Faith & Spirit Quote by John Calvin

Expectation is Calvin's quiet target here: the human habit of turning faith into a ledger. The line sounds like comfort, but it also disciplines. If God's "infinite liberality" always exceeds "wishes" and "thoughts", then our desires are revealed as small, and our imaginations as provincial. Calvin flatters and chastens in the same breath, training the reader to distrust their own spiritual appetite even as he promises abundance.

The phrasing matters. "However many blessings we expect" concedes that believers do, inevitably, calculate; they hope for outcomes, signs, protections. Calvin doesn't pretend otherwise. He redirects that impulse toward humility by placing a ceiling on human expectation and removing the ceiling from divine giving. "Exceed" is the hinge: God is not merely generous, but structurally beyond comparison. It's a rhetorical antidote to bargaining with heaven, to the transactional piety that can follow anxiety or suffering.

Context sharpens the edge. In the Reformation's turbulent economy of certainty and fear, Calvin is building a psychology fit for his broader theology: God's sovereignty is not a theory; it's an emotional regimen. You don't secure grace by clever prayers or correct forecasts. You receive it. The subtext is pastoral but also polemical, pushing back against systems that treat blessing as something mediated, measured, or earned. At the same time, the claim offers a stabilizing counterweight to the era's chaos: if God's generosity outruns even the believer's best hopes, then the ground of trust isn't your capacity to believe hard enough, but God's capacity to give.