Love Makes Servants into Sons

Suppose someone, relying on God’s help and not on his own efforts, has been granted to reach this state. Then he will begin to pass from the condition of a servant, where there is fear, and from the greedy hope of a hired man, which looks not so much for the good of the giver as for the payment of a reward, to the adoption of sons. There, there is no longer fear or greed, but the love that never fails lasts on and on. [a]

The Lord, rebuking some people, shows what belongs to each of these, fear and love: “A son knows his own father, and a servant fears his lord. And if I am a Father, where is my honor? And if I am a Lord, where is my fear?” For one who is a servant must fear, because “if, knowing his lord’s will, he has done things that deserve a beating, he will be beaten with many blows.”

Whoever, then, has reached the image and likeness of God by this love will now delight in goodness for the pleasure of goodness itself. Having in some way a feeling like God’s own patience and gentleness, he will no longer be angered by any faults of sinners; in his compassion and sympathy he will rather ask pardon for their weaknesses. He remembers that for so long he himself was tried by the stings of the same passions, until by the Lord’s mercy he was saved. So he will feel that, since he was saved from the attacks of the flesh not by what his own efforts taught him but by God’s protection, it is not anger but pity that ought to be shown to those who go astray.

And with full peace of mind he will sing this verse to God: “You have broken my chains; I will offer you the sacrifice of praise,” and, “Unless the Lord had helped me, my soul would almost have dwelt in hell.” And while he continues in this humility of mind, he will be able even to fulfill this command of perfection from the Gospel: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute you and slander you.”

And so it will be granted to us to reach the reward that is added after it, by which we will not only bear the image and likeness of God but will even be called sons: “so that you may be,” he says, “sons of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” The blessed John knew that he had reached this disposition when he said: “so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we also in this world.”

For in what can a weak and fragile human nature be like him, except in always showing a calm love in its heart toward the good and the evil, the just and the unjust, in imitation of God? And by doing good for the love of goodness itself, it arrives at that true adoption as sons of God of which the blessed apostle also speaks: “Everyone who is born of God does not sin, for his seed is in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God,” and again, “We know that everyone who is born of God does not sin, but his birth from God keeps him, and the wicked one does not touch him.”

This must be understood not of every kind of sin but only of mortal sins. If anyone will not free and cleanse himself from these, the same apostle tells us in another place that we ought not even to pray for him: “If anyone knows that his brother is committing a sin that does not lead to death, let him ask, and he will give him life, for those whose sin does not lead to death. There is a sin that leads to death; I do not say that he should ask for that.”

But of the sins that he says do not lead to death, from which even those who serve Christ faithfully cannot be free, however carefully they guard themselves, he says: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” and again, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

For it is impossible for any of the saints not to fall into those slight faults that are committed by word, by thought, by ignorance, by forgetfulness, by necessity, by will, and by surprise. Though these are quite different from the sin that is said to lead to death, they still cannot be free from fault and blame.