Sunday, February 27, 1994

	Gal. 2:20  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.

	The text, once again before us as the Body of Christ, is one that will not seem to satisfy itself in my heart. Lately, each time I go to the Word, I am brought back to this passage with the knowledge that it holds an inexhaustible treasure of the greatest of God's Love to us in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. I hope and pray that each one of us is receiving of the bounty of Christ held within the truth of this verse, and that you will bear with me as, together, we again seek after the Holy Spirit to continue to pour out the fullness of Christ upon us as we consider the fact that we are crucified with Christ, and that He now lives His life in us.
	This evening, hold onto the truth that in being crucified with Christ, we are blessed. In a faculty meeting, after the earthquake, my assistant principal greeted our school staff with the statement that we were blessed. The damage to our classrooms and school was moderate, compared to other schools in our district. None of our teaching staff had been injured, and most were at the school, working together to clean up and get ready to receive the children, in an effort to present them with some sense of normalcy in a situation that had vitally changed their lives. We were told to remind ourselves that we were blessed!
	The students returned to us in various states of despair and turmoil. Some had lost things such as furniture, toys and tv's. Others had lost pets and homes and are even now staying in hotels or with relatives or friends. Several had relatives who had been killed in the Northridge Apartments, and a couple of them had known the motorcycle policeman who died. He had been their neighbor before he had moved to Palmdale. We to remember that we were blessed!
	One of my students was especially in turmoil at that time. His 38 year-old father had died of a heart attack the week before the earthquake. Already having to cope with that tragedy, their home was devastated, and they had no insurance due to the cost and the high deductible. His life is in shambles. Blessed, we are blessed.
	As well, our school suffered the problem of 13 seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students who were expelled or removed from our campus because of illicit drug use and trafficking. On top of this, there was a stabbing and killing of a fourteen year old boy by a thirteen year old at a sister junior high school with its full effects felt on our campus because of the popularity of the victim and the closeness of the community. It was the first killing on a school campus in the history of Simi Valley Unified School District. And again, we were told that we were blessed!
	The earthquake, as terrible as it was in its enormity and effects and these other incidents of violence and grievous behavior serve only again to show the need for Jesus Christ as our life. How can we deal with the tragedies of natural disasters, acts of God, apart from Him? How can we work with young people who are shocked senseless and those who are not shocked at all without an utter reliance upon Christ? 
	The world tries to answer this with psychology. We were inundated with all sorts of lesson plans and suggestions to help get the students to express their inner feelings and concerns. The greatest emphasis was to get the students to verbalize their deepest fear at the earthquake or the killing in order for them to see that they could face that fear in a rational manner rather than with an hysterical sense of helplessness. What is lacking, however, is a true sense of security in the lives of these young people, and in the lives of those who purport this type of remedy.
	What is lacking is the knowledge of the fact that we are blessed! We are blessed in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior! We are blessed in the fact that it is no longer I that liveth, but Christ who liveth in me, as declared by the Apostle Paul. We are blessed in the fact that we have a God Who so loves us that He has brought us into a living relationship with Himself, a relationship that sets aside all fear of earthquakes, death or any such thing. We are blessed in the fact that we are crucified, that we are dead to our self in Christ, and resurrected in Him on the other side of the cross.
	This blessed reality far exceeds the attempts of this earth to placate fear and trembling with its lies of nothingness. Apart from Christ, there is fear and trembling at the quaking of the earth and the disregard of humanity, one to another. In Christ, there is the comfort of knowing that we can but slip the bonds of this earthly realm, to reign with Him on high, in the heavenlies. This is not some future view of Christianity, but the realization that what God is doing in our lives, on this earth, at this moment, no matter what the circumstances entail, will manifest His fulfilled fruition in the spiritual realm at all times, now and forever. Whether we are on earth in the physical bodies that encapsulate our spiritual beings, or released from the constrictions of this realm, we are, in Christ, now, immediately in the presence of God and in complete fellowship with Him.
	It was this knowledge that kept Daniel in the lion's den. It was this reality that kept Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego in the fiery burning furnace. It was this truth that kept the focus of the Apostle Stephen as the stones were crushing his physical body, as his spirit ascended to the open gates of heaven.
	We are blessed! But this is no mantra to be spoken over and over again until the beat of its words are drummed into our subconscious awareness. This is the fact of Jesus Christ living His life in us, unto us, through us and unto others about us. Wherever we go, we are blessed in the presence of Christ Jesus, and we are to be a blessing of Christ Jesus.	
