“What does it mean to take up your cross and follow Jesus Christ? How can you be heavenly minded and yet do much earthly good? Calvin addresses these practical questions and more in this excerpt from his classic, Institutes of the Christian Religion. I love this little book, and heartily endorse this judiciously translated and edited printing that makes Calvin even more accessible to the modern reader.”

”We are living in a golden age of Christian publishing. Readers are being served with new works written here in the twenty-first century and, perhaps even more importantly, with classics from days gone by. This booklet is one of those classics, and I'm grateful to Aaron Denlinger and Burk Parsons for allowing today's Christians to rediscover it. I pray that it blesses us just as it blessed many of our forebears.”

“I have often thought, ‘I would love to retranslate for the twenty-first century the life-shaping material in Calvin’s Institutes book 3, chapters 6–10,’ and I’ve done nothing! But now, Burk Parsons and Aaron Denlinger have done the job for us all. We owe them a big thank you, because every Christian needs to have a working knowledge of this little book.”

“The smooth and pleasant Latin Calvin wrote has found a just as smooth and pleasant translation in this wonderful little book. That sure is an accomplishment and will help many to enjoy even more the timeless message this treasure contains.”

“Calvin’s treatment of the Christian life in book 3 of his Institutes is a treasure. For more than five hundred years, Christian believers have profited from the clear way in which Calvin describes the Christian life of self-denial and cross-bearing in union with Jesus Christ. Reformation Trust Publishing’s fresh translation of this Christian classic is a most welcome addition to earlier publications of Calvin’s masterful description of life in conformity to Christ.”

John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism.

Dr. Burk Parsons is senior pastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Fla., chief publishing officer for Ligonier Ministries, editor of Tabletalk magazine, and a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow. He is author of Why Do We Have Creeds?, editor of Assured by God and John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, and cotranslator and coeditor of A Little Book on the Christian Life by John Calvin. He is on Twitter at @BurkParsons.

Dr. Aaron Clay Denlinger is department chair in Latin at Arma Dei Academy in Highlands Ranch, Colo., adjunct professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and a research fellow for the Puritan Studies Program of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a regular contributor to Reformation21.