crucified with christ

Elliot Ritzema quotes CH Spurgeon on Galatians 2.20, "I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me."

Crucified with Christ:

“When a man finds and knows himself to be linked with Christ, his life is altogether a new life. Crucified, then dead. Crucified, then the old life is put away. Whatever life a crucified man has must be new life. Whatever you have of life was not given you till you came into union with Christ. It is a new thing—as new as though you had been actually dead and rotted in the tomb and then had started up at the sound of the trumpet to live again.”

I no longer live:

“How many first-person pronouns are there in this verse? Are there not as many as eight? It swarms with ‘I’ and ‘me.’ The text deals not with the plural at all. It does not mention someone else nor a third party far away, but the apostle treats of himself, his own inner life, his own spiritual death, the love of Christ to him, and the great sacrifice that Christ made for him. This is instructive, for it is a distinguishing mark of the Christian religion that it brings out a man’s individuality. It does not make us selfish; on the contrary, it cures us of that evil. But still it does manifest in us a selfhood by which we become conscious of our personal individuality in an eminent degree.”

The Gospel is like a telescope:

“In the night skies there had long been observed bright masses of light. The astronomers supposed them to be stores of unfashioned chaotic matter—until William Herschel’s telescope resolved them into distinct stars. What the telescope did for stars, the religion of Christ, when received into the heart, does for men. Men think of themselves as mixed up with the race, or swamped in the community, or absorbed in universal manhood. They have a very indistinct idea of their separate obligations to God and their personal relations to His government. But the gospel, like a telescope, brings a man out to himself, makes him see himself as a separate existence, and compels him to meditate upon his own sin, his own salvation, and his own personal doom unless saved by grace. You know nothing about conversion if you merely believe in human depravity and human ruin, but have never felt that you are depraved, and that you yourself are ruined.”

Christ lives in me:

“I do not know a better epitome of Christian experience than this. This is the daily walk of a true child of God; if he lives after any other sort, then he does not live a Christian’s life at all. Christ living in us, ourselves living upon Christ, and our union to Christ being visibly maintained by an act of simple faith in Him—this is the true Christian’s life.”