What do you believe? What do you really believe? Please
note that I haven’t asked you to tell me what you say you
believe. We all like to think that there’s no discrepancy between
what we say we believe and what in truth we do believe. But as a
matter of fact there exists a discrepancy – smaller in some people
but larger in most – between what we believe and what we say we
believe.
For a long time now I’ve been convinced that what we really believe
about God, about the gospel, about ourselves is indicated by what we
pray for. If others could peer into our heart they would see
immediately how we understand God, what we expect from him, what we
hope for concerning ourselves and the church and the world.
Many of Calvin’s prayers have been preserved. They admit us to his
heart. What we are privileged to see of Calvin’s heart through
perusing his prayers we find reflected repeatedly in Calvin’s head.
In other words, Calvin’s theology of prayer and his practice of
prayer are far more consistent than we find in most Christians.
There’s something else we should know about Calvin and prayer: our
beloved foreparent in the Reformed expression of the faith has
written more on prayer than anyone else in the history of the
church. While no one has written as much, many have written at
length. Few, however, come close to him in sensitivity and
profundity. This shouldn’t surprise us, in view of the inner and
outer situation from which Calvin wrote everything; namely, the
situation of the refugee. From the time of his conversion in 1534
until his death in 1564 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. Above all, the refugee is possessed of an
inner and outer homelessness that will disappear only in the
eschaton as the City of God, long promised God’s people, is made
theirs eternally.
II[1]
“Prayer”, writes Calvin, “is an intimate conversation of the pious
with God.” Intimate, yes, but never presumptuous; intimate, yes,
but never sentimental or saccharine. “An intimate conversation of
the pious with God”? Yes, but the piety of the pious isn’t
religiously “smarmy” or sickly sweet. While “piety” is a pejorative
term today, it’s one of Calvin’s richest words, for everywhere in
his theology piety is “that reverence [or fear] joined with love of
God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.”
In other words, just because we are the beneficiaries of all that
God has wrought on our behalf in the cross of his Son, we are
constrained to love God in gratitude, and reverence (fear) God in
adoration. Piety, then, has nothing to do with religious
sentimentality or “palsy-walsyness.” At the same time, the force of
“intimate” should never be reduced: through prayer believers do meet
God himself – “in person”, says Calvin. Thereby they “experience”
(another rich word in Calvin’s vocabulary that the Reformed
tradition reads past too quickly in its headlong flight into
near-rationalism); they “experience” that God’s promises are more
than a verbal declaration. Categorically Calvin states that “prayer
is the chief exercise of faith”, and by means of this chief exercise
believers “receive God’s benefits.”
Calvin knew that we shall ever need God’s benefits or blessings, for
we are “destitute and devoid of all good things.” When Calvin
speaks of “all good things” we must be sure to understand that he
isn’t speaking moralistically. He’s always aware that fallen
humankind, “totally depraved” for sure, nonetheless remains capable
of that moral good essential to the preservation of the social
order. 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. For these “good things,” says Calvin, we must
go “outside ourselves” and receive them from “elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere,” of course, is Jesus Christ. Christ alone is that
“overflowing spring” given us for our eternal good. Since Christ
alone is this, the “good things” of which Calvin speaks aren’t
things at all. 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. This
one, grand promise, of course, is Jesus, the One who has fulfilled
God’s covenant with humankind on our behalf. Believers can count on
“good things” through prayer in so far as they continue to
acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the good, the
blessing, who comes to his people as the fulfilment of all the
Father’s promises.
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. Believers must
resolutely “dig up” by prayer the treasures of God’s promises as
surely as someone, informed of treasure buried in a field, will
profit from such treasure only if she pursues it. While “dig up”
never has, for Calvin, the force of pry out of or coax from a
grudging and reluctant deity what desperate people need and crave,
prayer nonetheless remains a human activity that believers must
undertake with unrelenting ardour. To be sure, we don’t badger God
or pester him; still, we must importune him relentlessly – otherwise
it can only be concluded that we aren’t serious. Reflecting yet
again the seriousness of persistent prayer, Calvin speaks of prayer
as a “sacrifice of worship,” insisting prayer to be what the
God-appointed sacrifices of old were; namely, a human activity that
is yet the vehicle of God’s blessing descending upon us. Unless we
importune God unrelentingly, says Calvin, our faith can legitimately
be suspected of being “sleepy or sluggish.”
Calvin, as is his custom, reads scripture so very closely as to note
that while prayer is God’s appointed means of meeting our needs, our
needs are never the ground of prayer. Prayer is grounded in the
command of God. Ultimately we are to pray not because we are
ceaselessly needy, but rather because God’s command and claim are
ceaselessly operative. Moreover, since the God who commands us to
pray is never a tyrant or an ogre but is rather “easily entreated
and readily accessible,” not to pray is simply to advertise
ourselves as disobedient and distrustful.
