Galatians 2:20 Not I, But Christ

Galatians 2:20 (Not I, But Christ)

Jim Eliot, Nate Saint, and Roger Eudarian were flesh and blood just like the rest of us but they faced a circumstance that few of us can even imagine. Landing their single prop airplane on a river in the jungles of South America, they were martyred for Jesus Christ. Just a few days before he was murdered by the very people he’d come to serve, one of those now- martyred missionaries Jim Eliot wrote these words (it’s an entry in his diary that should challenge us today). He wrote,

[As believers], we are so utterly ordinary and commonplace. It’s disheartening. We profess to know a power with Whom the 20th century cannot reckon, but we are harmless therefore unharmed. We are spiritual pacifists. Meekness must be had for contact with men but brash unspoken boldness is required to take part in the comradeship of the cross. We are side liners coaching and criticizing the real wrestlers while we’re content to sit by and let the enemies of God go unchallenged. The world cannot hate us because we are too much like its own. Oh, that God would make us dangerous.

A man who was considered dangerous by the society in which he lived identified with the spiritually surrendered life when he wrote these words in Galatians 2:20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives 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. Not I, but Christ. Can there be four more appropriate words to describe the theme of a totally surrendered life? Not I … but Christ!

In this image-conscious society that is modern-day America, what is the reputation of your life? With whom or with what do you identify? Is yours the crucified life of saying No to sin and Yes to the urgings of the Savior? Is it the exchanged life that allows you to freely work out what Jesus Christ works in? Is it the sacrificial life that seeks the next level spiritually by seeking the excellencies of God? When Jesus Christ felt your pain on the cross, He did more than identify with your eternal needs, He looked like you so that one day, by taking your sin on His body on the tree, you can look just like Him. Sometime today, transport yourself mentally to the foot of the cross and remind yourself that because it’s Not I, But Christ we live.

Within a generation of Jim Eliot’s death, some of those nationals who killed him became Christians and were martyred themselves. Even now, there’s a vibrant testimony for Christ in that region of South America. I guess it does pay to live the crucified life because nevertheless we live. By the way, that’s the inscription that appears on my father’s tombstone in a cemetery in Central Ohio … Nevertheless I live. You can too when you respond to the claims of Jesus Christ. Now go and live a Christ-centered life.

You can find this and other articles on my website: www.keithpisaniministries.com