Not I, But Christ in Me
So one thing true for all of us is that we live within days that have a start and an end. Seasons start and end (thank God); weeks start and end; and days start and end — and I’m convinced that the way we start and end each day matters. Again, this is not about whether we do this (we all do this) what matters is how we do this — how we start and end each day. And this morning’s passage in Galatians Chapter 2, I think helps us.
Because this passage is all about getting “the truth of the gospel” crystal clear. The first thing Paul does here in verses 15–16 is he explains the truth of the gospel; and then in the few verses that follow he shows us how the truth of the gospel reorients everything about our lives. And so for the sermon today, this is what we’re looking at. There are two parts:
Gospel Explanation (verses 15–16)
Gospel Reorientation (verses 19–21)
Before we get started, let’s ask again for God’s help:
Father in heaven, we are gathered here now, with your Word open before us, and all your saints together ask, by the power of your Spirit, speak to us and show us the glory of your Son. We ask in his name, amen.
Part One: Gospel Explanation (verses 15–16)
So we’re going to pick up in verse 15, but in terms of where we are in the Book of Galatians, this week just continues what we saw last week when our brother Paul confronted our brother Peter in Antioch.
For the Galatians and Us
If you look at your Bible you’ll see that back in verse 14 that there are quote marks around the sentence that Paul said to Peter. Paul said to Peter (or Cephas) in verse 14: [Quote]: If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? …
Now in some English translations, the quote marks end there at verse 14, but I think Paul’s actual quote continues through verse 21. So we’re gonna pick up in verse 15 today, but just know that this is part of what Paul started in verse 14. Paul is saying all this to Peter — although Paul also means to be saying this to the Galatians.
Okay, don’t think that just because this is what Paul said to Peter, that he’s merely transcribing it here, rather he’s saying what he said to Peter for the Galatians’ benefit. Paul is telling the Galatians — and us — what he said to Peter for our sake.
Back to the Confrontation
And what Paul is saying, again, goes back to last week: It’s that a person is saved not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ alone. Faith in Jesus alone, plus nothing else is how we are saved.
Because remember there’s a controversy going on here: There were some “false brothers” — or some “troublers” — who had been telling the Christians in Galatia that in order to really be saved, in order to really be part of the people of God, faith in Jesus was not enough, but you also had to keep Jewish law.
The false teachers were saying: Yes, trust in Jesus, but also, for the men, you need to get circumcised like Jewish men, and you need to abide by Jewish dietary laws and so forth.
They said that: faith in Jesus is important and necessary, but you also have to do these other things. They were teaching a “Jesus plus something else” heresy.
And the apostles struck this down.
The apostles, together in Jerusalem, in verses 1–10, they were united in their rejection of this false teaching. The apostles confirmed the truth of the gospel, that Gentiles don’t have to become like Jewish people in order to be saved because you are saved by faith in Jesus alone plus nothing else.
And it’s because Peter’s behavior suggested something different, that Paul confronts him. Verse 14:
Peter, you’re Jewish and live like a Gentile [which means he lives like he’s not bound to Jewish law.] And therefore, don’t force Gentiles to live like their Jewish.
And Paul’s going to expand what he means here in verses 15 and 16.
Focusing on Verses 15–16
These two verses are one long, amazing sentence, and I’m gonna read the whole thing first, and then we’ll slow down and look at each part. Verse 15, Paul is continuing here what he’s saying to Peter … he says:
Peter, we ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet knowing that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
Okay — have any of you ever read a book or had a class on public speaking? [Okay, you’ll get this.] There’s an old adage in public speaking advice that goes: “Tell them what you will say, say it, tell them what you said.” [Anybody heard that?] That whole idea is basically what Paul is doing here.
It feels like he’s being super redundant, but let’s slow down and look at the pieces, and I think there are three things we need to see in order to track with Paul. [The first is that …]
1. We need to understand the justification metaphor.
Now last week and so far today I’ve been using the word “saved.” We are saved by faith in Jesus plus nothing else. And that’s a good Bible word. Paul uses that word in other places, but you’ll see the word that Paul uses here is “justified.”
Now to be “saved” or “justified” mean the same thing — they’re getting at the same idea — but they are different metaphors or images. To be “saved” means you’re trapped in a house that’s on fire, so somebody runs in, takes you, and brings you out. They rescue you. They save you. We get that. Well to be justified is a law-court metaphor.
Did anybody in here used to watch Judge Judy or any court TV?
I think we all can probably imagine a court room.
