Crucified With Christ: by Andrew Murray

 I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live;

yet not I, but Christ lives in me. Galatians 2:20

As in Adam we died and went out of the life and will of God into sin and corruption, so in Christ we are made partakers of a new spiritual death—a death out of sin and into the will and 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 am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Dying with Christ had had such power that he no longer lived his own life; instead, Christ lived His life in him. He had indeed died to the old nature and to sin and had been raised up into the power of the living Christ dwelling in him.

It was the crucified Christ who lived in Paul and made him a partaker of all that the cross had meant to Christ Himself. The very mind that was in Christ—who emptied Himself and took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7) and who “humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death” (verse 8)—was at work in him because the crucified Christ lived in him. He lived as a crucified man.

Christ’s death on the cross was His highest display of holiness and victory over sin. The believer who receives Christ is made a partaker of all the power and blessing that the crucified Lord has won. As the believer learns to accept this by faith, he yields himself as crucified to the world and dead to its pleasure and pride, its lusts and self‑pleasing. He learns that the mystery of the cross, as the crucified Lord reveals its power in him, opens the door 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” (1 Corinthians 1:23–24). He grows into a fuller understanding of the blessedness of daring to say, 

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live;

yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”

Oh, the blessedness and power of the God‑given faith that enables a man to live all day yielding himself to God and considering himself as “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ” (Romans 6:11).