What is the Christian Life About? (Gal. 2:20)

A question I have often been asked is, ‘And who are you?’ No doubt, you have been asked it as well. Normally, the question is asked because the other person wants to know your background. But imagine if you were in a line of people, one of whom was an atheist, another a Moslem, another a Buddhist, another a Spiritualist, and each of you had to say who you are. What would you as a Christian say?

No doubt, there are many verses from the Bible that Christians could use to explain themselves. One of them is Paul’s words in Galatians 2:20: ‘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.’

Why did Paul say these words about his identity? Because some among his listeners were saying something very different. If someone had asked them who they were, they would have replied, ‘I believe that Jesus is the Messiah and as a follower of him I am required to keep the Jewish ceremonial law.’ The first half of their self-description sounds fine, but not when it is combined with the second half. Paul wanted his readers to realise what a Christian is, and he does so in this verse.

One thing we can deduce from his statement is that Christian identity is totally Christ-centred. Paul lists several experiences that he has had or has, but what makes them authentic is that in each of them Christ is or was involved. Those experiences only happened because of Jesus. So we can look at them briefly and see what they tell us.

Crucified with Christ

What does Paul mean by this description? After all, he was not present when Jesus was crucified outside the city of Jerusalem. In fact, since Paul was a Roman citizen, one of the benefits of that status was that he could not be crucified if the authorities were to arrest him. So he is not referring to a physical involvement with Jesus.

Neither does he say that he was crucified for Christ, which many believers had been because of their dedicated witness to the Saviour. The apostle Peter would yet be crucified for Christ, as he mentions in 2 Peter 1, with some accounts of his death saying that he was crucified upside down.

Paul’s self-description does raise the questions, who crucified him, when did they crucify him and why did they crucify him. So who crucified Paul? Who placed him on a cross beside Jesus? The answer is God the Father. When did he do this to Paul? The answer is at the conversion of Paul. Why did he do this to Paul? The answer is to indicate that the old Paul had died, and everyone should see that was the case, and a new Paul was now living on earth, and everyone should see that was the case.

Sometimes we speak about the conversion of Saul of Tarsus as a dramatic event. When we do so, we have in mind the external events that happened to him on the Damascus Road. But there is a danger that if we focus on those external aspects, we will miss the really radical aspects of Paul’s experience. What does the apostle mean by this reference to crucifixion?

First, he is saying that he deserved to be crucified, not in a literal sense, but in what crucifixion illustrated, which was that a crucified person was cursed. That cruel action pictured the curse that God had pronounced on sinners because of their rebellion against him. Saul of Tarsus deserved to be punished eternally because of his great sins against God.

Second, he is saying that he was delivered by being crucified with Jesus. In a strange way, it was not just the penalty of Paul’s sins that were dealt with when Jesus died. At the time of the death of Jesus, Paul, in God’s estimation, was united to Jesus. What happened to Jesus, in a sense, happened to Paul. Jesus was Paul’s representative when he suffered on the cross. When he bore the punishment for Paul’s sin, Jesus made it possible for Saul of Tarsus to become a new person. And that took place when Saul was converted. God the Father regarded the old Paul as punished on the cross and dead because the sentence had been carried out, and he was now the new Paul.

Christ alive in Paul

When Paul says that ‘it is no longer I who live’, he does not mean that he was somebody else. Instead he is speaking about the energy, the life that he now possesses. Before he was crucified with Christ, Saul of Tarsus had lived according to his fallen heart, mind and will. He did what he wanted, even although what he wanted was a religious life. His desire to be committed to the Old Testament ceremonial law was merely a personal choice based on his wrong understanding of what spiritual life is. But having been crucified with Jesus, he was no longer spiritually dead. Instead he was alive because he had Jesus.

We should observe that he does not say, Christ is with me. That would be true, but Paul is stressing something internal to him and not something external to him. So he says that Christ lives in him. But we know that Jesus has not come down from heaven physically to live inside Paul. I suppose we could ask if Paul means that the divine nature of Jesus is inside him because as God he is everywhere. The answer is that the apostle does not mean that when he says Christ lives in him.

So what does he mean? He means that the Holy Spirit indwells him. In what way does the Holy Spirit indwell him? Paul tells us in Romans 8:10: ‘But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.’ Jesus promised his disciples when he spoke to them in the Upper Room that he would send to them another Comforter who would indwell them. The other Comforter is the Holy Spirit, and when Jesus used the word ‘another’ to describe him, he meant another the same as himself. The Holy Spirit would indwell his people to empower them to live for Christ and to have fellowship with Christ as he revealed to them the things of Christ.

