Crucified with Christ

How does the Bible measure love?

We measure the greatness of the love by the greatness and dignity of the lover, and there is no greater dignity. That's what's so astonishing to the apostle. It's the Son of God who loved me. 1 John 3 says, Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God. You know, you can hear the apostle John's utter amazement and delight at the magnitude of the Father's love for his children. We're going to consider that today here on Renewing Your Mind as we look at a theme that we come across repeatedly in the New Testament, our union with Christ. What does it mean to be united with Christ? What does it look like? And how is it a measure of God's love for you and me?

Our teacher is Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. Now we're coming again to this theme of our union with the Lord Jesus Christ, and I want especially in this session to focus on one particular verse, very famous verse, which if you became a Christian in my era, you would have been told to memorize immediately. It's Galatians chapter 2 and verse 20, these amazing words of Paul that in a way nothing seems to prepare you for.

When he says, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. Among the many striking things about this statement is the prepositions that Paul uses.

I'm not sure there's another verse in the whole of the New Testament where the whole gospel is summarized by the use of four different prepositions. I have been crucified with Christ. Christ lives in me. I live by faith. He gave Himself for me.

Isn't that amazing? Just in these four prepositions, it seems as though the whole of the gospel is summarized, and certainly our union with the Lord Jesus Christ is so clearly stated. In a way, this is the framework for a gospel-saturated Christian life, and clearly it focuses on this idea that we are united to Christ. And in some ways, certainly if this was Paul's first letter, at least first letter that we still have, this would be his earliest statement of this theme that we said you remember earlier on in our studies. We can trace all the way back to his encounter with Stephen and Stephen's martyrdom.

Sometimes the logic of a passage is slightly different from the order of the words in the passage. And so I want us to think about this, since we're thinking especially about this doctrine of union with Christ, I want you to think about the logic, the nature of the gospel that comes to expression in what he says here in Galatians 2.20, because there are four steps in his thinking. Step number one, the Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me. Step number two, I live by faith in the Son of God. Step number three, I have been crucified with Christ, yet I live.

And step number four, at the same time it is also true that Christ lives in me. Let's remind ourselves first of all that union with Christ is not some abstract concept. And the way in which Paul brings that out here is by the way he undergirds all he says with the with the knowledge of the love of Christ.

We can be united to Christ for one simple reason, Jesus Christ loved us. And Paul stretches that statement to its maximum, we might say, by the way he describes the Lord Jesus Christ. The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me. Paul is actually the only person in the New Testament who says that the Son of God loved me. Remember how the Apostle John, author of the fourth gospel, described himself as the disciple Jesus loved, the disciple Jesus loved. But you know, when he says that, I don't think he's saying, he loved me more than he loved the other disciples. I think what he's saying is, I have discovered that he loved me.

And Paul is saying, he not only has discovered that, he wants to state it, the Son of God loved me. And when you think about that statement, you realize he's actually saying a tremendous amount about love. How do we measure love? Well, how do we measure love? Well, one of the ways we measure love is by the greatness of the lover, don't we?

That's how the stories work. That's how Cinderella works. The greatness of…it's the prince who has fallen in love with Cinderella. So, we measure the greatness of the love by the greatness and dignity of the lover. And there is no greater dignity. That's what's so astonishing to the Apostle.

It's the Son of God who loved me. And then we measure love by the distance or the difference between the lover and the loved one. That's how Cinderella works, isn't it? If Cinderella were a princess, it wouldn't work in the same way. But she's not a princess.

She's a poor girl. And that's what makes the prince's love so overwhelming. And that's what Paul has captured, the Son of God loved me. And before we translate that into our own experience, which is perfectly legitimate, don't just confuse that me with this me. That me.

Who is this me? Well, this is the me who was trying to destroy the church. This is the me who had the blood of Christians on his hands. This is the me who seriously believed he was the chief of sinners. Now, I know we often say you can see Paul growing in holiness through the letters because he grows from being the least of the apostles to the chief of sinners.

That may well be true, but Paul believed he was the chief of sinners because he really did believe he was the chief of sinners. But the Son of God loved him. But then we measure love by a third measurement, don't we? By what the lover will do for the loved one. What the lover will do for the loved one.

The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me. It's unspeakable, isn't it? And let me remind you of what he's doing here. He's saying, this is the one to whom you're united.

This is the one to whom you're united. I wonder if you've ever met a Christian who just retains a deep sense of lack of assurance of the love of God. A friend said to me recently, a mature Christian friend said to me, sometimes you wonder, I wonder if you've ever met a Christian me, sometimes you wonder if he really loves you. You've gone through a hard time.

Not much sign of it. So, how do you really know Christ loves you? I rather suspect many Christians' subliminal answer to that is, well, things are going so well in my life. Those are the signs the Lord loves me.

