First Instruction for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday: On Love for God

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might and with all your mind” (Lk 10:27; Mt 22:37).

Beloved brethren! It is proper to love to often remember and think about the beloved; it is proper to love often to direct and turn the heart and soul toward the beloved. To remember the beloved constantly and to think about him, to continually feel oneself drawn toward the beloved, is proper to perfect love. God desires that we love Him with such perfect love. This is natural. God is perfect, and He must be loved with perfect love.

Examining ourselves impartially, we do not find in ourselves such love for God, nor capacity for such love. What does this mean? It means that the faculty of love has been damaged in us by the Fall, as have our other faculties. It means that we must cultivate in ourselves love for God, cultivate it to the degree required of us by God’s commandment.

Holy Apostle Paul says that the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5). The Apostle says this about perfect love. The same must be said also about the other virtues. Faith, humility, meekness, patience, and courage can reach perfection in us only when our hearts are renewed by the Holy Spirit. We demonstrate our desire to acquire virtues by the cultivation of virtues depending on us and by earnest prayer for their obtaining.

The way to cultivate love for God is pointed out in the commandment about love itself: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might and with all your mind”.

It is evident: to direct wholly toward God the heart, soul, and mind, one must first of all abandon sinful life. “Turn away from evil”, the Holy Spirit teaches each of us, “and do good” (Ps 33:15); turn away from evil, and only then will you become capable of cultivating virtues in yourself. It is impossible to serve God and sin at the same time. One who serves sin takes in the poison of sin, is imbued and defiled by it: for this reason he cannot make himself God’s own. If for vision there is need of purity of heart (Mt 5:8), it is all the more necessary for union with God. Divine love, by the goodwill of the all-good God, unites into one with Him His rational creature – man, “and whoever adheres to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17).

Cold, superficial service to God, mixed with service to passions, confession of God with lips, without confession by deeds and the hidden life of the heart, by the mere performance of certain external rites and Church ordinances, is recognized as empty, soul-destroying hypocrisy. “Hypocrites”, thus did the Saviour of the world rebuke those who neglected God’s commandments and with petty precision adhered to the traditions of the elders, who preferred traditions to commandments, “well did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men’” (Mt 15:7–9). Church ordinances are very useful and necessary both for each Christian and for Christian society, providing conduct with order and rules; order and rules promote pious living, but the commandments must be the soul of each Christian and Christian society. The Saviour of the world gave proper place and proper worth both to the traditions of the fathers and to God’s commandments. “These” [traditions of the fathers] “you ought to have done”, He said, “and those”, to wit God’s commandments, “do not neglect” (Mt 23:23). From the observance of the ordinances of the holy Church the fulfilling of the commandments becomes especially easy, while life according to the commandments keeps the exact observance of Church ordinances protected from vain-glory, hypocrisy, and carnal reasoning. God’s law is “spiritual” (Rom 7:14); the Gospel commandments are “spirit and they are life” (Jn 6:63). But since man consists of soul and body, external rites and ordinances have proved necessary. They are united with the spirit of the Law. One who is content with fulfilling Church ordinances and rites alone, while neglecting attention to the Gospel commandments or paying them insufficient attention, lowers, by his dullness of mind, the Law from the heights of spiritual significance, deprives it for himself of its spiritual dignity, its whole essence, and perishes in his carnal reasoning and on account of his carnal reasoning (Rom 8:6).

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul”. We are obliged to direct all our will toward God. Just as we care to fulfill the desires of those we love, and to do this we try to know their desires, to study their inclinations, so must we act also with respect to God. We must carefully and thoroughly acquaint ourselves with the will of God. God’s will is revealed to us in God’s Law, which is the Gospel. “Blessed is the man”, says the Prophet, “who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps 1:1–2). “Do not be conformed to this world”, the Apostle exhorts, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). Having learned the will of God, we must fulfill it, because love demands this. It is not content with studying the will of the beloved: it yearns to fulfill it. For fulfilling it, love devotes itself to learning; having learned, it devotes itself to fulfilling. The study and fulfillment of God’s will is recognized by God Himself as a true sign of love for God. “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.” If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. “He who does not love me does not keep my words” (Jn 14:21, 23, 24).

