Dave's Diary

This sermon was preached on Sunday 30 January 2022 as the first in a series of sermons aiming to prepare us to renew our Covenant with God.

Galatians 2:20

Introduction to Covenant Service and Series

Today we begin our new 4-part sermon series named: “Called to Covenant”. It’s to prepare us for a Covenant Service – a service I am certain is very familiar to many of you. Although newer generations of worshipers in Methodist Churches might be less familiar with this unique annual event – for those of us who have been around for decades, the Covenant Service is very familiar. And as I have worshipped at 7am with you for a few weeks now, I suspect this a service mostly made up of people who do not need too much reminding about the Covenant Service.

However, it is probably still helpful to be reminded each time we approach this service … that it began in 1755 because John Wesley was mindful of the danger of Christians losing the passion of our first love for Jesus Christ. This annual service was meant to help us to renew our commitment to loving and serving Lord with all our heart and with all our soul … and with every aspect of our lives.

It is a powerful moment … in which we recommit our lives to the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ. It is a restating of our personal salvation commitment … and of our commitment to be more than just “saved” but to be disciples who live fully for Christ every second of our lives. It’s not just a commitment, it’s a radical commitment.

The ”radicalness” of the commitment is captured in our sermon title for week 1 of the series. The title for today’s sermon is “Dying to Live”. In a minute or two we will see why that is when we read our Scripture for today.

But before we read it, I would love us to hear the actual covenant prayer, and to sense for ourselves how praying this prayer will bring us to a place of total surrender to Christ. Let’s bring it up now on screen as I read it through. The prayer says this:

I am no longer my own, but Yours.

Put me to what You will, rank me with whom You will.

Put me to doing, put me to enduring. 

Let me be employed for You or laid aside for You,

exalted for You or brought low for You.

Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to Your pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, You are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen. 

In this introductory sermon, I hope to capture the foundational understanding that a Christian life … a life of discipleship, of following Jesus, of “new life” or “eternal life” or “abundant life” whatever we call it … that life is only truly BORN (begun) when a person can honestly say what the apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 2:20.

²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

I hope that this verse will help us to dig in to the meaning of the opening sentence of our Covenant Prayer. This is where we are focused today. Holding in our minds that on 20 February we will be invited to pray to the Lord saying: “I am no longer my own but Yours”.

To pray, “I am no longer my own but Yours” … is really to pray … “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”

Context of Galatians 2:20

Why did Paul write that to the Galatians? Well, there was a bit of a disagreement going on among Christians in the province of Galatia. There had been a visit from some Jewish Christians from Jerusalem who taught that for a non-Jew (a Gentile) to be a Christian, they first needed to adopt Judaism and obey the Law of Moses. Particularly they were insisting that the male Gentiles needed be circumcised as prescribed by the Law if they were to be true Christians.

Paul was furious about this false teaching. He saw how dangerous it was. He saw how it would lead both Jewish and Gentile Christians back into slavery to legalistic obedience to rules.

He says that even Christians who were born as Jews KNOW that  no-one could ever make him- or herself righteous through obeying laws – which is precisely why even he as a Pharisee had come to realise this: No one is ever brought into right standing with God through works of the Law. Anyone who is ever brought into right standing with God is brought there “by faith in Jesus Christ”. He says this absolutely clearly in Galatians 2:15-16:

¹⁵ ‘We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles ¹⁶ know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.

Then Paul drives his argument home by stating this incredible truth. THIS is how a person is brought into right standing with God. He says that he himself, Paul, had “died” to his efforts to make himself right with God through obeying the Law. He says, in v.19, “I died to the Law so that I might live for God.”

He made a decision that he was finished and done with a life of trying to get to God by his own effort at legalistic obedience … and instead … what did he do? Well, that’s our verse for today – v.20:

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”

In a nutshell, here is the Good News according to Galatians 2:

We can live

• in an eternal abundance of life
• life as it was always meant to be
• a life that is pleasing to God
• in a right and intimate relationship with our Almighty God and Father Who created us for intimacy with Himself

But we can only live this life if we

• stop trying to do it through legalistically obeying religious rules or formulas, and instead
• receive it as a free gift from God, through faith in Jesus Christ.

Galatians 2:20 is about HOW we receive this free gift of eternally abundant life, and how we continue to live it out. So, let’s spend this “sermon time” meditating on that single verse

1. I have been crucified with Christ

That’s how our verse begins: “I have been crucified with Christ”.

The Christian life begins with a decision to die to self … and to surrender all that we are to Jesus and His Lordship. It is a life that, by God’s grace,

• has deliberately turned aside from the kind of life we once lived …
• has been brought to the Cross of Jesus …
• and has taken a clear decision to die to the old self … to die to sin, to the world, and to the control of physical lusts and desires, and then
• to receive all that has been bought for us by Jesus’ own sacrificial life and death.

