Throughout our life we are continually making choices. We choose either to follow the direction that grace leads us in, or, we instead, choose to follow our own thoughts and reasoning. St. Theophan tells us that when we do live a grace-filled life our internal being will become "radiant like a star, beaming bright rays everywhere.”
Saint Theophan cautions us that if we do not continue to choose the path grace leads us down then grace will abandon us. When we do follow it a powerful center forms in us.
He says,
This is the aim of Orthodox Spirituality to draw in and empower the grace of the Holy Spirit within us. Our aim is to become Holy through the work of grace working through all our members and in all of our actions. With our cooperation we can become as bright as a star as Saint Theophan suggests.
If you, through your own choice and decision, do not choose grace, then it will abandon you completely, and leave you in the hands of your self-will... Inner regulation begins only when you choose the side of grace, and make the ways of life in the spirit of grace the inviolable rule of your life. From that moment, as the decision is forming inside you, a center will also form within you, a powerful center, which will begin more and more forcefully to draw you toward itself. In this center will be grace... Then the grace of God will begin to draw towards the center all the other forces of your nature, both intellectual and spiritual, and govern their entire action, retaining within them that which is good, and destroying that which is bad. This drawing of everything to one center and directing of all to one goal is the inner rebirth that you have so fervently desired.
Reference: The Spiritual Life; pp 128–132
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