Christ Lives In Me

To read this verse well I have to remember it does not float free. It sits inside a letter to churches in Galatia, and the temperature runs high all the way through. After Paul moved on, other teachers arrived and told his converts that trusting Christ was not quite enough; they would also need to take on the law of Moses, circumcision included, to be properly in. Paul will not have it. Unlike most of his letters, this one has no warm thanksgiving at the start, and by chapter three he is calling them foolish (Galatians 3:1). Verse 20 itself comes out of a story he is retelling, the time he confronted Peter to his face at Antioch (Galatians 2:11) for quietly backing away from Gentile believers when pressure came. So when Paul writes that ‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me’, he is not musing quietly in a study. He is making a case, with his guard up, that the gospel he preaches is the whole gospel and adds nothing of human effort to the finished work of the cross. The setting matters. This is a verse worked out in conflict, not in comfort.

There is a detail in the wording I would have walked straight past if someone had not pointed it out to me years ago. ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ stands in the Greek as a perfect tense, which carries a past action with a settled, ongoing result. Paul is not saying he crucifies himself afresh each day as a project he has to keep up. He is saying it has already happened, once, and it still stands. The deed is done, and I am living inside its aftermath. I find that quietly steadying on the days I feel least crucified, least dead to my old self, most aware that the same old pride is very much alive and elbowing for room. The verse does not rest on how dead I feel this morning. It rests on something Christ accomplished that does not come undone. Notice too the order of the last clause: he ‘loved me and gave himself up for me’. The love comes first, and then the giving. The cross was not God being talked round into caring. The caring was already there, and it spent itself.

Paul says this sort of thing elsewhere, and following the echoes slowly is worth the trouble. In Romans 6:6 he writes of our old self being crucified with Christ, and in Colossians 3:3 he says our life is now hidden with Christ in God. The picture across these passages is union: not Christ as a distant figure I admire from the stands, but Christ joined to me so closely that what happened to him counts as having happened to me. His death becomes my death to the old way; his risen life becomes the life I now live. Jesus drew the same picture himself in John 15:5 with the vine and the branches, where the branch bears nothing cut off from the stem. And 2 Corinthians 5:17 puts the upshot plainly: anyone in Christ is a new creation. This is the thread I keep coming back to. The whole story has been God closing the distance between himself and us, patiently, until the distance is gone and Christ lives in his people.

I want to be honest about how this lands in an ordinary week, because it is easy to make it sound grander than it feels. For me ‘no longer I’ rarely arrives as a dramatic surrender. It shows up small. It is the moment I want the last word in a disagreement and something in me lets it drop. It is choosing not to defend my reputation when defending it would be easy and satisfying. It is the quiet decision, when I am tired and nobody is watching, to do the right thing anyway. None of that feels like resurrection. Most of it feels like dying a little, which is rather the point. What helps me is that the verse never asks me to manufacture a new self by willpower. It asks me to lean my weight on the One who already gave himself for me, by name. Some mornings I get this wrong and snatch the controls straight back into my own hands. The mercy is that the death Paul describes is not undone by my bad days. I get up and lean again.

• Where am I still gripping the controls of my own life, and what would it honestly cost me to loosen that grip today?
• The verse says Christ ‘loved me and gave himself up for me’. Do I really believe that love is personal, with my name on it, or do I keep it general and safe?
• When I read ‘it is no longer I who live’, does that frighten me, free me, or a bit of both, and why?
• Where is one small, ordinary place this week where I could let Christ live through me rather than striving in my own strength?

If you would like to sit longer with Paul, you can read more from his letter at /bible/galatians/, or find a verse for wherever today finds you at /bible-verses-for-how-you-feel/.