Daily Devotional Details

Date

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20 (NIV)

We are considering together the inside story of the Christian life. How do you make sense of the Christian life—your experience of it and all that the Bible says about it?

If you are a Christian, you have died to sin, but sin seems very much alive to you. You feel the pull of sin in your life. Its presence is real and obvious to you.

Have you noticed the contradictions of your Christian life? You love Christ and yet you are tempted to sin. You trust Christ and yet you struggle with many fears. Perhaps you even feel that your struggles and temptations are a mystery to you.

Maybe you have struggled to hold together what the Bible says about the Christian life and your own experience of it. You read about righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17). You hear about God working in you with the same power that He exercised in raising Jesus from the dead, and yet here you are struggling with an illness, looking for a job, trying to raise a family, and it doesn’t seem quite so grand.

Matthew Henry speaks about the “mysterious life of a believer.” He has died and yet he lives. He lives and yet it is not he but Christ. He is crucified with Christ and yet Christ lives in him. But one thing is certain, the Bible teaches this mystery, and we feel it every day.

Have you felt these or similar tensions?