“St. John Chrysostom writes, ‘You will ask, “What will happen if Christ is within us?” “If Christ is in you, your body is dead to sin, but your spirit lives unto righteousness” (Rom. viii. 10). You see how much evil comes from not having the Holy Spirit within you: death, enmity towards God, the impossibility of pleasing Him by submission to His Law, or of belonging to Christ and having Him dwelling in you. Look also how good it is to have the Spirit within you: really to belong to Christ, to have Christ Himself within you, to compete with the angels! For to have a body that is dead to sin, means to begin to live in eternal life, to carry within you – even here on earth – the pledge of the resurrection and the reassuring power to advance upon the path of virtue. Note that the Apostle said not only, “the body is dead”, but added, “to sin”, so that you should understand that it is the sins of the flesh, and not the body itself, that is mortified. It is not of the body as such that the Apostle speaks; on the contrary he wants the body, although dead, still to remain alive. When our bodies, in so far as carnal reactions are concerned, do not differ from those that lie in the grave, this is a sign that we have the Son within us, and that in us dwells the Spirit.’ As darkness cannot stand before the light, so all that is carnal, passionate, or sinful, cannot stand before our Lord Christ and His Spirit. But as the existence of the sun does not abolish the fact of darkness, so the presence within us of the Son and Spirit does not abolish the existence within us of something that is sinful and passionate, but only takes away its power.” (Theophan the Recluse in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, pgs. 176-177)
“… Christianity is the personal encounter with Christ, and not, in the final analysis, the acceptance of one or another teaching or dogma about Christ, but of Christ himself.” (Alexander Schmemann in Tradition Alive edited by Michael Plekon, pg. 250)
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