Mysty, we should never limit God's authority or what God can do. God created Adam with the potential to live in submission to him. He also created Adam with the freedom to go his own way. Adam chose the later. Because sin entered into the world through Adam, the rest of us have been born into a different world in which our natural potenial was different from the potentialities that were true for Adam. Having been marred by the consequences of Adam's sin, we were never free to live in a completely sinless world and by all appearances it seem our natural inclination seems to have been to continue to make the choice that Adam did to serve self rather than to submit to God. As such we are anything but sanctified people, set apart for God's purposes, but much more by nature we tend to "look out for #1" (and notice how no one ever questions that by #1 we mean one's self).
God's love is so great that in the person of Jesus he entered into his world where everyone thinks (and lives) as if he/she is #1 - from the infant crying for its mother's milk, to the priest of God who demands that people respect his office - and showed us what it was like to live a live that declared that actually was sanctified (set apart for the purposes of God).
Let us remember that Jesus (though we like to speak of him as "the Son of God" or even as God the Son, was also thoroughly human. The doctrine of the incarnation means that yes this is God who dwells among us; it als means he is limited by that flesh the same as we are. If Jesus lives a perfectly sinless life, he does so under the same constraints and potentialities that we have (or at least that Adam had), NOT because he has some divine power to avoid sin. As Paul tells us in Philippians 2, Jesus gave up all of his divine perogatives when he came in the form of a human being. He was still divine, but he faced all the same challenges and temptations and difficulties and trials that are common to every other son and daughter of Adam. Some theologians of a particular persuasion that I suspect you grew up with like to remind us that if Jesus was not the Son of God then his death on the cross could not make atonement for us. They forget that for Jesus bearing that cross was a decision he had to make as a human being, one that the Son of Adam made in the Garden of Gethsemane when he cried out, "If it be possible Father, let this cup be taken from me. Nevertheless, not my will but thy will be done."
Now, anything can be sanctified temporarily. The objects of the temple are washed, sprinkled with blood, so a to mark them as holy, i.e. sanctified (the Engish words "holy", "saint", "sanctified" are all one and the same word in Greek -- "hagios" -- which means "belonging to God") or set apart for God's purposes, and pretty much anything can be so "sanctified". Even the concept of Messiah (meaning literally "anointed") is not a special designation applied to Jesus alone. There were many messiahs in Jesus's day. We tend to think of those who were false messiahs. But not all of these messiahs were false. For instance the term "messiah" was applied to John Hyrancus and the Maccadees who had cleansed the temple and for a time gave Israel a brief period of independence from occupation under Persians, Greeks and Romans that it experienced following their return from the Babylonian exile. Indeed, in Isaaih, the one who took thm into exile, Nebudchadnezzer, is called "the Lord's anointed", in the Hebrew the word is "maschrach" or "messiah".
It is that final phrase, "thy will be done" which is the mark of a sanctified person. When our utlimate will is to do the will of God, one is entirely sanctified. And Jesus obviously lived his life that way in its entirety.
But, again I remind you, that this is something Jesus did in his humanness. So, is it possible for a human? Yes. But let us also remember, even Jesus didn't live this way depending on his own power, but did so s he was led by the presence of the Holy Spirit in his life. Apart from that reality, who knows, Jesus might have failed just s we each do. I know that some will think such a concept heretical, but they will be wrong. The heresy would be to deny the risk that God took when he incarnated himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. As the second Adam, Jesus face the very same risks that the first Adam did. The potential to choose God was there, and so was the potential to make a different choice. Apart from that choice, the cross is not a sacrifice.
You and I are faced with similar choices in our lives. Because of what Christ has done, we who place our trust in him are continually challenged with regard to whose will will we follow. Conversion is about a change in our nature, from one that is predisposed to serving #1, to one that has the potential to fully rely on God. Again, we cannot do this n our own power any more than Jesus did. When we are in Christ, we become his brothers and sister, and in a very real sense are sons and daughters of God just as Christ (and before him Adam) were. God's Spirit restores us to an unbroken relationship with the Father through the work of the Messiah (God's anointed one) and sets before us the potential to say "nevertheless, not my will but thy will be done" with regard to the choices that are ever before us.
So, we are sanctified in two different ways. One, we are sanctified because God claims us in Jesus, the Christ of God. To be a Christian is not just to be a follower of Christ, but to actually be a "little Christ" ourselves. This is possible because we don't attempt to follow Jesus in our own power, but to do so with the assistence of the Spirit who indwells us every bit as much as Jesus was God dwelling among us.
Second, because of this change in our nature, we have the potential to not just be an object that is claimed by God. We can actually live lives that are set apart for God. In this way our very life, our way of living is also sanctified, made holy. And, as you will note from your reading of the New Testament, Paul writes to those who have so identified themselves calling them "saints". He uses this term with regard to them even when he is chastising them for some of their sins. Therefore, to be a saint, to be holy, to be going through the process of sanctification is not a statement about being sinless. But it is a statement about our desire to be like Christ.
And here is the tricky part, that I guess snumerouno is going to disagree with, that process is a process which depends on our openness to God. He is indeed perfecting us, that is working on finishing us to become Christ-like. And regardless of our past, because we are new creatures in Christ, the past, including our human nature and its natural tendency to sin is irrelavant. We are new creatures, born again, filled with the Spirit who does enable us to follow Christ and to become like him. And just as the human Jesus did not sin, such has to be held out as a possibility for those who have been crafted in the image of the second Adam and cleansed of our sinful nature. Most of us return to the old nature as Paul describes in Romans 6, willing one thing, yet experiencing another in our lives. But it does not have to be that way. If we would ever truly let that Holy Spirit have control over us, if we would submit fully as the human Jesus did and showed us the way for us to follow him, then we too could not just be living lives in which we are being sanctified, but even lives that have been entirely sanctified, where our only thought is to do the will of him who sent Jesus and sends us into the world. And of course, such a life, with the Spirit of Jesus would have no room for anything that was not of God in thought, word or deed.
Now if that ever happens, it is not because we have willed it, but because of the presence of Christ living within us, and God having accepted the offering of our lives to him when we first learned to trust in Christ, and now shaping us to become ever more like him.
