05/09/2024
"It has...been shown that the Lord kindly and spontaneously manifests Himself in Christ, in whom He offers all happiness for our misery, all abundance for our want, opening up the treasures of heaven to us, so that we may turn with full faith to His beloved Son, depend upon Him with full expectation, rest in Him, and cleave to Him with full hope...But after we have learned by faith to know that whatever is necessary for us or defective in us is supplied in God and in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom it hath pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell, that we may thence draw from an inexhaustible fountain, it remains for us to seek and in prayer implore of Him what we have learned to be in Him. To know God as the sovereign disposer of all good, inviting us to present our requests, and yet not to approach or ask of Him, were so far from availing us, that it were just as if one told of a treasure were to allow it to remain buried in the ground" (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3, Chap. 20, Sec. 1).
