Prayerlessness is, at its core, unbelief. When Jesus comes again, will he find us praying and trusting (for the two are interconnected)? Or will he find us living and acting and planning and complaining and manipulating our own strategies as if there were no God at all?

Mark 11

Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (Mark 11:24)

We don’t always think of prayer as a doctrinal topic, but many of the best systematic theologies have a section on prayer, often as an aspect of God’s providential care. This makes sense. In an ultimate sense, God doesn’t need our prayers, but he has chosen to govern the world through secondary means, and one of those means is the prayer of his people. God has ordained prayer so that we may see our dependency upon him and so that he receives glory as the giver of all good gifts. Calvin devotes seventy pages in his Institutes to prayer. As a part of this exploration, he gives four rules for right prayer:

Drawing from texts like Mark 11:24 (“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask . . . believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”) and James 1:5–6 (“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God. . . . But let him ask in faith, with no doubting”), Calvin exhorts believers to be convinced that God is favorable and benevolent toward them. “It is amazing,” Calvin writes, “how much our lack of trust provokes God if we request of him a boon that we do not expect.”2

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