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart”; this is not enough: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul”. Destroy in yourself every division: let the whole man be united into one and wholly directed toward God. Let this striving be guarded from double-mindedness and wavering; let it be guarded from inclining toward any attachment whatsoever, even if this attachment seemed the most insignificant. One very insignificant attachment can hold a Christian bound to the earth and completely deprive him of spiritual progress. O, how weak we are! How the Fall has corrupted and blinded us! We see that all our brothers, gradually, each in his turn, are called into eternity by God’s command, to which it is impossible to resist or contradict. Upon leaving the earth, this inn, this prison, this exile, all necessarily leave everything that belongs to the earth. We see this; we know for certain that our turn will come; but we live as though we had never seen the dying, had never heard of the existence of death; as though we were appointed, unlike others, to remain on earth forever. We bind ourselves with countless attachments; our love is scattered upon many things, and concerning the acquisition of love for God, concerning making ourselves His own, we take no care, nor even think. What a terrible self-deception! When we depart hence as naked souls, then, upon entering the new world, there can be one hope alone, one consolation for us – the union with God acquired during earthly life. Having acquired this union here, we shall take it with us there. There it will serve for us as a pledge, a cause of obtaining eternal, unspeakable goods. What does God not give to those who have made themselves His? What can He give to those who, of their own will, not heeding His calling voice, have become estranged from Him, have become incapable of remaining with Him, incapable of receiving His precious and eternal gifts? Eternal blessedness is spiritual, Divine. Only he can inherit this blessedness who has first broken communion with sin, who has first entered into holy communion with God. He who, on the contrary, has acquired a hostile disposition to God and to all that is pleasing to God, by necessity must be rejected from the face of God, cast down to where all the enemies of God are cast. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your might”: not only all the powers of the soul must be directed toward God, the body itself must take part in this striving. The body is capable of this striving. The longing for God was from the beginning natural to our body, created with a longing for God. The longing for God is spiritual and holy; the body too was spiritual and holy. It has been infected with baseness and corruption on account of the Fall; it has been infected with bestial desires on account of the Fall. The Redeemer has restored to it the capacity for spiritual longing, and the true followers of the Redeemer have availed themselves of this gift, driving out passionate desires from their bodies, acquiring holy longing. Divine love is proper to our bodies. Having been freed from the disease of sinfulness, unnatural to them and hostile, they are in the course of earthly pilgrimage constantly drawn to God, according to their nature and the action of the Holy Spirit that overshadows the purified nature; they are drawn to God with all their might, joining their strength to the strength of the soul. After the universal resurrection, sanctified bodies, receiving into themselves sanctified souls, will fly by the power of divine love, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the dwellings of Paradise (1 Thes 4:17); they will fly to heaven, whither, as Forerunner of men, our Lord Jesus Christ ascended with His holy flesh. The Apostle says: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom 12:1). “For this perishable body” must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body “must put on immortality” (1 Cor 15:53). “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44).

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind”. This last part of the commandment is fulfilled by the unceasing remembrance of God. Unceasing remembrance of God seems impossible to minds unfamiliar with true service to God, and urging oneself to such remembrance seems a burden heavy and a struggle unbearable. But the Gospel commandment says: “You shall love the Lord your God” with all your mind, “with all your understanding” (Mk 12:30), “with all your thought” (Mt 22:37); it commands that the mind be constantly and wholly directed toward God, that the thought of God be always with us. “His commandments” are not “burdensome”, testified a zealous doer of God’s commandments, the beloved disciple of the Lord (1 Jn 5:3). If God’s commandments are not burdensome, then the commandment calling God’s servant to be inseparable from God in mind and thought is not burdensome either. The commandment seems burdensome only because we have no practice in it, have no slightest experience. It is not burdensome; it is desirable. “I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved” (Ps 15:8), the Prophet says. Living and constant remembrance of God is a vision of God. God forgotten by man becomes for man as if non-existent, becomes hidden from man: constantly remembered, He, as it were, comes to life, appears, becomes, though omnipresent and omnipotent, co-present with man. The soul is transformed when a spiritual sensation opens in it, through which the presence of God is felt, and the Invisible becomes Visible. The soul is clothed in spiritual, victorious weapons, in unshakeable courage, in faith, in patience, in unwearied watchfulness. The life of man begins to pass under the eyes of the sleepless eye of God, which looks unfailingly upon all and sees all that is done by us and happens to us. Dwelling and acting under the eyes of God, man is guarded with special care from sins, takes special care in fulfilling God’s commandments: he looks with coldness upon passing temporal goods, magnanimously bears the reverses of earthly life. When the hour comes of separation of the soul from the body, of entrance into eternity, then there will appear to him a consciousness full of joy and consolation: the consciousness that earthly life was passed not in self-forgetfulness, not in self-deception and absorption in vanity and sins, not in forgetfulness of God – but in unceasing remembrance of Him, in the fulfillment of His all-holy will, under His all-holy guidance.

The beginning of unceasing remembrance of God is already contained in the careful study of God’s Law, in attentive reading of the Gospel and all the New Testament, in reading the holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church. It is impossible not to remember frequently during the day that which occupied us with special attention during an hour. The fulfillment of the Gospel commandments constitutes remembrance of God. By the spiritual comfort and enlightenment that arise from the fulfillment of the commandments, the heart is roused and warmed to special remembrance of God. A life wholly devoted to the fulfillment of the commandments is constant remembrance of God. A most important aid to unceasing remembrance of God is the unfailing fulfillment of one’s personal prayer rule and frequent, as possible for each one, visiting the temple of God to participate in public worship. The time of prayer is of itself the time of special remembrance of God, the time of union with God. The prayerful disposition acquired in the temple of God and in the fulfillment of one’s personal prayer rule continues to accompany man and to work in him in all his occupations, bringing to the remembrance of mind and heart God. Finally, an additional excellent means of remembrance of God is prayerful appeal to God before every undertaking, with a request from Him for blessing, guidance, help, mercy. This mental struggle has been commanded by the Lord Himself, Who declared to His disciples: “Apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). Invocation of the Lord for help before every deed, before every conversation has been used by the greatest saints of God and they have bequeathed this meaningful, holy, powerful, though invisible action, as a precious treasure and inheritance, to their disciples and to all Christians. When we are alone, we can call upon God both with mind and with lips; when we are with our neighbors, then we should turn to God with mind alone. “There is nothing faster than the mind,” said the Venerable Barsanuphius the Great, “direct it to God” in any encountered need. Experience will not delay in proving to the diligent laborer the importance of this struggle, in proving the nearness of God to us, His sleepless care for us, the faithfulness and omnipotence of Him who said: “He who clings to me, I will deliver; I will protect him, because he knows my name. When he calls to me, I will answer him” (Ps 90:14–15).

