Delivered April 10, 2011
What is your favorite Bible verse? For many people it is the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul….” Others will quote the well-known John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Both are usually quoted in the King James Version. What verse comes to your mind when I ask the question: What is your favorite Bible verse? If nothing comes to mind right away, you might want to think about it. It might reveal a lot about yourself. And it might come in handy some day.
An elderly lady came home from church and discovered a burglar in her house. She immediately yelled out her favorite bible verse at the top of her lungs: "Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins! - Acts 2: 38.” The burglar froze and stood motionless while she called 911. When the police arrived, they handcuffed the burglar, and then asked him, "Why did you stop when she yelled out that Bible verse?" The burglar replied "Bible verse? What Bible verse! I thought she said she had an axe and two 38s!"
Many Christians not only have a favorite verse, but also what is called a “life verse.” This is a verse from the Bible that serves as the theme of your spiritual life. It is like a personal mission statement. It is benchmark by which we can measure events and decisions in our life. It reminds us of what is really true and important at those times in life when we need to be reminded. It serves as a spiritual center, which we can return to when life becomes unbalanced.
Your life verse may change over the years. Mine has. For many years my life verse was Romans 1:16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes….” For most of the 2000’s it was 2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” A year or so ago I chose Galatians 2:20. It is a verse I have always loved, but it has became much more important and meaningful to me. “I have been crucified with Christ; 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 for me.” That is now my favorite Bible verse. Today, because I am the preacher, I get to preach on my favorite verse. I am going to examine it section by section.
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live.” The NIV puts it this way: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live…” What does this mean? It is relevant to this Lenten season when we reflect on the death of Christ. When it says, “I have been crucified with Christ” it is saying that the death of Jesus is not just something that happened to Jesus more than 2000 year ago. In a spiritual sense it happened to us. It is a mythic event in which we participate. By “mythic” that I don’t mean it didn’t happen; it did happen! By mythic I mean that it has a deep personal spiritual significance that transcends history.
As a follower of Jesus I identify with Christ because he identified himself with me. I am spiritually linked to him through faith. He is an archetypal figure. When he died, I died, even though historically he died long before I was ever born. “I have been crucified with Christ.” I really believe that. Jesus aid, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny himself take up his cross and follow me.” When we decide to follow Jesus and surrender our lives to him, we become united with him. Paul says in our Epistle lesson in Romans 6 “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?”
When we give our lives back to God, we die to our own small lives. In WWII Japanese kamikaze pilots would cut their hair and fingernails before their suicide mission so as to give their families something to bury. They composed and read a death poem, a tradition stemming from the times of the samurai. They knew they were going to their deaths. When we decide to follow Christ, in a sense we go to our deaths. We do not physically die in an act of war like the kamikaze pilots of WWII whose purpose is to kill the enemy. Ours is a spiritual death, but it is real nonetheless.
“I have been crucified with Christ.” What is it that dies with Christ? Who is this “I” that has been crucified with Christ? Paul says, “It is no longer I who live.” “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live…” The Greek word for I is ego. What dies is the ego. In our epistle Lesson Paul calls it “the old man.” He says, “Our old man was crucified with Him.”
As we read these Bible passages carefully we discover that the apostle is talking about two I’s – two me’s. There is one I who dies and one who lives. There is a mortal I and an immortal I. You might call it the false self and the authentic self. The self who we really are, and the self that we think we are. The mortal I is going to die one way or another. All of us will die some day. None of us are getting out of this life alive. Our bodies will fail and cease to function, and our egos will die also. A great part of who we think we are will not survive death. Who we really are will survive, but not our egos. That is something we don’t like to think about, because we are very attached to our egos. We think they are us. We really think that if our egos die then we will cease to exist. But that is not true.
