Sermon Tone Analysis

Intentional living…living the life on purpose, choosing to live the life God has outlined for us in Scripture that Jesus modeled for us.

Those three-and-a-half years He was here was not standing in line waiting to be crucified, for that happened very quickly, but it was to model for us how we are to live a crucified and resurrected life.

Today I want us to understand that intentional living begins with intentional dying, that to live for Christ is to die to self.

Paul discovered this, for he had lived a religious life.

He had lived a life of zeal.

He had done all of those things, but he didn't discover the life God had until he first learned to die to self.

There was an occasion where Paul had to confront another great apostle named Peter.

Peter, like so many of us, was a man who was sold out to Christ but was still under the pressures of his fellow man.

When he was around the Jewish Christians, he tended to fall back on certain Jewish practices so that when he was around the Gentile Christians, he began to impose and set the wrong model before them of following some of those Jewish practices the Gentiles were really free from and never had to follow.

So Paul in the letter to the Galatians confronts Peter.

He confronts him not from a Jewish standpoint but from the standpoint of a man who had learned to die to self, to die to the law, to die to all of those practices.

You see, there are some of us here today who are here this morning to worship and to praise and to fellowship the resurrection of our Lord and Savior.

We sing to Him loudly.

We praise Him loudly.

But in just a few moments, we're going to dismiss and we're going to be gathered around family who don't share the same beliefs we do.

There is going to be that tendency to be like the apostle Peter, to shrink back and to fall back into old practices, and if not this afternoon, this week.

We'll go back to work, we'll go back to school, we'll surround ourselves with friends…friends whose company we kept before we came to Christ as Savior, jokes that we once laughed at, ways of doing things that, as a Christian, we don't prefer, but we tend to fall back on.

Paul sees this in Peter, and he confronts him to his face, and he says, /"…why do you compel the Gentiles to live as Jews?"/

Why do you take this new life we have received in Christ, this freedom we have received and set it aside and take up again that old way of life and that old man?

Oh, it ought not to be so.

He really lays out for Peter his own discovery.

This is the discovery I want all of us to take with us as we leave this morning.

Either you know Christ as Savior or maybe you're here seeking a relationship with the Savior, and I want you to know that to begin and to walk that life begins by dying…by an intentional dying.

Listen with me in Galatians.

I want to pick up with the discussion he had with Peter back in verse 17 of Galatians, chapter 2. Galatians, chapter 2, in verse 17, Paul, speaking to Peter said, /"But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not!"/

If we claim Christ as our Savior, and then we find ourselves participating yet again in sinful activities, is that because Christ has led us to do that?

Is He our minister, our pastor, our leader, into sin?

Well certainly not.

It's not Christ, in other words, who leads you to laugh at that dirty joke again.

It's not Christ, in other words, who is leading you to back off of your praise and love of Jesus that you have right now.

That is sin that is creeping back into one's life that's causing that to happen.

Verse 18, Paul said to Peter, /"For if I build again those things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor."/

It's one thing to be a slave to sin, to be a slave to pornography, to be a slave to cursing, to be a slave to cheating, a slave to lying, but you've been freed in Christ.

Having been freed in Christ, if you return again to that pornography, if you return again to that lying and stealing, you are building that again in your own life what Christ has removed from you, and now you're the transgressor.

You see, my friend, it is one thing to commit those sins without Christ, but when you have Christ, those sins double in transgression.

For now you are free from it, and to commit it again is far worse.

Paul says in verse 19, /"For I through the law died to the law."/

My friends, when Christ died the reason Christ died for your sins is because the law required it.

That's the payment for your sin.

That's the payment for your participation in pornography.

That's the payment for your participation in lying and cheating.

That's the payment for the raw deals you've struck with other people.

That's the price that you pay for the life you've lived; according to the law, it is death, and Christ died.

But when you receive Christ as Savior, your death is Christ's death.

He says, /"For I through the law died to the law..."/ There's far more than death to the law; there is life through God.

He says, /"…that I might live to God."/ Paul is telling Peter, "Listen, this old way of life is nothing more than a tutor to show us our need for Christ, and so I have died to those things.

The law did that.

Christ did that.

His death on the cross is not meaningless.

It freed me from the penalty of all of those sins I have committed.

The problem is, Peter, we have to begin to live as though we have died the death with Christ."

We can't just go through life and say, "Oh, I believe in Jesus, and yet have it make no change in our lives."

That's not real belief.

We can't just say, "I accept Christ as my Savior, but I have no intention of getting out of the swirling tide that He's saving me from."

That's not salvation.

Salvation is to begin anew.

Jesus said it to Nicodemus so clearly.

He said, "You must be born again."

But when you're born again, there aren't two of you.

Salvation is not Siamese-twin living.

One has to die and the other comes to life.

Paul sums it up in our text for today in verse 20.

This is intentional dying.

This is how you do it.

This is how you leave today different from the way you came in.

This is how Easter '09 has significance in your life.

Paul said to Peter, and he says to you and me, he said, /"I have been crucified with Christ."/

You see, God's way to abundant living is opposite to the world.

The world's way to abundant life means you live it up, but God's way means that we must die to the selfish nature in order to live.

If you want to live the abundant life that Christ has for you, it will begin with you dying to self.

It will begin with you being crucified with Christ.

That's in the perfect tense in the Greek, by the way.

It is a completed action never to be repeated.

It's not something you do every revival season.

It's not something you have to do every Easter.

It's not something that you do when you really feel bad.

There has to come a point in your life, a time when you are crucified with Christ.

It's a completed action.

The Bible tells us that Christ died once, never to die again.

That must be the model of our lives as well.

We can't just keep feeling bad about the things we're doing, regretting the things we're doing.

There comes a time when you must change from the things you're doing, and die to self.

Paul says to Peter, /"I've been crucified with Christ..."/ Those things of the law, those old ways of living, they were buried.

A stone rolled over them and the dirt put on the grave, in my case, he said.

We must die to the selfish nature in order to live.

Paul says, /"…it is no longer I who live..."/ It is no longer me, Peter, whom you're looking at.

It's no longer Saul of Tarsus.

He died on the road to Damascus.

It's a new creature you're seeing, and it's no longer you, Simon, either.

You're Peter now.

You have a new life now.

To every one of you in here who have reached out and claimed the cross as your own, it's not you anymore.

It's something entirely new.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.

You see what he's saying here?

I no longer live.

Christ lives in me.

The life I now live is the life of Christ.

The life I'm living now is a life that is being led not by my mind, not by my raising, not by my education even, but by faith in Christ.

Notice what he says here.