another great basketball state, that is Kansas.

And it turns out that you’ve got to be careful about praying for rain in Kansas because your neighbor might have just cut hay. And if you catch, if the rain catches, you know, that period when the hay is laying on the ground and hasn’t been baled yet, your neighbor is in a mess. And so the law of love might on some days prevent you from praying for rain. But it is a bit of a, apart from that, it’s a test case, really, for Calvin and for others, whether you’ll pray for rain, because it’s a question whether you believe that God will act personally within the creative order. and so Calvin is always ready to pray for rain if rain is what is needed because it’s on God whether or not the rain comes but if you pray for rain then it shows that you realize that the Lord can act personally within the created order and it’s on him to decide, is this the time and place for rain?

But you pray for rain if rain is what’s needed. If you’re in a drought, you pray for rain. And let the Lord take care of the neighbor who’s cut his hay. I mean, the exceptional cases. Judges always say that hard cases make bad law, right? And it’s the same thing with theology. Hard cases make bad theology as well. Let the Lord take care of the hard cases. And you pray for rain because you believe the Lord can act personally in the created order. And so this is also Calvin’s view. If it looks like it’s going to rain, then you realize that that that is within the realm of the providence of God, but you also take an umbrella. Because God’s created a law-abiding universe where things happen in a relatively predictable way, and dark clouds tend to mean rain. what do you say if you’re a Calvinist elder Christian perhaps a pastor and someone in your church says to you they have a tragic death in their family so you’re my age 45 you’ve got a daughter, as I do.

She goes out on a date with some boy, as my daughter never has, thank God, who you told her not to go out with. You with me? You said, no. She does it anyway. pegs her out to the edge of town and drinks six beers. She doesn’t have any, but she went out with him. Comes back into the middle of town and tries to take a 90 degree turn, left turn, at 60 miles an hour. And what happens? Your daughter’s with the Lord. Well, what happened? Did God take her away? I used to sit there and listen to what they said, and I’d be praying, really, that I would enjoy it, because I’m only a high school graduate, you know, so I’m not going to do it, but when I used to hear what was happening, Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I mean, you know, the Lord created a world in which these things happen.

But you don’t say that he needed another little angel in that situation, right? Because he doesn’t need anything. But it’s a world in which the laws of nature apply. And those things don’t surprise God. but you don’t say it was God’s will quite direct I mean it didn’t take him by surprise if you ever think you’re going to take the Lord by surprise you know it’s not only Calvin who’s got something to suggest to you but probably the Lord himself has got something to say you’re not going to take him by surprise but at the same time did he was it God’s best for her, you know, that she gets crushed in this car accident. No, it’s not God’s best, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s right. It’s just crazy. It’s just not right. It doesn’t surprise God. At the same time, it’s not His best for them.

And Calvin perfectly, perfectly realizes this. You know, we’ve received from our, you know our tradition or from from somewhere from the our school textbooks or somewhere this picture of calvin as this person who says uh who has no heart who just says human life is of no significance and you know these lives get lives like Servetus or you know the daughter in the car wreck or whoever it is get wiped out and it’s of no significance because of the great you know goodness and glory and beauty of god well this is not at all not at all the way calvin sees these things and he will pray with enormous vigor that lives be preserved it’s like abraham you know we started a month ago five weeks ago with Abraham and realized that Abraham was a kind of model for Calvin because he was always on his way somewhere.

And my friend Howard Eddington would say in a famous sermon of his that’s been put on TV and published and republished that two-thirds of God is go. Well, this was Calvin’s reality as well. God was constantly telling him go. But God was also always allowing Calvin to, if you want to put it this way, negotiate with him in prayer. As Abraham negotiated with the Lord over Sodom and Gomorrah, Calvin would pray for things that seemed enormously unlikely. he prayed for the life of his wife he prayed for the life of his children none of whom survived infancy he prayed to be allowed to remain in Strasbourg he prayed for everything whatever was coming up in his life he was constantly praying for everything and that expectation that history has taught us that Calvin should always be that very reserved, very quiet, very cold sort of personality who is always defending God when God doesn’t need defending.

