Living For Christ
Texts: Galatians 2:15-21; Mark 8:34-35
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, UT
May 14, 2023
These verses from Galatians are absolutely some of the best in the entire Bible. If you were told you had to condense some of the most golden passages of the Bible onto one or two pages, these might make it. I feel like I am handling fine china or crystal. If these words don’t preach it won’t be the fault of the passage.
I think these verses in Galatians get at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, was a bible teacher and we have his lectures on the book of Galatians. In it he gives his definition of a Christian. Luther said that a Christian is not someone who has no sin or feels no sin. A Christian is someone to whom, because of his or her faith in Christ, God does not charge that person with their sin.
That’s very different than how many people today would define a Christian. Many people today would say that a Christian is a good person. A Christian is someone who is nice, kind, and does good things. They don’t have bad thoughts. They don’t do wrong things.
It’s true. A Christian life should have a certain healthy moral quality to it. As a Christian we want to be full of what is good. We aren’t to do harm. We are to be people of love in our words and our actions. But we all fail. We all can be weak. Or is it just me who feels like that? Is everyone else here crushing being holy, loving, and full of faith all the time?
It is the struggle of every Christian to not feel guilty, to not get totally depressed and defeated by our failings. We wonder if those dark places in our personalities and behavior will ever go away. We wonder why we keep making the same mistakes. There are times we sense that we are just not good enough.
Someone said Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good.[1]
The good news is that the life of Jesus Christ, and identification with his life, puts us right with God even in our failure to be good. Had a bad day? A bad week? Your life is in Christ. Not thinking right? Your life is in Christ. Struggling in some way? You are in Christ.
Paul writes that we are not justified by works of the law – by keeping all the rules - but we are justified by faith in Christ Jesus.
Paul writes to the Galatians to say that we are right with God through the grace of Jesus Christ. Yes, the Jewish law and sacrifices and ceremonies had been how people worked out their relationship with God. Men had to be circumcised. People had to make blood offerings for their failings. Judaism was full of rules to keep.
There were many teachers who said though you now believe in Christ you still have to follow the Jewish legal system. But Paul writes to the Galatians to tell them that rule-keeping is not going to make them right with God. He knows because he tried it. He became convinced that no human being can please God by self-improvement. No, only by trust in Christ will someone please God.
We are justified by faith. The word “justified” means to be made right. It means to be put into a right relationship. In construction, to justify something is to make it line up. You justify the edge of a board to another straight edge. In the legal world to be justified means to be declared not guilty. The opposite of justified is to be condemned.
Jesus Christ justifies a person with God. He makes us right with God. He puts us in a right relationship with God. He lines us up with God. His life declares us “not guilty” for whatever wrong ways our life can turn.
Some people’s religion is to establish their own goodness before God. When we do that we trust ourselves. We trust that going to church earns us points. We trust that our good deeds make God love us. We trust that if we don’t do wrong then we must be OK. Yes, religion can just be something to justify ourselves. “I’m OK, and let me tell you why.”
Paul said he tried to live that way and he couldn’t do it. He tried to live by the rules and found out it didn’t work. So, as he put it, he “died to the law” meaning that he stopped trying to work his head off to keep the law, and trusted Christ instead.
This is why he wrote in verse 20, these golden words:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
What does it mean to live by faith in the Son of God? I think that is a succinct and clear way of saying what the Christian life is all about: a life lived by faith in the Son of God. There are seven references to life or living in these three verses. Lifestyle is a big topic these days. Being a Christian is a lifestyle because it is a life lived for Jesus.
To live by faith in the Son of God is to let him lead our lives. It is to trust that he is at work when things don’t make sense to us. It is to bank on his life above our own lives. It is to trust that he is our ticket with the Father rather than anything we do ourselves. It is to live by grace.
Paul is writing to people who are trying to do it on their own with God as a supplement. They figure they can keep the rules and do enough good things to make it with God. They were pretty legalistic. And the apostle is writing to say this life with Christ doesn’t work that way.
Paul puts it this way:
I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a “law man” so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not “mine,” but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.[2]
He says, “I died to the law so that I might live for God.” Paul presents a life of trying to keep the law as incompatible with a life lived for God. They don’t mesh. They are two different things.
Who do you live for? Who is dead-center of your life? Calling the shots? Who you want to please more than anyone else?
