I Am Crucified with Christ…Nevertheless I live: Reclaiming Our Identity in Christ

Galatians 2:20 I Am Crucified with Christ…Nevertheless I live. (Reclaiming Our Identity in Christ) Introduction: Who are you? Or who do you think you are? How do you want to be perceived? Is the person you project at work among friends or at Church or any social event, or on social media who you really are? Every single one of us is getting our identity from something, from someone. It may be a childhood dream of success. it might be your marriage, or your kids. It might be some image portrayed through fashion that you are seeking to attain. It might be the attainment of a respectable university degree. It could be an identity based on proving your parents wrong, or showing an old boy friend or girl friend what they’re missing out on. Identity has also become in our culture the center of one’s religious quest. Expressive individualism is all about finding the true me, the authentic me. Religion is seen as the journey of becoming the spiritual me, the unique me, the fundamental me. Me as individual, me as chooser, me as definer of my own reality, me as creator, sustainer, definer. The older religious patterns of finding my place within a larger cosmos and community through moral living and dutiful service are replaced by finding my path to becoming my best self, my truest self. Obviously all this talk about identity is because we’ve lost any sense of our created purpose. The Bible clearly shows that we were created to Glorify God and to enjoy him forever. But for many of us we are still stuck in this personal quest of the finding of self, our true self. The offer of Jesus in the gospels is that you will only truly find who you are, what you are made for, as you follow him. But remember the way of Jesus was not one of fame and fortune or your best life now, but of a cross, of suffering. But a suffering that ultimately ends in Glory. It is the only way in fact in which you can not only find yourself but in fact save yourself. Jesus said “he who seeks to save his life will lose it but he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” 1. Spiritual Amnesia 1. Remember the Bourne series. Amnesia is what these stories were based on. We’ve all seen a tv show or movie where something dramatic happens to the main character causing amnesia or something like it - the rest of the plot has this individual, from scratch, finding clues that might help them discover who they really are.That is precisely what people who who have suffered severe memory loss have to do. It is what people who have suffered other kinds of loss also need to do: the refugee without home, country or family, must discover who he is without all this or apart from all that he has lost… But this is the same sort of exercise that Paul is talking about here - Losing one’s identity and reconstructing another. 2. This is actually the huge difference between Paul and these Jewish troublemakers. It isn’t just a matter of a few twist and turns in the interpretation of the gospel, or the Jewish law. It isn't about one style of missionary policy against another. It is a matter of who you are in Messiah. Galatians 2:20 is the pinnacle of Paul’s argument to Peter. One must lose everything, including memory of who one was before; and one must accept and learn to live by, a new identity, with a new foundation. 3. The question Paul and Peter had run into, which was focused on whether or not Jewish and Gentile Christians were allowed to eat at the same table, is the question: Who is God’s Israel? Who are the true people of God? Is it all who belong to Messiah? Or is it only jewish Christians? Are Gentile Christians second class citizens? 4. Paul focuses his answer on the most basic point of all. God’s true Israel consist of one person: the Messiah. He is the faithful one. He is the true Israelite. This is the foundation of identity with God’s people. 1. The question then is: who belongs to messiah? How is that person identified? Those who belong to Messiah are in the Messiah, so that what is true of him is true of them. The roots of this idea are in the Jewish beliefs about the king. The king represents his people (think of David fighting Goliath, representing Israel against the Philistines, his victory was their victory) what is true of him is true of them. This section doesn’t spell this out; it assumes it. Paul will return to it in more detail later on. His point here is quite simple: All who are in the Messiah are the true people of God and that means Gentiles as well as Jews. 2. Paul makes the point earlier to Peter that it is no longer their Jewish heritage, their possession of the law, or circumcision that define them but rather their identity in Christ Jesus. Paul says, I died to the Law that I might live to God. - This means each of us must also die to who we were before we met Christ and we must learn who we are in a whole new way… 1. "What does it mean to be crucified with Christ? I think it means this: First, that the gruesome death of the all-glorious, innocent, loving Son of God for my sin is the most radical indictment of my hopeless condition imaginable. The crucifixion of Jesus is the open display of my hellish nature. And, second, when I see this and believe that he really died for me, then my old proud self which loves to display its power by climbing ladders of morality and intellect and beauty and daring dies. Self-reliance and self-confidence cannot live at the foot of the cross. Therefore, when Christ died, I died.” -John Piper 2. So who are we? We are the Messiah’s people, with his life now at work in us. And “since the central thing about Jesus is his loving faithfulness, the central thing about us, the only thing that in fact defines us, is our own loving faithfulness, the glad response of faith to the God who has sent his son to die for us. Faith or trust is the very heart of the Christian identity.” - N.T Wright 2. New Identity - How does it all work? 1. Paul says I no longer live and then says, “the life I now live”. this seems a bit confusing - Honestly the more you study the Bible and understand the Gospel you realize that the Bible continually calls us to live in tension. Sovereignty and free will. Faith and obedience… 2. Verse 20 on it’s own would suggest that we just sit back and let Christ give us the power to live rightly. Verse 21 alone would mean we have to do it all ourselves. The two sentences taken together show us that we are to live out our life on the basis of who we are in Christ. 3. Verse 20 is a restatement really of verse 14: we need to live our lives “in line or in step” with the truth of the Gospel. Now that Christ’ life is my life, Christ’ past is my past. I am in Christ, which means that I am as free from condemnation before God as if I had already died and been judged, as if I had paid the debt myself. And I am as loved by God as if I had lived the life Christ lived. 4. "So it’s not me that lives but Christ” is a triumphant reminder that, though “ we ourselves are sinners, In Christ we are righteous (or in the right). Then Paul says, Now when I live my life and make my choices and do my work, I do so remembering who I am by Faith in Christ, who loved me so much! (How desperately we Christians need to reclaim this identity - how it would transform our lives, our peace and comfort, our faith hope and love) 5. Only when I see myself as completely loved and holy in Christ will I have the power to repent from sin, self justification and autonomy, to Joy, conquer my fears, and obey the one who did all this for me. Conclusion: Everything about our natural self is all wrong - this is potentially the most offense thing one can be told - yet this is what the scripture says to us again and again - You’ve done it all wrong, since the moment you came out of the womb, and you will continue to do it wrong until you surrender, give up, admit that even your righteousness has been done for selfish, self glorifying, self justifying reasons. Now look at all that God is and has done for you, allow the truth of his love for you to break all self reliance and cast yourself upon the mercy of God shown in his Crucified son. It’s not that God spares or pardons this natural self. He kills it. “Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.” - Lewis Paul has died to himself and everything else in order that he might live or rather Christ might live through him. This is what it means to be a Christian, this is what it means to be in Christ. It means that you’re old self, the ways in which you might have tried to justify your existence before God and people, the way you thought about your self, the world, God, right, wrong, life, death, sex, money, power, prestige all of that is dead, gone. Where did it go? It has been crucified in Christ Jesus’ crucifixion. You have died with him in order that you might be raised with him. And the life that you are living now is actually Christ Jesus’ life being lived out in you. His way of thinking, speaking, and living. "For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” -Colossians 3:3 His justification is yours, his perfect life is yours, his standing before God and others is yours. But not only that - his view of God, right, wrong, life, death, sex, money, power, prestige - all of that is yours now also. It is now in this new way, this Christocentric identity that you are to live….Let this be the filter through which everything in your life is brought through and seen through. This is the apex of who you are. You are, we are, in Christ. This is the most important thing about us.