This can’t be sustained when you begin to read his letters, When you begin to read about his prayer life, when you begin to recognize the kinds of things he prayed for and the people he prayed for and the aspirations that he had as a pastor for his people, maybe he was wrong about the kinds of things that would lead people to sanctification. certainly if you and I well I’ll speak for myself if I were placed under the discipline of the church of Geneva I could probably get pretty cynical and snarky you know I would reach as a 21st century American Christian I would reach the point where being instructed to hear more sermons You know, I would get enough of that pretty quickly. And hearing more sermons would not help. It’s just going to make me more and more cynical.

And so, I think a lot of people look back on the ideal of the Christian life as we receive it from Geneva and think, ah, you know, who wants to live there? But we come back again to that reality that that’s a late medieval world. And it’s not our world. What we can take from that time, you probably don’t want to go hear four, five, six sermons a week. but it probably won’t hurt your Christian walk if you spend more time in the Scriptures. Anybody think that’s going to hurt? So, in a world in which probably one person in the household is literate, hearing more sermons means spend more time in the Word of God. Well, we’re not in that situation where anybody live in a household where one person is literate and one and only one? No. Me either.

But are you literate? Yeah. Anybody know how to read in this room? Huh? Anybody? No? Cub two? Two people know how to read? Okay. Yeah. So you read the scriptures for yourself. This is what hear more sermons. If you read the old, you know, the disciplinary cases from the consistory in Geneva, they say hear more sermons what they mean is spend more time in the scriptures you need to spend more time in the scriptures I do I feel like I I’m not a beginner with the scriptures but do I spend a lot of time just letting them speak to me Well, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to make them speak to you. And other churches, do I spend a lot of time learning how to, hearing the scripture speak to me? Well, not as much as I need to. And that’s what I think I take away from reading the disciplinary cases.

If you want to know what church discipline means, it means what is your Christian walk like? Do you hear the word of the Lord speak to you? This is what Calvin’s concerned about. Calvin is also very interested in just the normal, on-the-ground experience that people have living in what’s supposed to be this godly city. Luther, as we talked about earlier, wants to know what does the unbeliever receive when they receive the Lord’s Supper. And he wants to know that they receive the flesh and blood of Christ. Well, Calvin doesn’t have any patience with that, but he wants to know if somebody walks into the city of Geneva, what are they going to experience there? if you come to Geneva from France if you come to Geneva from Germany, if you come to Geneva from Strasbourg, if you come from England or Scotland as many people do, what are you going to experience in this city?

And his hope is that you feel that you are under the providence of God. So that, for example, in the 15… In the early 1550s, they have built, they’ve renovated the churches and there’s some built, they’re getting ready, they have created the, what’s called the academy at that time. Today, if you go to Geneva, it’s the University of Geneva. But at that time, it was still the academy. They’re going to build a building in which to house the academy. And Calvin doesn’t sit in his study drawing drawings and making pictures and writing. He is out there on the building site with the carpenters and the stonemasons. And he is not looking toward the glory of God. I mean, good for the glory of God. Yes, in a way he is. But, you know, what we know from his correspondence is that the things he’s thinking about out on that building site are things like the safety of children.

That’s not Calvin we grew up hearing about, is it? But, you know, he insisted when they’re building a building, the first dedicated building for the academy, what’s today the University of Geneva, Calvin, his big priority was that on the second and third stories, there would be railings at the windows so that the children would not fall out. Well, that’s not a Calvin we’ve heard about, is it, in eighth grade? But this is the real Calvin. He is not sitting in his study, preparing a sermon and writing a commentary. he’s out there on the building site thinking about the safety of children well I just love that I had it when I was pastor in Conyers Georgia I always love to have chapel with the kids and in the preschool both those churches that preschools and in in Conyers that one of the director of the preschool said at one point if preaching doesn’t ever work out for you you know you can always be a preschool teacher because because i can i can uh connect with four-year-olds that is just you know that’s just wonderful for me uh well this is this is somewhat the way calvin was he uh he he saw children in a way that very very few people by his time had ever seen them.

