Christ and our Dying

Galatians 2:20
20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Paul is preaching a death to self, but it is very important to notice how this death took place. Paul was dead through what Jesus did. Paul experienced this death by simply reckoning what had already happened through Christ to be so (Ro 6:11).

There are people today who have taken the "dying to self" doctrine to an extreme, and instead of being free of self, they are totally self-centered. They constantly think of self. It may be in all negative terms, but it is still self-centered. A truly humble person is one who is Christ-centered. Dying to self is not a hatred for self but rather a love of Christ more than self.

There are false religions that preach a denial of self. The legalistic Jews Paul was preaching against did that. Paul was not just dead to self, he was alive to God. A focus on the denial of self without the enthronement of Christ leads to legalism.

Paul's "old man" was dead through Christ (Ro 6:2-11). Now he was truly free to live, but it wasn't actually Paul who was living. It was Christ living through him. Paul had learned the secret of victorious Christian living. It is not us living for Jesus, but Jesus living through us.

Failure to understand this simple truth is at the root of all legalism and performance mentality. The law focuses on the outer man and tells it what it must do. Grace focuses on the inner man and tells it what is already done through Christ. Those who are focused on what they must do are under law. Those who are focused on what Christ has done for them are walking under grace.

Notice that Paul didn't say he was living by faith in the Son of God. He said, "I live by the faith OF the Son of God." He used this same terminology twice in verse 16. We were so spiritually bankrupt that we couldn't even believe for salvation with our own faith. We had to use God's supernatural faith (Eph 2:8) that came to us as a gift through hearing God's Word (Ro 10:17).

I don't believe it is wrong to say we put faith in the Son of God, but Paul was clearly stating that he was living by the faith OF Jesus. Paul said this same thing twice just a few verses earlier (Ga 2:16).

Paul was using the faith OF Jesus. Where did he get it? The same place every born-again believer receives it. He got it from God's Word (Ro 10:17), and it thereafter resides in the spirit of every believer (Ga 5:22-23). Ro 12:3 says every believer has been given THE measure of faith. There aren't different measures but only ONE. Since the Apostle Paul said the faith he was living by was "THE faith of the Son of God," then that must be THE measure given to every believer.

Many believers don't realize what they have, because this faith is in their born-again spirits. It can't be perceived with just carnal methods. They just have to trust the revelation given in God's spiritual mirror (Joh 6:63 and Jas 1:25). There isn't a lack of faith, just a lack of knowledge. (2Pe 1:3).

There is a human faith which is limited to believing only what we can perceive through our five senses, but the supernatural, God-kind of faith goes beyond what we can see, taste, hear, smell, and feel. God's kind of faith calls those things which be not as though they already were (Ro 4:17; Ro 12:3).

The Christian life is not just hard to live--it's impossible to live in our human strength. The only way to walk in victory is to let Christ live through us.