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. Such peril, Calvin notes, has to be intuited or sensed
rather then taught, since “words fail to explain how necessary
prayer is.” As is the case with mystery of any sort, words may
point to a profundity whose depths forever find such words
insufficient, but words can never do justice to the profundity they
attempt to describe. The peril of prayerlessness, then, is a peril
sensed by the spiritually alert rather than a peril taught by the
verbally adept. A refugee like Calvin characteristically sensed the
peril of prayerlessness, and for this reason could write, tersely
and plaintively in equal measure, “The only stronghold of safety is
in calling upon [God’s] name.”
Whenever we do call upon God’s name we “call upon him to reveal
himself as wholly present to us.” Calvin’s expression here is
intriguing as he struggles to persuade us of prayer’s efficacy.
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.
The outcome of our vivid awareness of God’s presence will be nothing
less than “an extraordinary repose and peace to our consciences” –
in the midst of all the insecurities and treacheries, it must be
remembered, that continue to harass God’s people.
III
We have seen Calvin ground prayer in the command and promise of
God. We have seen Calvin highlight the human frailty and fragility
that renders slackness concerning prayer folly. We have noted
Calvin’s insistence that the heart senses or intuits the folly of
indifference concerning prayer before the head reasons about all of
this. 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.
Reason One:
We are to pray in order “that our hearts may be fired with a zealous
and burning desire ever to seek, love and serve [God], while we
become accustomed in every need to flee to him as to a sacred
anchor.” Plainly Calvin regards prayer as a habit to which all
believers should aspire. 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 Three:
We are to pray in order that our hearts may ever be attuned to
thanksgiving, since we know that every blessing comes from God (and
since, of course, we are grateful above all for the blessing,
our eternal salvation given to us from the One who didn’t spare his
own Son.)
Reason Four:
We are to pray in order to enhance our spiritual alertness as we are
increasingly enabled to recognize answers to prayer. What’s more,
as we recognize answers to prayer we shall subsequently come to
meditate “more ardently” on the kindness that alone supplies our
need. (“More ardently,” of course, underlines Calvin’s insistence
that prayer is a vigorous activity requiring resilience, perception
and persistence; anything, in other words, but a “Now I lay me down
to sleep” thoughtlessness undertaken at day’s end when we are too
fatigued to do little more than mumble mindlessly before weariness
renders us unconscious.)
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. (Once again, delighting in
God is a feature of Calvin’s theology that has found its way into
his Puritan successors but has not found its way, it would appear
into his successors in many other areas of the Reformed tradition.
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.
If Calvin had been heard characteristically promoting believers’
delight in God, the word “dour” wouldn’t come to mind as soon as the
word “Presbyterian” is heard; and if Calvin had been heard
characteristically promoting our delight in God, a more charismatic
expression of the faith would have found a home in the Presbyterian
tradition, and such charismatic expression would thereby have been
preserved from an inherent tendency to unbiblical one-sidedness and
shallowness.)
Reason Six:
We are to pray in order that we may confirm God’s generosity and
care for us “by use and experience.” Here Calvin means that our
heart-discerned and heart-owned experience of God’s answer to
prayer, together with the use we make of our experience of God; all
this in turn authenticates and endorses the efficacy of prayer and
the promises of God, even as it confirms us in the truth and reality
of our being “in Christ.”
Calvin sums up the six reasons for prayer by insisting that as we
pray, even amidst circumstances dreadful enough to find us groaning
(in other words, amidst circumstances that allow for no natural
conclusion that God loves us), our praying becomes the occasion
wherein we are persuaded afresh – all “evidence” to the contrary –
that God loves us more than we can say but not more than we
now know.
IV
Having articulated the six reasons for prayer, Calvin proceeds to
develop his four “rules” of prayer.
Rule One:
When we pray we must be reverently single-minded. Calvin, of
course, is always realistic (refugees, we must remember, aren’t
permitted the luxury of fantasy or escapism of any sort.)
Realistically, then, Calvin is aware that God’s people are attacked
by assaults from without and by anxieties from within. He’s aware
that we can never rid ourselves of all anxieties and distractions,
only thereby and only then creating “open space” wherein we may
contend with God. Our inescapable assaults and anxieties will have
to become the “stuff” (or at least part of the “stuff”) of our daily
prayers. Even so, our minds should aspire to a “purity worthy of
God” as we endeavour to contemplate him. Such contemplation is
possible only if the mind is “raised above itself.”
