February 5, 2022 - Pastor Message
04/19/2024GRACE
“By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
“The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1999).
Continuing our reflection on the Holy Spirit and how the Spirit works in our lives for our salvation, we turn today to the concept of grace. Salvation is the work by which God shares his own immortal, divine life with us when we had rejected him in sin. It is not something we can accomplish on our own or that we somehow deserve. God shares his life with us freely through the saving sacrifice of his Son, who conquers sin and its consequence, death, on the cross. He then enables us to share in his victory and the new, risen life that flows from it by sending his Spirit into our souls, who makes his home within us (John 14:15-24), like breathing his own breath into us as one would do through CPR for someone who has stopped breathing, as St. Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ, so that it is no longer I who live, but Christ living in me” (Galatians 2:19-20). The divine life that God gives us is called grace.
Grace takes different forms as God meets us wherever we are in this world of sin and death and gradually frees us and makes us a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). As a gift from God of his own divine life, grace is supernatural, yet we can sense it in a preliminary way in the beauty of nature and created things (Romans 1:20). God has also planted in our hearts and minds a hunger for the fullness of truth, goodness, and life that only he can satisfy, moving us to seek him and, in finding him, to freely love and serve him. That free response of faith is itself a gift of grace and a prerequisite for receiving the life of the Holy Spirit called sanctifying grace, normally first received through baptism. Sanctifying grace is called habitual grace when referring to the enduring power God gives us to live and act according to the life he has given us. It is called actual grace when referring to interventions God makes in our lives to fan the burning ember he plants in our souls into flame. Sometimes these helps God gives us come in unexpected and surprising ways, like an un-looked-for kindness in a time of need, but we can also seek them out and intentionally benefit from them in regular and structured ways, like the sacraments.
It is no exaggeration to say that our whole purpose as Christians is to receive and live in God’s grace in this life until it grows into full maturity and bears the fruit of complete, eternal communion with God in the life to come: “God’s divine power has bestowed on us everything that makes for life and devotion, through knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and power. Through these, he has bestowed on us precious and very great promises, so that through them you may come to share in the divine nature, after escaping from the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire” (2 Peter 1:34).
Fr. Marc Stockton
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