430
A.D.
Augustine of Hippo
Patristic
A.D. 354–430
“"O come, let us worship, and fall down to Him; and mourn before the Lord our Maker" [Psalm 95:6]....Perhaps you are burning with the consciousness of a fault; blot out with tears the flame of your sin: mourn before the Lord: fearlessly mourn before the Lord, who made you; for He despises not the work of His own hands in you. Think not you can be restored by yourself. By yourself you may fall off, you can not restore yourself: He who made you restores you. "Let us mourn before the Lord our Maker:" weep before Him, confess unto Him, prevent His face in confession. For who are you who mournest before Him, and confessest unto Him, but one whom He created? The thing created has no slight confidence in Him who created it, and that in no indifferent fashion, but according to His own image and likeness.”
“But I do not somehow think that this is what the Holy Spirit was chiefly concerned to remind us of in this psalm, where it says, "Let us weep before the Lord who made us." In another place it says, it is "he who made us, and not we ourselves," which, as I remarked, no Christian doubts. Because not only did God create the first human being, from whom come all people, but God also creates each and every human being today—he who said to one of his saints, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." So at the beginning he created people without other people; now he creates people from people. Still, whether it is people without people or people from people, it is "he who made us, and not we ourselves."8So at the first and easy sense of these words—still a true one, of course—"let us worship him, brothers, and prostrate ourselves before him and cry before the Lord who made us." He did not, after all, make us and now desert us. He did not go to the trouble of making us only to abandon us. "Let us worship before the Lord who made us," because we did not worship when he made us, and yet he made us all the same. So having made us before we worshiped him, is he going to desert us when we worship him? If someone were doubting whether he would be listened to when he prayed, Scripture reassures him when it says, "Let us cry before the Lord who made us." Of course he listens to those he made; of course he cannot fail to care for those he made.”
“Do not despair. You are sick, approach him and be healed; you are blind, "approach him and be enlightened." Those of you who are healthy, thank him for it; those of you who are sick, run to him to be healed. All of you, say, "Come, let us worship and prostrate ourselves before him, and let us weep before the Lord who made us," made us human beings and saved us. You see, if it was he that made us human beings, while we saved ourselves, it means we have done something better than he has. I mean, a saved human being is better than an unsaved one. So if God made you a human being, and you made yourself a good human being, what you made is better. Do not lift yourself up above God; submit yourself to God, worship, prostrate yourself, confess to the one who made you; because nobody can recreate except the one who creates; nobody can make you new but the one who made you in the first place.”