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. —Galatians 2:20
According to John Wesley, the words of Galatians 2:20 “manifestly describes a deliverance from inward as well as from outward sin.”((Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, 12.)) Wesley explained that the phrase “I live not” meant that the body of sin was destroyed and the phrase, “Christ lives in me” affirms “all that is holy, and just, and good.” The two phrases are inseparably connected, expressing the same truth in negative and positive terms.
However, W. E. Sangster, who compiled Wesley’s texts on Christian perfection, wrote, “It is doubtful if this exposition would command general support today. Most commentators would feel that Wesley had overpressed the metaphor and taken an aspiration as an achievement.”((Sangster, The Path to Perfection, 41.)) It is beneficial for preachers and teachers to question themselves. Too often we read into the text our own presuppositions and find precisely whatever we are looking for. But we must also examine Sangster’s assumptions. He argued that Wesley handled the text very unnaturally and such an interpretation was out of harmony with other sayings of Paul. According to Sangster, Paul rarely, if ever, expressed a deep sense of sin after his conversion. However, this argument is weak because it is based upon what Paul did not say about himself. Paul did teach that the body of sin could be destroyed after the old life of sin was put off.
Sangster concluded that Paul taught a relative perfection, “capable of achievement by all who receive the gift of new life in Christ.” Does Galatians 2:20 address this relative perfection? Certainly, crucifixion is a metaphor in this context. But why did Paul employ it here? Wesley explained:
A man may be dying for some time; yet he does not, properly speaking die till the instant the soul is separated from the body. And in that instant he lives the life of eternity. In like manner, he may be dying to sin for some time; yet he is not “dead to sin” till sin is separated from his soul. And in that instant he lives the full life of love.((Wesley, A Plain Account, 19.))
Galatians 5:24 says, “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” Wesley’s comment here is that all true believers have “nailed their fleshly nature to a cross, where it continually grows weaker and weaker.”((Wesley, Explanatory Notes, 85.)) Pope described the crucifixion referenced in Romans 6:6 and Galatians 5:24 as a “gradual mortal process.”((Pope, Compendium, 3:37.)) While Jesus was crucified at nine o’clock in the morning, he did not die until three o’clock that afternoon. “Dr. H. Orton Wiley pointed out that crucifixion and death were two distinct moments for Jesus’ suffering on the cross, as they are normally in the life of every person in Christ.”((William M. Greathouse, “Our Life in Christ,” God’s Revivalist (Winter 2008) 9.))
Wesley wrote that inward sanctification begins in the moment a person is justified. “Yet sin remains in him, yea, the seed of sin, till he is sanctified throughout. From that time a believer gradually dies to sin and grows in grace.”((Wesley, A Plain Account, 17.)) Logically, however, there must be a moment of death.((Wesley, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Sermon #43, 3.17–18.))
In his sermon “Crucifixion with Christ,” William Burt Pope stated that Galatians 2:19–20 describes a sinner appropriating the sacrifice of the Great Substitute and is set free from condemnation through personal union with the Redeemer’s death. In Galatians 5:24 the flesh, or the old man remaining in the pardoned believer, is delivered unto death in the same mystical fellowship. The first act of their regenerate life was to deliberately renounce the old Adam, which regeneration did not kill. Every Christian must have his own Calvary. He must crucify there and keep crucified until crucifixion ends in death all that belongs to his flesh, with its affections and lusts. Crucifixion is not death, but it is unto death. It is the business of the Christian man to use every sacred effort to hasten that death. Though we have crucified our flesh and keep it bound to the cross, it is not the rigor of our ascetic severity that destroys our sin. It is the breath of the Holy Ghost, which withers the fruits of evil in our nature. Though it is said most explicitly that we crucify the flesh, it is not said that we put it to death and destroy the “body of sin.” That is the sole work of the Divine Spirit. We must not doubt that he will finish the work he has begun in us, which is the case described in Galatians 6:14. Here the crucifixion is perfect and entire.((Pope, Sermons, Addresses, and Charges, 292–313.))
More recently Dr. Kinlaw explained that as our new life comes from the Spirit, we are now to live in the Spirit (Galatians 5:25).
The purpose of the Spirit within us is to bring us to the place of which Paul speaks when he says of himself, “I no longer live, but Christ 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” (Gal 2:20). . . . The purpose of the Spirit in the life of the new believer is to bring the person as part of the bride of Christ to a devotion to Christ that fulfills the demands implicit within the nuptial metaphor. . . . What the Spirit seeks is a relationship of love in which Christ reigns supreme without rival or competitor as Lord and Lover within the believer.((Kinlaw, Let’s Start with Jesus, 139–140.))
As it turns out, the crucifixion metaphor turns out to be an apt picture of the gracious work of the Holy Spirit. It implies that new life in the Spirit comes first. But at that moment of regeneration, the Spirit begins to crucify the body of sin. The total salvation package is not received at the moment of birth. What follows is a maturation leading up to deliverance from the remains of sin—which happens in another decisive moment. In regeneration, something dead is brought to life. In complete sanctification, something alive—if being nailed to the cross can be considered living—is put to death. This is a de jure or legal sentence of death. But this becomes a de facto reality when we are “conformed to his death” (Phil 3:10). Samuel Powell observed, however, that although believers have crucified the flesh, the flesh has an amazing power to resurrect itself after we have crucified it. We are never so free from the flesh as to be exempt from temptation or falling away.((Powell, Holiness in the Twenty-first Century, 41.)) Legalism will not work. George Findlay wrote that legalism guards the mouth, the hands, the senses, and imagines that through these it can drill the man into divine order. However, it is fatal to the spiritual life in us. It clouds the divine character; it dwarfs and petrifies the human. “What becomes of the sublime mystery of the life hid with Christ in God if its existence is made contingent on circumcision and ritual performance?”(Findley, The Epistle to the Galatians, 161–62.)) The answer is death, not self-improvement or self-reformation. This is the scandal of the cross.
So with all his train of “passions and of lusts,” the “old man” is fastened and nailed down upon the new, interior Calvary, set up in each penitent and believing heart. The flesh may still, as in these Galatians, give mournful evidence of life. But it has no right to exist a single hour. De jure it is dead—dead in the reckoning of faith. It may die a lingering, protracted death and make convulsive struggles; but die it must in all who are of Christ Jesus.((Findley, The Epistle to the Galatians, 359–60.))
The paradox is that we are living physically in this present world—in the flesh. But after the fleshly nature had been put to death, we are more alive than we have ever been! We still live physically in the flesh, yet we live in Christ and the ego no longer lives.
It is imperative that the sinner’s death with Christ not be confused with crucifixion of one’s essential selfhood or what is often termed self-crucifixion. It is rather the old, inner self, helplessly and hopelessly depraved by sin that dies.((Richard E. Howard, Beacon Bible Commentary, 9:51.))
Sermon Suggestions
- Union with Christ—I am crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20)
- Dysfunction between the Spirit and the flesh (Galatians 5:16–18)
- Resolution through the power of the Spirit (Galatians 5:25)
J. O. McClurkan preached:
- I have a sinful self to be crucified with Christ.
- I have a natural self to be disciplined by Christ.
- I have a true self to be realized in Christ.((Greathouse, “Our Life in Christ,” 9–13.))