Delivered from Bondage

KEY VERSE: “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.” —Galatians 2:20

SELECTED SCRIPTURE: Galatians 1:6, 7

THOSE WHO HAVE consecrated themselves to the doing of God’s will, and have received the begetting of the Holy Spirit, have a new outlook on life. The Scriptures reveal that the will of God for these is that they lay down their earthly lives in sacrifice. This, of course, is contrary to their human desires, so their new, Spirit-enlightened and Spirit-led minds have a constant struggle to keep their human desires under control, and, symbolically speaking, to keep their human bodies on the altar of sacrifice.

Paul wrote, “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust [desire] of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” (Gal. 5:16,17) Every devoted Christian has found, as Paul has stated, that it is impossible fully to keep the desires of the flesh under control, and that the struggle to do so is a continuing one. We all rejoice, however, that our unwilling imperfections are covered by the robe of Christ’s righteousness, and that under the covering of this robe our imperfect works are acceptable to our Heavenly Father.

Paul explains that we have been called unto liberty. His reference is to freedom from the Mosaic Law. Those who are wholeheartedly devoted to the doing of God’s will do not need to be commanded not to commit any of the evil ‘works of the flesh’. While not under the old Law, Christians are under a higher law, one which we might refer to as the law of love. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” James quotes, and those who do love their neighbors will not in any way injure them.—James 2:8

What the Apostle Paul describes as the works of the flesh are all evil, and the Christian should fight against these evil tendencies as resolutely as possible, looking to the Lord at all times for help in this struggle to crucify the flesh. The Lord’s help reaches us through the power of his indwelling Spirit, holy power, or influence, in our hearts and lives which produces the fruitage of “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such,” Paul says, “there is no law.”—Gal. 5:23

Our Key Verse states that we have been crucified with Christ. The apostle in his letter to the Romans also declares that we are crucified with Christ, “that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.” (Rom. 6:6) In the 10th verse Paul explains that Christ “died unto sin,” and in the next verse we read, “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

It is made plain that we are dead to sin in the same sense that Jesus was dead to sin. Jesus did not possess sinful flesh—he was a perfect human being. He died unto sin in the sense that he gave up his human life as a sacrifice for sin. Through the merit of Christ our imperfect flesh is made acceptable to God as a sacrifice, so we can, as Paul explains, ‘reckon’ ourselves to be dead unto sin even as Jesus.

In other words, we, like Jesus, are laying down our lives in sacrifice as part of God’s plan to completely destroy all the sin throughout the earth, and to restore fallen and dying humanity to life and atonement with the Creator. This is our calling. This is what is implied in being ‘crucified with Christ’.

Since we are being crucified with Christ sacrificially, as part of what Paul describes as the ‘better sacrifices’ of the present age, and since this is part of God’s plan to eradicate sin from the earth, it would be inconsistent for us, as individuals, to have any sympathy with, or association with, sin.—Heb. 9:22,23

There could be no greater motive for putting off the works of the flesh than this. May the indwelling Spirit of God enable us to do this ever more successfully as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus day by day!

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