	Consider the vitality of this passage in Galatians. To the world, it is foolishness to discuss life in terms of being crucified. That is an inconceivable notion in human terminology. We have to die in order to live? How can that be? This world teaches that we are to fear death, because death means an eternity of nothingness to those who deny God. It is a nothingness of their own design, in complete separation from the Being of Love, from Whose love they turn each day of their earthly lives. They lack the spiritual awareness to realize how God blesses each inhabitant of this orb with Himself through His creation of natural beauty and harmonious law of nature. He is keeping order in this realm, having set the stars and sun and moon into place, and making the rain of spring and the warmth of summer to the beauty of fall and the purity of winter. The seasons follow His design and purpose. The earth is filled with His glory and the world receives it not. 
	We are blessed in Christ, beyond the measurement of the universe and the depth of the sea, we are blessed in Him because we have been crucified with Him into a spiritual life with far greater beauty and vitality than this present physical being can imagine. This is ours, not because we have earned it, not because we deserve it, not because we have worked for it in any measure, but because we have received Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior from the very Heart of God the Father, through the effective ministry of the Holy Spirit. It is because we are now dead to sin that we are alive in Christ, and that death is worked through the crucifixion of the cross of Christ.
	We are blessed, not because we are survivors of physical calamity and human senselessness, but because God has made us alive in Christ Jesus our Lord! Contemplate upon the fact that He so loved us in Christ, that He has made us dead to those elements which caused such fear and trembling in our old nature. Look at Gal. 5:24 for a moment. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. Remember, albeit briefly, the painfulness of those elements of the former being, as outlined in this letter to the Galatians. We were tossed to and fro in the fleshly desires after someone to love us. In that pursuit, we each debased ourselves in all types of ways in order to find someone, anyone to love us. We committed acts unspeakable as a means of trying to find acceptance, and when that acceptance wasn't forthcoming, we gave into the hatred of this realm and defied authority, defied logic, defied God. Lest anyone sit and think themself above this debased former life, reflect upon the reason that we were brought to cross of Christ, looking upon the pain of that righteous sacrifice for our lives, knowing that it was our sins that nailed the Son of God to the wood for our transgressions. Remember the tears that burned the cheeks as we asked forgiveness and asked for the resurrected Son of God to come into our hearts, to live His life. Recall the joy as He shattered the burden of sin which bound us in death, and the unspeakable exultation that emanated from our hearts as the rightful King entered into that which was His, and chose to love us to the utmost! We are blessed! 
	No longer are we the slaves to the heated passions which ruled our beings with fiery coals of indignation and animosity! No longer are we drudges to the emotional upheavals of a self-life cemented in bondage to all the filth and depravity of a world racing in the rampant lies of the godhood of man! The world calls us foolish to be crucified with Christ. To the world, steeped in its foolish desire for self-deity, anything that promises the elevation of man is seen as plausible and filled with virtue, while obedience to God is seen as pure folly. That is the curse from which we have been freed in Christ. As He was crucified by this realm, for our salvation, so this realm sealed its own mutinous destiny apart from Christ. What this world holds forth as wisdom and intelligence, involves the darkest recesses of witchcraft and ritualistic subservience to the deities of human imagination. 
	We are fully blessed to be released from that imprisonment of self-deception into Christ Jesus. He has delivered us into the realm of life and made us partakers of what humanity continually desires, but will never find apart from Him, righteousness, peace and joy. We, again, echo the voice of the Apostle Paul in Phil. 1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. As He lives His life in us, as we are daily more and more crucified to self, so are we gaining a spiritual weight of glory in Christ our Lord.
	This is where the glorious salvation process finds its culmination in Christ. It is not a matter of just being saved from hell, but a matter of being saved unto God. Our lives are now His life to indwell and to sanctify on a daily basis. All those tears we shed at our conversion, as the Love that is Christ indwelled our beings, now become the wellspring of the work of the Holy Spirit to make our lives the fit witness of Christ. And, beyond the fact that He works to such a glorious end, no matter how painful we might perceive it to be, ultimately it becomes our increased desire that He continue His good work to the end. Not the end of us, but to the completion, the perfection of His glorious desire in us.
	This opens two aspects of being crucified with Christ that are vital to our growth in Him. The first is that we are crucified with Him in the work of His Atonement. Because He died for us, as we accept Him into our hearts, we are carried into that grave that holds our sin, and resurrected in Him apart from that sin. He has made us, those who accept Him and believe on Him, to be acceptable in the presence of God. That is an acceptance with absolutely no basis in our selves, but, rather because our selves are now crucified by His accomplished work of grace and mercy, we are enabled, through Christ, to come into the very presence of God and to partake of the love that is God. Our vacant recess of being, that drive for something which manifested itself in the worst of ways as we tried every avenue to fill it with anything but God, that vacuum is now filled to overflowing by the One Who created us to be indwelled by Himself. In John 1: 3-4 we have the Apostle describing this aspect of God's created reality expressed in Christ. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. 
