July 11 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20).

Devotional

The life of Christ and the life of self cannot both continue in the same heart. If the one lives, the other dies. The sentence of death is written upon your self when the Spirit of Christ enters your heart and quickens your soul with the life of God. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20).

What a striking and beautiful example of this have we in the life and labors of the apostle Paul!

Does he speak of his ministry? What a renunciation of self appears! Lost in the greatness and grandeur of his theme, he exclaims, "what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Cor. 4:5). Again, "to me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ" (Eph. 3:8).

Does he refer to his office? What self-crucifixion! "I magnify my office" (Rom. 11:13). In what way? Was it by vaunting proclamations of its grandeur and legitimacy, its Divine institution, or its solemn functions? Never! but he magnified his office by diminishing himself and exalting his Master. He was nothing—yes, and even his office itself was comparatively nothing—"that in everything [Christ] might be preeminent" (Col. 1:18).

Does he speak of his gifts and labors? What absence of self! "For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me" (1 Cor. 15:9–10).

Such was the religion of Paul. His Christianity was a self-denying, self-crucifying, self-renouncing Christianity. "It is no longer I who live... I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I..." Oh what a self-denying spirit was his!

But everyone who is truly spiritual is self-renouncing. In the discipline of your own heart, beneath the cross of Jesus, and in the school of trial and temptation, you have been taught in some degree, that if you live, it is not you who live, but that it is Christ who lives in you. You trample upon all your own righteousness, your duties, and your doings as to the great matter of justification. At the same time, as fruits of the Spirit, as evidences of faith, as pulsations of the inner spiritual life, as, in a word, tending to authenticate and advance your sanctification, you desire "to devote [yourself] to good works," that in all things God might be glorified.

Jesus, merciful and mild,
lead me as a helpless child:
on no other arm but thine
would my weary soul recline.
Thou art ready to forgive,
thou canst bid the sinner live;
guide the wand'rer, day by day,
in the strait and narrow way.

(Thomas Hastings, 1858)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.