The Cross: Our Boast
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
Galatians 6:14
The false teachers who had infiltrated the Galatian churches boasted in themselves, in their obedience to the Old Testament Law, which no person other than Christ had ever completely fulfilled — so the very grounds for their boasting was false. They had not obeyed all of the law. They had not kept every command perfectly. The most they could say is that they were better than others, but they still fell far short of the standard of God.
Christian thinking is entirely different from this. Our glory is not in ourselves but in Christ, and in what He has accomplished for us. We glory in Him — in His love, in His sacrifice for our sins, in His work of redemption — for in the cross and in the cross alone is our sin atoned for. There we can boast in Him, we can glory in Him, because here our Savior — who loved us and gave Himself for us — achieved the payment for our sins. The cross leads us to the resurrection and the resurrection leads us back to the cross — they two acts are welded together in God’s work for our salvation. In Him who loved us so much that He died for us, in Him whom death could not hold we glory and boast.
But here Paul wrote of the cross not only as an historical event, but as a principle of his own life, of the life of every Christian. We can hear the words of Christ in this verse: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow after me” (Luke 9:23). We see embedded in this verse the words Paul wrote earlier in Galatians, “I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Paul boasted in the cross first as an historical event, but secondly as a principle of spiritual life — through which he related to the world in an entirely different way.
“The world” meant the world system, the system away from God. In this letter to the Galatians Paul had already written that the Jewish legalists had acted with the same spirit as the pagans when they took to a mere outward and ceremonial obedience to the Law of God (Gal. 4:3) — they had taken that which God had given, the Mosaic Law, and ignored heart-felt faith. Outward obedience was all that mattered, and not the response of the inner person to God, and in so doing they had even made the Law of God part of the world system.
Satan can certainly take the very rites, symbols, and even words of the church and twist them and turn them into worldly things. Martin Luther, who had been an Augustinian monk and knew very well what went on in the monasteries, wrote: “The monks imagined the world was crucified unto them when they entered the monastery. Not the world, but Christ, is crucified in the monasteries.”
1 John 2:15–16: “Do not love the world of anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world — the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does — comes not from the Father but from the world.”
James 3:16: “For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.”
So even in the church the world exists — wherever self-righteousness exalts its ugly head, wherever envy exists and ambition rules, wherever pride and lust prowl, there the world is.
But through the cross and through the principle of the cross we are set free. We live now in the freedom of the Spirit, not in the enslavement of our pride and ego. Who we are does not matter. What we become in the estimation of others likewise does not matter. All that does matter is the work of redemption that turns us into new creations, and our work for Christ achieved in His Word and by His Spirit, and our service in His name and for His glory. Everything else about us turns to dust. Possessions go eventually to another. We enter into eternity as naked as we came into the world. Friendships also disappear and fade with time, and though in Christ the redeemed family is always important, our standing among even the redeemed is best understood not in terms of authority but only in terms of grace. We boast not in anything other than that we are saved by the grace of God.
What holds you back from real life? Pride? Lust? Fear? Guilt? Shame? Superstition? Misunderstanding? All of these are answered in the cross of Christ and we rise above them as we live through the cross of Christ. Let Christ free you from their tyranny by reckoning yourself dead to the world but alive to God through Christ. Let Him live His life in and through you. You will rise above your own natural and human limitations through Him.
