Grace is a gift offered
Faith is a gift offered
Salvation is a gift offered
My Response completes covenant decision (both parties)
Trust is my response
Or
Reject is my response
These gifts can only be received if you put your Trust in Him. If you reject, you don’t get the gifts. Gifts cannot be earned. But they are to be used (cooperated with). God means for you to use the gifts to be transformed into the likeness of His son.
Grace to know and understand God is a person who wants relationship
Faith is to believe He is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do
Born Again is when God gives me Spiritual Life, Jesus’s Blood Sacrifice justifies me and the Holy Spirit Indwells me.
He gives Spiritual life to those who receive His Son and believe in His Name. (We must respond then right to be reborn-not reborn first) [God gives grace, but our response is necessary to complete covenant] see John 1:12
Salvation is Turning from the world to God the Father, being Born Again in Spirit, on the road to Heaven, being healed from my sin, fighting it surrendered to God’s Holy Power.
The point of Salvation is to be made Christlike. If you are not cooperating with Grace, Faith, and Surrendered to the Holy Spirit to heal from your sin, you are not truly RECEIVING the gifts. You must check your Trust…. It takes both parties for the covenant. God is faithful, are you?
Human response: trust or rejection
• The Fathers stress that receiving Christ is an active choice; without it the gifts remain ungrasped.
• The Catechism teaches that grace must be cooperated with; otherwise it does not bear fruit8.
Therefore, if one trusts and cooperates, the promise of sonship is fulfilled; if one rejects, the gifts remain unreceived.
John 1:12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.
• The covenant requires both parties: God’s faithful promise and our trust‑filled response(faith, obedience, cooperation with grace).
• John Chrysostom explains that the wording “gave them power to become sons of God” shows that the divine gift must be received and then cooperated with; it is not earned but must be accepted and lived out2.
• He also warns that the gift can be lost if one abandons it through sloth or sin1.
• Augustine likewise says that God “gave power to become sons of God” to those who receive Him and believe3, emphasizing the adoptive relationship that follows faith.
These Fathers read John 1:12 as a covenantal grant: God offers adoption; the human response—faith and perseverance—completes it.
• Grace is defined as “the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons”4.
• It “introduces us into the intimacy of the Trinitarian life” and makes us partakers of the divine nature5.
• The grace of baptism is the “sanctifying or deifying grace” that makes us “a new creation” and adopted children of God6.
Thus the Church teaches that grace (the gift) and faith (the human response) together effect adoption, exactly as John 1:12 describes.
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