Other men were crucified with Christ that day on Calvary. Only one of them understood what was taking place. Only one found the freedom that comes from being, as the apostle Paul said, “crucified with Christ”. That repentant sinner was the fleshly example of what Paul later pinpointed as a spiritual reality when he testified to the Galatians.

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Gal 2:20

This, even in a land of freedom like America, is the path that leads to true and lasting freedom. Fundamental to all Americans is the question of freedom. Our forefathers crossed great oceans, blazed trails through frightful gaps and over granite mountains, settled hostile territories, fought wars … even gave up their lives, for the right to be “free”. Today freedom is not merely an American’s heritage, it is an inalienable right. But Christians ought to know that there is more to freedom than what our socio-economic, political system can provide.

Though we are grateful to God for the freedoms we enjoy to worship and gather together unrestricted in His name, we are also doomed to bondage if we confuse this and other base worldly “freedoms” with the kind of freedom which breaks the shackles of sin and delivers us from our natural entanglement with the world. The Jews, who protested to Jesus that they were free men solely because they were of the seed of Abraham, serve as an example for us. We Americans fall into a similar delusion, believing we are free because our political heritage guarantees it. But, real freedom is only gained through Christ and we can acquire it only on a different road, a road past a place called Golgotha, on top a hill called Calvary. There can be no short cuts past this place called “skull”, no way around this hill of death. As the saying goes, “Any place worth going to offers no short cuts to get there.”

Be Crucified With Christ
Yes, others were crucified with Christ on Calvary. Matthew, Mark and Luke all mention that these dying criminals reviled Jesus and tempted Him, urging Him to come down from the cross and save Himself and them. They were like the people scolded by the old gospel song, “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

But the gospel of Luke reports one dissenter, a convicted thief who spoke in defense of Jesus. This man, this condemned sinner, accepted the justice of his crucifixion and testified with his last breath that Jesus deserved to live. In essence, this is Paul’s testimony to the Galatians. In one verse of Scripture the pathway to freedom is carved out – Death to Self.

The Galatians had become bogged down in ritual, seduced by false teachers who taught them that they had to follow the law in order to be righteous, in order to be free from sin.^[1] Though Paul had been instrumental in founding their faith they had been wooed away from the sound doctrines of faith, losing sight of the necessity of being crucified with Christ, if they were to come to perfection. They had limped off the path because they were no longer being led by the Spirit, but were being cajoled and bewitched by self-willed men. Now Paul was insisting that they return to that Gospel which they had heard at first – a gospel that, because it was free from their own fleshly inability to fulfill the law – would lead to true freedom and righteousness in Christ. By dying to self they could walk in the spirit. Only the dead can breath, stand, live and walk in the Spirit. When walking in the Spirit they would be able to fulfill the law, just as Paul had told the Romans.  (Rom 8)

Broken down point-by-point we can see the simple truth of the miracle of the cross. Like Simon, who picked up Jesus’s cross and followed Him to Calvary on that day, we must do the same and go straight up the hill to Calvary. First, the Christian must know and strive to make a reality out of the saying, “I am crucified with Christ.” Gal 2:20 We must go to our own spiritual Calvary. We must tack our flesh (hopes, ambitions, attitudes, ideas, conceptions) on the cross. Jesus told his disciples “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) And, “He that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matt. 10:38-39) And perhaps most significant of all is what Jesus said in Luke 9:23 “And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his CROSS DAILY, and follow me.” This is not a one and done deal. Being crucified with Christ is just that – being – crucified with Christ. We are as sheep accounted for the slaughter. We die all the day long; we are told Yet Paul proclaims that he lives through his death by the resurrected life of Christ. “Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Gal 2:20 If we are willing, as Paul was, to pick up our cross and then do it daily, then we can share in Christ’s resurrected life. Along with Paul, we can start to say, I live, but it is Christ and His love which lives in us. What freedom is brought when we “die” and Christ lives in us. What can be done to a dead man? The bible says only the dead are free from sin.  

