My Greatest Bible Verse

If you had to pick out the one verse in the Bible with the greatest spiritual impact, the one with the most significance, which one would it be?
The one that might come to mind first is the one most seen on signs at football games and often quoted in church, John 3:16 - "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." This is a good one! It gives an insight into God's thinking concerning how to take care of the fallen, misguided human race. Jesus had to come to die as a penalty for our sins. We need a verse like this when we cry out to God for forgiveness of our repeatedly sinful actions. It is a good verse to memorize. But it is not that one verse that I call the greatest.
How about John 14:2-3? "In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there you may also be." This also is a good verse to help you think about your future happiness in God's spirit realm. But it, too, is not that one verse that I call the greatest.
How about the Twenty-third Psalm? You hear it at just about every funeral as the hope of the believer. "The Lord is my shepherd.....surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." This is a fine exposition of how the love of God removes fear from our lives. It really helps to console the loved ones of those who have died in faith. It is good to commit to memory not only for the content but for the beautiful literary makeup. But - I can't consider this the focal point area of the Bible.
Well, let's get to it! The verse which makes the story of God's Plan come alive to me is 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!

I have added six exclamation points to the text to accentuate six important subdivisions of the verse. This verse, to me, is the greatest because it tells the whole story, in rapid fire form, of man's purpose in being.

When we first bump into Christianity, we hear about the Trinity of God; about how there is God the Father, God the Son Who became Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit. How can this be? Three Persons in one God? All equal? In some kind of a union? Who is the boss? Who decides? Who takes the orders? It is all presented as a vast mystery. And it is! As we grow in understanding, we begin to see some of the qualities and powers of these Persons, but the true awesome mystery remains.

Well, the fact is that man was created to have a living union with Jesus Christ. And this union, although just as mysterious as the union of the Trinity of God, is just as real and glorious! Our human minds cannot really comprehend how a spirit being like Christ can live within us. Our material senses are overwhelmed by this kind of thinking. But the Bible over and over demonstrates that man is the only creature in the material universe that also contains a spirit essence from another realm, the spirit realm.

Let's go over these subdivisions of Galatians 2:20 in some depth.

I AM CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST

Life on earth is nothing more than a schoolhouse to drive us to the recognition and appreciation of the fact that we don't have the human power and strength to live a moral life. At first, we may not even accept that our pulls toward morality come from a God. We may think that it is just some kind of an "evolutionary" conscience, or something. But whatever this moral pull is, we seem to go the other way a good part of the time. We look around us at the complexity of the world and practically all of us sooner or later come to see that there must be a "God", a higher power, a "Creator". We hear about Jesus Christ and Christianity. Then one day, when we reach the depths of guilt over our immorality and our inability to make life work, we call out to God for a Savior. We accept Jesus Christ as that Savior. We acknowledge that if the punishment for our sins can be removed from us and given to Him as the Bible says, then we gratefully accept forgiveness. In other words, we are crucified with Christ. Two thousand years ago, when Christ died a human death punishment, the whole sinful human race died with Him. Not figuratively, not positionally, but actually!

But how can this be? At conversion, I didn't suddenly drop dead and then get up and live again. Or did I? Maybe I just did it too fast for anybody to see! The Bible says that at conversion, I became a "new creation", a new person. So the old Lou must have died, even if only for an instant in eternity. And the new Lou instantly appeared, so quick that if you blinked your eyes, you missed it!

NEVERTHELESS I LIVE

The new Lou looks just like the old Lou. The new converted person looks just like the old unconverted person. The death and new birth goes totally unrecognized physically. In order to understand how this works, we need to study the composition of man and the function of his parts.

1 Thessalonians 5:23 says that man is composed of:

SPIRIT - SOUL - BODY.

I AM a spirit. I HAVE a soul. I LIVE IN a body. My spirit is that part of the spiritual realm placed in me by God making me different from other physical creatures. But that spirit is only a container form meant to contain God. At the creation of the first man, Adam, this spirit container was empty. God gave Adam the choice of how to fill it. Adam decided to go his independent way unknowinly leaving his spirit container empty! But this spirit vacuum needed to be filled. And since the intended Spirit, God, was not invited in, an independent spirit from the other realm, Satan's nature, came to dwell in Adam's spirit.

The soul is made up of the intellect, the emotions and the will. It resides in the physical brain. The soul is the control panel to direct the actions of the body. The animals of the earth have souls! The word translated "soul" is the Hebrew word "nephesh". And this word is used in Genesis One three times for lower life forms before it is ever used in connection with man. The term "immortal soul" is not found in the Bible. Men have confused the spirit, which IS immortal, with the soul. Souls can die! "The soul that sins, it shall die." (Ezek. 18:4 and 20).

When Christ is in your spirit, most of the soul's input is from Him, but Satan can exert external influences at times interfering with the intellect, emotions and will. When the nature of Satan is in your spirit, most of the soul's input is from him, but God can exert external godly influences at times on the intellect, emotions and will.

The third part of man, the body, is the material shell that the spirit and soul live in. It is the contact we have with the schoolhouse world around us. As I said, the body is controlled by the soul, mostly through internal spirit input but occasionally through external influences.

