Reformed Doctrine Daily Devotions

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.” Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1.

Psalm 2

The Reign of the LORD’S Anointed.

    1  Why are the nations in an uproar
         And the peoples devising a vain thing?
    2  The kings of the earth take their stand
         And the rulers take counsel together
         Against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying,
    3  “Let us tear their fetters apart
         And cast away their cords from us!”
    4  He who sits in the heavens laughs,
         The Lord scoffs at them.
    5  Then He will speak to them in His anger
         And terrify them in His fury, saying,
    6  “But as for Me, I have installed My King
         Upon Zion, My holy mountain.”
    7  “I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD:
         He said to Me, ‘You are My Son,
         Today I have begotten You.
    8  ‘Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance,
         And the very ends of the earth as Your possession.
    9  ‘You shall break them with a rod of iron,
         You shall shatter them like earthenware.'”
    10  Now therefore, O kings, show discernment;
         Take warning, O judges of the earth.
    11  Worship the LORD with reverence
         And rejoice with trembling.
    12  Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way,
         For His wrath may soon be kindled
         How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!”

But some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed stood up, saying, “It is necessary to circumcise them and to direct them to observe the Law of Moses.”

The apostles and the elders came together to look into this matter.

After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brethren, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and believe.

“And God, who knows the heart, testified to them giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He also did to us; and He made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith.

“Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?

“But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are.”  Acts 15:1-11.  (Emphasis added.) 

Now, here is Galatians 3:1-6.  Paul likewise here opposed those who were trying to teaching that circumcision and the works of the Law were necessary for perfection.  Note how Paul here likewise focuses on receiving the Holy Spirit, hearing with faith, and salvation through grace as compared to salvation through the Law.   

“You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?

 This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Did you suffer so many things in vain–if indeed it was in vain?

So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

Even so Abraham BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.”  Galatians 3:1-6.  (Emphasis added.)

This is Part Eight of a special article on John Calvin written by Dr. Joel R. Beeke of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.  Dr. Beeke also has an interesting web site on  located at http://calvin500blog.org titled “The Calvin 500 Blog” “Fostering a healthy discussion for an international community about events, conferences, tours, reviews, studies, discussions, and developments related to the 2009 quincentenary of Calvin’s birth.”  Dr. Beeke has given me permission to post his article here which I copied and pasted from his post at his web site.  I hereby thank him for giving me this permission to post his article here and for giving us his web site as a resource to use.

Piety in the Psalter

Calvin views the Psalms as the canonical manual of piety. In the preface to his five-volume commentary on the Psalms—his largest exposition of any Bible book—Calvin writes: “There is no other book in which we are more perfectly taught the right manner of praising God, or in which we are more powerfully stirred up to the performance of this exercise of piety.”   Calvin’s preoccupation with the Psalter was motivated by his belief that the Psalms teach and inspire genuine piety the following ways:

• They offer the divine remedy for our needs. They present Christ in His person, offices, sufferings, death, resurrection, and ascension. They announce the way of salvation, proclaiming the blessedness of justification by faith alone and the necessity of sanctification by the Spirit with the Word.

• They demonstrate God’s amazing goodness and invite us to meditate on His grace and mercy. They lead us to repentance and to fear God, to trust in His Word, and to hope in His mercy.

• They teach us to flee to the God of salvation through prayer and show us how to bring our requests to God.  They show us how to pray confidently in the midst of adversity.

• They show us the depth of communion we may enjoy with our covenant-keeping God. They show how the living church is God’s bride, God’s children, and God’s flock.

• They provide a vehicle for communal worship. Many use first-person plural pronouns (“we,” “our”) to indicate this communal aspect, but even those with first-person singular pronouns include all who love the Lord and are committed to Him. They move us to trust and praise God and to love our neighbors. They prompt reliance on God’s promises, zeal for Him and His house, and compassion for the suffering.

• They cover the full range of spiritual experience, including faith and unbelief, joy in God and sorrow over sin, divine presence and divine desertion. As Calvin says, they are “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.”  We still see our affections and spiritual maladies in the words of the psalmists. When we read about their experiences, we are drawn to self-examination and faith by the grace of the Spirit. The psalms of David, especially, are like a mirror in which we are led to praise God and find rest in His sovereign purposes.

Calvin immersed himself in the Psalms for twenty-five years as a commentator, preacher, biblical scholar, and worship leader.  Early on, he began work on metrical versions of the Psalms to be used in public worship. On January 16, 1537, shortly after his arrival in Geneva, Calvin asked his council to introduce the singing of Psalms into church worship. He recruited the talents of other men, such as Clement Marot, Louis Bourgeois, and Theodore Beza, to produce the Genevan Psalter. That work would take twenty-five years to complete. The first collection (1539) contained eighteen Psalms, six of which Calvin put into verse. The rest were done by the French poet, Marot. An expanded version (1542) containing thirty-five Psalms was next, followed by one of forty-nine Psalms (1543). Calvin wrote the preface to both of those, commending the practice of congregational singing. After Marot’s death in 1544, Calvin encouraged Beza to put the rest of the Psalms into verse. Two years before his death in 1562, Calvin rejoiced to see the first complete edition of the Genevan Psalter.

