Many of God’s people consider Galatians 2:20 the most important single verse in the Bible on HOW we live the Christian life. It is so important that we are going to focus just on this single verse this morning.

If you want to be a better person, a more godly person, it seems logical to most of us, that we need to find a set of principles or rules to follow, to impose on ourselves, to tame our unruliness, to squelch our sinful tendencies, to get control over our outbursts, to curb our appetites, to restrain our bad temper, or to help us stop yelling at our spouse or kids. You think, “If I could make myself keep those rules and commands I would be a better person.

But we end up frustrated with our own efforts – we try to please the Lord but fail, again and again and again. We find that laws cannot stop our coveting, or lusting, or our anger, our tendency to quarrel. The law cannot make us righteous- not from the inside out. A couple of weeks ago we said, the law is like a thermometer, it can show us we are sick, but it cannot heal us. Even the perfect law of God cannot manage our corrupt tendencies.

There might be some changes at the surface. But that is not Christianity! The Christian answer to your battle with sin and self and the world is MUCH MORE DRASTIC! God’s answer is to crucify you! And then to send Christ himself to live INSIDE you! -to live a new kind of life altogether. So that you can say, “It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me”. Paul takes us from what the law CANNOT do for us, to what Christ CAN do for us.

William Law said, "the one and only sufficiency for the Christian life is the power of the Holy Spirit; not as a doctrine, but as a living person, who manifests through us the very life of Jesus Christ." The one and only sufficiency for the Christian life is Jesus Christ living in you by his Spirit.

What does it mean that he lives in you? To live means that something is alive. To be alive as a person, means you are breathing, moving, thinking, feeling, growing, doing things, planning things, taking initiative. It means you are conscious, you have a will, you have desires, you have thoughts, you communicate. There is this mysterious power at work in a living person we call life. It is the opposite of being dead. A dead person has lost all ability to function. A dead person doesn’t have anything to do or say and doesn’t want anything. He can’t communicate. He is just dead!

But Galatians 2:20 says Christ lives in you! He is NOT dead in you! He is not nothing in you. He is not silent. He is not powerless, inactive or ineffective! He has things to do through you, things to say through you. He has attitudes and qualities of life to express through you. Jesus said he is like a living vine, with his life flowing through us like branches and we bear fruit, BECAUSE of his life! This is to become very practical!  

Paul said, “I will only boast about what Christ had accomplished through me”. When the Gentiles were saved, Christ did that through me! “All that I said and did was what Christ accomplished through me. When I healed people, Christ did that through me. When I preached or taught or wrote letters, that was Jesus at work in me. When I loved people, and poured out my life, Jesus was doing that through me. When I kept going, in danger and beatings and shipwreck and insults and prison, that was the power of Christ in me. He is willing to work through you too!

AB Simpson said: “Yes humble sister, He will help you at the washboard and the kitchen sink as gladly as at the hour of prayer. Yes, busy mechanic, He will go with you and help you to swing the hammer, or handle the saw, or hold the plow in the toil of life, and you shall be a better mechanic, a more skilled workman, and a more successful man, because you take HIS wisdom for the common affairs of life. There is no place or time (Christ) is not able and willing to walk by our side, to work through our hands and brains, and to unite Himself to us in loving and all-sufficient partnership with all our needs and tasks and trials and prove our all-sufficiency for all things!”

Your greatest need might be to know Jesus Christ as a living person in you! The Christian life is not imitating Christ, it is not “What would Jesus do?”. It is what IS Jesus doing in me, and yielding to that, trusting in him. AB Simpson said, “We live Christ-like because we have the Christ-life” - within us! He imparts his own nature to us and lives his own life in us and then it is not imitation but simply an outgrowth of the nature planted within”.

This is not a sensational, sis-boom-bah kind of life. BUT life can be a daily adventure of trusting Jesus to express himself through you!

But to experience this kind of life, we have to start where this verse starts: “I have been crucified with Christ”. In order for Christ to live in you, something had to happen to remove you from the center of your life. Something had to happen to remove you as lord of your life so he could be Lord of your life. Something had to kill the dominance of sin over your life and attitudes and heart. Something had to free you from your constant condemnation by the laws of God because of your inability to keep them.

