Calvin on the Christian Life Quotes

“Only a misunderstanding of Calvin’s theology could prompt the question Why pray if God is sovereign? The Reformer himself might turn the question back on us: Why pray if God isn’t sovereign?”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“I expect that Calvin would evaluate our worship today not as too emotional, but as too narrow in its emotional repertoire.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Trials are the workshop of a Father, not the threats of a Judge. The arrow that looks as if it were targeting our heart is actually aimed at the sin that clings to us, so that we may be loosened from its grip.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“If I do not procure the edification of those who hear me, I am a sacrilege, profaning God’s Word.” Edification is central to proper preaching: “For God will have his people edified. . . . When we come together in the name of God, it is not to hear merry songs and to be fed with wind, that is vain and unprofitable curiosity, but to receive spiritual nourishment.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Since God has descended to us in swaddling clothes and in hanging on a cross, we should not consider any calling menial or unimportant. When Christ—the God of the universe—wrapped a towel around his waist to wash his disciples’ feet, Calvin observes, he dignified the humblest callings. No one and no service is “beneath us” if it benefits others.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Wherever Reformed convictions gained a foothold, there was a revival of classical learning and interest in the arts and sciences—not only among the highly educated, but even among the daily laborer, who also had more access to basic education.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“This may be the most valuable and the most challenging thing we can learn from Calvin’s ecclesiology today: that the church is not something that we form of our own accord. It is not a product of our reaching out to God, but a gift of God reaching out to us.”107”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“The same God who commands us and calls us to obedience is the one who has justified us, removing the law’s terrors. For those who find their justification in Christ alone, the law is now a friend rather than an enemy. God speaks his law to us now not from Mount Sinai, with its ominous threats attended by lightning, but from Mount Zion, where the throne of judgment has been turned into a hearth of peace.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“We are not trying to win his favor, but are seeking to rest in it, to bask in it, to delight in it.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“For whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of his fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“We have to ground obedience in the gospel, Calvin insists. It is enough for the Papists if they can extort by terror some sort of forced obedience, I know not what. But Paul, that he might bind us to God, not by servile fear, but by the voluntary and cheerful love of righteousness, allures us by the sweetness of that favor by which our salvation is effected; and at the same time he reproaches us with ingratitude unless we, after having found a Father so kind and bountiful, do strive in our turn to dedicate ourselves wholly to him.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“In short, the God who is not bound nevertheless binds himself freely to his Word. He cannot go back on his promises, and he even delights in our appealing to his covenant pledge and its signs and seals as we bring our case before him. Our”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Nevertheless, we pray not only when all is well and we have a vivid sense of God’s presence and goodwill. Indeed, an even better time to pray is when God seems remote and his care is less than evident to us in view of our circumstances.34 In some expressions of Calvinism, a stoic resolve has been confused with reverence. One should suffer difficulties in quiet. In any case, one should never give vent, especially in public, to any frustration with God and his ways. No, Calvin replies; in this covenantal relationship, God even gives believers “license” to complain. He can handle it.35”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Across Calvin’s writings, one of the recurring terms for God’s lavish gift-giving disposition is “liberality”—often “fatherly liberality.” God is not stingy. As we see in nature, God has provided for us far beyond our needs, to delight us with the diversity of pleasures that ought to lead us to gratitude for his bounty.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Genuine and earnest prayer proceeds first from a sense of our need, and next, from faith in the promises of God,” so”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“So true it is that we dig up by prayer the treasures that were pointed out by the Lord’s gospel, and which our faith has gazed upon.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Just as we would not have expected to find God in a feeding trough of a barn in an obscure village, much less hanging, bloody, on a Roman cross, we do not expect to find him delivering his gifts in such humble places and in such humble ways as human speech, a bath, and a meal. Think”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“In evangelical circles we typically think of preaching as teaching and exhorting. Of course, Scripture informs, instructs, explains, asserts, and commands. Yet for the Reformers, the preaching of the Word is more than a preacher’s thoughts, encouragements, advice, and impassioned pleas. Through the lips of a sinful preacher, the triune God is actually judging, justifying, reconciling, renewing, and conforming sinners to Christ’s image. God created the world by the words of his mouth and by his speech also brings a new creation into being. In other words, through the proclamation of his Word, God is not just speaking about what might happen if we bring it about but is actually speaking it into being. Hence, Calvin calls preaching the sacramental word: the word as a means of grace. Faith comes by hearing the Word—specifically, the gospel (Rom. 10:17). Thus, the church is the creation of the Word (creatura verbi).”