The ego is all in the mind. It is a mental construction that we have fabricated since childhood. It is our minds and emotions; but we are not our minds or emotions. The ego is the collection of our likes and dislikes, our upbringing and education, our experiences, our idiosyncrasies and personality quirks. It is our sense of selfness and selfishness. It has a name given to us by our parents at our birth, and we identify our selves with this name and with this physical body that we attach the name to. That name will one day appear in an obituary that says ‘Here lies Marshall Davis, born September 14, 1950 died ? (God knows when.) The body dies and the ego dies.
But the real I does not die. What is that real I? It is that which is made in the image of God, not what we have made of ourselves in our own image. It is who I am in God. It is who I am in relationship to Christ. It is real and conscious – the real me. I do not plan to die, because I believe Jesus who says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” I start every funeral with those words because they are true words. This personality named Marshall Davis will die. But the real me - whom I recognize as me beneath the masks I wear and the body I wear – will live. We can’t take the old man with us to heaven. We have to leave that behind.
On one occasion Jesus met a rich young man very attached to his wealth. He told the man that if he wanted eternal life, he had to give up all his material riches, take up his cross and follow him. The man refused to do it; he could not conceive of life without his things. Jesus turned to his disciples and said, “It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven then for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” I love that image. You only get to take with you what you can fit through the eye of a needle. The point is that you can’t take anything with you. You can’t even take you with you. Jesus explained it this way: “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” It is sometimes translates “whoever seeks to save his soul” or “whoever seeks to save himself.” The Greek word used is psuche; we pronounce it psyche. It is our psychological self.
We have to lose ourselves to inherit eternal life. We have to give up our selves. Our selves are not the stuff of heaven. They are temporary earthly instruments that we have – like we have our bodies. In fact we need to think of our selves just like we think of our bodies. To come to God we have to lay them aside. We have to give up our attachment to our selves – bodies and minds - as surely as the rich man had to give up his attachment to his riches. We can’t take our selves with us to heaven. You have to lose your self to save yourself. You have to lose everything you think of as your life to gain true life.
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” When we die to self, what is left is Christ. We are crucified with Christ. We no longer live, but Christ lives in us. When we reckon ourselves dead, then Christ begins to live in us. By faith we die before we die. We are going to die anyway, so we might as well get used to it. We might as well practice now, because this is who we really are in eternity. Anything that is born will die. It is temporary – here today and gone tomorrow. We might as well practice being what is permanent. We are temporary; Christ is permanent. We are dead; Christ is alive.
We are crucified with Christ, and we are raised with Christ. Paul says this clearly in our epistle lesson: “8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, 9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. 10 For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. 11 Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
The death and resurrection of Jesus is not just a history lesson that we repeat every Easter. It is a symbol of our spiritual lives. We die with Christ and we are rasied with Christ. It is not about us; it is all about Christ. There is another passage I read at every funeral I do. It is Rom 14:7-9, “7 For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself. 8 For if we live, we live unto the Lord; and if we die, we die unto the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and rose and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”
Back to my verse in Galatians 2 – “I have been crucified with Christ; 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 for me.” Until our bodies actually die, we still live in the body, but we live with a different understanding. As Paul says in Philippians 2 “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” Paul says in 1 Cor. 2 “16 For “who has known the mind of the LORD that he may instruct Him?”[e] But we have the mind of Christ.”
When we go through this death and resurrection by faith, we live differently. “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Rom 6:4 “1 If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col 3:1-3) Our verse says, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
We live by faith in Christ. We live his life and not our own. Ours is dead. Christ lives. Our epistle lesson says, “Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The whole purpose and meaning of life is to let Christ live through us. Live his life of love through us. Live his life of sacrifice through us. This is who we are and who we are meant to be. This is our authentic self. We are not a petty little egos who are always concerned with I, Me, Mine. Always weighing everything that happens in relationship to how it affects us, benefits us or harms us. What a tiny, selfish, introverted, little creature that is. That is not who we are or who we were made to be. We are made in the image of God to live the life of Christ. We are meant to live transparently to God who dwells in us as Holy Spirit. That is eternal life. That is the Kingdom of God. To live a big life of faith and love.
“I have been crucified with Christ; 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 for me.”
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