You see, that's why we get into difficulties when things aren't going well in our lives. We're sitting there, He loves me, He loves me not. When things go well, I know He loves me. When things don't go well, I doubt whether He loves me. But the Bible never tells you to believe that Jesus loves you because good things are happening in your life.

The Bible tells you to believe that Jesus loves you because He gave Himself for you. Providence is extremely difficult to read because we're not God. We don't know what God is doing in our lives. We don't see the full picture.

So, where are we going to look? We're going to look to the place where He gave Himself for us. Some of you will know how Charles Haddon Spurgeon sometimes used to say, I look at the cross and I wonder if God loves me more than He loves His Son because He's dying in my place, because He's given Himself for me. I remember how Paul also, towards the end of Romans 8, says this is the anchor of our assurance as those who are united to Jesus Christ. We know that He will give us everything we need because we know He gave us His Son.

It's as though God is saying, I don't have any more to give you. I've given you everything in giving my Son to you. And this is the background to the idea of union with Christ. This is the Christ to whom we are united.

It's amazing. From heaven, He came and sought us to be His holy bride. With His own blood, He bought us, and for our life He died. This is the foundation of all of our union and communion with the Lord Jesus Christ.

But then Paul goes on to a second dimension here. So, there's the wonder of the love of Christ for us is the foundation of this union. But then secondly, the nature of our response to Him. I live by faith in Him. Now, many of you know how the Reformers and the Reformed theologians have described faith as being a kind of amalgam of three dimensions. There is knowledge because you can't believe in what you don't know, and there is assent because you don't believe in something that your mind rejects, and then there is trust. Faith is entrusting yourself. I was taught as a young Christian young Christian that faith is forsaking all, I take Him.

And that's what Paul is saying here. I live by faith in the Son of God. But notice what he's really saying here is not, I live by faith.

No, he's saying it's not my faith that sustains me. It's the object of my faith that sustains me. And of course, later on, he'll put it a little bit differently, that this faith is a faith that unites me to Jesus Christ.

I believe into the Lord Jesus Christ. And when I am thus united to Him, all that He is for me is also mine. All that He has done for me is also mine. And this is a very important thing for us to understand. People often speak about their relationship to the Lord Jesus, don't they?

Very common. How is your relationship to the Lord Jesus? And often the answer to that question is, well, I'm struggling a bit, or I'm backsliding to tell the truth, or things are going really well. And in a way, I want to say that's not what I mean when I ask you what your relationship is. If somebody says to me, what is your relationship to Dorothy? The answer is not, we're getting on okay at the moment, or, you know, we're 4,000 miles away at the moment. My answer is I'm married to her.

That's my relationship to her. And that does not change. In the ups and downs of life, that is the steady reality of our lives. And Paul wants us to understand that exactly the same is true of our union with Christ.

It doesn't go up and down. Yes, our communion with Him, we may grieve the Holy Spirit, that we may stumble and fail, stumble and fail, we may turn away for a season. But the relationship is a constant reality, and it never changes. We live by faith in the Son of God. And the reason it never changes is because when we believe into Jesus Christ, something happens, says Paul.

And what happens is this, I at that point am crucified with Christ. I want to encourage you just to step back from that statement for a minute and parse it. I know most of us didn't like the teachers who told us to parse verbs because we get kind of all confused with moods and voices and all the rest of it.

But it's very important that we parse this statement of Paul. First of all, the tense. Second, the voice. Third, the mood. The tense, is it present or past? The voice, is it active or passive? The mood, is it indicative, a command, imperative?

What is it? Well, look at what Paul says here. First of all, the tense, I have been crucified with Christ. Hold on to this. Paul is not telling you to do anything here.

This is not something you have to do. This is something that has happened. This is something that happened to you when you came to faith in Jesus Christ. Now, there are other places where he tells us those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its lusts. He says that at the end of Galatians.

That's something we do. We are to put sin to death. We are to take up the cross and carry it daily. But that is not what he is saying here. This is not a command about what we are to do in the present. This is a statement about something that has happened to us in the past when we became united to Jesus Christ. And that's why it's in the passive voice, I have been crucified with Christ.

And that's why it's not in the imperative mood, but the indicative mood. It's not telling us to do something. It's telling us to recognize something that has been done. In other words, it's encouraging us to recognize who we are.

Who are you? I am somebody who has been crucified with Christ and yet I live. What does Paul mean by that? Well, we'll explore that later on in our studies, but it's a very important thing for us to ask, how do you think about yourself as a Christian? Because Paul is encouraging us to think about ourselves as Christians. We get up in the morning, who am I?