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Theologies of glory ascend to heaven with humanly devised methods for bringing Christ down or for descending into the depths to make him living and real to us, but a theology of the cross receives him in the humble and weak form of those creaturely means that he has ordained.3”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Christ died for us, but he does not repent and believe for us. Repentance and faith are gifts that he gives us by his Word and Spirit, but we exercise them as a deliberate act of the will.67 Let us not downplay the difficulty of this struggle. Every believer fights against insurgents within and without, the remnants of a defeated foe. This growth is not automatic. We may quench the Spirit by refusing his promptings. When we fail to avail ourselves of the means of grace, we shrivel on the vine. Furthermore, if we don’t communicate with our Father and if we abandon the fellowship of our brothers and sisters, we become drifters instead of pilgrims. The gospel gives us a secure place to stand as we fight this battle with all our might and main.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“This undue rigor was something he detected in both Roman Catholic and Anabaptist discipline.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“We encounter this sometimes in our own circles today, as believers often feel obliged to smile in public even if they collapse at home in private despair. Calvin counters, “Such a cheerfulness is not required of us as to remove all feeling of bitterness and pain.” It is not as the Stoics of old foolishly described “the great-souled man”: one who, having cast off all human qualities, was affected equally by adversity and prosperity, by sad times and happy ones—nay, who like a stone was not affected at all. . . . Now, among the Christians there are also new Stoics, who count it depraved not only to groan and weep but also to be sad and care-ridden. These paradoxes proceed, for the most part, from idle men who, exercising themselves more in speculation than in action, can do nothing but invent such paradoxes for us. Yet we have nothing to do with this iron philosophy which our Lord and Master has condemned not only by his word, but also by his example. For he groaned and wept both over his own and others’ misfortunes. . . . And that no one might turn it into a vice, he openly proclaimed, “Blessed are those who mourn.”35 Especially given how some of Calvin’s heirs have confused a Northern European “stiff upper lip” stoicism with biblical piety, it is striking how frequently he rebuts this “cold” philosophy that would “turn us to stone.”36 Suffering is not to be denied or downplayed, but arouses us to flee to the asylum of the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. It is quite unimaginable that this theology of the cross will top the best-seller lists in our “be good–feel good” culture, but those who labor under perpetual sorrows, as Calvin did, will find solidarity in his stark realism: Then only do we rightly advance by the discipline of the cross when we learn that this life, judged in itself, is troubled, turbulent, unhappy in countless ways, and in no respect clearly happy; that all those things which are judged to be its goods are uncertain, fleeting, vain, and vitiated by many intermingled evils. From this, at the same time, we conclude that in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle; when we think of our crown, we are to raise our eyes to heaven. For this we must believe: that the mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it is previously imbued with contempt for the present life.37”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“The ladders of glory we are told to climb to behold the “naked God” are now marked, “Danger: No Entry.” Just as we would not have expected to find God in a feeding trough of a barn in an obscure village, much less hanging, bloody, on a Roman cross, we do not expect to find him delivering his gifts in such humble places and in such humble ways as human speech, a bath, and a meal. Think cross, not glory.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“The unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church depend entirely on what it hears and tells.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Jerome does not condemn singing absolutely, but he corrects those who sing theatrically, or who sing not in order to arouse devotion but to show off or to provoke pleasure. Hence Augustine says, When it happens that I am more moved by the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned, and then I would rather not hear the singer. Arousing men to devotion through preaching and teaching is a more excellent way than through singing.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“Jerome does not condemn singing absolutely, but he corrects those who sing theatrically, or who sing not in order to arouse devotion but to show off or to provoke pleasure. Hence Augustine says, When it happens that I am more moved by the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned, and then I would rather not hear the singer. Arousing men to devotion through preaching and teaching”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“It is the theology of the cross over against theologies of glory that drives Calvin’s reforming zeal.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“The church’s principal officers are not monks, artisans, and a retinue of priests whose calling is to serve images they’ve made, but heralds, announcing God’s mighty acts in history. Zwingli’s”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“The flesh of Christ is like a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead into itself. Now who does not see that communion of Christ’s flesh and blood is necessary for all who aspire to heavenly life?”81”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever

“All of the Reformers agreed among themselves and with Rome on the point that the Supper lies at the heart of the person of Christ, the Christian life, and the nature of the church.”
― Michael S. Horton, Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever