Wondering what your definition of sanctification is? Thanks.
Back from Services, only to find yet ANOTHER rotten-child definitional theological question...
No good deed ever goes unpunished, I say!
Sanctificaiton is the making of Godliness in a person...
God alone can give Sanctification...
When we eat His Body and drink His Blood, His Sanctity is imparted unto us, according to our stage of purification of the heart, and according to His Purposing... It is not merely SAID of us because we claim to believe in the One Who Sanctity IS - eg Jesus Christ - but is because of the presence of God IN us - And only God HAS this to give TO us... If we turn back and re-claim our prior ways of sinning, this imparted Sanctity will depart from us, even though the Holy Spirit has been Sealed in us at Baptism...
This is why Paul writes in Hebrews:
Heb 6:4-6
For it is impossible
for those who were once enlightened,
and have tasted of the Heavenly Gift,
and were made partakers of the Holy Spirit,
And have tasted the Good Word of God,
and the Powers of the Age to Come,
IF they should fall away,
to renew them again unto repentance;
seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh,
and put him to an open shame.
This
repentance is that
repentance which leads to Baptism, wherein all one's sins are forgiven and in the purity of that washing, one is reborn and given the Seal of the Holy Spirit... The sins one commits AFTER Baptism must be confessed and repented - They are not subject to re-Baptismal washing away... For we are Baptized INTO Christ, and INTO His Crucifixion on the Cross, INTO His Death, and live in the hope and epectation of His Holy Resurrection, as we:
"
Run with patience the race that is set before us,"
Not to lose, but to win... By God's Holy Grace...
Whose Strength is perefected in our weakness...
We emerge from the Baptismal Waters of Regeneration fully Justified, and in the purity of that Justification we are Sanctified by the Holy Unction that imparts the Seal of the Holy Spirit within our souls... This, you see, is what the Old Testament Holy Ones did not have... They were much more Sanctified than most of us will ever be, but that saturation of the Holy Spirit was not Sealed in them by God as a part of their hypostasis/person... THIS is what came with Christ's Incarnation, this UNION with Himself, within His Holy Body, the Church, this New Creation IN Christ, of those of us who have been joined together with Him in Holy Baptism, and who then as a part of that Baptism, have been Chrismated [eg 'Christed'] with the Holy Spirit...
And the better prepared by repenting the pereson being Baptized is when he or she is Baptized, then the more Sanctified will that person be when emergent from those Sanctified Waters...
This is how the Early Church approaches these matters...
Not from the point of view of legal requirement...
But from that of the ontology of restoration to God...
Arsenios