That “thing” that needed to happen, is that we were crucified with Christ. Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live”. Romans 6:6 tells us the same truth. “For we know that our old self was crucified with Christ”.   “We were 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 had died has been set free from sin”. “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”.

In Romans 6 the emphasis is that being crucified with Christ freed us from sin. In Galatians 2 the emphasis is that being crucified with Christ freed us from the law. These are related! Laws cannot heal your sin problem only Christ living in you can do that.   As Paul said, “I died to the law so that I might live for God”. Romans 7 tells us we had to die to the law so that we might be joined (united or married) to Christ in order to bear fruit for God!

Without Christ, the only way we knew how to try to be good was by trying to keep laws! “Do this. Don’t do that.” But God said that is over.   It could never make you righteous anyway. Now your focus is on something that can really make you whole, that can really heal you - the very life of Jesus dwelling in you.

Later in the book of Galatians Paul will say he is crucified to the world. We died to sin, to the world, and to the law. We are unresponsive to sin, to the world, and to law based living...but ALIVE to Jesus Christ.

When someone was crucified in the Roman Empire, how big of an impact did that make on their life? Total!! It killed them! It changed everything! Being crucified with Christ changes everything for you! Your old self, your old sinful, want-everything-my-way self, your angry, complaining, prideful, stubborn, self pitying, self, is slain in this crucifixion.

Galatians 2:20 says, “it is no longer I who live”, or “I no longer live”. Your ego, your personality, and your will, is no longer the driving force of your life.

This crucifixion of our self life, is NOT bad news! It is good news! When we see the misery and the destruction and the offense to God that we produced by living our own life, in our own way, we will be GLAD to be freed from our own life. And we should embrace this truth! Matt Chandler has a brief video of this verse in which he says, “I am here to celebrate my own funeral!”.

“We must be willing to lose everything in order to find what God has shaped us for”. That’s Galatians 2:20.

How does this work? How do I get myself crucified? You RECEIVE this as something already done for you! Romans 6 tells us to “count yourselves dead” or CONSIDER yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. You view your old self as hanging on the cross with Christ.

You receive it by faith. The secret to this experience is that we must exercise faith that we are joined with him in his crucifixion and in his life. You believe it! You proclaim it! You confess it to be true. You take hold of it by faith.

You cannot go back 2000 years and crucify yourself on the cross with Jesus. You cannot create the miracle of Christ living in you. No matter how much you fasted, or gave away, or how many hours you prayed, or how much you deprived yourself of pleasure, you could not make this happen. It is a work of God that must be believed and received. It must be embraced as a gift from God.

This becomes your identity!   This is how you think about yourself! You go around saying the SAME THING Paul said about himself! This is WHO YOU ARE. THIS IS YOUR STORY! This isn’t just a quote of Paul’s.

There is no genuine faith in Christ where this is not a reality. “All who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions”. If someone says, I like being accepted by God without doing anything to earn it, but I don’t want any part of being crucified and I don’t want Christ managing my life, then there is no saving faith in that person. If you are a justified person, YOU ARE ALSO A CRUCIFIED PERSON. AND you area a person in whom Jesus Christ lives by his Spirit. You may not understand all this, but it’s yours, and we are all in a process of gaining greater revelation of it.

But though we are crucified we still have a life to live. Paul went on to talk about, “The life I live in the flesh or in my body”.   You still live, you still are a person, with unique gifts and personality, but NOW you live to show forth Jesus!!!

The life I now live, I life by faith in the Son of God – not by faith in yourself, not faith in what you can do for God, not faith in how nice you are, or how good you are in comparison to other people, not faith in your own energy and thoughts, not faith in your own wisdom and personality, not faith in your inner strength, or the power of self confidence, not faith in the power of positive thinking, not faith in the human spirit. But you live life by faith in the Son of God, who lives in you!

We LIVE by faith. Like we breathe to live, we draw from Christ, by faith every day, for every situation, for every responsibility, for every need, for every attitude, for every thing we say and how we say it. WE LIVE by faith in Christ. Faith is the atmosphere in which we live. It is the dominating attitude of living. It’s how you function! Its the one thing you need to operate everyday.

