These questions are for all members as well as any newcomers. Grace is mentioned over 250 times in the scriptures. Christ has put all believers under grace. If there is a subject that is common to all believers and something that we could give testimony about, it would be the grace of God. I am asking these questions so that we can discuss in sincerity, this vital aspect of God.
1. What is grace and what does it do for us?
2. When is grace available and how is it received?
3. Is there any limit to growing in grace?
As a youngster attending religious instruction I remember there are two kinds of grace, sanctifying and actual.
Sanctifying grace stays in the soul. It’s what makes the soul holy; it gives the soul supernatural life. More properly, it
is supernatural life.
Actual grace, by contrast, is a supernatural push or encouragement. It’s transient. It doesn’t live in the soul, but acts on the soul from the outside. It’s a supernatural kick in the pants. It gets the will and intellect moving so we can seek out and keep sanctifying grace.
Our soul in its natural state, it isn’t fit for heaven. If I die in its natural state, heaven won’t be for you. What we need to live there is
supernatural life, not just natural life. That supernatural life is called
sanctifying grace. The reason we need sanctifying grace to be able to live in heaven is because we will be in
perfect and absolute union with God, the source of all life ( Gal. 2:19, 1 Pet. 3:18).
If sanctifying grace dwells in our soul when we die, then we are able to live in heaven (though we may need to be purified first in purgatory; ( 1 Cor. 3:12–16). If it doesn’t dwell in our soul when we die—in other words, if our soul is spiritually dead by being in the state of mortal sin (Gal. 5:19-21)— we cannot live in heaven. We then face an eternity of spiritual death: the utter separation of our spirit from God (Eph. 2:1, 2:5, 4:18). The worst part of this eternal separation will be that we are responsible.
One obtains supernatural life by yielding to actual graces received. God keeps giving us these divine encouragements, and all wehave to do is cooperate.
For instance, God moves us to repentance, and if we take the hint we go to confession,
where the guilt for our sins is remitted (John 20:21–23). Through the sacrament of penance, through reconciliation to God, we receive sanctifying grace. But we can lose it again by sinning mortally (1 John 5:16–17).
Mortal means death. Mortal sins are deadly sins because they kill off supernatural life, sanctifying grace. Mortal sins can’t coexist with the supernatural life, because by their nature such sins say"No" to God, while sanctifying grace says "Yes."
Venial sins don’t destroy supernatural life, and they don’t even lessen it. Mortal sins destroy it outright. The trouble with venial sins is that they weaken us, making us more vulnerable to mortal sins.
When you lose supernatural life, there’s nothing we can do on our own to regain it. We are reduced to natural life again, and no natural act can merit a supernatural reward. We can merit a supernatural reward only by being made able to act above our nature, which we can do only if we have help—grace.
To regain supernatural life, we have to receive actual graces from God. Think of these as helping graces. Such graces differ from sanctifying grace in that they aren’t a quality of the soul and don’t abide in it. Rather, actual graces enable the soul to perform some supernatural act, such as an act of faith or repentance. If the soul responds to actual grace and makes the appropriate supernatural act, it again receives supernatural life.
Sanctifying grace implies a real transformation of the soul. Most of the Protestant Reformers denied that a real transformation takes place. They said God doesn’t actually wipe away our sins. Our souls don’t become spotless and holy in themselves. Instead, they remain corrupted, sinful, full of sin. According to the Protestant heresy of Forensic Imputation, God merely throws a cloak over them and treats them as if they were spotless, knowing all the while that they’re not.
But that isn’t the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox view. We believe souls really are cleansed by an
infusion of the supernatural life. Paul speaks of us as "a new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17), "created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Eph. 4:24). Of course, we’re still subject to temptations to sin; we still suffer the effects of Adam’s Fall (what theologians call "
concupiscence"); but
God removes the guilt from our souls. We may still have a tendency to sin, but God has removed the sins we have.
