2002 ** God’s free initiative demands *man’s free ***response, for God has created man in his image by conferring on him, along with freedom, the power to know him and love him.
The soul only enters freely into the communion of love. God immediately touches and directly moves the heart of man. He has placed in man a longing for truth and goodness that only he can satisfy. The promises of “eternal life” respond, beyond all hope, to this desire:
If at the end of your very good works . . ., you rested on the seventh day, it was to foretell by the voice of your book that at the end of our works, which are indeed “very good” since you have given them to us, we shall also rest in you on the sabbath of eternal life.52
2009 Filial adoption, in making us
partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God’s gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us “co-heirs” with Christ and worthy of obtaining "the promised inheritance of eternal life."60** The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness.61 "Grace has gone before us;** now we are given what is due. . . . Our merits are God’s gifts."62
THE UNIVERSAL CALL TO PRAYER
2566 Man is in search of God. In the act of creation, God calls every being from nothingness into existence. “Crowned with glory and honor,” man is, after the angels, capable of acknowledging "how majestic is the name of the Lord in all the earth."1 Even after losing through his sin his likeness to God, man remains an image of his Creator, and retains the desire for the one who calls him into existence.** All religions bear witness to men’s essential search for God.2**
2567**
God calls man first**. Man may forget his Creator or hide far from his face; he may run after idols or accuse the deity of having abandoned him;
yet the living and true God tirelessly calls each person to that mysterious encounter known as prayer. In prayer, the faithful God’s initiative of love always comes first; our own first step is always a response. As God gradually reveals himself and reveals man to himself, prayer appears as a reciprocal call, a covenant drama. Through words and actions, this drama engages the heart. It unfolds throughout the whole history of salvation.
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