I mean, even up into the period of our country’s founding. I’ve been told this in Williamsburg. Been to Williamsburg, anybody? And you go into those little shops and they say, well, the children are taught, they are treated like little adults. Well, Calvin knew that children were not little adults. That children are children, they have their own special needs. And so he brought teachers for them, as we talked about last time and built buildings around the special needs of children. That’s not the Calvin that I was taught about in eighth grade, but it’s the real Calvin. Calvin’s conviction that you can’t take God by surprise is not just doctrine for him. But it is also his piety. We talked early on, I think. Is this right? Have we talked about piety?

The word piety? Anybody remember talking about piety? No, because I’ve been teaching Calvin in different contexts. I don’t know what I’ve said to one group and what I have said to another. Well, what does piety mean to you? You hear that word piety? What does it mean to you? A bit of a snob. Exactly. Isn’t that the way it is? Well, in Calvin’s mind, piety is just the way your faith works out in the world. Today, probably, we would say spirituality. You know the word spirituality. But Calvin’s not going to say spirituality because that has completely other connotations for him. When you say somebody’s going to be spiritual, well, to Calvin, in Calvin’s world, that means you’re going to try to take over the government. You’ve got guns, and you are trying to take over the government.

I mean, it’s like in the middle of the 16th century, if you say spiritual, it’s like saying terrorist in our world. People who are spiritual, they are violent, and they’re going to try to take over the government. And it happened at Munster in Germany. there were these spirituals people who came to be later called Anabaptists and they’re like the Mennonites that live around here their predecessors were spiritual people in the middle of the 16th century and the way that our Mennonites, our neighbors the reason they’re so peaceable is because they learned in the middle of the 16th century that those who live by the sword will die by the sword and they took over the city of Münster and the emperor after two years finally that reached the top of his to-do list to go get Munster back and it was bloody and awful and they a bunch of them died and it was it was terrible and so that’s what spiritual is piety in the 16th century means what you and I are likely to think of spirituality as in other words, you live your faith.

Walk in the talk. And so Calvin’s, when we speak of Calvin’s piety, we’re talking about the way he lives his theology. And so if it’s the case that Calvin believes in his doctrinal, abstract sort of teacher-professor world that you pray for rain. That’s going to come to a practical issue in his own prayer life. Not as an abstract thing, not as saying people in general ought to pray for rain in general, but here today, in Greenwood, in 2009, we’re going to pray for it to rain here and now. Now, whether it does or not, you know, sometimes God answers no. But that is not a hindrance to believing that the Lord acts in time and space personally in this situation. And so not only will he personally in his own prayer life pray for rain, but he will also lead the church in prayer for rain. he will go into the company of pastors and pray for rain and believing that this is what the Lord will do, that he will hear this.

Calvin also, when it comes to his prayer life, that kind of, what do we call it, that kind of expectation that this is serious business because it could really happen comes to a very practical expression in the language that he uses and in the way he configures his body. You’ve been in an Episcopal church? Yeah? And, huh? Have we not? Long time. A lot. And what’s the, how do you pray in the Episcopal Church? Kneeling, right. I mean, there’s something missing here, isn’t there? What’s not here? Yeah, yeah, there’s no kneeling bench there, no rail. Well, Calvin, he would say, doesn’t mind, you know, in words say, well, you can, any physical attitude of your body is okay for prayer. He really, as a practical matter, found it very difficult to imagine praying in any other way except kneeling.