The mind can’t raise itself above itself, however, in light of the
assaults and anxieties that harass us – unless we behold the
“majesty” or grandeur of God. As we apprehend the grandeur of God
we are taken out of ourselves, above ourselves. So very
realistically and profoundly are we lifted above ourselves that it’s
entirely appropriate for us to lift our hands in prayer, says Calvin
in a Pentecostal recognition the Reformed tradition appears not to
admit, for raised hands help us in turn to raise our mind yet higher
to him whose holiness is enthralling and whose grandeur frees us
from our captivity to our mundane predicament with its relentless
pain, even as all this occurs without neurotic denial of our pain.
What Calvin has just stated we should linger over; we should savour
its cumulative dynamic. We who are God’s people cry out to God in
our burdened state, pleading with him to fulfill in us the promises
he has made to us and guaranteed for us in Christ. As God answers
prayer, we are moved to greater eagerness and ardour in seeking
him. Our newly intensified zeal and fortified confidence find him
in turn dealing with us “more generously.” It all swells into an
upward spiral that leaves believers ever more ardent, blessed and
grateful.
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 doesn’t answer prayer simply on account of our
petition; he answers prayer, rather, only in conformity to his name
(that is, his nature) and in accord with our need for sanctity. 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. For this reason he maintains that
our engagement with God presupposes “keenness of mind” followed
by “affection of heart.” Several matters are to be noted here.
[a] Keenness of mind is essential since prayer is an exercise of
faith, and faith presupposes an understanding of the gospel, some
understanding of the gospel, however elemental. “Faith” so-called,
that is devoid of understanding is no better than superstition or
idolatry. What’s more, keenness of mind is crucial with respect to
our awareness of the nature of God’s promises and our discernment of
answers to prayer.
[b] Affection of heart is no less needed than keenness of mind, for
without affection of heart “faith” so-called will be reduced to
ideation, something that Calvin quaintly says “flits about in the
top of the brain”, the mere shuffling of intellectual furniture,
however doctrinally correct. Our heart must always be “affected” or
else the mere assimilation of doctrine (doctrine being abstract by
definition) will become a substitute for the concreteness of loving
God “in person.”
[c] Affection of heart, we must note, can only follow
keenness of mind. If affection of heart were to precede keenness of
mind, “faith” so-called would be no more than sentimentality. God
can be loved (love being the affective dimension of faith) only as
God’s nature is apprehended, however rudimentarily.
Calvin’s insistence on this exquisitely fine balance of mind and
heart anticipates one of the strengths of the Seventeenth Century
Puritan movement even as it exposes the one-sided cerebralism of
post-Calvin Reformed Scholasticism and the equally one-sided
romanticism of Reformed Neo-Protestantism (specifically, the
theological liberalism of Schleiermacher, who, we should remember,
was Reformed, not Lutheran, and who spawned an ever-burgeoning
theological liberalism that reduced the church to nothing more than
the world talking to itself albeit with a religious vocabulary.)
Calvin admits that if our mind is to be “raised above itself” with
appropriate keenness and the heart is to be genuinely affected, the
Holy Spirit must come to our aid. Calvin, as noted earlier, never
loses touch with the harshness of human existence, and therefore he
is always quick to acknowledge that the godliest people, when
afflicted with atrocious suffering, are overcome with “blind
anxieties” that so consume them as to leave them unable to voice in
prayer what God’s people should be articulating. Even when they
“try to stammer they are confused and hesitate;” their pain beclouds
their understanding and stifles their cry. 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. In short, while the assistance of the Holy
Spirit can be counted on to foster and facilitate in us what we
can’t achieve ourselves, the Spirit is never given so as to “hinder
or hold back our effort.” Once again the picture Calvin gives of
the Christian at prayer is anything but a hands-folded hibernation.
Rather it’s the picture of Abraham, of Job, of Jacob contending with
God, wrestling in such a way as to exemplify the patriarch’s “I will
not let you go unless you bless me.” (Genesis 32:26)
Rule Two:
When we pray we must be aware of our insufficiency. How aware must
we be? Calvin says we must possess “a burning desire to attain”
what we most sorely lack. Calvin’s vocabulary here says much: his
use of “burning” in the second rule and “groaning” in the first
reminds us of the ardour and anguish found in true prayer. Calvin’s
vehemence is telling. Whether prayer be free or liturgical, it must
never be casual or indifferent or perfunctory “as if discharging a
duty to God.” Merely “discharging a duty” is light-years removed
from prayer’s characteristic intimate conversation with God in
person. Calvin simply abhors the non-reverent, tuned-out practice
born of a “cold heart” and an equally non-reverent mindlessness
wherein people “do not ponder what they ask.” In other words,
slackers may recite prayers frigidly and thoughtlessly but they fall
short of praying.