Our souls don’t become something other than souls when God cleanses them and pours his grace into them (what the Bible refers to as "infused" ["poured"] grace, cf. Acts 10:45, Rom. 5:5 Titus 3:5–7); they don’t cease to be what they were before. When grace elevates nature, our intellects are given the new power of faith, something they don’t have at the natural level. Our wills are given the new powers of hope and charity, things also absent at the merely natural level.
As previously mentioned, we need sanctifying grace in our souls if we’re to be equipped for heaven. In other words, we need to be
justified.
"But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (1 Cor. 6:11).
The
Protestant misunderstanding of justification lies in its claim that justification is merely a
forensic (i.e., purely declaratory) legal declaration by God that the sinner is now "justified." If you "accept Christ as your personal Lord and Savior," he
declares you justified, though he doesn’t really
make you justified or sanctified; your soul is in the same state as it was before; but you’re eligible for heaven.
While protestants expect the person thereafter to undergo sanctification, the
degree of sanctification achieved is, ultimately, immaterial to the question of whether you’ll get to heaven. Protestants submit that the person is justified; and justification as a purely legal declaration is what counts. Unfortunately, this scheme is a
legal fiction. It amounts to God telling an untruth by saying the sinner has been justified, while all along he knows that the sinner is not really justified, but is only covered under the "cloak" of Christ’s righteousness.But, what God declares he does. S]o shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it" (Is. 55:11). So, when God declares you justified, he makes you justified. Any justification that is not woven together with sanctification is no justification at all.
The Bible’s teaching on justification is much more nuanced. Paul indicates that there is a real transformation which occurs in justification, that it is not just a change in legal status. This is seen, for example, in
Romans 6:7, which every standard translation—Protestant ones included—renders as "For he who has died is freed from sin" (or a close variant).
Paul is obviously speaking about being freed from sin in an experiential sense, for this is the passage where he is at pains to stress the fact that we have made a decisive break with sin that must be
reflected in our behavior: "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?" (Rom. 6:1-2). "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness" (6:12-13).
The context here is what Protestants call
sanctification, the process of being made holy. Sanctification is the sense in which we are said to be "freed from sin" in this passage.
Yet in the Greek text, what is actually said is "he who has died has been justified from sin." The term in Greek (dikaioo) is the word for being justified, yet the context indicates sanctification, which is why every standard translation renders the word "freed" rather than "justified." This shows that, in Paul’s mind, justification involves a real transformation, a real, experiential freeing from sin, not just a change of legal status. And it shows that, the way he uses terms, there is not the rigid wall between justification and sanctification that Protestants imagine.
According to Scripture, sanctification and justification aren’t just one-time events, but are ongoing processes in the life of the believer. Both can be spoken of as
past-time events, as Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 6:11: "But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God." Sanctification is also a
present, ongoing process, as the author of Hebrews notes: "For by one offering he has perfected forever those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14). In regard to justification also being an
on-going process, compare Romans 4:3; Genesis 15:6 with both Hebrews 11:8; Genesis 12:1-4 and James 2:21-23; Genesis 22:1-18. In these passages, Abraham's justification is advanced on three separate occasions.
Most Fundamentalists go on to say that losing ground in the sanctification battle won’t jeopardize our justification. We might sin worse than we did before "getting saved," but we'll enter heaven anyway, because we can’t undo your justification, which has nothing to do with whether we have supernatural life in our soul.
Calvin taught the absolute impossibility of losing justification. Luther said it could be lost only through the sin of unbelief; that is, by undoing the act of faith and rejecting Christ; but not by what Apostolic Christians call mortal sins.
Apostolic Christians see it differently. If we sin grievously, the supernatural life in our soul disappears, since it can’t co-exist with serious sin. We then cease to be justified. If we were to die while unjustified, we would go to hell. But we can become re-justified by having the supernatural life renewed in our soul, and we can do that by responding to the actual graces God sends us.
In Christ