The Genevan Psalter is furnished with a remarkable collection of 125 melodies, written specifically for the Psalms by outstanding musicians, of whom Louis Bourgeois is the best known. The tunes are melodic, distinctive, and reverent.  They clearly express Calvin’s convictions that piety is best promoted when priority is given to text over tune, while recognizing that Psalms deserve their own music. Since music should help the reception of the Word, Calvin says, it should be “weighty, dignified, majestic, and modest”—fitting attitudes for a sinful creature in the presence of God.  This protects the sovereignty of God in worship and conduces proper conformity between the believer’s inward disposition and his outward confession.

Psalmsinging is one of the four principle acts of church worship, Calvin believed. It is an extension of prayer. It is also the most significant vocal contribution of people in the service. Psalms were sung in Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon services. Beginning in 1546, a printed table indicated which Psalms were to be sung on each occasion. Psalters were assigned to each service according to the texts that were preached. By 1562, three Psalms were sung at each service.

Calvin believed that corporate singing subdued the fallen heart and retrained wayward affections in the way of piety. Like preaching and the sacraments, Psalmsinging disciplines the heart’s affections in the school of faith and lifts the believer to God. Psalmsinging amplifies the effect of the Word upon the heart and multiplies the spiritual energy of the church. “The Psalms can stimulate us to raise our hearts to God and arouse us to an ardor in invoking as well as in exalting with praises the glory of his name,” Calvin writes.  With the Spirit’s direction, Psalmsinging tunes the hearts of believers for glory.

The Genevan Psalter was an integral part of Calvinist worship for centuries. It set the standard for succeeding French Reformed psalm books as well as those in English, Dutch, German, and Hungarian. As a devotional book, it warmed the hearts of thousands, but the people who sang from it understood that its power was not in the book or its words, but in the Spirit who impressed those words on their hearts.
The Genevan Psalter promoted piety by stimulating a spirituality of the Word that was corporate and liturgical, and that broke down the distinction between liturgy and life. The Calvinists freely sang the Psalms not only in their churches, but also in homes and workplaces, on the streets and in the fields.  The singing of Psalms became a “means of Huguenot self-identification.”  This pious exercise became a cultural emblem. In short, as T. Hartley Hall writes, “In scriptural or metrical versions, the Psalms, together with the stately tunes to which they were early set, are clearly the heart and soul of Reformed piety.”

This is Part Seven of a special article on John Calvin written by Dr. Joel R. Beeke of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.  Dr. Beeke also has an interesting web site on  located at http://calvin500blog.org titled “The Calvin 500 Blog” “Fostering a healthy discussion for an international community about events, conferences, tours, reviews, studies, discussions, and developments related to the 2009 quincentenary of Calvin’s birth.”  Dr. Beeke has given me permission to post his article here which I copied and pasted from his post at his web site.  I hereby thank him for giving me this permission to post his article here and for giving us his web site as a resource to use.

Piety in the Sacraments

Calvin defines the sacraments as testimonies “of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him.”  The sacraments are “exercises of piety.” They foster and strengthen our faith, and help us offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. For Calvin, as for Augustine, the sacraments are the visible Word. The preached Word comes through our ears; the visible Word, through our eyes. The sacraments hold forth the same Christ as the preached Word but communicate Him through a different mode. In the sacraments, God accommodates Himself to our weakness, Calvin says. When we hear the Word indiscriminately proclaimed, we may wonder: “Is it truly for me? Does it really reach me?” However, in the sacraments God reaches out and touches us individually, and says, “Yes, it’s for you. The promise extends to you.” The sacraments thus minister to human weakness by personalizing the promises for those who trust Christ for salvation.

God comes to His people in the sacraments, encourages them, enables them to know Christ better, builds them up, and nourishes them in Him. Baptism promotes piety as a symbol of how believers are engrafted into Christ, renewed by the Spirit, and adopted into the family of the heavenly Father.  Likewise, the Lord’s Supper shows how these adopted children are fed by their loving Father. Calvin loves to refer to the Supper as nourishment for the soul. “The signs are bread and wine which represent for us the invisible food that we receive from the flesh and blood of Christ,” he writes. “Christ is the only food of our soul, and therefore our heavenly Father invites us to Christ, that refreshed by partaking of him, we may repeatedly gather strength until we shall have reached heavenly immortality.”