“A Christian is more than a person who is baptized, goes to church, who keeps some rule...He is someone who has Christ within himself, who lives by the grace of God…Grace is nothing other than the Divine Energies, the very “life” of God. Grace is God Himself. We are “saved by grace” because salvation is nothing other than union with God. To live by grace is to live by the very life of God and communion with Him. Thus when Christ speaks of communion with Him He says, “Whosoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood, abides in me and I in them.” (Jn. 6:56) This is grace.” (Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, Father Stephen Freeman)
“…, we celebrate the eternal Son of God, Who spoke the universe into existence, becoming fully one of us while remaining fully divine. He did so in order to restore and fulfill us in the image and likeness of God. The God-Man had to be truly human in order to make us participants in His divinity by grace. He was not born to teach or embody a few rules about piety and morality, but to make us radiant with the divine energies as “partakers of the divine nature.” (Fr. Philip LeMasters)
“By judging the temple and applying its functions to Himself and His ministry, Christ showed that He is now the point of intersection between heaven and earth, the place where we can have access to God. John’s Gospel makes this explicit in the wonderful passage from 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The Hebrew word translated dwelt is “tabernacled,” which connects Christ to the tabernacle, where God’s presence had first come to His people after the loss of Paradise.” (Robin Phillips)
“To live rightly in the world-as-the-gift-of-God is to love the world as the gift of God. It is to extend ourselves towards each and everything (and everyone) around us. Love is the supreme instrument of participation – it is that which adheres. In a life so lived, every element of God’s creation becomes a Cup, a vessel of communion, by which we may drink of His grace. It makes of our lives a song. In the tradition, human beings are described as “rational animals,” the image of God who “speaks.” Supremely, we are the rational (logikos) voice of all creation whose sound rightly soars above the chorus of creation itself…as grace penetrates nature, Christianity becomes incarnate.” (Father Stephen Freeman, Philip Ryken)
“When we come before Christ every day and speak to Him with love and longing, we will find our relationship with Him deepen, so that He will live in us more fully. When we daily reestablish our connection with Jesus Christ in this way, it will become natural for us to follow His commandments throughout the day, in every aspect of our lives. Then His commandments — even the hardest ones, like loving those who spitefully use us (cf. Matt. 5:44) — will not seem burdensome to us. Through our life of Grace in the Church, we are to be continually transformed into the likeness of God, which is the likeness of Christ. We are to be united with God ever more fully by acquiring and assimilating His Grace, His Uncreated Energy.” (Hieromonk Damascene Christensen)
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