There’s always at least a judge and a defendant, and the judge issues a verdict on the defendant, who is a person with charges against them. The climatic moment of a court-room is when the judge pronounces the defendant either guilty or not guilty. Or you could say: either guilty or justified.
To be “justified” means to be declared “in the right.” To be justified is to be declared righteous — and theologically, for God to justify us it means that God is the Ultimate Judge and we’re in his court with charges against us and he declares that we are righteous. For God to justify us means that he says we are right with him.
That’s what Paul is talking about here. This is about: how can we be right with God?
2. The answer to how we can be right with God is the same answer for everybody.
In verse 15, Paul starts with the common ground of his and Peter’s Jewishness. Paul and Peter were both by nature, by birth, ethnically Jewish. Which means they were not “Gentile sinners.”
Remember, in the ancient world, within the Jewish mindset, there were just two categories of people: There was Jewish people and was everyone else — and everyone else was called the “nations,” or “Gentiles,” or a lot of times just simply “sinners.” The word “Gentile” and “sinner” were interchangeable. And Paul is saying:
Hey, Peter, we know that we’re Jewish. We know that we’re in this category of people (not that category of people), but we also we know that being in this category is not what makes us right with God. It’s not by works of the law.
Now when Paul says “works of the law” he means any and every kind of Old Testament law-keeping. This is what makes a Jewish person a good Jewish person. And Paul says, We know that’s not what justifies us. And in fact, law-keeping, works-doing is not what justifies anybody.
Skip to the last sentence of verse 16 (right before verse 17) and notice Paul repeats, “because by works of the law no one will be justified.”
Well, when Paul says this, he’s actually quoting from Psalm 143, verse 2, when David prays to Yahweh:
Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous [or justified] before you.
And the “no one” is put strongly here. It means no human flesh. No humankind. Paul gets this from the Old Testament because the evidence is there: being Jewish does not make you right before God. Keeping Mosaic law doesn’t do it. Sacrifices and offerings and all the most genuine acts of religious devotion does not do it. But everybody, Jewish and Gentile, can only be right with God the same way: not by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ,
That’s what the apostles have confirmed; Paul and Peter have agreed: All peoples have in common their need for Jesus … and Paul and Peter, our brothers, this is something they knew firsthand.
3. Paul and Peter have embraced the necessity and sufficiency of faith in Jesus.
This is really Paul’s point in verse 16. It’s not just that Paul and Peter shared the same conviction about faith in Jesus, but it’s that they have acted on that conviction by they themselves putting their faith in Jesus and not their works.
One fascinating thing about this passage is that Paul stays away from theoretical and he gets practical and personal.
Look at how practical he gets here. We can see this in the language. In the Greek, the noun for “faith” and the verb for “believe” are the same words. We have words like this in English too. For example, take the word “trust.”
“Trust” is a noun and a verb with the same meaning. And this is a small thing, but I think hearing the sameness of the words in verse 16 will help bring this together for us. So I’m gonna put verse 16 in a paraphrase and I’m gonna use the word “trust” — because I want you to hear the sameness in English. Paul says:
Peter, because we know that even Jewish people like us are not justified by works but through trust in Jesus, we have trusted in Jesus.
Because we know we can only be right with God by trusting Jesus, we trust Jesus.
See! Paul is saying: Look, we don’t merely affirm this; we don’t merely agree with this; but we are banking everything on this truth. Our background does not matter.
And we know that Paul, from his other letters like Philippians, he was a fantastic law-keeper. Paul was an outstanding Jewish religious person. And he said none of that matters.
Hey, Peter, look! All of our eggs are in the faith-in-Jesus basket.
Which means that faith in Jesus is not just necessary for justification, but it’s also sufficient.
And those are the two words that I think are central to Paul’s explanation of the gospel here. It’s the two words necessity and sufficiency. Faith in Jesus is necessary and sufficient for justification. In other words, contra the false teachers: what goes for everyone, Jewish and Gentile, is that faith in Jesus is not just needed to be justified, but faith in Jesus is enough to be justified.
And that changes everything. And Paul knows it.
Which is why Paul now goes from explaining the truth of the gospel to showing how it reorients everything about how we live.
And this is Part Two of the sermon. We’re going from Gospel Explanation to Gospel Reorientation, and what I wanna do here is a little bit different.
Part Two: Gospel Reorientation (verses 17–21)
My hope is to make what Paul is saying here very practical for us. So we’re gonna work through verses 17–21, but I’m going to summarize what Paul is saying in the form of three resolutions in the first-person.
