put up for sale to you. Take stock of the resources of your consciences and
168 SAINT A UGUSTINE - SERMONS you will have pure hearts, and you will see the one who made the world.5 And just as he has overcome the world, so will you too, by his grace, overcome the world.6 Assuredly you will overcome it and trample on it right away, if you do not presume to rely on your own strength, but on the help of the most merciful God.
Do not despise yourselves, though, just because it has not yet appeared to you what you shall be. You must know, however, that when he appears, you will be like him,1 since you will see him (1 Jn 3:2), not as he came to us in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4), but as, abiding forever, he was when he created us.
Put off the old man, in order to put on the new.8 The Lord is entering into a bargain with you. You have been living for the world, giving yourselves over to flesh and blood, wearing the image of the earthly man. So just as you wore the image of the man who is from the earth, in the same way from now on wear the image of the man who is from heaven.9
It is a human word—because that is why the Word became flesh—that just as you presented your bodies to sin as weapons of iniquity, so now you should present your members to God as weapons of justice (Rom 6:19). Your attacker was armed against you for your destruction with your own missiles; against him for your salvation let your protector in turn be armed with your members. That one will do you no harm, if he doesn't possess the members you have taken away from him. This one will rightly forsake you, if your intentions and wills dissent from him.
Do not let the seed of God's word in you
be trampled on the path or wither
3. Look, in the auction and market of faith, the kingdom of heaven is being put up for sale to you. Take stock of the resources of your consciences and husband them; be of one mind in putting together the funds of your hearts. And yet you are buying for nothing, free, gratis, if only you can recognize the graceful grace that is being offered you. You are spending nothing, and yet what you are acquiring is just huge. Don't hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day10 the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son.
Well, you won't be cheap in that way, if you distinguish what's precious or dear from what's cheap; if you devote yourselves to the service not of the creature but of the creator; if you do not let yourselves be dominated by your lower nature, so that free from all stain,11 you may be cleansed from a grave capital sin;12 if you do not let the seed of God's word in you, which even now the heavenly farmer is broadcasting in the field of your hearts, either be trampled on the path, as by the passing feet of the unworthy, or wither as soon as it sprouts on the solid, stony hardness of your consciences; or be stifled among the thorns and pernicious thistles of your greedy desires.
If you shun with shuddering horror the sterility of such doom-laden and damnable soil, then a rich and most fertile soil will assuredly receive you,13 and