1.21 blog

A few months ago, I issued the challenge to read through Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion during this five hundreth anniversary of his birth. I don’t know if anyone is still doing this or not. It’s ok if you’re not, but I’ve been finding some great stuff in the reading. In any case, today’s reading dealt with how Christians spend their lives carrying the cross (see, e.g., Matthew 16.24), dying to ourselves, and living instead for and from God. One paragraph in particular stood out:

For, overturning that good opinion which we falsely entertain concerning our own strength, and unmasking our hypocrisy, which affords us delight, the cross strikes at our perilous confidence in the flesh. It teaches us, thus humbled, to rest upon God alone, with the result that we do not faint or yield. Hope, moreover, follows victory in so far as the Lord, by performing what he has promised, establishes his truth for the time to come. Even if these were the only reasons, it plainly appears how much we need the practice of bearing the cross. And it is of no slight importance for you to be cleansed of your blind love of self that you may be made more nearly aware of your incapacity; to feel your own incapacity that you may learn to distrust yourself; to distrust yourself that you may transfer your trust to God; to rest with a trustful heart in God that, relying upon his help, you may persevere unconquered to the end; to take your stand in his grace that you may comprehend the truth of his promises; to have unquestioned certainty of his promises that your hope may thereby be strengthened (Calvin, Institutes, 3.8.3).

I love the line where he says that we learn to distrust ourselves, and that this leads us to transfer our trust to God. This is essentially what the Christian life is all about. And it’s good for me to hear. One of my perennial temptations is pride. Here Calvin shows prideful people like me that it’s through the cross that we learn humility. So rather than turn my gaze inward and analyze the mixture of pride and humility in my heart so that I can try to increase the latter and decrease the former (which essentially means I’m trusting myself), the solution is to direct my gaze outward to Jesus’ cross, where my pride was crucified.

Where is your trust?

Posted by: Gene Schlesinger