And I’m saying these as resolutions partly because I’ve been reading Jonathan Edwards and he loved some resolutions; but also, as resolutions in the first-person, these are things that I want you to take and embrace for yourself.
These resolutions are truths (and opportunities) that I want you to remind yourself all the time. Put these on your fridge or in your car or wherever. These are practical things to take with us. Make sense?
Okay here’s the first:
#1. Resolved, I can do nothing to contribute to my justification because God gets the glory, not me.
Look at verse 17. In verse 17 Paul is answering an accusation from the false teachers. Remember in the Jewish mindset, there are two categories of people: Jewish and then Gentile/sinner. [Right? Got it?]
Okay, so track with me: the false teachers were saying that if you listen to Paul and embrace that you’re justified by faith in Jesus alone so that you stop the works of the law, to stop the works of the law is to no longer be Jewish, but it’s to be like a Gentile sinner.
So they’re saying that when Jewish people believe the gospel that Paul preaches it actually moves them from the Jewish category to the sinner category, and therefore Jesus is just making more sinners in the world. That was their thinking.
And Paul says No, first, your whole dichotomy is wrong. We’re all sinners.
And in fact, now, Pauls says, if I go back to relying on the works of the law for my justification, that’s actually what makes me to sin.
See, Paul turns the tables!
Faith in Jesus is not what moves us into “the category of sinner,” but now it’s that, because we have believed in Jesus, WE SIN if we go back to relying on the law.
That’s verse 18, and then 21. In verse 21, Paul understands that if he has contributed to his justification in any way, it nullifies the graces of God. It empties the grace of God of its power.
And this is something for us to nail down and get clear in our hearts. The question is: Did GOD save me or did God help ME save myself?
Like, did God bring me 90% of the way, but then the last 10% is my part? Or is it 99% faith in Jesus, and the last 1% is my law-keeping?
Well, Paul would say that if that’s the case — even if it’s 99 and 1 — that invalidates God’s grace altogether (Paul will say more about this in Chapter 5, but it’s already clear in verse 21). If we could be justified in any way by the law, it means the death of Jesus was pointless. Because it would mean that Jesus’s death was not enough to save you. Basically this would make the gospel of Jesus not a gift, but a coupon.
Okay, so Melissa and I, by God’s grace, we’ve been married for 15 years, and over the years, for Christmas and birthdays and anniversaries, I’ve been able to get her some really good gifts, I think. But also in that stretch of time I’ve gotten her some not-so-good gifts. You live, you learn. And so, for some of you younger guys, you can just take this as marriage advice: giving someone a coupon as a gift is not a gift.
Any of you ever seen a person unwrap a coupon? See, I’ve been there. At one point you thought this was a good idea, until you see it being unwrapped and you’re like, Oh …
Now it might have been a good try. It could be a decent head-start. Because that’s all a coupon can be.
Look, we need to know that the death and resurrection of Jesus was not a coupon.
When the Son of God was slain for you, when nails were driven through his hands and feet, and the wrath of God that you deserved was poured out on him; when Jesus died in your place, he died to save you all the way AS A GIFT — which is what faith represents as the empty-handed embrace of that gift.
If we come to the cross of Jesus and we think that it only partially saves us, if we think that we still gotta do this part on our own — if we make the cross a coupon — it actually makes the death of Jesus pointless and it dishonors him.
I hope that you can see here that what’s at stake is the glory of God.
If we have contributed anything to our justification it means that we should get credit for it. It would mean that God does not get all the glory, but we some too. Even if it’s just 1%. It would mean that we get glory too.
I mean, can you imagine meeting Jesus one day, and standing before him face to face, and saying to him, I’m here because we worked together …?
And yet every time here and now that we act like our performance or our works contributes to our justification, we are acting like we will say that to Jesus one day. You’re in a fantasy land.
God gets all the glory. Hey! Hey. He gets it all.
God has determined that in the gospel, in every way, he is the only one who saves us so that he is the only one who gets the glory. And even our faith as the empty-handed receiving of Jesus, that too is not our own doing, but it is the gift of God so that no one may boast (see Ephesians 2:8–9).
We contribute nothing! Faith in Jesus alone is sufficient and we need to get that clear: Resolved, I can do nothing to contribute to my justification because God gets the glory, not me.
Here’s the second resolution:
#2. Resolved, to love others freely and fearlessly.
Now Paul doesn’t address love head on in this passage like he’ll do later, but I bring it up now because this answers a common objection to justification by faith. It’s that: if we’re justified by faith alone in Christ alone for the glory of God alone, what is there left for us do? If we’re not on the hook to contribute to our justification, what does that mean for the activity of the Christian life right now?