When James Calvert went out as a missionary to the cannibals of the Fiji Islands, the captain of the ship tried to dissuade him from going ashore. He is reported to have told Calvert, “You will lose your life and the lives of those with you if you go among such savages”. James Calvert replied, “We died before we came here.”

James Calvert had said to Christ: I am no longer my own but YOURS, Lord. My life is not my own any more. My life now belongs to Jesus my Lord.

Someone once asked the German Christian George Mueller, the secret of his victorious Christian life. His answer was: “There came a day when George Mueller died, utterly died! No longer did his own desires, preferences, and tastes come first. He knew that from then on Christ must be all in all.”

This is where the Christian life begins in the first place – a moment of absolute surrender … of absolute self-emptying … a moment of absolute trust that as of right now my life is no longer my own … I don’t OWN my life anymore … I now belong to Christ!

Have I made that absolute surrender of my SELF to Christ? This is a question we don’t just answer once. It is a question we ask ourselves daily. Am I still in a place of honestly being totally surrendered to the Lordship of Christ? Because that total surrender … where my life is no longer my own but His … where the old “I” has been crucified WITH Christ … that surrender needs to be reaffirmed daily. It is a daily surrender and a daily decision to remain surrendered.

What happens when I make that decision? Well, let’s continue with our verse:

2. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me

The Christian life is a beautiful exchange.

• One’s broken and sin-stained life is exchanged for a totally forgiven and graciously cleansed life.
• One’s sinful separation from God is exchanged for Christ’s right relationship with God.
• And more to the point of this verse, one’s spiritual emptiness is filled with the life of Christ.

You will often hear me quote this … Henry Scougal was a Christian author who described the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the Christian as “the life of God in the soul of man”.

Without Christ a person is spiritually dead … we are spiritually full of our sinful self … which is actually a profound emptiness … because we were never created to be filled with self … we were created to be filled with God’s own life.

Just as a glass that is filled with air is described as being empty – even though it is actually full of air … just so a person whose life is full of self (self-centred pride, arrogance, self-interest, self-seeking, self-government) … that person is full of self but actually best described as EMPTY.

Two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time. If I want the glass full of water (as it was designed to be) … rather than full of air as it is now … there is only one way … fill it up with water.

My SELF … and the life of God … cannot fill my heart at the same time. A self-centred life hinders the entrance of the life of God. Only when one dies to self … when one casts out one’s own self-centred efforts at living … can the life of God fill one.

The beautiful promise of Scripture, and of  Galatians 2:20 particularly, is that when my self-centred life is expelled from the throne – then the Spirit of Jesus will flow.

It is an unspeakably holy and glorious thing that a person can be filled with the Spirit of Jesus. And the promise of Galatians 2:20 is that when the present governor of the heart, the individual self, is dethroned and Christ is enthroned … when the current occupant of the heart, the individual self, is cast out and everything is surrendered into the hands of Christ … then THE new governor and Lord … the Holy Spirit of Jesus comes IN to take up residence within us.

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”

3.The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me

What picture is Paul painting here of the normal Christian life? It is a picture of someone whose life has been surrendered to the Lordship and reign of Jesus … someone in whom Jesus therefore lives by His Spirit …  AND someone through whom the life of Jesus is expressed in the world.

It is a picture of the risen Lord Jesus expressing Himself physically in the world through the physical body of the believer so that …

• When Jesus speaks audibly today, He speaks through the vocal chords of believers who belong to Him.
• When Jesus feeds the hungry today, He feeds them by the hands of believers who belong to Him.
• When Jesus heals the sick today, He does so through the ministrations of believers working in the medical professions … as well as through laying the hands of believers on the sick and praying for them.

The life of the believer is a life of allowing the life of Jesus which is within us by the Holy Spirit … to be lived in the world THROUGH us.

This verse captures that beautiful mystery. I still live. I still make decisions. But when my physical body and my decision-making is surrendered to the Lordship and presence of Jesus … Jesus lives through me in the world.

But fear might arise in us when we hear this. If I let Jesus call all the shots, what will become of me? The answer that comes immediately from this verse is that JESUS IS WORTHY TO BE TRUSTED BECAUSE JESUS LOVES ME SO MUCH THAT HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR ME. I AM NOT SURRENDERING TO THE LORDSHIP OF SOEONE ABOUT WHOM I KNOW NOTHING … OR SOMEONE WHO MIGHT NOT HAVE MY BEST INTERESTS AT HEART … I AM SUREENDERING TO someone WHO is willing to die for me.

SO, surely His will for my life can be nothing but the best … can be nothing but God’s best!

We could rephrase that part of verse 20 like this:

The life I now live, I live TRUSTING ENTIRELY in the Son of God who LOVES ME WITH AN EVERLASTING LOVE me and gave Himself for me.

The rest of our series is essentially going to be an unpacking of the implications of this surrender for our everyday living. It is going to be about how Christ will live His life through us.

But it all begins with this surrender: “I am no longer my own but YOURS.”