St. Francis de Sales On Living For and Loving God
Today the Church celebrates the life of St. Francis de Sales. If you’ve ever read anything by him (he’s most famous for Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God), then you’ve experienced his infectious love for God. It’s amazing that hundreds of years later his words still have the power to make readers fall more in love with the Lord! That being said, rather than another post about St. Francis, it seemed more fitting to simply let the saint speak to you directly through quotes:
In His great love, Jesus is always pursuing our hearts…
- “Behold this divine Lover at the gate, He does not simply knock, but stands knocking; He calls the soul, come, arise, make haste, my love (Song 2:16), and puts his Hand into the lock to try whether He cannot open it.”
And the more we come to know His love for us, the more we desire to love Him…
- “When the soul sees her God wounded by love for her sake, she immediately receives from it a reciprocal wound…And we, seeing the Savior of our souls wounded to death by love of us, even to the death of the cross, how can we but be wounded for him, but wounded with a wound as much more dolorously amorous as his was amorously dolorous, and a wound as great as is our inability to love him as much as his love and death require?”
And Jesus always responds to our desire to love Him more by giving us the ability to do so…
- “For the measure in which our heart dilates itself, or rather lets itself be dilated and enlarged, and does not deny the void of its consent to the Divine Mercy, in the same measure the Divine Mercy always pour into it, sheds over it, and increasing and ever increasing inspiration under which we also increase, growing more and more in divine love”
Love of God and a life of prayer then help teach us to place God’s will above our own…
- “Our free will is never so free as when it is a slave to the will of God, nor ever so much a slave as when it serves our own will. It never has so much life as when it dies to itself, nor ever so much death, as when it lives to itself”
- “The indifferent heart is as a ball of wax in the hands of its God, receiving with equal readiness all the impressions of the Divine pleasure; it is a heart without choice, equally disposed for everything, having no other object of its will than the will of its God, and placing its affections not upon the things of God but upon the will of God who wills them”
When we have died to ourselves we are then able to joyfully embrace all the Lord sends us…
- “Look at tribulations in themselves, and they are dreadful; behold them in the will of God, and they are love and delights…In truth, love either takes away the hardship of labor, or makes it dear to us while we feel it”
- ” God has given [crosses] to you with His holy hand; receive them, kiss them, love them. My God! They are all perfumed with the dignity of the place from which they come “
I hope you will meditate on some of these quotes because they are so rich! We have so much to learn from St. Francis de Sales, and it’s my most fervent prayer that we will come to know him better and let him teach us to love God as he does!
For a more autobiographical post on St. Francis de Sales, check out The Patience & Perseverance of A Saint



