Scripture: "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."—GAL. ii. 20.
As in Adam we died out of the life and the will of God into sin and corruption, so in Christ we are made partakers of a new spiritual death, a death to sin and into the will and the life of God. Such was the death Christ died; such is the death we are made partakers of in Him. To Paul this was such a reality that he was able to say: "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." The death with Christ had had such power that he no longer lived his own life; Christ lived His life in him. He had indeed died to the old nature and to sin, and been raised up into the power of the living Christ dwelling in him.
It was the crucified Christ Who lived in him, and made him partaker of all that the cross had meant to Christ Himself. The very mind that was in Christ, with His self-emptying and taking the form of a servant, His humbling Himself to become obedient unto death—these dispositions worked in him because the crucified Christ lived in him. He lives in very deed as a crucified man.
Christ's death on the cross was His highest exhibition of His holiness and victory over sin. And the believer who receives Christ is made partaker of all the power and blessing that the crucified Lord has won. As the believer learns to accept of this by faith, he yields himself as now crucified to the world and dead to its pleasure and pride, its lusts and self-pi easing. He learns that the mystery of the cross, as the crucified Lord reveals its power in him, opens the entrance into the fullest fellowship with Christ and the conformity to His sufferings. And so he learns, in the full depth of its meaning, what the Word has said: "Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God." He grows into a fuller apprehension of the blessedness of daring to say: "I am crucified with Christ, I live no more; Christ the crucified liveth in me."
Oh the blessedness of the power of the God-given faith that enables a man to live all the day counting himself, and yield¬ing himself to God, as indeed dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
