And yet sin is still in us and we constantly fall away from the new life we have received. The fight of the new Adam against the old Adam is a long and painful one, and what a naive oversimplification it is to think, as some do, that the “salvation” they experience in revivals and “decisions for Christ,” and which result in moral righteousness, soberness, and warm philanthropy, is the whole of salvation, is what God meant when he gave his Son for the life of the world. The one true sadness is “that of not being a saint,” and how often the “moral” Christians are precisely those who never feel, never experience this sadness, because their own “experience of salvation,” the feeling of “being saved” fills them with self-satisfaction; and whoever has been “satisfied” has received already his reward and cannot thirst and hunger for that total transformation and transfiguration of life which alone makes “saints.”
Schmemann, A. (2018). For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy: Vol. I (pp. 95–96). Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
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