So here we have fact number 2 about the identity of a Christian. Fact 1 is that he is no longer the same person that he was – the man under the curse has gone because Jesus paid the penalty for his sin. Fact 2 is that as a new man who has been made alive by God he has the Holy Spirit living inside him and his presence is the same as Jesus being present with him.

What new life looks like

What does a person with this new kind of life look like? Paul tells us in his next phrase. A person with new life lives daily by faith in the Son of God. What does Paul mean by this expression? How would we describe our personal faith to the person who asks us who we are?

The first feature of faith that can be mentioned is that it is a loving embrace of Christ. Faith in Christ is a meeting with him, a means of contact with him. But it is not a contact like shaking hands. Rather it is a meeting of hearts. Faith, we are told elsewhere, works by love. One cannot have faith in Jesus without love for Jesus. A believer loves everything about Jesus. He loves to hear about him, he loves to speak about him, he loves to be share things about him. Jesus fills his vision.

A second feature of faith is that it is dependence on Christ. This dependence is complete, on Jesus only. The Christian life is one of dependence on Jesus for everything. It is a mark of a healthy child that eventually it shows independence and can live individually as an adult making his own choices and taking his own decisions. But such independence is not a feature of Christian living because a believer always depends on Jesus. Of course, he has to learn how to apply the Bible himself and not to be always looking to others for their ideas. But his life from conversion to the end is one of dependence on Jesus.

Paul knew that. This is what he meant when he said that he could do all things through Christ who gives him strength. In the Christian life, dependence on Christ leads to dedication to Christ. That is how we know that a Christian who does little for Christ is not depending on Christ. If he was depending on Christ, he would do what Christ tells him to do in the Bible.

So here we have fact number 3 about the identity of a Christian. Fact 1 is that he is no longer the same person that he was – the man under the curse has gone because Jesus paid the penalty for his sin. Fact 2 is that as a new man who has been made alive by God he has the Holy Spirit living inside him and his presence is the same as Jesus being present with him. Fact 3 is that as a Christian, he embraces Jesus as the Lover of his soul and depends on him to supply the grace that is needed to live the Christian life.

What is so special about Christ?

Paul’s assessment of Jesus concerns who he is and what he did. Who is Jesus? So far in this verse, Paul has referred to Jesus as the Christ, the one who is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. But who was he before he became the Messiah? He was the eternal Son of God. He was God with no beginning, one of the three persons of the glorious Trinity. As the Son of God, he possessed all the attributes of God. Everything that could be said about God could be said about Jesus because he is the eternal Son of God.

That is who he is. But what did he do? Paul highlights two features of the activity of the Son of God. The first one is that he loved Paul. We might not regard love as an activity, but it is. When we think about the attributes of God, we are not to imagine them as each taking up a separate space in God, with a space called love, and another space called power, and another space called wisdom. Rather all the attributes function together. His love is powerful and wise, and his power is loving and wise, and his wisdom is loving and powerful, and so on. So when Paul says that the Son of God loved him, he is not merely saying that Jesus had affections for him. He is also saying that the Son of God fully loved him according to his divine abilities.

What did that great love lead the Son of God to do? It led him to voluntarily and freely give himself for Paul on the cross. Paul at the end of the verse comes back to its beginning. How could he be crucified with Christ? Because the Son of God loved him and gave himself for him. The Son of God gave himself to pay the penalty for Paul and gave himself as he paid the penalty for Paul. It was the mind and intention of the eternal Son to give himself on the cross for a sinner like Saul of Tarsus, to take Saul’s place and become a curse, and then to live with him forever.

So here we have fact number 4 about the identity of a Christian. Fact 1 is that he is no longer the same person that he was – the man under the curse has gone because Jesus paid the penalty for his sin. Fact 2 is that as a new man who has been made alive by God he has the Holy Spirit living inside him and his presence is the same as Jesus being present with him. Fact 3 is that a Christian is a person who embraces Jesus and depends upon him. Fact 4 is that a Christian’s motive for living a holy life is that the Son of God loved him and gave himself for him.

It is interesting that Paul does not use the present tense and say that Jesus loves him. Paul knew that Jesus did and always would love him. But he also knew that nothing in the whole of eternity would reveal the love of the Son of God as did his self-giving on the cross when he became a curse in the place of his sinful people.