On Loving God IX: 26
On Loving God IX: 26
God's grace which frees him and come to love God not for his own advantage but for the sake of God?
THE THIRD DEGREE OF LOVE: MAN LOVES GOD FOR GOD'S SAKE
Man's frequent needs oblige him to invoke God more often and approach him more frequently. This intimacy moves man to taste and discover how sweet the Lord is.242 Tasting God's sweetness. entices_ us more to pure love than does the urgency of our own needs,. Hence the example of the Samaritans who said to the woman who had told them the Lord was present:
"We believe now not on account of what you said; for we have heard him and we know he is truly the Savior of the world. "243
We walk in their footsteps when we say to our flesh, "Now we love God, not because of your needs; for we have tasted and know how sweet the Lord is."244 The needs of the flesh are a kind of speech, proclaiming in transports of joy the good things experienced. A man who feels this way will not have trouble in fulfilling the commandment to love his neighbor.245
He loves God truthfully and so loves what is God's. He loves purely and he. does not find it hard to obey a pure command ment, purifying his heart, as it is written, in the obedience of love.246 He loves with justice and freely embraces the just com mandment. This love, is pleasing because it is free. It is chaste because it does not consist of spoken words but of deed and
Pet 1 : 22. truth.247 It is just because it renders what is received. Whoever loves this way, loves the way he is loved, seeking in turn not what is his248 but what belongs to Christ, the same way Christ sought not what was his, but what was ours, or rather, our selves.249 He so loves who says: "Confess to the Lord for he is good.''250 Who confesses to the Lord, not because he is good to him but because the Lord is good, truly loves God for God's sake and not tor his own benefit. He does not love this way of whom it is said: "He will praise you when you do him favors."251
242. Ps 33:9.
247. 1 Jn 3:18.
248. 1 Cor 13:5.
249. 2 Cor 12:14.
250. Ps 117:1.
251. Ps 48:19.
243. Jn 4:42.
244. Ps 33: 9.
245. Mk 12:31