The Three-Step of Faith
“And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34)
At the end of the 1541 edition of his Institutes, Calvin outlines the three habits of a healthy soul: self-denial, cross-bearing, and meditation on the future life. When it comes to self-denial, Calvin says, we refer partly to our duty to consider others more important than ourselves, but principally to the divine imperative of subjugating our own interests to God’s.
Consider first of all that self-denial is really the antithesis of pride, a wretched and pervasive disposition that permeates all of mankind. Calvin asserts:
We look for ways of asserting our supremacy over all others and we despise them all, without exception, as our inferiors . . . (T)here is no one who in his heart of hearts does not imagine he deserves to outrank everyone else. Thus each person, in his own way, fondly nurses an entire kingdom in His heart . . . If conflict flares up, out comes the poison: there is no hiding it. There are many, it is true, who maintain the appearance of mildness and moderation as long as things go their way. But how few there are who can remain gentle and even-tempered once they are nettled and irritated! This is bound to be the case until the mortal plague of self-love and self-promotion is plucked out from deep within the heart.
How can this self-abnegation be achieved? Only, Calvin says, as we “resign ourselves and all we have to God, surrendering to Him our dearest desires that He might tame and master them.” We must make Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane our very own, “Lord, not my will but Thine be done.” This will require a daily death to self and to our constant thirst for self-satisfaction, indulgence, and promotion. It will be (indeed it must be) in the small things that we learn this grace of self-denial, in those little temptations offering a little godless pleasure. We surely cannot pretend to love God if we sell our allegiance to Him cheaply.
Secondly, we must not shy away from cross-bearing, so we must “allow” God to disappoint us without grumbling or complaint, and so show patience and restraint in every “chance” occurrence which affects our present circumstances. We must not blame God when things don’t fall out to our liking. For God is King, and we must allow HIm to rule us as He will.
No instrument teaches the Christian this lesson better than the cross. What is the cross? In the simplest terms, the cross is an instrument of death by which God intends to execute the old man who lives deep inside us all. Such trials have their appointed end when we receive them by faith and submit to them in hope. Seen from this perspective, present difficulties serve to loosen our love affair not only with sin but also with this present evil world.
Do you view your trials from this perspective? We are God’s strange plants who grow best in winter and not in springtime. We do not fare well with uninterrupted prosperity: “ God’s generosity was meant to make us value and love His goodness. But such is our ingratitude that instead of being provoked to virtue, we are spoiled by His lenient treatment. He must, therefore, keep an especially tight rein on us and impose a certain discipline, in case we grow wilful beyond measure.”
Finally, as a result of His firm but loving training, we are able to meditate on eternal things above as God weans us from this world and teaches us to long for better days ahead in heaven. To accomplish this end, lest we seek the delights of this world as our final and eternal home, usually God must train us in the school of misfortune and disappointment. The trick, Calvin says, is to scorn this world without hating it. This is a hard balance to maintain.
When I was a fourth-year medical student, I spent six weeks in India as an intern at a rural hospital out in the boondocks. Contracting Typhoid in the tropics was not a pleasant experience. I was as sick as a dog and couldn’t wait to get home. I am not exaggerating when I say that those six weeks felt like six years. At last, the day came for me to go home. My itinerary was a little complicated, requiring an overnight stay in Mumbai between two flights. Well, I didn’t really want to trudge around the Mumbai International Airport all night, and I was definitely too cheap to rent a hotel room, so I chose instead to slum it in the lobby of a five-star hotel near the airport. After six weeks in the downs and further downs of rural India, I don’t mind admitting that it was paradise. Grazing at the all-you-can-eat buffets of the hotel’s restaurants, I had a marvelous time. Real western food never tasted so good. However, as pleasant as that idyllic night was, nothing could have persuaded me to settle there because I had somewhere better to go: home.
So it should be for the Christian. While there are many delights down here which God intends to thrill the taste buds of our souls, we must never allow these things to dull our desire to go home to God. So let us think often and fondly of heaven. And let us enjoy the Giver in each of His gifts, sure in the knowledge that “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” Life means Christ to me, Paul says, and death means more of Christ. As Calvin says, “So far as our crown is concerned, it is to heaven that we must look. We may be sure that our heart will never consciously learn to desire the life to come and to meditate on it, without first feeling (at least some) disdain for this earthly life.” To learn this lesson, we must feel the incompleteness of every earthly happiness. Only then will we have eyes to see and ears to hear the promise of better days ahead in the glory to come.