Who’s living your life today? If you claim to be a follower of Jesus that’s not a question you get to answer quickly or easily. If you confidently say, “I am – I’m living my life for God’s glory!” you’re missing out an absolutely key truth of the Christian life.
The key to the Christian life isn’t working hard. It doesn’t even begin with having deep feeling of affection for God. The key to the Christ-centered life is the revelation that you no longer have a life of your own; that when you were born again in Christ your life was overtaken.There’s a completely new life at work in you.
Paul puts it this way in Galatians:
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Galatians 2:20 (ESV)
The Passion Translation puts it this way:
“My old identity has been co-crucified with Messiah and no longer lives; for the nails of his cross crucified me with him. And now the essence of this new life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives his life through me—we live in union as one! My new life is empowered by the faith of the Son of God who loves me so much that he gave himself for me, and dispenses his life into mine!
Galatians 2:20 (TPT)
I have been crucified with Christ
This is a piece of the Gospel that is far too often utterly ignored. If you are in Christ you have been crucified with him. You have died. Obviously not in a bodily sense, but in a sense that is far more real and true than any bodily death you could have died. To quote Paul again, “don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death” (Romans 6:3-4).
Your spiritual self was literally crucified with Christ. When Jesus took his last breath and declared, “It is finished,” you were spiritually put to death. When you were born again by grace through faith, that death was applied to you. You had to die in order to be born again into new life (c.f. Romans 6-7).
It is no longer I who live
Here’s the amazing thing; this new life that you live isn’t just you living a new life. The Christian life isn’t you trying hard to live by spiritual principles. It’s not you following some prescribed practices in hopes of getting holy. If it feels like that you’re doing it wrong. You’re dead. Of course you’re not going to be very good at living on your own.
Let me repeat that. If you’re trying hard to live for God you’re going to fail because you’re no longer alive. You have been crucified with Christ. There’s a new life that’s at work in you, and every time you start striving and trying hard to do things in your own power you’re trying to bring a dead man back to life. Of course a dead man is going to stink.
Christ lives in me
You no longer live. But that doesn’t mean you’re not alive. It’s Christ who is living in and through you. It’s the actual life of Jesus indwelling and reanimating you. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” (Romans 6:4)
Hear this, my friends: Jesus is alive in you through his Spirit. The animating force of your life is the Holy Spirit, not you. Your life is meant to be Jesus living through you.
What does this mean for you today? What does your life look like if Christ is living in and through you? What will 2020 be like if Jesus is alive in you – not just in some cute, metaphorical sense but in a spiritual, viscerally true sense that shapes how you think, feel, and act?
I live by faith in the Son of God
To have Christ alive in you is to live by faith.
My prayer for myself and for each of you over these final weeks of this year is that we would come to know intimately the reality that we have indeed be crucified with Christ. We no longer live, but Christ lives in and through us, and that changes everything.
May what is true of us in the spiritual become equally true of us in this physical reality.
To quote at length from Watchman Nee’s incredible book, The Normal Christian Life:
Let me tell you, You have died ! You are done with! You are ruled out! The self you loathe is on the cross in Christ. And “he that is dead is freed from sin” (Rom. 6:7, KJV). This is the gospel for Christians.
Our crucifixion can never be made effective by will or by effort, but only by accepting what the Lord Jesus did on the cross. Our eyes must be opened to see the finished work of Calvary. Some of you, prior to your salvation, may have tried to save yourselves. You read the Bible, prayed, went to church, gave alms. Then one day your eyes were opened, and you saw that a full salvation had already been provided for you on the cross. You just accepted that and thanked God, and peace and joy flowed into your heart. And now the good news is that sanctification is made possible for you on exactly the same basis as that initial salvation. You are offered deliverance from sin as no less a gift of God’s grace than was the forgiveness of your sins
God’s way of deliverance is altogether different from man’s way. Man’s way is to try to suppress sin by seeking to overcome it; God’s way is to remove the sinner. Many Christians mourn over their weakness, thinking that if only they were stronger all would be well. The idea that, because failure to lead a holy life is due to our impotence, something more is therefore demanded of us, leads naturally to this false conception of the way of deliverance. If we are preoccupied with the power of sin and with our inability to meet it, then we naturally conclude that to gain the victory over sin we must have more power. “If only I were stronger,” we say, “I could overcome my violent outbursts of temper,” and so we plead with the Lord to strengthen us that we may exercise more self-control.
But this is altogether a fallacy; it is not Christianity. God’s means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger, but by making us weaker and weaker. That is surely rather a peculiar way of victory, you say; but it is the divine way. God sets us free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening our old man, but by crucifying him; not by helping him to do anything, but by removing him from the scene of action.
Nee, Watchman. The Normal Christian Life (p. 22)
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