Galatians 2:20-21 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me… What principle can tend to cherish tenderness, lowliness, modesty, recollectedness, dignity, quietness in speech and manner, devotion and the winning grace of a pervading charity, so effectually as the abiding consciousness of our Lord dwelling and walking in one's self as a tabernacle of His own gracious election, and in others as in oneself according to the same promise? What can so sustain the soul above natural desires, in a higher sphere of life, in an ever-upward advance towards the glory of the heavenly Court, as the instinctive sense, rooted and grounded in the soul's life, that there is a wedded union between the soul and the Lord who bought it with His own blood, and now Himself within it claims it for His own? What gives so keen a remorse at the hatefulness and horror of sin, as a conviction of its desecrating the organs, the limbs, the faculties which God inhabits and uses as the chosen vessel of His own sanctity? It is not what he himself is that forms the joy of the saint, nor the failing to be what God had willed him to be, that constitutes the remorse of the true penitent; but it is to the one the consciousness that God is in him, and he in God; and to the other the loss of a Presence in Whom alone is peace, and out of Whom is utter darkness. To realize what we are, or what we fail to be, we must appreciate what His abiding in us causes us to be. We can never truly look at ourselves separate from Him. Our power is His power in us. Our efforts are the putting forth of His strength. Our sin is, that after He had come to us, we resisted Him. (T. T. Carter, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: 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. |
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