Sanctification or the price of aging

(thank you John Camp. Read the whole quote here)

Gerhard Forde on Sanctification:
from "Christian Spirituality"--(pp. 31-32)

.. Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because
I'm getting tired! It's just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is
that sanctification? I wouldn't think so! One should not, I expect, mistake
encroaching senility for sanctification! "But can it be, perhaps, that it is
precisely the unconditional gift of grace that helps me to see and admit all
that? I hope so. The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about
ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain humor, a certain
down-to-earthness."

I can really understand this, especially since August 2006 when suddenly I had an M.I.

Grace precedes sin

Another short quote from Ray S. Anderson's continuation guest post at Faith and Theology

My puzzle is that without labelling something as sin (as Ray says "Jesus did not label people sinners") and therefore someone who does it as a sinner  how does one know how to engage with it. It could be that one cannot do this kind of labelling even to ones own sins without grace.

Sin is not a condition that precedes grace. For until one is welcomed into the Kingdom of God through grace, the tragic only is a condition to be overcome, sometimes by religion, rather than by a relationship in which the tragic is brought under the promise of redemption. Until we each have discovered our own sin, always through grace, to be called a sinner by others is not only graceless, it is tragic. It breaks the common bond that makes us human. Saul of Tarsus would never have accepted the accusation that he was a sinner until he experienced the grace of God through his encounter with the risen Christ. Until the tragic nature of sin is revealed though grace, it lies untouched and unredeemed, hidden like a deadly virus that thrives on self-affirmation only to emerge in self-condemnation.