Faith To Die To Self Is Needed
Surely this may only apply in an area or to situations at the beginning, but its reality will grow as our faith to “die to self” grows. When picking up our cross becomes the rule, the ‘natural’ instinctive thing, rather than the exception, we will be able to say as Paul said, I do this that I may win Christ, “for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.” Phl 3:8 Because Paul was crucified with Christ he could say, “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.” Gal 2:20  If the life Paul lived was one sustained by the faith of the Son of God, then why should that not be the case for any Christian who seeks it? We are fed, sustained, fulfilled and directed because we are His sheep and we hear the Master’s voice. We do not seek to follow the Law, not even our own inclinations. We are not slaves to rules, but we are obedient to His Word and voice, which we know is love – and “against love there is no law”. Gal 5:22-23 

How is this possible? Or, why should I seek to die to myself, so I can let Christ and His faith live through me? Because, as Paul concludes: “He loved me and gave Himself for me.” Gal 2:20 Are we not asked and then told by the Scripture, “Know ye not that you are the Temple of the Holy Ghost and you have been bought with a price and you are not your own, glorify therefore the Lord God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” 1 Co 6:19-20 No greater love has any person than to lay down his life for his friends. Just as the thief on the cross, we know in our heart that we should accept our own crucifixion, trusting that we shall see God and be with Him in paradise. And we know that Jesus is the one who deserves to live in us. After all he died for us. This is the real meaning of the resurrected life, and there can be no resurrection unless our ‘death’ (spiritual) takes place. That is one of the great mysteries of our faith. Through the miracle of the cross, we who deserve to die, can die without fear (in the Spirit), so that He who deserves to live can live (through us in the Spirit).

God’s provision as usual is not Man’s way, but it is His glorious unimaginable loving eternal way. The pathway to freedom and perfection goes through the cross, not around it. It goes up the hill called Golgotha and to the top of Calvary. Finally, take note that the Gospel written by the apostle of love, John, shows us a remarkable thing, that there was a garden situated at the foot of the cross on Calvary’s Mount. God makes no big deal about it, just takes note of it for those who might have eyes to see. “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a GARDEN; and in the GARDEN a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. John 19:41 Jesus went before us, never before was there a man who was laid in a tomb that would be his booster for resurrection. The first man died in a garden, the second man was resurrected to life in a garden, a garden that sprouted eternal life; a garden able to bring forth everlasting life because it was fed and nourished by the death of flesh on the Cross. How lively, how good, how sweet the garden of death is in Christ for we can find total freedom there and like Jesus whom Paul followed, say, “Father, into thy hands I COMMEND my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost”. Luke 23:46 We can give up our ‘ghost’ in favor of the Holy Ghost whereby we can find a new life, a resurrected life following in the footsteps of Christ, daily without fear.

Like the literary character, the Scarlet Pimpernel, we Americans “seek freedom here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere.”, but it is nowhere to be found except on that high and lifted up place, that gardened, fragrant hill, where we can testify as Paul did, “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I now live. …”

Anyone who tries to keep the law is doomed to ultimate failure and will be considered a transgressor and sinner, because we are told that sin is the transgression of the law. We are reminded of Jesus’ doctrine; that we are not to seek our own life, but to lose it. That is a prime doctrine of Jesus which he lived and can identify with our sufferings and experience of the cross. We are to seek our spiritual death by being crucified with Christ, picking up our cross daily and following in His footsteps closely behind. We are to seek to ‘die’. We must trust the Holy Ghost to bring about the circumstances and the grace needed to climb Calvary and mount our cross. He is the master architect of this high and lifted up spiritual process of the ‘cross’ experience for the individual saint.

Those that try to master the Law and attain righteousness by keeping the Law are trying to stay alive rather than seeking the death of their Will, exploring their ethereal demise and swallowing their pride and exterminating the natural desire to keep their own righteousness and ego alive and well. It is a bad sign to the Holy Spirit when a person wants to seek to hold on to their own ideas and will. If one is clinging to the Biblical Law in any form that person is living under a bad sign. It is the greatest indicator of resistance in a Christian soul, of resisting being ‘crucified with Christ’, of not taking that solem climb up to a personal Calvary experience of ultimate deliverance from fear of death.

This lack of climbing up Calvary where one can meet the Spirit on His terms, is why Paul called out the churches of Galatia and confronted them with this blistering question: Having started out in the Spirit why have you turned back to the flesh? He even admitted his fears for them when he said, “I stand in doubt of you.”  Gal 4:20