Augustine understood that the same grace that saves is the same grace that sanctifies. Dependence upon God in yielding one’s own will over to God was a continual process that begins at salvation and extends throughout the believer’s life. Nowhere in Augustine’s writings is the balance between freewill after regeneration and the rule of God in the believer’s life more clearly seen than in this passage where Augustine reflects upon the imago Dei being renewed.
He who is thus renewed by daily advancing in the knowledge of God, in righteousness and holiness of truth, is changing in the direction of his love from the temporal to the eternal, from the visible to the intelligible, from the carnal to the spiritual; diligently endeavoring to curb and abate all lust for the one, and to bind himself in charity to the other. In which all his success depends on the divine aid; for it is the word of God, that ‘without me ye can do nothing.’
—Augustine, The Trinity