When we become conscious that we are somebody and we say, well, who am I? Paul is not saying, you'll be one thing tomorrow, one thing today, different thing yesterday. He's saying, the answer to that question every single day of your life as a Christian is, because I'm united to Christ who was crucified and raised, I am somebody in union with Him who has been crucified and raised. The old has gone, the new has come.

Isn't that what he said in 2 Corinthians chapter 5? If anyone is in Christ, the old creation, it has gone. The new creation has come.

How has the old creation gone? Because when you were united to Christ, you were united to a crucified Christ, and you shared in all the implications of that crucifixion when you believed into the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, at some of our churches we say the Apostles' Creed, probably most Sundays, and the minister or the person who's involved in the service usually introduces it by saying this, Christian, what do you believe? And what he means is, what do you believe about the truths of the gospel? And so, we all say, I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, or one of the other creeds. But what if, to our surprise, the minister said, Christian, what do you believe about yourself?

What do you believe about yourself? I think it would be tragically unusual for a congregation unless it were there in the order of service instinctively to say, I have been crucified with Christ and yet I live. And yet, Paul is saying this is absolutely definitive of what it means to be a Christian. You cannot be a Christian unless you have been crucified with Christ. It's of the very essence of coming to faith in Him and participating in what He has done so that it brings to an end the old life that you used to live. It's on the other side of the cross. That's what he's saying.

The person who takes up the cross and follows Him is like the person who puts his hand to the plow and does not look back to that old life. Let me try it another way. Who are you? Well, I can't tell that by looking at you. I mean, you might be English. You might be French. You might be Canadian. You, for all I know, you're German. I can't tell by looking at you. So, who are you? Oh, you're going to say, most of you are going to say, I am an American. So, if I say to you as a Christian, who are you Christian?

Then this is the heart of the response. This is who I am. I'm somebody who has been crucified with Christ and yet I live. What happened to him is a reality in which I have come to share because by faith I've been united to him.

And because I've been united to him, he has given me an entirely new and glorious identity. We were thinking about this in the earlier study, weren't we? That's one of the basic problems of the world in which we live. People don't know who they are, and so they have to invent themselves. And it's actually the problem with many Christians. They don't know who they are, and so they're scurrying around inventing themselves and not reading their Bibles and learning from their Bibles who we really are in Christ.

But then you notice he adds something else. Yes, I've been crucified with Christ. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. But then he adds this, and this Christ has come to indwell me. I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. I said in an earlier study that the great focus of the New Testament is on getting out of ourselves into Christ. But you see, correspondingly, when the Spirit brings us out of ourselves into Christ, He also comes to dwell in us. He comes to dwell in us as the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that we are able to say, as Paul says here, Christ lives in me. I'll never, till my dying day and perhaps beyond that, ever forget the first time I heard a sermon, I think I was fifteen, on the words of Paul in Colossians 1, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

And you see, this is the other side of it, isn't it? Who am I? I'm somebody who's been crucified with Christ, but I'm also someone in whom that crucified, risen, ascended and reigning Christ by His Holy Spirit has come to indwell. That's who I am. That's why the Christian life is so extraordinary. That's why the gospel is so great. That's why salvation is so big, because that's who you are. Christian, what do you believe about yourself?

I've been crucified with Christ, and yet I live, and yet not I, but Christ lives in me. There couldn't be a closer union than union with Christ. That's one of the greatest comforts you and I can have as Christians, to know that we have Christ in us.

And as we learn today, it's because of our union with Christ. Dr. Sinclair Ferguson has been our teacher today. He's one of our teaching fellows here at Ligonier Ministries.

And as he pointed out, many believers are unaware of this doctrine, but it helps us understand how closely Jesus identifies with us as Christians, how our relationship with sin and the devil has changed, and how we bear the fruit of the Spirit. It's all part of Dr. Ferguson's teaching series, Union with Christ, and we're making all 12 messages available on DVD for your donation of any amount. You can call us today to request your copy at 800-435-4343, or you can give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. Dr. Ferguson will be one of our featured speakers at next year's Ligonier National Conference. That's March 24th through the 26th here in Orlando. Our theme is Upholding Christian Ethics. You'll also hear from the other Ligonier Teaching Fellows, along with Dr. John MacArthur. They will help us understand how to stand for truth, love our neighbors well, and seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness. So I hope you'll make plans to join us. Again, that's March 24th through the 26th.

If you'd like to register or just know more about the conference, go to ligonier.org slash events. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow as Dr. Ferguson addresses what it means to be baptized into Christ. He says it's not possible logically to receive Jesus Christ, to be united to Jesus Christ. It's illogical to think that if you've been baptized into His righteousness, you would live as though you were still dominated by the world of sinfulness. Please join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind.