Thank you very much, Mike. It is a joy to be here.
You know, whenever I am here and they introduce guests, I always tell them, “Don’t introduce me; I’m not a guest here.” I have probably been here longer than most of you, and it has been a real joy.
So let us go right to the Word. I want to read a number of passages. The first one is in Deuteronomy.
I also want to share today from Galatians 2:20, but I want to read a number of passages. Deuteronomy 6, verse 10.
This passage is a great illustration of the grace of God, and I will talk about it some later.
Then it shall come about when the Lord your God brings you into the land which He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you, great and splendid cities which you did not build,
and houses full of all good things which you did not fill,
and hewn cisterns which you did not dig,
vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant,
and you shall eat and be satisfied.
Now let us turn to Galatians. I want to read a number of passages in Galatians, and one in Hebrews, and then we will go back to Galatians 2:20.
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me;
and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself up for me.— Galatians 2:20
Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
— Galatians 5:24
But may it never be that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
— Galatians 6:14
Let us go back to Galatians 1, beginning with verse 15.
But when He who had set me apart, even from my mother’s womb, and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.
— Galatians 1:15-16
He revealed His Son in me.
My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you.
— Galatians 4:19
And Galatians 4:6:
Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”
— Galatians 4:6
I want to read one passage in Hebrews. You might keep your thumb there: Hebrews 13, verses 20 and 21.
Now the God of peace, Who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord,
equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to Whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.— Hebrews 13:20-21
Let us look to the Lord again in prayer.
Dear Father, we thank You for Your blood. Father, we thank You very much for the songs we have been singing, and the praise and prayers that have been offered. Dear Father, now we come to Your Word.
Father, we thank You that all Scripture is given by the inspiration—the breath—of God. We thank You that we have Your Word in our own language. Father, we thank You that we are literate and can read Your Word. Dear Father, we thank You that we have the freedom to publish and proclaim Your Word.
But, dear Lord, we know that we need Your illumination. Dear Father, as we come to Your Word, we pray that the Spirit of Christ, Who is in us, would reveal truth to us. We know that there is truth that we know inwardly that will satisfy.
So, Father, today as we come to Your Word, we pray that the Word of God might bring us to the God of the Word. We pray in Your Son’s name. Amen.
You know, the book of Galatians is a book that Paul wrote to correct an error.
He was quite vehement, quite agitated, that the enemy, somehow through false teachers, had perverted the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Whenever we come to Galatians, we always notice that there is a negative purpose: he is seeking to correct something; he is seeking to destroy something. He even uses language such as, “If any man preaches another gospel to you, or even an angel from heaven, let him be anathema.”
It is a very strong book in that way, and it is defending just what we have been singing about: the gospel of the grace of God. These wrong teachers were telling them, “Well, you must be circumcised, and you must eat the right things and keep the law.”
Paul is correcting that. But his burden for them was greater still. He says, “My little children, I am travailing again in birth till Christ be formed in you.”
In other words, suppose they dropped circumcision but did not go on to know Christ, to have Christ. It would have fallen short, because his burden was not just to correct the wrong thing, but to impart Christ to His church, His assembly.
Most of the letters were written to correct something. In Colossians, they speak of some form of Gnosticism, which evidently involved the worship of angels and philosophy. But his real burden was Christ in you, the hope of glory, and that the fullness of the Godhead rests in Christ.
So the correction that Paul gives for these errors will correct any error, because Christ Himself is the answer to all things.
Paul’s burden was for Christ to be formed in them for sonship, for the living Christ to be able to express Himself in His people.
His burden for them was that Christ could live in them as He did in Paul, as he testified in Galatians 2:20: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” In Philippians, he says, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
It is not all about circumcision. Twice in the letter he says this: circumcision does not avail anything, nor uncircumcision.
I think sometimes we think of ourselves as the uncircumcision. We are the ones who do not have a lot of things that some people think are so essential. But uncircumcision does not avail anything.
What avails something, he says, is a new creation. And the life of that new creation is Jesus Christ.
So Paul’s antidote for the problem of the Galatians was the indwelling of Christ and the working of the cross.
Galatians 2:20 says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who 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.”
That is such a tremendous statement for Paul to make. You know, that very verse is the truth the Lord has used to transform so many people. F. B. Meyer, for instance—if you read his book The Christ Life—it was this very verse that transformed his life and ministry. Well, I should say the very Christ, the very truth in the verse.
You can gather so many truths from this verse. You can gather here the truth of substitution. That is what the blood represents: Christ died for us as our substitute, because he says, “He loved me and gave Himself for me.”
That is the gospel of forgiveness. When Jesus died on the cross, shedding His blood, God visited all our sins upon Him. That is when He was wounded for our transgressions, when He was bruised for our iniquities.
Oftentimes Paul, in his letters, talks about the corporate. That is so important. We apprehend with all the saints what is love. But he is also so personal: “He loved me and gave Himself for me.”
There is no tension or conflict between the personal life in Christ and the corporate. When all the pianos are tuned to the same fork, they are playing in harmony. When all the trees are rooted in the same soil and have the same nutrients, in the same field, they are all one forest.
We are corporate because this life is in each of us. But you have to know Him personally. You have to be able to say with Paul, “I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
But then you also have in this verse the great truth of Christ in you. Christ lives in us by the Person of the Holy Spirit. This is a wonderful truth.
Christ is the Christ of history. He is the Christ in heaven, where He sits at the right hand of God. But in the Person of the Holy Spirit, He comes to live in the believer.
In John 14, you remember our Lord was telling His disciples that He was going to die and rise again. He said, “I will send you another Helper, that He may be with you forever.”
Then, in John 14:20, He says, “In that day you will know.” Now remember, when God wants us to know something, He wants us to know it spiritually.
Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” But how many have learned that it is the truth you know inwardly, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, that sets you free—not the truth you know by education?
It is the truth that the Spirit of God shows you. And He wants us to know. He said, “In that day you will know that I am in the Father.”
Jesus and the Father are one, and the Spirit is the triune God. He was in the Father when He lived on earth. Our Lord Jesus was God, but He laid His glory aside. He lived as a man, and He lived in total dependence upon the Father.
All His works He did in conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. He who says he abides in Him ought to walk as He walked.
Then He says, “In that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you are in Me.” When God saves a sinner, by a divine act—and I do not try to explain it—He takes that sinner somehow out of Adam and puts him in Christ.
That is where you stand before God. That is why you are secure before God: in Christ Jesus. That is very wonderful.
I think it says some thirty times or more in the New Testament, “in Me,” “in Christ,” and “in Christ Jesus.” It says ten or more times, “I in you,” or “I in them”—Christ in you.
So He says that you will know that He is in the Father; you will know that you are in Him. And if you are in Him, all the spiritual riches that He won for you are yours in Him.
When He died on the cross, He did not do it for Himself. He did not have any sins to die for. He did not win the victory for Himself. He could have defeated Satan just by bowing on him, or something—a word. He did it as our Representative. It is all ours in Him.
When someone does something as your legal representative, it counts just as though you did it. People make all kinds of suits and bring all kinds of pleas and do all kinds of things in court. Sometimes they are not even there. Some attorney says, “We do thus and thus,” and it goes down: you did it.
He did it as our Representative, and it is all ours in Him. So, in that day you will know—not think, wish, or hope—you will know these things.
Then the other thing: “I am in the Father, you in Me, and I in you.” Can you imagine if you were one of the apostles in the group and He said, “I will be in you”? They could understand Him being with them, but He said, “I will be in you.”
Then in John 15: “I am the vine.” Thank God, He did not say, “Seek to be a branch, and pray that I will be the vine.” He did not say that. Talking to His own, He said, “I am the vine; you are the branches.”
What did He say? “Abide—dwell—in Me, and I will dwell in you.”
Then, in that wonderful prayer recorded in John 17, our Lord Jesus prayed for His disciples and for all who would believe through them.
You remember, He prayed for their unity and for their sanctification, that they would be kept from the evil one. The final phrase in the prayer is, “And I in them.”
I love that because our Lord Jesus was praying to the Father, and He so wanted to live in us that He asked the Father as part of that great prayer, “And I in them.”
I think that is so wonderful. I think that is actually the answer to all the prayer. He asked for unity. If He is in me, if He is in each of you, then we are one. We share the same Christ.
He prayed for sanctification. If He is in me, then that is my way to sanctification. He prayed that they would be kept from the evil one. Well, “He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world.”
Not only that, in Him you are high above every name that is named. So we see how wonderful this matter is: Christ has come to live in us, and He comes to live in our spirit.
God gave us a spirit. We are spirit, soul, and body. Thank God, when the Lord saves an individual, his spirit comes to life. The spirit comes alive; it becomes capable of union with God, of fellowship with God.
I think that is so wonderful—amazing. You remember Romans 8:9:
But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.
But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.— Romans 8:9
In other words, the Spirit of Christ comes in. You have the Spirit of Christ. You have almost a parallel passage in Galatians 4:6: “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”
The Spirit of Christ—we have the Spirit of Christ. But then Romans 8:10 says, “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin”—in other words, the body is subject to death; the body is decaying—“yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.”
So if Christ is in you, then your spirit is alive. That is where 1 Corinthians says, “He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” You see, He comes and dwells in our spirit.
That is very wonderful, because He dwells at the right hand of God. I remember one time I wanted to witness to a boy. He was just a little boy, about five or six. I said, “Jesus lives in my heart.” He said, “No, He lives up there.”
A smart kid, because he was right, was he not? That is just what it says: Christ sits at the right hand of God. Thank God, if Jesus is at God’s right hand, He does not get off His throne and come out here and get in your heart. That would be impossible.
But by His Spirit, He is in us. Thus we are joined to Him: union with Christ. “I am the vine; you are the branches.” It is a living union.
It is just as though the cross can cut us out of Adam and graft us onto the hand of Christ. You see, He is in you.
Then in 2 Corinthians 13:5, Paul has been defending his apostleship, so he says, “Examine yourselves. See if you are in the faith. Do you not know that Jesus Christ is in you, unless indeed you fail the test?”
Sometimes I revert back to the King James: “Unless you be reprobates.” But Jesus Christ is in you. Paul says, “Don’t you know it?” That is why He wants us to know that Christ is in us.
You have that three times here in Galatians. In chapter 1, he says, “When it pleased the Father, Who separated me from my mother’s womb, that I might preach the gospel,” he says, “to reveal His Son in me.”
So you have Christ revealed in the believer. Then here in Galatians 2:20, he says, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” You have Christ living in the believer.
Then his prayer for them was, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.” So you have Christ revealed in the believer, Christ living in the believer, and Christ formed in the believer.
You see, that is sonship. When Christ is formed in the believer, He is bringing maturity, and He is bringing us up so that Christ can be seen in us. Something that is formed in you can be seen and can be touched spiritually.
So we have this great matter of Christ in you. Someone—it may have been F. B. Meyer; I am not sure—but someone said that John 3:16 is the good news for the sinner, while Galatians 2:20 is the good news for the Christian.
John 3:16 tells me I do not have to die. But, thank God, Galatians 2:20 tells me I do not have to live.
We live in a world of war and strife and sickness and death. Christ is the answer to all those things, and He lives in us. He wants to live through us.
I have been approaching the verse from the last clause and going back to the first clause. We have talked about Christ for us and Christ in us. But the first clause is, “I have been crucified with Christ.”
That is Paul’s own confession to what he teaches in Ephesians, Romans 6, and many places. The key to Christ living in you is dying with Christ.
I remember a series of messages I heard some years back by Stephen Kaung on Galatians. He always said this: “You can understand it by just remembering: it is not works, but faith; it is not law, but grace; it is not flesh, but Spirit; and it is not I, but Christ.”
Those four contrasts: not this, but that. Right between the “not” and the “but” is the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus in our union with Him.
This morning we are talking about that last phrase: not I, but Christ. Not I, but Christ living in me. And, you know, it is all by grace.
Sometimes today I think people have wrong ideas of grace. I think sometimes I pick this up in some messages somewhere. Sometimes people say that their idea of grace is this: “I am just a poor, miserable sinner, and I will never be anything but a poor, miserable sinner. But thank God, I am saved and justified, and I am going to heaven. I do not really expect to do anything, but thank God, by grace I am forgiven.”
Well, that is wrong. Or you could say it is only part of the truth. Thank God, we are forgiven. I am not a perfectionist. I am not saying you attain to sinless perfection in this life. But I am saying that He has victory for us, and it is all by grace.
Grace does not mean that we continue in sin. That is just what the Bible says, is it not? “Should we continue in sin so that grace might increase? God forbid.” We should not do that.
Romans 6:14 says:
For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
— Romans 6:14
But you do not read that sin is not your master because you are not under law but under grace. You read that sin is not your master because you are not under law but under Christ.
I was trying to think of an illustration of grace, and I think you have it in Deuteronomy 6, the verse we read.
In the Old Testament, the land represented something. Egypt was the world. The wilderness was the Christian out of the world but going nowhere, just walking around in circles, following signs and wonders and murmuring.
But then there was the land, and that represented fullness. It says somewhere that when you come into the land, it is a land of brooks and streams, and wheat and barley, and pomegranates and figs, and minerals and metals—in other words, a place of fullness.
The verse we read says that when you come to the land which the Lord your God gives you, you will dwell in great houses that you did not build, filled with all kinds of good things that you did not procure. You will draw from wells that you did not dig, and eat from fig trees and vineyards that you did not plant.
That is a picture of grace. All I did was receive. They possessed.
So this righteousness, this holiness, this—just that Christ might live in you—this fruitfulness that we all desire, it is all by grace.
I think sometimes we live by performance. We have somewhere in the back of our mind that if I perform correctly, God accepts me. But, you see, that is just what the law says: “Thou shalt do this. Thou shalt not do that.”
Because we have not given up on the flesh, we have not done what God did. That is what Romans 7 is all about.
Romans 7 is the man who has not given up on the flesh. He still lives by performance. So he is seeking to obey God’s law by self.
The highest he can get is, “I wish I could. I would do it if I could, but I find I do not do it in spite of my best efforts.”
But thank God, grace means that God puts into you what He wants out of you. That is what grace means. The Word of God puts in what He provides. It is all of God.
When you get to the sixth chapter of Galatians, you have this verse:
For those who are circumcised do not even keep the law themselves, but they desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your flesh.
— Galatians 6:13
In other words, that means, “We want to boast in something that we can do. We want to boast in something that the flesh can do.”
But life helps us to see that the flesh cannot do anything that is right and spiritual and acceptable to God. But thank God, by His grace, He will do it by the indwelling Christ.
I mentioned that three times in Galatians it says that Christ is revealed in us, Christ is living in us, and Christ is formed in us. Well, in Galatians it also mentions co-crucifixion three times.
In the verse we had before, it says, “I have been crucified with Christ.” In chapter 5, remember, when he talks about walking in the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, and the works of the flesh, it says, “Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
We have not died with Christ in a way that annihilates the flesh so that we do not have a battle with it. But, on the other hand, we have not died with Christ in a way that is only a standing and only a position.
We have died with Him in a way that can be claimed and possessed, and, above all, that the Holy Spirit can apply. There is a key to walking in the Spirit.
It is a spiritual reality, but it is the Spirit of God, as we live in dependence upon Him, Who can apply it and make it a daily reality in our walk.
So there you have, “I have been crucified with Christ.” You have, “Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh.” Then you have this great verse: they want to glory in your flesh. In other words, they want to boast about something that you can do on your own.
But verse 14 says, “May it never be that I should boast.” If you did not build that house, if you did not fill that house, if you did not dig that well, if you did not plant those vines, if you did not plant those fig trees, what can you boast about?
Well, you can boast about the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, because that is what procured all those things. God forbid that I should boast about anything but the cross. That is living under grace.
It is all by grace; it is all through the cross. We died with Him, we arose with Him, and He lives in us.
But may it never be that I should boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
— Galatians 6:14
Thank God, we died with Him that we might live unto God in Him. It is already done in Him.
Thank God, I always remember when, by the grace of God, someone put in my hands the little book Sit, Walk, Stand. I always remember the right beginning. He says Christianity does not begin with “do”; it begins with “done.”
Thank God, that is grace. The law says, “Do.” Grace says, “Done.” I have been crucified with Christ.
Then he says it again elsewhere: “Neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision.” Again, sometimes I think we think we are the uncircumcision. We do not need all kinds of circumcision or something. But that does not prevail.
What prevails is a new creation.
Then look at verse 16:
And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.
— Galatians 6:16
Those who walk by this rule. Now Paul has used all this ink to tell his readers that you are not under law, and then he says, “Mercy upon those who live by this rule.” So you are not under law, but you are under one rule.
What is the rule? I think the rule is the rule of grace. The rule is this: “God forbid that I should boast of anything except the cross of Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I am crucified to the world.”
So I would say the rule is a new creation that springs out of union with Him.
But thank God, He says, “Mercy upon those who live by this rule.” That is the centrality of the cross. That is not boasting in anything but the cross.
Both for justification and sanctification. Do you see what I mean? Since He died for me, thank God, I am justified. But since I died in Him and He lives in me, I can be sanctified by His grace.
So let us look to the Lord in prayer. I think I will stop right here, and I will reiterate this: Paul’s burden for his readers, and for us, was sonship. The means was the cross and the indwelling of Jesus Christ.
Dear Father, we offer this back to You and pray that You would use it for Your glory.
Dear Father, as we go back out into our homes and jobs, and wherever we may associate with people, Lord, may You so form Christ in us that He could be seen in us.
We thank and praise You in His holy name.