'Deny Yourself and Take up Your Cross': John Calvin on the Christian Life

John Calvin's vision of the Christian life is guided by the fundamental insight that what distorts our lives more than anything else is our blind self-love. This self-love is the reason why we love to hear things that flatter us, and hate to hear things that truly reveal who we are. Our self-love also provides the driving engine behind our pride, ambition and arrogance, whereby we seek the meaning of our lives in power, wealth and honor, so that we may despise those we consider to be inferior to us. If we are to be transformed more and more into the image and likeness of God, so that we may at the end be united with God in eternal life, we must eradicate this blind self-love from our hearts. Although there is much in Calvin's vision of the Christian life that may strike us as odd or even as alien, it is hard to disagree with his insight that blind self-love is the primary reason our lives do not express the image and likeness of God.