The circumstance in which a baby is conceived may be wicked, but that does not make the unborn baby less valuable. Murdering an unborn baby who is conceived by rape does not righteously fix a situation but only adds crime upon crime. Punish the rapist—not the baby. Justice is getting what you deserve and giving others what they deserve. Murdering an unborn baby is unjust because an unborn baby does not deserve to die. You don’t have the right to tell my fourteen-year-old daughter she has to carry her rapist’s baby.” That’s what Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, recently argued when he interviewed Seth Dillon, owner and CEO of the satire website The Babylon Bee.

The one thing that really matters is this: to have a religion that will bring us safe at last to the new heavens and the new earth. To have that “little that a righteous man has,” to have faith that is lodged in Jesus Christ even if our trust seems as fine as a spider’s thread. To believe in your heart and to say with your mouth, “I know my Redeemer lives.”

Read the words of the Apostles to the early church: “We will devote ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). This Apostolic commitment gave the church of the new covenant the priorities of a twofold vocation: it was to be characterized by prayer to the Father in the name of His Son and by the preaching of the Bible. Let me seek to open up something fresh about both of these marks.
Praying
Recently, I began to read a book that I found interesting in its concept, purpose, and accomplishment. A woman named Berenice Aguilera discovered a copy of John Calvin’s commentaries and realized that the original transcriber of his sermons—more than four hundred years ago in St. Peters, Geneva—also transcribed and printed his closing prayers. These brief living intercessions are printed in most of Calvin’s books of sermons. Berenice was so moved in reading them that she proceeded to gather them together, and she seems to have published them herself in England—because there is no name of a publisher to be found anywhere in a 255-page book that she has titled Praying through the Prophets. Publishing the book herself would have required not only cash but a strong conviction that there was something very valuable in listening to John Calvin speaking to God after he had spoken to the people in his congregation. This one book contains more than three thousand prayers of the Genevan Reformer at the close of each of his sermons on the Major and Minor Prophets from Jeremiah to Malachi.
I initially dipped into these prayers and found them refreshing. In daily readings, I am in the latter chapters of the prophet Jeremiah and Lamentations, so I have begun, at the end of the verses apportioned for each day, to read the prayers of Calvin on that chapter. These latter chapters of Jeremiah contain both a relentless declaration of the forthcoming destruction of mighty Babylon and also words of encouragement to the Lord’s people in captivity there. Let me give an example of a portion of Jeremiah as he seeks to encourage the people of God in their long exile from Jerusalem, and then the prayer of John Calvin when he finished preaching on them:
“You who have escaped from the sword, go, do not stand still! Remember the LORD from far away, and let Jerusalem come into your mind: ‘We are put to shame, for we have heard reproach; dishonor has covered our face, for foreigners have come into the holy places of the LORD’s house.’ Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will execute judgment upon her images, and through all her land the wounded shall groan. Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height, yet destroyers would come from me against her, declares the LORD.” (Jer. 51:50–53)
This is the prayer of John Calvin after he has preached on these verses:
Grant, Almighty God, that when you hide at this day your face from us, that the miserable despair that is ours may not overwhelm our faith, nor obscure our view of your goodness and grace, but that in the thickest darkness your power may ever appear to us, which can raise us above the world, so that we may courageously fight to the end and never doubt that you will at length be the defender of the church which now seems to be oppressed, until we shall enjoy our perfect happiness in heaven, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
What simplicity, theocentricity (God-centeredness), humility, and submissive yearning that expresses the oneness of the redeemed. That spirit is what we long to experience when we are hearing public prayer. Christians meet at the mercy seat. When we all bow there in the presence of our Lord in prayer, we are never closer together. There are Christians who will refuse to read anything that was written by John Calvin. They are missing so much. He was a man of prayer. You will never understand or appreciate the Genevan Reformer or realize his impact in the world until you grasp how there was a part of his life lived at the throne of grace. I often heard Ernest Reisinger say, “It is a sin to preach and not to pray.”
When one visits the Martyn Lloyd-Jones Trust website, one discovers that five examples of the congregational praying of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones are recorded there. They are most moving, comprehensive, and deeply reverent as spoken by one addressing the almighty Creator of the cosmos through what His Son Jesus Christ has achieved. The first recorded prayer was prayed on the opening Sunday of a new year, and so it is the longest—fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The others average between ten and eleven minutes, but all are so gripping and relevant that the last thing one thinks of is their length. Little wonder people looking back sometimes said that when they went to Westminster Chapel for the first time, it was the praying of the Doctor that moved them more than the preaching. Only a man who knows the Scriptures, prays privately, and who walks in the Spirit could pray for that length, gripping and lifting a congregation of 1,400 into the presence of the Holy One. John Owen said, “If the word does not dwell with power in us then it will not pass with power from us.”
There are also four different versions of some of the pulpit prayers of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, prayed on Sunday mornings in the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The most accessible is published by the Banner of Truth. It has been said about Spurgeon’s praying:
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Empowered by the truth that God keeps me as “the apple of [his] eye” (Psalm 17:8), I made the commitment to be a man who takes literally the command that “each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4). Over the years, I have landed on three practices that promote a marriage culture that sees: stop, scribe, and speak.

The scene was reminiscent of a scary movie. Julia walked out to the church parking lot and found an ominous note taped to her car window: “I SEE YOU!”
Though she thought I was hundreds of miles away, I was actually nearby, watching the entire scene unfold. When she began to nervously look around, I took that as my cue and drove up next to her. As she stared in shock, I asked in the smoothest way possible, “Wanna take a ride?” (Yes, I had rehearsed it many times.) She joyfully got in the car, and a few hours later, I got down on one knee and asked if she would marry me. She said yes.
The cryptic three-word message was actually not the way I intended to start the morning. I had crafted the perfect poem to start our engagement day, but it got lost somewhere between my hotel and the church. With only a few seconds to write something, “I SEE YOU!” was all I could come up with.
We used to think our engagement was perfect except for those hastily written three words. Ironically, after 22 years of marriage, that note has become one of our favorite parts of the day. In fact, one of our marriage goals is to regularly and intentionally communicate what first happened on accident: “I see you.” While many fantasize about falling in love at first sight, we’ve discovered a better dream: a marriage that furthers love with each additional sight.
God Saw
It took a few years of marriage before I realized the power of sight as a way to pursue Julia. Up to that point, I was focused on developing my listening skills. Then, right when I began to make progress on that, God revealed (in perfect Godlike fashion) a new need for development: looking skills. We get a glimpse of the power of sight in the way God describes Israel’s suffering in Egypt:
God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel — and God knew. (Exodus 2:24–25)
By developing our listening and looking skills, we unlock a powerful combination in our marriages. When we listen, we communicate that our wife has been heard. When we look, we communicate that she is known and understood.
Unfortunately, far too many wives are overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness. Day after day, they feel invisible to the man they love. When I reflect on my own marriage and the real reasons why I don’t actively bless my wife as God intends, I admit that one of my main obstacles is optical. I don’t actually see what’s happening around me because I’m not really looking.
Savior with Wide Eyes
My breakthrough started with a study on all that Jesus noticed. Our Savior walked through life with eyes wide open. Jesus noticed Nathaniel under a tree (John 1:48) and Zacchaeus up in a tree (Luke 19:5). He noticed John’s disciples following at a distance (John 1:38) and the touch of one desperate woman while the masses pressed around him (Luke 8:45).
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