Such slackers, Calvin is quick to point out, may possess a vague
sense of their need, but they lack the gospel-quickened focus to
target “the relief of their poverty.” He illustrates his point by
referring to ersatz worshippers who ask for pardon for sin while
secretly thinking that they aren’t sinners – or while not thinking
that they are sinners. Calvin’s subtlety here is noteworthy: both
spiritual ignorance (‘thinking they aren’t sinners’) and spiritual
drowsiness (‘not thinking they are sinners’) are alike
reprehensible, and reprehensible to the same extent.
Like all able theologians, Calvin is thoroughly acquainted with
human psychology. He knows that moods fluctuate in God’s people as
much as in others. Therefore our constancy in prayer is governed
not by our mood but rather by our recollection that however strong
we may appear to ourselves at times, in truth we are weak; we never
get beyond the neediness that forever keeps us beggars before God.
If we are prone to doubt this, we need only recall the dangers that
beset us on all sides, not to mention the temptations that never
cease to molest us – including the temptation to slacken in prayer.
If we quibble over the necessity of praying constantly we are most
surely exposing ourselves to “hypocrisy and wily falsehoods before
God” – if we haven’t already succumbed to such hypocrisy and
falsehood.
One feature of the burning awareness of our insufficiency is our
awareness that new creatures though we are in Christ, the “old” man
or woman still clings to us. In light of the truth that we are new
creatures in Christ definitively even as the old creature still
haunts us, we need always to repent. And in fact, says Calvin, only
the repentant can rightly be said to pray. Self-examination, then,
born of Spirit-quickened self-perception, can bring us to that
penitence which Calvin maintains to be both the preparation for
prayer and the commencement of prayer.
Rule Three:
When we pray we must ever recall our residual depravity (the “old”
creature of sin who continues to dog the “new” creature in Christ);
and recalling our residual depravity, we must divest ourselves of
our own glory. We must cast away all notions of our own worth. We
must give glory to God alone. Putting aside all self-assurance, we
must content ourselves with the one assurance of God’s never-failing
care for us.
At this point in his major exposition of prayer Calvin returns to a
theme found in Rule Two; namely, confession of guilt and the
forgiveness from God by which we are reconciled to God. For only as
we are reconciled to God shall we receive anything from God; only as
we are pardoned shall we find God propitious.
“Propitious”: few words in Calvin’s theology loom larger than this
word. When Calvin speaks of God as propitious he means that God is
fatherly, benevolent, merciful. Believers know God to be propitious
inasmuch as we have benefited from propitiation.
Propitiation, a word sadly out of fashion in the church today
despite its frequent occurrence in scripture, is simply the averting
of God’s wrath at God’s initiative. Propitiation must be
distinguished from expiation, the bearing of sin and the bearing of
it away. Expiation presupposes propitiation. Or to say the same
thing, propitiation grounds expiation. God can bear sin away only
because his anger has first been dealt with. Calvin never suggests
anything else. In his major exposition of prayer Calvin repeats a
theme that is found everywhere in his theology; namely, Christ’s
death has “appeased” the Father. Calvin’s theology is steeped in
the nature and force of propitiation, and his Commentary on
Hebrews is a sustained amplification of it.
In this regard Calvin maintains that as often as we, Christ’s
people, pray, we should recall before God not only the atomistic
sins we’ve committed but even the sinnership that continues to
infect us systemically. Quoting Psalm 51:5 – “Behold, I was brought
forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” – Calvin
insists that only God’s mercy, received and enjoyed, allows us to
approach God confidently and plead with him as Father instead of
cowering before him as just judge. The forgiveness of sins
underlies our commerce with heaven at all times. Only our
conviction of God’s mercy – his propitious fatherliness born of
propitiation – assures us that our prayers are going to be heard.
Rule Four:
Knowing that God is propitious, merciful, fatherly, we must always
pray with confident hope. Once again, our confidence here has
nothing to do with an unrealistic and therefore ridiculous denial of
the upheavals that harass us. While Calvin insists that prayer
isn’t prayer unless it is undertaken in confident hope, he never
pretends that Christ’s people are to work themselves up into
pretending that suffering hasn’t engulfed them. Calvin is too wise
ever to hint, however slightly, that confident expectation in prayer
means that people are left expecting themselves to be superhuman – a
psychological burden, we know today, that keeps therapists and
pharmacists forever employed. Calvin admits that believers can be
“troubled by the greatest unrest;” so very troubled, in fact, as to
be “almost out of their senses.” Even here, however, our
apprehension of God’s goodness fosters hope for our deliverance. In
fact godly prayer arises from the twofold awareness of both our
predicament and God’s promised provision. Not only does prayer
arise from this twofold awareness, all genuine prayer
contains this twofold awareness: honestly we lay before God our
predicament in its perplexity and horror, while expectantly we look
to God to “extend his helping hand.”
