"Give the first place to God"
No one who cares about himself can love God, but whoever takes no care for himself on account of the far greater riches of divine charity is one who loves God. Such a one never looks to his own glory but that of God, for the man who cares about himself is looking for glory for himself. Whoever cares for God loves the glory of his Creator. Indeed, it is characteristic of an interior soul, a friend of God, always to seek God’s glory in all the commands it carries out and to rejoice in its own nothingness. For glory is fitting to God because of his greatness but to man, nothingness. This is the way he becomes God’s friend. If we act like this, rejoicing like Saint John the Baptist in the glory of the Lord, then we will begin to say unceasingly: “He must increase, I must decrease,” (Jn 3,30).
I know of someone who loves God so much that, even though he groans because he does not love Him as much as he would like, his soul is always burning with the desire to see God glorified in him and to see himself as though he were not. That man has no words for telling what he is, even when he is praised, for he has no thought for his own dignity in his great desire to be abased. He carries out the divine services as is fitting for a priest, but in the extremity of his attraction towards love for God he hides the memory of his own dignity in the abyss of his charity for his God, burying the glory that he might have drawn from it in the humility of his thoughts. At all times he thus seems to be, in his own eyes, nothing but an unprofitable servant: his desire for abasement excludes him, after a fashion, from his proper dignity. Here is what we also must do, in such a way as to flee all honour, all glory, on account of the overflowing riches of the love of Him who has so loved us.
St. Mark the Ascetic