What is the work of divine grace in a person’s life?

The answer

God, who by His grace created us in His image and likeness, granted us free will to support us in harmonizing our own wills with the will of God; in knowing goodness and enacting it; and in considering others as our brothers and sisters. But we corrupted this holy freedom. St. Gregory of Nyssa says, “To the rational nature, however, he gave the grace of self-determination and added a capacity to detect what fits one’s purposes. In this way space might be made for our responsibility, and the good should not be compelled and involuntary but come about as the product of choice. Since the impulse of self-determination unavoidably leads us toward the apparent good, there was found in the order of Being one agent who used this power wrongly and, according to the word of the apostle, became the ‘inventor of mischief’ (Rom. 1:30).”⁵⁸⁵

The scholar Origen says, “both I and the prophets before me have received the more divine and greater prophetic grace from his fullness for the grace we received from him in relation to our free choice.”⁵⁸⁶

Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty