In yesterday’s post Let there be Light I wrote what the Lord was showing me about the Light that the Holy Spirit brings into our lives. Today the Lord is taking me deeper into what it actually is.
Another name for this ‘Light’ is ‘Sanctifying grace’. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has the following to say about it.
1999 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 to sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification:48Therefore if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself.49
2000 Sanctifying grace is an habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God, to act by his love. Habitual grace, the permanent disposition to live and act in keeping with God’s call, is distinguished from actual graces which refer to God’s interventions, whether at the beginning of conversion or in the course of the work of sanctification.”
So this Sanctifying or “deifying” grace, makes us part of Christ and prepares us for a life lived in Union with His Will… we are saved and get to experience a little bit of heaven here and now, we are in a state of grace …but it’s not a ‘once saved, always saved’ as many other Christians like to believe. We need to choose Him and keep choosing Him… not just in our words but in our actions. So the only thing that removes God from us is sin… mortal sin to be exact. For it to be a mortal sin it requires it to be serious matter, we must know that it is a serious sin and choose to commit it anyway. So in other words we tell God that we don’t want to obey Him and we turn our back and walk away from Him, choosing our own path of self gratification instead.
The effect of mortal sin is it “deprives us of sanctifying grace and consequently of all virtues and supernatural gifts” ~ Fr. Jacques Nouet
What a devastating loss and the majority of humanity so easily throw it away without a second thought. This grace is the pearl of great price.
Fr. Jacques goes on to tell us some of the ways this may happen “Men cast out God from their hearts by blasphemy, lascivious discourse, a desire of revenge, some gross evil-speaking; and you may see them enjoying themselves as if they had lost nothing.”
Blasphemy being; disrespecting, insulting and rejecting the Lord, taking His name in vain. Lascivious discourse is impure or indecent talk, sexual bantering and so forth.
Then in James 5:9 we hear “Do not grumble, brethren, against one another, behold, the judge is standing at the doors.”
The Lord gives it all to us with great love, it is up to us what we will do with it. Do we accept His great gift and reciprocate His love or do we carelessly throw it all away?
I confess to almighty God,
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned
through my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done, and in what I have
failed to do;
through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sister,
to pray for me to the Lord our God