	This is the way that we were created by God, with a knowledge that we were lacking something. He always intended to be that fulfilling manifestation in our beings, that we would share together in a relationship beyond that of Creator with creation. Rather, His heart was set upon a purer relationship of son with Father, and Father with son. We, however, tried to make anything but God the center of our desires. Whether it was another human being including parents, children, spouses, or lovers; whether it was a job, or partying, or money, or any other element that this world puts on a pedestal as the fulfillment of life, all of it lacks the true fulfillment of the longing in our hearts for God. This is why there is so much foolishness cast about in the world today, because anything, even the most absurd anything is far more acceptable to the world than having the One, True, and Living God be the center of our essence.
	But at the cross, all those other things were abolished in the Love that is Jesus Christ in laying down His perfect life for us, those who denied Him, and sought after anything but Him as the answer to the question of the purpose of life. In that crucifixion, we are now partakers in the burying of the filth of this world. Partakers, not in an active sense, but in a most passive sense as the recipients of an action of supreme love showered upon us in all our unworthiness to receive the Love of God. We are blessed!
	That is the first exposure of this being crucified with Christ, the atonement of us into the proper relationship with God through the blood of Christ. The second aspect, that we will consider is that it is an ongoing process of the crucifixion of our self-lives before the throne of God's grace and mercy. 
	It is a matter of a daily crucifixion of self unto the glory of Christ in our lives. The reality of It is no longer I that liveth, but Christ that liveth in me... finds its fruition in a daily basis as we are faced with the residue of those elements of our old being which need to be cleansed from our lives. Please remember, as far as our relationship with God is concerned, we are at this moment seen in the perfection of Christ Jesus. Nothing of a perfection of our selves, but rather that complete truth of our self-lives being left in the grave, through the blood of Christ, and our right standing before God set firmly and eternally in Christ and Him alone.
	However, as we are learning on a moment-by-moment basis, our physical lives are being brought into conformity with what is true of us spiritually. God will have us to be sanctified, not just spiritually, but also in regard to our sojourn in this physical realm. He works, by the Holy Spirit to cleanse our beings of the self-life which once held us captive to the lusts of the flesh. It requires a putting to death of the desire after the elements which once so perversely swayed our attention and cravings. We are crucified each time that we turn from the allurements of this realm and seek to obey our glorious God. We are crucified each time we bite our tongue as it craves to gossip about others, and rather pray for the Lord's blessing upon that individual. We are crucified each time we forgive the wrongs of this realm, heaped upon us, even by those most dear, and rather seek after the Lord to return Love for the hatred, beauty for the depravity, and joy for the sorrow.
	This is not just a crucifixion centered in us, and in our lives, but a complete crucifixion of the Body of Christ as we, together, seek after the Lord to manifest Himself on this earth. How can He do His good work of grace and mercy without the true witnesses that He does make all the difference in the world? How can lives of others be touched and changed unless they see the action of the Lord in the living relationship of the Church with Christ on a daily basis? 
	It is easy for the world to hold up Christianity as just another religion to occupy the time away from work, or school. It can so easily be relegated to a social gathering for the weekend, if the schedule permits. But that is not the true witness that God is after on this earth. He is working to the end that He will be seen as the Light and Life of all creation. 
	This is why we are being crucified, so that there is no earthly touch left upon us that would hinder from His Glory in Jesus Christ being manifested livingly to those in such need of Him. This is the answer, the only answer to the woes of the earth that are so increasingly evidenced today. Christ, and Christ crucified in the lives of you and of me is the answer to the fears of this realm. It is Christ Who is the answer to the fears of earthquake victims, to the insecurity that seeks after illicit drugs, to the hatred that leads to violent death and wanton acts of brutality. Christ livingly manifested does not seek to bring forth an admission of fear, as does this world with its warped sense of subconscious abilities. Christ brings forth light to show the futility of mankind apart from God, and He is the Love of God to bring man into the very heart of God, by coming into the very heart of man. In that heart, He works to cleanse and to turn that hardened rock into a heart of flesh which is the manifestation of a brand new creation, a creation of grace and mercy and truth and righteousness, a creation of Love. Yes, we are blessed, blessed to the utmost in Christ. We are blessed to be included in the very death and resurrection of Christ. We are blessed by God to the very crucifixion of our selves that God will be glorified forever and forever, Amen.  

	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.