People often say, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through today – the kids are wearing me out, the house is a mess, I’ve got so much work to do, or I’ve got so much going on at work”. We “get through” the day by faith in Christ. We don’t mange ourselves by law-keeping, or by trying to do our best, or giving it our best shot. We manage our lives by faith in Christ!

When your kids require more than you have to give, you put your faith in the Son of God for grace, for help, for wisdom, for joy. You can’t handle it but he can. When you are weak he is strong! When you are deserted, or betrayed, or wounded, how do you handle that? You live by faith in the Son of God. When you are tempted to respond to life with bitterness, or resentment, or despair. How do you get through that? You live by faith in the Son of God. How do you keep out of the bondage of pornography, or other addictions? By faith in the Son of God – by faith in being crucified with him and by faith in his indwelling your soul.

You say, “Lord, I utterly trust in your life within me in this situation today”. It is not merely asking God to control your temper, it is trusting in Jesus to express his mind, his attitudes, his words, through you.

Luther said, “Faith connects you so intimately with Christ, that He and you become as it were one person. As such you may boldly say: ‘I am now one with Christ. Therefore Christ’s righteousness, victory, and life are mine.’

What is the Christian life to you? Is it to stop being bad and to start being good? Is it being generous, being nice, be moral and pure? Is it helping others, fighting for good causes? Well those things should come, but the Christian life is NOT these things, the Christian life is being united with Christ in his crucifixion and united with him in his life. The Christian life is faith in God’s Son living and working through us by the Spirit. Yesterday, today and till the end.

What is faith? Faith is simply looking to Christ in your heart and spirit. It is calling upon him. From within your being, you call upon Christ to save you, in each moment of life. It is turning away from yourself and your own resources and turning to Christ. It is trusting in him and his life in you, and trusting him to express himself through you.

Tozier defined faith as the gaze of your soul upon a saving God. It is the gaze of your heart upon a saving Christ. It is giving him the full attention of your heart and the complete trust of your heart. This looking of the heart to Jesus can be done by any person, at any moment, in any place. It does not require worship music, or a church service, or even a quiet time. In fact it must be practiced when your boss gives you an unreasonable assignment, or your kids are fighting, or your spouse provokes you. These are the very times we live by faith in the Son of God!

As you trust in Christ to be your life, to live in you, in your daily situations, HE becomes very precious to you. You love him because he really is your strength. You experience him love through you, say things through you. You confidently say, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!”

Then Paul adds this, “I live by faith in the Son of God WHO LOVED ME AND GAVE HIMSELF FOR ME”. This Christ who lives in you, loved you and gave himself for you. This is what he feels toward you. What he did for you in the past proves his disposition toward you now! The living and dynamic strength you have for every situation, every day, to overcome every sin, is NOT an impersonal LAW or rule, it comes from some ONE living in you, who loved you and loves you still and gave himself for you and still gives himself for you.

Luther put it this way, “Did the Law ever love me? Did the Law ever sacrifice itself for me? Did the Law ever die for me? On the contrary, it accuses me, it frightens me, it drives me crazy. Somebody else saved me from the Law, from sin and death unto eternal life. That Somebody is the Son of God, to whom be praise and glory forever.”

You really are not saved by Christ until you know and believe that he did this personally for you. Faith is not believing in your mind, that Christ died for the sins of the world. Faith that saves you is when you say, “I believe he died for me and gave himself for me”. And being a Christian, is not only believing that Jesus Christ was raised and somewhere Jesus lives. Being a Christian is believing he lives in ME.

This is all very personal, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is not longer I who live, but Christ who lives in ME. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved ME and gave himself for ME”. This has to become YOUR story, YOUR outlook, YOUR reality.

We affirm daily that the sinful part of us has been nailed to the cross. We don’t affirm the power of our sins over us. We daily affirm that we have died to sin and are freed from it. We affirm daily that Christ lives in and through me.

Crucified with Christ, my Savior,
I am dead to sin and shame;
Now HIS LIFE rules my behavior —
To the glory of His Name! Amen.

Stephen Olford