These are the blessed deeds by which love for God is cultivated. In the writings of the holy Fathers we find teaching based on Holy Scripture (1 Jn 2:5) that love for God is acquired through love for the image of God – man. A holy teaching! A true teaching! This teaching is identical with the teaching that love for God is acquired through the fulfillment of the Gospel commandments, because true love for one’s neighbor consists in the fulfillment toward him of the Gospel commandments, and not at all in the fulfillment of his caprices, not in actions toward him according to the impulses of the fallen heart, according to the calculations and conceptions of falsely-named reason. The fulfillment of the Gospel commandments toward men is for the most part incomprehensible and unpleasant to them; they seek and demand that their will be fulfilled, that their passions be satisfied. This they call love, and this love, filled with hypocrisy, craftiness, deception, the sons of the world bring to those of whom they have need for earthly, fleshly prosperity. This incorrect love, this distortion of love, this hatred covered with the mask of love, Scripture calls men-pleasing. By men-pleasing not only is love for God destroyed, but also the very remembrance of God. “God scatters the bones of those who please men” (Ps 52:6) – all the strength of the soul, without which no virtue can be firm. “For if I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Gal 1:10), says the Apostle.

The degree of our love for God we perceive with special clarity in prayer, which serves as the expression of this love and is very aptly named in patristic writings as the mirror of spiritual progress. When in prayer we are subject to constant distraction, this serves as a sign that our heart is held captive by earthly attachments and cares, which do not permit it to be wholly directed to God and to remain with Him. Attentive prayer serves as a sign that the heart has broken the bonds of attachments and therefore is now free to be directed toward God, to cling to Him, to make itself His. The transition from distracted prayer to attentive prayer, or from love of the world to love of God, requires a prolonged time, prolonged labor, many efforts, many aids. There is need for aid from fasting, need for aid from chastity and purity, need for aid from non-acquisitiveness, need for aid from faith, need for aid from humility, need for aid from mercy, need for aid from Divine grace. Through the combined action of these aids the heart is torn away from love of the world; man, freed from the invisible chains of the Fall and sinfulness, is wholly directed toward God. Having recognized the height and blessedness of this state, he strives to be in it more often. Divine love proves to him by experience its presence in him, and he proves his love for God by attentive, constant prayer, not robbed by thoughts of things and affairs of the passing world. The first spiritual manifestation of love for God is revealed in the feeling of the fear of God, which, according to the testimony of Holy Scripture, is “the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 1:7). What is Divine wisdom if not Divine love? It is natural that the fear of God be the beginning of love and the first fruit of attentive prayer. What other feeling can be the feeling of a man burdened with countless sins and infirmities when he feels the presence of God and his standing before God face to face, than a feeling of fear and the deepest reverence? When we are invited by an earthly king, through his special favor toward us, the first feeling that seizes us upon being presented to him is a feeling of fear. It is inspired both by the grandeur of the royal rank and the magnificence of his setting and by the insignificance of our standing before the king. Gradually, with a kindly reception, fear begins to diminish, giving way to feelings of pleasure and love. The same happens in our relations with God. Upon the appearance in the soul of blessed purity by which God is seen, fear first seizes the soul. The fear of God, being an action of Divine grace, has its own spiritual sweetness. Through gradual union with God this sweetness is intensified and finally is transformed into love, which is the most abundant action of that same Divine grace. Human labor within our power is crowned by the gift of God. If man does not undertake the labor first and does not prove the faithfulness of his will by experience, the gift from on high is not sent. If the gift is not sent, labor is in vain: it is robbed and damaged either by negligent and half-hearted accomplishment of it, or by the admixture of vain-glory and men-pleasing.

May God’s unspeakable mercy grant us to struggle lawfully and in a manner pleasing to God in the seeking of Divine love, and may He crown us with the gift of love for our sincere desire for love, for our right striving toward love. Love for all that the passing world presents as objects of love must necessarily be broken by the irreversible determination of God, by which we must in due time part with these objects: he who has acquired love for God has acquired God, Who, having become here on earth the object of love and the possession of man, remains his forever and ever. Amen.

Macarius the Great, Word 7, Ch. 19

Replies 260, 261, 592

Saint Isaac the Syrian, Word 55, and other Fathers

The Ladder, Word 28, Ch. 1