Scoffers, of course, are always nearby. Scoffers relish pointing
out that prayer must be pointless since the results appear meagre
when compared to the ardour and expectation of those who pray.
Wisely Calvin avoids being drawn into playing any game on the
territory that scoffers have staked out. Instead he insists there
to be no point in disputing with the “empty imagination” of
detractors. There is simply no common ground between believer and
scoffing sceptic that can serve as the starting point of an
apologetic argument for prayer. To be sure, all believers have
undergone apparent frustration in prayer. While unbelievers shout
“Reason enough to abandon the entire economy of faith,” such
apparent frustration merely finds believers praying still, and
praying with undiminished expectation.
Always a theologian of the heart (a feature of Calvin’s thought too
readily overlooked not only by foes but even by friends who
one-sidedly depict him as a theologian of the head), Calvin
maintains that believers “perceive the power of faith” just because
they “feel it by experience in their heart.” More to the point,
believers feel the power of faith by experience in their heart more
deeply than they feel the seeming contradictions of faith. Because
their experience of God’s promise and fatherly care is deeper
than their experience of outer torment at the hands of the world and
inner torment at the hands of sin, an apologetic argument for prayer
would only be superfluous for believers and unpersuasive for
unbelievers. While prayer is rightly such only if it is “grounded
in unbroken assurance of hope”, Calvin points out that assurance of
hope is precisely the orbit and atmosphere in which Christ’s people
live and struggle, look to God and rejoice in him. Absence of hope,
Calvin concludes, would only point to absence of faith; which is to
say, absence of hope would only mean that prayers, so-called, are
“vainly cast upon air.”
V
Is there any Christian, anywhere, who claims to exemplify everything
that Calvin prescribes for Christ’s people? Can even the godliest
claim that their praying displays a confident expectation without
trace of secretly harboured dubiety? While Calvin, following
scripture, insists that the line distinguishing believer and
unbeliever is absolute (albeit known only to God), Calvin also
insists that the prayers of even the godliest are in truth “a
mixture of faith and error.” Our apprehension of God and his way
with us, while certainly real and adequate, is never exhaustive.
Our apprehension of God, in other words, while trusting and true,
never approaches comprehension (as if we had mastered God and his
way with us.) Our repentance, while certainly sincere (i.e., as
sincere as we can make it), remains riddled with self-interest; and
in any case, our repentance is never commensurate with our
depravity. While Spirit-sensitized believers “feel the depths of
evil” within them, in truth the sin that still lurks in us more
hideous than we can imagine. In short, even the godliest person’s
faith remains shot through with unbelief. Therefore it is a
singular instance of God’s mercy that he promises to hear us even
when finds in us “neither perfect faith nor repentance.”
Plainly even the most ardent believers can present themselves to God
only as they cling to Jesus Christ as advocate and mediator. Only
the propitiating mediator can “change the throne of dreadful glory
into the throne of grace.” More specifically, says Calvin, “the
power of [Christ’s] death avails as an everlasting intercession in
our behalf.…[Christ] alone bears to God the petitions of the
people.”
In the mediator all the intercessions of Christ’s people are
gathered up and rendered effectual. He who is the promise of
God and in whom all God’s promises are fulfilled is the sole,
sufficient guarantor that these promises are now operative among
God’s people. Not surprisingly, then, Calvin climaxes his
exposition on prayer with the insistence that the saints must ever
embrace Jesus Christ “with both arms.”
A Prayer of Calvin’s on the Matter of Prayer
Grant, Almighty God, that as you not only invite us continually by
the voice of your gospel to seek you, but also offer to us your Son
as our Mediator, through whom an access to you is open, that we may
find you a propitious Father, – O grant that relying on your kind
invitation we may through life exercise ourselves in prayer; and as
so many evils disturb us on all sides and so many wants distress and
oppress us, may we be led more earnestly to call on you, and in the
meanwhile be never wearied in this exercise of prayer; until having
been heard by you throughout life, we may at length be gathered to
your eternal kingdom where we shall enjoy that salvation which you
have promised us, and of which you also daily testify to us by your
gospel, and be forever united to your only-begotten Son of whom we
are now members; that we may be partakers of all the blessings which
he has obtained for us by his death. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Victor
Shepherd
July 2006
