We always need God’s grace

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
December 2, 2017

MAKE no mistake about it. We always need God’s grace. On our own, we can only do evil. Whatever good we think we can do without God’s grace is only apparent. Sooner or later, that good will have no other fate but to degenerate into something evil.

Actually, God’s grace – at least what is known as the actual grace – is always available. But we need to be aware of it by constantly asking for it so that our actuations will always be according to God’s will and ways even as they are also according to ours.

Let’s always remember that our life is always a life with God. Considering that we have been created in God’s image and likeness and are children of his, everything in our life is infused with God’s spirit which we have to learn to be aware of and to correspond to as best as we can.

Christ affirmed this truth when he said he is the vine and we are the branches. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.” (Jn 15,5)

We have to overcome our strong tendency to think that we can be just on our own, wrongly thinking that this is how we exercise our freedom. Our freedom can only be true freedom when it is exercised with God who is its source, its power and its end.

The autonomy that we enjoy in this life, especially in our temporal affairs where we are legitimately allowed to have different views and opinions, should never be understood as being totally independent of God such that we can even go against God’s will.

Without corresponding to God’s grace, we are bound to misuse our human powers. If our first parents, still in their state of original justice, managed to sin because in a moment they lapsed into forgetting God and following the suggestion of the devil, how much more us who have been born already with the handicap of the original sin.

Without corresponding to God’s grace, the use of our human powers will be distorted and will just convert into all kinds of isms. Our intellectual activity, for example, will fall into intellectualism, the exercise of our will into voluntarism, the joy of our sentiments into sentimentalism. These human powers become easy prey to the wiles of our wounded flesh, the deceptive charms of the world, and the tricks of the devil.

Our will, for example, which is what enables us to be the image and likeness of God and is therefore our most powerful human faculty, can be misused such that instead of becoming like God, we can choose to become like the demon.

For us to correspond properly to God’s grace, we need to be always humble, always feeling the need to be in his presence and to know his will in an abiding manner. May it be that no moment passes without being with God and interacting with him.

We have to regularly examine ourselves to see how we can plug the hole that takes us away from God’s presence. This hole usually takes the form of the pride that we can derive from enjoying our God-given endowments. Instead of thanking God for them and using them for God’s purposes, we simply enjoy them on our own, using them entirely according to our will and designs.