“… truly loves God for God’s sake and not for his own benefit …”
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. 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.” 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.”
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. 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 commandment, purifying his heart, as it is written, in the obedience of love. He loves with justice and freely embraces the just commandment. This love is pleasing because it is free. It is chaste because it does not consist of spoken words but of deed and truth. 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 his but what belongs to Christ, the same way Christ sought not what was his, but what was ours, or rather, ourselves. He so loves who says: “Confess to the Lord for he is good.” 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 for his own benefit. He does not love this way of whom it is said: “He will praise you when you do him favors.” This is the third degree of love: in it God is already loved for his own sake.
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God IX —