He really expects you to be kneeling. And it’s very clear in all of his talk about prayer that you kneel before the Lord in prayer. Well, we’ve lost that. You know, it’s not here. But my church in Mobile, we had kneeling rails in the chapel, not in the main sanctuary. This is what Calvin expected you to do, that you’d kneel in prayer. Except the one place he would never have you kneel is at the Lord’s Supper. Don’t kneel while you receive the element, because that might suggest you think that Jesus is there in that stuff. You’re not kneeling before the elements, but you kneel before the Lord. And in prayer, you kneel. This is his expectation. And so, you know, I’ve got to admit that at the dinner table, making a hospital visit as a pastor, I don’t usually kneel. but it is a little bit refreshing as Chris knows one day a year I go to an Episcopal church and I teased Chris about it a little bit last year since we’ve been here there’s been resurrection up here up down Greenwood on Christmas Eve late at night my family and I we always go we go there and we go find an Episcopal church and I do the whole thing and you know it’s kind of refreshing to kneel at prayer on that occasion Calvin couldn’t imagine that you would pray in any other attitude not that not that you couldn’t you probably could but the norm was that you kneel before the Lord well most Presbyterians and American Protestants as well, have come to think, well, that’s a little embarrassing.

Well, we would never do that. We wouldn’t worship the Lord with our bodies. We better sit very still. Amen. But Jesus says, quoting the Lord in the Old Testament that you worship the Lord, your God, your heart, soul, mind, and spirit. And, well, that’s your body, too. I like in the Lord’s Supper to lift up my hands like this and I’ll pray like this. What are you, becoming a Pentecostal? I’ve had people say this to me. Are you a Pentecostal? Are you charismatic? No. But, you know, this is the You know, the body is also the temple of the Holy Spirit. I don’t, I’ve seen pastors who would, you know, I’ve been in worship where pastors kneel just like this. You know, and this is the attitude of prayer. In the intercessions and things right there.

Well, I haven’t done that. And I’m not going to do that. Because I feel like it, you know, it would feel contrived to me. But I know somebody in Memphis, the greater Memphis, Tennessee area, who does that every Sunday. And Chris knows him, too. It’s not contrived to him. It works. So good. That’s what Calvin, I mean, he’s a better Calvinist than I am. Okay. I think that’s that’s about what we’ve got there’s as always there’s so much more than I could say but I don’t want you all to feel like you’ve got to to become Calvin scholars, but yeah. When you last did it, it was good. Good. Brilliant. Good. I really appreciate you spending four of your Wednesdays here with us. Please thank Dan Allen for wanting to do it. Oh, well. And it’s been very good.

I thank you very much. Do we have questions? Or? Yeah, I’m going to have to do some math here, which is really tough for me, but let me think. Okay, you do the math. I’ll tell you the numbers to do it with. He was born in 1509. He was born in 1509 and he went to Strasbourg in 1539. So he was 30 years old. 30 to 42. Came back to Geneva in 1542. Is that right? Yes. yeah it was rest but it was also work but it was just rewarding work you know it was it was the moment it was that period of his life where everything really came together and he could um he learned a great deal he taught a great deal he wasn’t under pressure to do things he didn’t believe in Well, it wasn’t past it because some more of it was coming in his future. When he got back to Geneva, he had a lot of struggle in front of him.

But during that time, I mean, I think it’s pretty clear from his correspondence and things that he felt like that was the golden age of his life and that he was really able to be at peace and to do what he felt like the Lord had called him to do at that time. Or, you know, it’s like that time of Israel. I keep coming back to that time of Israel at the Oasis in Exodus where there’s much water there. It’s not what God ultimately had for him, but it was a period in which… Refreshing. that’s right and it was a good time for him in his ministry 55 and very very sick kidney stones terrible arthritis diabetes heart disease intestinal bugs worms he had tremendous medical problems the amazing thing is that he lived as long as he did and was as productive as he was I thought I heard.