Free Will:
God has given human beings intellect and will so that they might reason to act freely to seek, know, and love God which is their true good and perfection.
God is continually calling:
God continuously offers His free and undeserved help of grace to humanity, and individuals can resist or reject this divine gift to respond to His call of becoming His children.
This grace precedes, prepares, and elicits the free response of man, responding to the deepest yearnings. The Holy Spirit is always at work, opening the human heart and making it ready to welcome the truth of the Gospel. While God touches the human heart through the Holy Spirit, man is not inactive and can reject this inspiration.
Grace:
Grace is defined as a participation in the life of God, a gratuitous gift infused by the Holy Spirit into the soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.
Grace acts where an individual provides personal assent, and all stages of the spiritual life require cooperation between human freedom and the grace of God.
While grace is a gift, justification establishes a cooperation between God's grace and human freedom.
However, human freedom is finite and fallible; a person's desire may be drawn to an apparent good, and in choosing a false good, they fail in their vocation to freedom.
How Grace is Resisted:
Sin is an offense against God, a disobedience to His law, and a turning away from His love.
Knowingly resisting the grace of God is considered a sin because it insults God and rejects His gifts, without which salvation is not possible.
several ways one can sin against God's love, which can be understood as forms of resisting grace:
• Indifference neglects or refuses to reflect on divine charity and denies its power.
• Ingratitude fails or refuses to acknowledge divine charity and to return love for love.
• Lukewarmness is hesitation or negligence in responding to divine love, implying a refusal to give oneself over to the prompting of charity.
• Acedia or spiritual sloth goes so far as to refuse the joy that comes from God and to be repelled by divine goodness.
- Impenitent: The radical refusal to accept the forgiveness offered by the Holy Spirit. It is a state of "non-repentance" and a radical refusal to be converted, where a person claims a "right" to persist in evil and thus rejects Redemption. This attitude is an interior resistance and impenetrability of conscience. It signifies a loss of the sense of sin (refuses to know they are a sinner), which is profoundly linked to the loss of the sense of God.
The Holy Spirit works to rouse a salvific restlessness in the conscience of those who turn from God through sin, enlightening them to see their deeds and helping them to be free from sin's slavery. However, if a person obstinately refuses to be converted to the love of the Father of mercies, they voluntarily exclude themselves from the path of forgiveness. This resistance can manifest as "resistance of the known truth," where one resists acknowledged truth to sin more freely, or "obstinacy," where one hardens their purpose by clinging to sin.
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