Learn More to Leave More

“You can only surrender all that you know of yourself to all that you know of God.” 

I recently stumbled across this quote like you would a four-leaf clover. I wasn’t exactly looking for it, but there it was, its value radiant. It immediately brought to mind the opening line of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

Calvin is not saying that the knowledge of ourselves is as important as the knowledge of God — God is always first, always most important.

Calvin, see, is explaining what’s necessary for wisdom. What do we need to know in order to live well? To live rightly? To live in congruence with the will of God throughout the complexities of a fallen world as fallen creatures?

We must know God — we must. And we must know something about ourselves.

And that last part is not unpopular in our society. The “getting to know yourself” tune has been popping for years, and there’s no shortage of books and materials out there that provide tools for the quest. Your atheist neighbors will pat you on the back if you tell ‘em you’re trying to learn more about who you are. 

Self-knowledge in and of itself should not appeal to us.

Unless it’s self-knowledge that we surrender to God.

Because for sure, as Calvin will tell us, if we start looking inside we’re not going to like what we see. It’s a mess. We’re a mess. Because we’re sinners. We’re broken. We’ve been subjected to the curse of sin. Rebellion against God is in our bones. 

Calvin, in fact, believes that one long look inside will actually make us seek God, because we’ll realize our desperate condition. He says that if any human lacks a desire to seek God, to be changed, it’s only because they don’t truly know themselves. We were not meant to live apart from God.

So the more we understand about ourselves (about our particular weaknesses, our besetting sins, our wirings and so forth), the more opportunities we have to humble ourselves before God, casting all our anxieties on him, because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). And see! That’s a crucial truth we must know about God!

We learn more about ourselves in order to surrender more to him — because we know that he loves us, that he already knows us and our frame, that he remembers we are dust, and he shows compassion to us like a father to his children (see Psalm 103:13–14). Even when we are still a long ways off, he sees us, and he’s always eager for our returns (see Luke 15:20).

So increased self-knowledge leads to increased God-dependence. 

Or, in shorthand, we might put it: 

Learn more to leave more.

“You can only surrender all that you know of yourself to all that you know of God.”