No Boasting Allowed: How Predestination Humbles Prayer and Praise

Predestination destroys any possibility of the believer glorying in himself. All glory belongs to God. To the God who in his infinite mercy chose me when I was unworthy, when I was a sinner, when nothing in me merited such favor. Calvin sees that predestination also profoundly affects communal prayer. When the Christian community understands that its members were chosen by God before the foundation of the world, prayer is no longer an anxious attempt to persuade a reluctant God to act. Rather, it is an aligning of human will with the divine will already established. We pray not because God might change his mind, but because prayer is part of the divine plan through which God realizes his purposes. Evangelistic mission is also profoundly affected by the understanding of predestination. Calvin emphasizes that predestination does not render the preaching of the gospel unnecessary or irrelevant. On the contrary, God uses precisely the gospel preached as the means through which he realizes his elective purposes. When we preach the gospel, we are being instruments of God to call the elect. We do not preach with the anxiety that God will fail in his will. We preach with the confidence that God will fulfill his purposes through the preaching of the word.