Crucified with Christ
Notes
Transcript
Last week, we began a short series through the letter Paul wrote to the churches in the region of Galatia.
Instead of going verse-by-verse, we are going to hit some of the highlights of the book and see if we can draw out what God has to say to us.
This morning, that is going to take us to Galatians 2, specifically in verse 20.
While you are finding that, let me remind you of what we discussed last week about why Paul wrote this and what he was teaching them.
Paul had visited and even founded some of these churches, but in the time since he had been with them, false teachers had crept in and were teaching a different way for people to be made right with God.
We looked at the first part of chapter 1 and saw what the real way to be right with God is. The Bible refers to that as the gospel, which is an old word that essentially means, “good news.”
We saw that we have all sinned and done what we wanted instead of what God called us to do. We deserve to die for our sins, but Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, and rose from the dead to pay the penalty for our sins and offer us new life. Those who receive the gift Jesus offers through his death, burial, and resurrection are made right with God and now live as a part of his kingdom, living our lives recognizing Jesus is in charge and looking forward to when he is going to come back and fully establish his kingdom forever.
There’s a lot to that, but if it doesn’t make sense, go to our website and listen to last week’s message to see if that clears it up. If not, let us know and we will be glad to sit down and try to help answer any questions you still have.
We also talked briefly about the fact that anyone who teaches you need to do anything different than that to be saved is not only wrong but should actually be cursed.
The false teachers in Galatia were doing just that. They were teaching that if you were really going to be right with God, you needed to follow all the commands the Jews were given in the Mosaic law—the dietary restrictions, circumcision, etc.
For the rest of chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2, Paul is defending the gospel and his right to share it.
He starts by reminding the Galatians that he was extremely devoted to the Mosaic law when Jesus revealed the truth to him.
After Jesus appeared to Paul, he spent years learning who Jesus was and what it meant to follow him. When he did begin to interact with the other apostles that came from Jewish backgrounds, they affirmed what God had taught Paul.
On one occasion, he had even had to confront Peter because Peter started to act like these false teachers. Under the old law, Jews weren’t supposed to eat with Gentiles, so when some of the Jews came to Antioch to see what God was doing, Peter stopped eating with the Gentiles.
Paul called him out on it because Jesus’s work that we share in the gospel has fulfilled much of the law, and God has removed the barrier between Jews and Gentiles.
That gets us to the section we are looking at this morning.
In 2:15-19, Paul is explaining that no one can be saved by adhering to the law because none of us can keep it perfectly.
The only way a person can be justified, then, is through faith in Jesus.
Let’s pause for just a minute on that word - “justified.”
Justification is an important term for us to understand.
Remember that last week we said that we are all sinners. Think of a courtroom where God is the judge. We have all broken his law, so we are all guilty before him and deserve to be punished, right?
Justification is the formal declaration by God that, although I was guilty and condemned to die, I am now declared right with God and freed from condemnation.
Justification isn’t God simply sweeping our sin under the rug and saying, “It’s no big deal; try to do better next time.” No, justification is God saying, “The punishment you deserve has been put on Jesus, and he has paid your debt. Now, Jesus’s righteousness is applied to you, and this court has no claim against you anymore.”
Let that sink in for a moment: When God justifies us, he declares that we have Jesus’s righteousness now, and that Jesus took our condemnation upon himself.
That’s why Paul wrote:
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus,
Before God, you are declared righteous.
How? Because I was good enough at keeping God’s Law that I earned God’s favor?
Not at all!
As Paul says in verse 16, I am justified by faith in Jesus Christ.
That brings us to verse 20, where we want to park for the rest of our time this morning.
In this powerful verse, Paul is going to give us at least three main concepts that come out of the reality that we have been justified by faith in Jesus alone.
The first looks back at our past and recognizes:
1) I am not who I was.
1) I am not who I was.
In a very real sense, you are not who you were before you met Christ.
Paul highlights that in two different ways in this verse, starting with the very first words:
"I have been crucified”
With one very notable exception, crucifixion is something you don’t normally come back from.
You don’t crucify someone to hurt them, you crucify someone to kill them in a conclusive way.
When you surrendered to Christ, the old you was crucified and put to death.
That’s why Paul would also say, “…and I no longer live”
Just in case there is any doubt, the old us died and is no longer alive.
While Jesus was resurrected after his crucifixion, your old way of life wasn’t.
That doesn’t mean that my individual personality or anything like that is gone; rather, that old, sinful me that was enslaved to sin was put on the cross and died.
In a very real way, you are not that person anymore.
You still look the same outwardly, but the inward part of you is changed.
You may still struggle with some of the same temptations and some of the sins you did before you met Christ, but there is something fundamentally different.
That’s what Paul pointed out to the church at Corinth:
Don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God’s kingdom? Do not be deceived: No sexually immoral people, idolaters, adulterers, or males who have sex with males,
no thieves, greedy people, drunkards, verbally abusive people, or swindlers will inherit God’s kingdom.
And some of you used to be like this. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
There is our word again, isn’t it? “You were justified”—you were declared righteous, not because of any good in you but because of Jesus’s righteousness and willingness to take your sin upon himself.
You didn’t wash yourself, and you didn’t sanctify yourself, and you didn’t justify yourself—God did all that.
When he did, he put that old you on the cross and it died.
Notice, though, that the old you wasn’t crucified alone, was it?
Look back at 2:20...
This points to the fact that not only is the old me dead,...
2) I am united to Jesus.
2) I am united to Jesus.
When your old self was crucified, it was crucified with Jesus.
When you put your faith and trust in Jesus, you weren’t just deciding to agree with some list of truths or about the account of some event.
You were united to the person of Jesus. You tied your life up with his.
Think about it this way: have you ever entered into some kind of partnership with someone?