Well, it means that we love others and we love them freely. One helpful way this has been explained, going back to the Reformers in the 16th century, is that we’re justified by faith alone, but faith is never alone — in that, faith is productive and active. Martin Luther called it fides viva — “living faith.” The faith in Jesus that alone justifies us becomes a power plant of righteous energy expressed through love, and the love is expressed freely because it’s not what I must do in order to be saved, but it’s what I get to do because I am saved.
Our love is not driven by compulsion, but it flows from freedom. To get more practical here, in the next 12 hours we all are going to come upon opportunities to love others. And when you encounter that opportunity, and you’re trying to decide whether you should step into it or not, just know that you are not being asked to justify yourself; it is not a demand with your eternal soul at stake; but it really is an opportunity where your love might Flow, Freely, from the Fact that you are justified by faith in Jesus alone.
We can love freely, but also fearlessly. …
I think one of the biggest hurdles to loving others is not distraction or indifference, but it’s the fear of how it will be received. We fear repercussions — like what if this person doesn’t receive this act of love? What if somehow this goes sideways and it backfires on me? Or, here in America, what if I get criticized?
Criticism from others — disapproval, disparagement — that fear, I think, is one of our main barriers to love. Basically, it’s the risk that others might think badly of you.
And just want you to know that the answer to that risk is justification by faith in Jesus alone.
Because justification by faith in Jesus alone means that we believe the worst and best thing that someone could say about us has already been said.
This is an insight from the late David Powlison (and I mentioned it to our men last week). It’s that at the cross the worst thing that could be said about you was said, by Jesus: it’s that you are so sinful, you are so guilty, you are so incompetent to save yourself that it requires the death of the Son of God — nothing worse could be said about us, right?
But also, nothing better could be said about us. Because it’s not just that you’re so sinful that Jesus had to die, but it’s that you’re so loved that Jesus willingly died. You are loved by Jesus. You are loved by Jesus so much that he gave himself for you. What could there ever be said about you that is better than that?
See, Christian … the worst and best things have already been said about you, by Jesus, and if we really believe that, it means we are … untouchable. It means that we look at people and think (or say):
Your potential scorn cannot touch me because of the gospel. So, I will love you fearlessly as an effect my justification by faith.
Resolved, to love others freely and fearlessly.
And finally, …
#3. Resolved, to live not I, but Christ in me.
First, verse 19:
For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.
This is the fundamental reorientation. The way I used to live, enslaved to the law as my hope for righteous, that’s over. It’s dead to me. I’m dead to it, so that I might be alive to God. Now what does that mean? How’s that look? This is verse 20.
And I’ve tried to save the best for last here in verse 20. And many of you might know this verse, and I just wanna stop for a minute to say that I’m amazed I get to preach this to you. The very fact that I get to stand here right now and say this is because it’s true. Hear the word of Lord, Galatians 2:20,
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Do you see it? I’m alive right now. I’m living right now. Christian, you’re living right now. But it’s not us, it is Christ living in us.
This activity — all this that we do here, in our skin and bones, this life — it is lived by faith in Jesus. Our lives are the empty-handed receiving of Jesus’s power. Don’t think “I’m living for Jesus!” Jesus lives in you and through you.
Do you know what is pulsing through my veins right now? You can call it blood, OR you can call it grace! I’m not kidding you. Right now, in this moment, Jesus Christ, the Son of God is living in me. He’s living in you.
Because it’s Jesus, the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
I mentioned earlier that in this passage Paul stays away from theoretical, but he’s practical and personal. And well, here is the personal part. Which doesn’t mean sentimental. This is a fact, man. Paul is stating the fact of Jesus’s love for him, which is seen in that Jesus gave himself for Paul. Paul says he loved me! He died for me! And Paul knows that Peter can say the same thing. And he know that you, Christian, you can say the same thing — you must say the same thing. Everyday.
Because everyday has a start and end, and the way you start and end matters, and there is not a better way to start and end your day than to remember that Jesus loves you and that he died for you, and that the life that you’re living now — this waking life, this resting life — it is Jesus alive in you. Resolved, to live, not I, but Christ in me.
And that’s what brings us to this Table.
The Table
Because at this Table, as we take the bread and cup, we remember and demonstrate our union with Jesus by faith. We are saying that indeed, all of my hope is in Jesus. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. If that’s your confession, your hope, if you trust in Jesus, let’s eat and drink together.
His body is the true bread.
His blood is the true drink.
