For What it’s Worth…

Calvin’s third rule on prayer – “We yield all confidence in ourselves and humbly plead for pardon”.
Simply, we are to ‘depend on no assurance whatever but this alone: that, reckoning [our]selves to be of God, [we] do not despair that he will take care of [us].”
We must come, knowing that we deserve nothing but judgment and condemnation, but trusting that Jesus Christ took all we deserved on the Cross. He bought us by his blood and we are his – nothing can snatch us from his hands. We can have confidence in prayer, we can have assurance of God’s love for us, we can know that our Father hear our requests – but only on the basis of Christ’s death for us and never on the basis of our own righteousness – remember that “on Christ the solid rock we stand, all else is sinking sand”.