Have you ever made a business deal with someone? Maybe you started a business or you hired someone or were hired by someone.
When you made that decision, you were joining with them in at least one area of your life.
You weren’t free to work with their competitor or just do whatever you wanted. Your work life was connected to that person or their business in some way.
We see that even stronger when we look at a closer relationship—something like marriage.
This week, my wife and I will mark 17 years of marriage.
When we got married in 2006, we made a choice to unite our lives together.
That decision forever changed the way I relate to other women and the way she relates to other men.
It changed the way I make decisions about how I use the time God gives me or the money he entrusts to me.
I gave up some of my autonomy to unite myself to her, and she to me.
I can’t be as selfish as I was before because I have chosen to love and honor and cherish Samantha—my life isn’t just my own anymore.
Our relationship to Christ goes even further than that.
When God draws us to himself, he unites us to Christ so deeply that we died with him and now, Paul says “Christ lives in me.”
Again, I don’t stop having a personality or preferences or talents or whatever that makes me different than others, even other Christians.
At the same time, my life isn’t about me anymore; my life is about Jesus.
Now, I can’t let myself be driven by my own self-interest or what I think is right.
I have the ability and the calling to live like God created me to live.
Why? Because Jesus is living in me through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit!
That’s why Christianity isn’t just a thing I can choose to do from time to time; following Jesus must be at the center of who I am, and as I grow to honor Jesus more and more, it should be flowing out into every area of how I spend my life.
It isn’t my life anymore—it is Jesus’s!
Do you realize that today? If you are saved, if you have been justified, then Christ lives in you!
You aren’t living anymore; Jesus is living in and through you.
When is the last time you stopped during the course of a day and thought, “Is this how Jesus would live this moment?” or “What should I be thinking, saying, or doing right now that would most look like Jesus?”
How often during the course of a day do you acknowledge that the Spirit of God is leading you and ask him to guide your words or your thoughts or your actions?
While we’re at it, let’s flip this around to another angle.
I will be honest that I am wrestling with how to communicate what I mean here.
I think we are accustomed to the idea of “Christ lives in me” meaning that my life should honor him in every way, and that is certainly a big part of what this means.
This isn’t just a caution to avoid sin; it is also a comfort to our souls.
“Christ lives in me.”
That means that, now that I am a Christian, every moment in my life matters.
Do you ever feel like a failure who no one could ever love or look up to?
Do you ever feel alone and like your life is meaningless?
Christ is living in you—do you realize that mean he is present in every single moment you experience?
He is there in every heartache, even the ones that come as a result of your own sin.
When we sin, he is there to forgive, to work repentance in our hearts, and to give us the strength to overcome.
He is there in every victory.
He is living in you in the mundane days when nothing notable happens, and he is there in the most memorable moments of your life.
If you are in Christ today, then Christ lives in you.
He is working in every millisecond of your life, even when you are rebelling against him and trying to do your own thing.
Christ isn’t sinning—that’s on you. However, he is standing ready to forgive and restore you when you do.
Christ is living in you.
This reminds me of a section of prayer that is attributed to St. Patrick of Ireland:
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.
Those first four lines about Christ’s presence are guaranteed by what God says in his word.
The last four are prayers that Christ would be evident in everyone around me.
In our lives, this means that Christ lives through me while I’m sweeping the kitchen or preparing dinner. He lives in me when I am working on a spreadsheet or talking with a client. He lives in me when I am telling a friend about Jesus or worshiping in church. He lives in me when I am sleeping.
Every moment is filled with meaning because it’s not my life anymore; it is Jesus’s!
You have been united with Christ.
Your old life died with him, and now your new life is Christ living through you.
Is Christ living in you because you have been so good?
No. The third truth we glean from this text is that...
3) I live by faith.
3) I live by faith.
Paul is going to hit this hard in chapter 3, but our faith doesn’t stop when we get saved; it is how we live.
My new life is sustained, not by my good works, but by Jesus who loved me and gave himself for me.
I live my life now in faith, trusting in Jesus every moment of this life I am still living.
Sound familiar? It’s the gospel message we have been talking about, isn’t it? The good news that Jesus loved me, died for me, and rose from the dead.
Again, faith isn’t just head knowledge or agreeing with some facts.
If you are in Christ, you are putting your faith in the person of Jesus himself—the one who showed his love for you by dying and showed his power by rising from the dead.
At no point does faith take a back seat and I begin trusting in what I have done or can do.
Even today, after 30 years of walking with Jesus, I am not living by my works. I try to show Jesus whenever and wherever I can, and I should—that demonstrates what Jesus has done in my life and that he lives in me.
However, my faith is still not in my works! If anything, there are a lot of days I am even less confident in my own works because I know better and still choose to sin.
It isn’t like we begin the Christian life by putting our faith in Jesus, and now the rest is up to us.
That appears to be what the false teachers were saying, and that isn’t what the Bible says at all!
My new life started by faith in Christ, and it continues through faith in Christ.
That faith trusts that Jesus can save me, but it also trusts that Jesus can sustain me through every single moment of life.
If he loved me and gave himself for me, than I can trust that he still loves me.
Faith rests in the fact that this isn’t my life anyway; it’s his!
So, what about you?
Have you come to the place where you recognize your need for Jesus is so great that you have surrendered to him, or are you out there trying to make it on your own?
You can’t ever make yourself right, no matter what standard you think you can live up to.
The only hope you and I have of being justified is by surrendering to Jesus, throwing ourselves completely on his mercy and grace.
When he justifies us, he puts that old way of life to death. Now, we are united with Jesus and he is living in us. That causes us to live our lives by faith in him, not by faith in ourselves.
What area of your life are you least living in faith in?
What would it look like for you to recognize that Jesus is living in you in that area?