Think of a wheel with a hub in the middle. This wheel represents your life. And there are various spokes going from the hub out to the rim. The hub is the center of your life that gives coherence to everything else in your life. That hub runs your life. Everything turns around it. The spokes are the various things that make up your life: spouse, kids, work, leisure, time, hobbies, responsibilities. To live for Christ Jesus is to make him the hub. Everything else gets its connection through him and revolves around him. If one of those spokes becomes the hub of our lives, then we are ultimately living for that and not God.
Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me.” This life we live is a crucified life. We die. And we keep dying. The actual way it is written is “I have been and continue to be crucified…” Oh, we are still the people God created us to be with our personalities, gifts, and uniqueness. But our egos submit to the Lordship of Christ. Self-fulfillment is not our primary concern. Christ-fulfillment is our life. We hand the reigns of our life over to Christ. We sign away our rights and say “God, what do you want me to be and do?”
Notice that Paul makes this personal. He speaks in terms of “I” and “me”. Paul did not mean he was physically no longer alive. He was speaking spiritually. He had spiritually died with Christ, which is essential in the Christian life.
And now Christ was living in him. Christ was taking over his thinking and his lifestyle. Christ was becoming the center, not his own ego or agenda.
“I no longer live.” What do you mean? It looks like Paul. Talks like Paul. Smells like Paul. When we are crucified with Christ our personalities don’t cease to exist. But when Christ lives in us we do change. We begin to see things as Christ sees them. We begin to do things as Christ would do them. We begin to hear things as Christ would hear them. We begin to think things the way Christ thinks them. And we want people to see Christ in us.
He lives in us. And the more we die, the less there is of us. And the less there is of us, the more there is of Christ. This doesn’t mean we become passive and merely empty pipes that God’s power flows through. Paul goes on to underscore the necessity of active faith. The life he now lives in the body – which is to say his actions, words, thoughts, emotions…the everyday life of responsibilities and relationships – he lives by faith in the Son of God.[3] He was trusting Christ moment by moment, becoming more aware of the Son, wanting to honor Christ.
Jesus called people who want to follow him to take up their cross. He said if we try to save our life, we will end up losing it. But to lose our life for his sake, and for the sake of the gospel, is to save it.
“Crucifixion ends one way of life and opens up another. It finishes a life in which the self is coddled and indulged and admired, and begins a life that is offered to God and raised as a living sacrifice.”[4]
When I start to live by faith in the Son of God my first question no longer is “what does Phil want?” The first question becomes “what does Jesus Christ want?” For the Christian this becomes a daily way of living. Christ living in me – what does he want?
So much of what we hear and see today in media, advertising, and even education is very “me” centered. Everything around us says that we are the most important thing in the world. We talk about ourselves, think about ourselves, promote ourselves, coddle ourselves, worry about ourselves, stare at ourselves. To an extent that is understandable. We have to live with ourselves 24/7.
The life crucified with Christ ends the life of the self as the center and begins the life with God at the center because God is the most important reality.
To be crucified with Christ doesn’t mean we lose our distinctiveness as human beings or become walking Christian zombies. To be crucified with Christ is to say “I’m not the big deal anymore” and that “I submit to Something – Someone! – bigger.” To be crucified with Christ and to have him live in us is when we understand that our lives have been swallowed up by something bigger than us.
When we live by faith in the Son of God we rely on him for our being right with God. We accept and trust fully in his grace, and his grace alone. It is no longer about our performance.
The Christian life is an ongoing, continuous, growing, changing life of dying and rising. There are no experts. Maturity, wisdom and formation certainly come. But whether you are a beginner or a seasoned veteran, living by faith in the Son of God is has all kinds of twists and turns.
And if we tell ourselves the truth we know that we stumble and get up, stumble and get up as we walk this path. Which is why it is a life of grace.
Robert Farrar Capon was an Episcopal priest. He really captured what it means to live for Christ and his grace. He said when we trust Jesus then we are living that life of grace. No matter our waverings, our sadness, our lapses, our whining, we simply believe that Somebody Else, by his death and resurrection, has made it all right, and we just say thank you and shut up.
“All of our performances are really our death.” [5]
We die so that Christ can live in us.
Paul says he lives for the Son of God because he loved me and gave himself for me. It was personal for the Apostle. It is personal for us. Put your name in the blank. He loves you and gave himself for you. And that is grace.
That’s what we need to trust. This is who we need to trust. This is the gift of grace. And we celebrate this grace at this table.
[1] Tullian Tchividjian in an interview with Jonathan Merritt on Merritt’s blog, “Faith and Culture”
[2] The Message
[3] IVP New Testament Commentary, www.biblegateway.com
[4] Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light, p.76
[5] From Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace