Crucified with Christ

“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).

For more than ten years, I have included The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions in my morning quiet time. One might assume that reading through this book two or three times each year would make its prayers familiar. Not so. This very morning I was brought up short by a line from the prayer titled Crucifixion and Resurrection. The sobering sentence read, “Let me reckon my old life dead to sin because of crucifixion, and never feed it as a living thing.”

Like the Apostle Paul, I have often claimed that I “have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” Yet through the words of this Puritan writer, I realized that far too often I still feed that crucified self as if it were still alive. In the natural world, when something—or someone—dies, we no longer feed them. Right?

Unfortunately, after we are born again, the Lord does not immediately take us to heaven, where we would no longer be subject to the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. No, He leaves us right here—remaining, as it were, “at the scene of the crime.” And here He calls us to repent: to turn away from sin and then turn toward Him. He calls us to be overcomers—those who overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil by the power of His shed blood, His indwelling Spirit, and the sanctifying Word of God.

I understand that this is a process—an ongoing process. Second Corinthians 3:18 tells us that we are “being transformed into the same image [the image of Christ] from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.”

In this ongoing work, we are called to play a part. Our role is to seek, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to surrender our lives to the will of God day after day after day. As we take deliberate steps in His direction, we discover God’s gracious provision that enables us to live as overcomers—here and now.

I have now been walking with Christ for fifty-four years, and I am still learning how to surrender myself more fully—spirit, soul, and body—to His will. I deeply relate to the words of an old hymn:

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.

Prone to leave the God I love.

Here’s my heart, O take and seal it.

Seal it for Thy courts above.”¹

Psalm 118:27 declares, “Bind the festival sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar.” Romans 12:1 likewise calls us to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God.

Both Isaac in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament were offered up as living sacrifices. Both were bound to their respective altars—Isaac by the ropes with which his father Abraham tied him, and Jesus to His altar, the cross, by nails.

I have come to see that my life, too, is a living sacrifice—one that daily needs to be bound to Christ and to His purposes for me. I am bound by cords of love, or as the Apostle Paul wrote, “It is the love of Christ that controls me” (2 Corinthians 5:14). I now understand that it is this love for Christ that keeps me from feeding the dead man.

¹ Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, by Robert Robinson (1758)