I Rest In Christ, 7: Crucified In Christ
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (NIV)
“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! (TPT)
Romans 6:6-8 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. (NIV)
Could it be any clearer that our former identity is now and forever deprived of its power? For we were co-crucified with him to dismantle the stronghold of sin within us, so that we would not continue to live one moment longer submitted to sin’s power. Obviously, a dead person is incapable of sinning. And if we were co-crucified with the Anointed One, we know that we will also share in the fullness of his life. (TPT)
11So let it be the same way with you! Since you are now joined with him, you must continually view yourselves as dead and unresponsive to sin’s appeal while living daily for God’s pleasure in union with Jesus, the Anointed One. (TPT)
It can be hard to process these verses; it was for me. Certainly, it can’t mean we have actually been physically put on a cross, so what does it mean to be crucified with Christ? When we first came to accept Christ, we received the Holy Spirit as a seal (see the previous post). At that point Christ via the Holy Spirit began living inside us. So having been joined with Christ, Romans 6:11 says we are to view sin as no longer an enticement and are to live our lives in a way that pleases God.
Why did Christ allow himself to be put on the cross? To give us the power to be free from the power of sin to kill. The Sinless One took sin on his shoulders, died, took sin to hell, and left it there when he rose again. Remember that Christ is God. He personally and individually knows each of his Father’s children. When he went to the cross, he went individually for each of us personally. The Son of God gave Himself for me, on my behalf, as my substitute. To be crucified with Christ means that when Christ actually hung on that cross, on that Friday afternoon, I hung there in that Christ knew me, in that Christ was assuming my place before God’s judgment seat. It means each of us was with Him in the sense that God gave Him to bear us in His arms, to represent us, to take upon Himself our sins, to confess that He had come to receive the punishment that was due to each of us. That is well and good and wonderful. It means at that moment in time when we accept Jesus as our Savior we are completely and permanently freed from the effects of sin. From that time forward whenever God looks at us, he sees Jesus. At the time of our salvation every previous sin, and every future sin is completely washed clean by the blood Jesus shed on the cross. We are free!
But does that mean we can willfully go on sinning? Certainly not as Paul so eloquently argues in Romans 6:1-3.
Romans 6:1-3 So what do we do, then? Do we persist in sin so that God’s kindness and grace will increase? What a terrible thought! We have died to sin once and for all, as a dead man passes away from this life. So how could we live under sin’s rule a moment longer? Or have you forgotten that all of us who were immersed into union with Jesus, the Anointed One, were immersed into union with his death? (TPT)
All of this describes what Jesus did for us on the cross. But each of us knows what we are like inside. We know that sin continues to tempt us, and that we continue to fail. Our mind understands that we are permanently free from the stain of sin, but our heart feels the continual struggle. This is where Galatians 2:20 comes in:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
To understand how Christ lives in ourselves we have to look at some other verses. In Luke 9:23 Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.” In John 5:5 Jesus said, “Without me you can do nothing.” In Zechariah 4:6 it says, “Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord of hosts.” In combination theses verses can mean only one thing: we can’t do anything through our own strength. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit can sin be overcome. That means we have to let Christ rule in our hearts; we have to remove our own selves from the throne of our hearts and let Christ rule there. When Jesus said the man who follows him must take up his own cross, he was saying that each of us must give up ownership of our heart, mind, and soul to Jesus. We must empty ourselves. When problems arise in our lives it is often because our Self is on the throne of our heart. Pride, self-actualization, and self-promotion are on the throne. Jesus isn’t.
But putting Jesus on our heart-throne is not an easy thing. We will fail a lot. True, we have once and forever been cleansed from the consequence of sin. But from that moment, until the day we enter eternity, we are sanctified, we are daily made more holy and more righteous through our submission to Jesus our Lord. Every day we must learn anew to say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” This process of increasing submission to God’s will is what allows more and more of the life of Christ to reside in us. And in so doing we are more and more allowing those hidden parts of our heart to be submitted to God’s will. Galatians 2:20 means that we have fully submitted all of our own self to Christ’s dominion. Upon this “water’ God commands us to step out and walk upon it, for we are now in him.