Scripture: "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me."—GAL. ii. 20.
The thought of fellowship with Christ in His bearing the cross, has often led to the vain attempt in our own power to follow Him, and bear His image. But this is impossible to man until he first learns to know something of what it means to say, "I have been crucified with Christ."
Let us try to understand this. When Adam died, all his descendants died with him and in him. In his sin in Paradise, and in the spiritual death into which he fell, I had a share; I died in him. And the power of that sin and death, in which all his descendants share, works in every child of Adam every day.
Christ came as the second Adam. In His death on the cross, all who believe in Him had a share. Each one may say in truth, "I have been crucified with Christ." As the representative of His people, He took them up with Him on the cross, and me too. The life that He gives is the crucified life in which He entered heaven, and was exalted to the throne, standing as a Lamb as it had been slain. The power of His death and life work in me, and as I hold fast the truth that I have been crucified with Him, and that now I myself live no more but Christ liveth in me, I receive power to conquer sin; the life that I have received from Him is a life that has been crucified and made free from the power of sin.
We have here a deep and very precious truth. Most Chris¬tians have but little knowledge of it. That knowledge is not gained easily or speedily. It needs a great longing in very deed to be dead to all sin. It needs a strong faith, wrought by the Holy Ghost, that the union with Christ crucified, that the fellowship of His cross, can day by day become our life. The life that He lives in heaven has its strength and its glory in the fact that it is a crucified life. And the life that He imparts to the believing disciple is even so a crucified life with its victory over sin and its power of access into God's presence.
It is in very deed true that I no longer live, but Christ liveth in me as the Crucified one. As faith realizes and holds fast the fact that the crucified Christ lives in me, life in the fellowship of the cross becomes a possibility and a blessed experience.