YET NOT [JUST] I

Paul came to see that we never live alone. Either Satan's nature or Christ's nature lives in our spirit. The whole idea of human life is UNION LIFE. Our spirit always houses a deity nature - it just depends on what deity, Satan or Christ.

How many times have I heard someone say, "How in the world can a human being act like that? Why, he acts like an animal!" We find it hard to understand that any unconverted person is controlled by Satan's independent spirit. We can, at least, start to see how the independence can be so evilly expressed.

But what about individual choice and responsibility? The only real "choice" a person has is whether to have a "dependent' or an "independent' lifestyle. Do you depend on Christ in you to direct your ways? Or do you choose to act independently by your own direction and power? If the nature of Satan lives in you, he causes you to sin. If his nature have been removed and Christ lives in you, then Satan exerts external influences on you to sin. But we do not make all the "little" choices over particular good or bad acts. We make the one big choice of dependence or independence. And we ARE RESPONSIBLE for our choice.

BUT CHRIST LIVES IN ME

At conversion, we become this new man, this new species, so to speak, with Christ living in our spirit to direct our soul. We have chosen a new deity nature to contain: the God of heaven rather than the god of this world, Satan. And Christ is here within us to direct our lives NOW. Conversion is not just for a forgiven past and a heavenly future, but it is for a JOYFUL PRESENT! You can't live a joyful present as the old species. Fear and guilt over sin takes away real joy. But knowing who you are in union with Christ brings real joy, even in adverse circumstances. Because we know that anything we go through, Christ in us is more than a conqueror. He is more than able to supply all that we need to carry on.

But what about when we slip, and sin, by temporarily listening to Satan's external influences? The Bible does say that we can and do sin after conversion. Here is a great mystery of this union between Christ and yoou: Christ is in you; you are in Christ; the two of you are in union; you are ONE. Then how can YOU sin? Did Christ sin with you? Never! Did Christ leave? No, once He comes to form a union with you, He said that He would never leave you. NO, CHRST DOES NOT LEAVE WHEN YOU SIN! The answer is that sin is nothing more than acting independently from God's direction. Christ said that He could do nothing of Himself. It was the Father in Him who did things. He was the perfect man because He never acted independently of His Father. That is how we are to "follow" Christ; not by trying to do the good things that He did. We do not have and can never develop the human ability and power to live the Christian life. We "follow" Christ, we "imitate" Christ, by having His lifestyle of living from within His spirit. Christ said that just as He lived by the power of His Father within, we must live only by the power of Christ Himself within us.

AND THE LIFE WHICH I NOW LIVE IN THE FLESH

I LIVE BY THE FAITH OF THE SON OF GOD

These days there is more talk about faith than ever before. In fact, I am told that more books are written on the subject of faith than any other subject in all of Christianity. But many a believer has faith in his own human ability for most circumstances and calls on Christ for "help" in the tough times.

Most of our faith ideas come from the historical ministry of Jesus where God's dealings with men were still on the level of man's efforts. It was not until the Day of Pentecost and after that grace took its final place in God's plan; from that point forward, it would never again be men's faith - only God's. If Christ lived in Paul and Christ was Paul's everything, then Paul has to use the faith OF Christ. The message is clear. Believers have to grow from a self-motivation to a Christ-motivation. In the beginning of their conversion, they had to believe on their own that Christ died for them and they could be saved. Even this faith was not theirs though; it was a God-given measure of faith. After the Holy Spirit came to reveal Christ as the believer's life, then even the believer's faith would be of Christ. We are limited now because faith is looked on as a thing of man. Satan relishes this since the more men there are who exercise their own faith, the more Satan's knowledge abounds.

GOD LOVED ME AND GAVE HIMSELF FOR ME

In Revelation 13:8 it says that Christ was "slain before the foundation of the world." This is an awesome thought. You may have thought that Jesus died just for your sins. He did, really, but not primarily. This verse says that Christ's death must have embraced something other than just keeping you from punishment and getting you saved, because God took His own Son and killed Him, in His mind, before He ever created the world.

What does that mean? It simply means God saw this great truth - how He could have sons who would please Him by taking His only Son, Christ, and birthing Him in evey believer. Then God would have a Family of TRUE SONS with the actual nature of God. But God did not want a family of cloned robots who mechanically followed God's will. There must be a choosing by the person to be a son of God. And since independence from God causes death, there was a death penalty to be paid. Justice demanded it. And by the death of a part of God, Jesus Christ, justice was satisfied.

1 John 4:16 says, "God IS love!" Not that God has love to give. All true love is a characteristic of God. God must be present to find love. The Father manifested love to His future sons in the giving of His Son on Calvary. And now we believers who have Christ living in us now manifest love to others in the world and in a circle of love back to the Father.

The key is that we get to know Christ within by prayer, study and meditation. Our mysterious supernatural relationship becomes "natural"! Our soul, that is, our intellect, emotions and will, learns to receive practically all of its input from our spirit. But we will slip and accept the wront input at times, causing the wrong output, sin. We will probably pay some material penalty for the sin, but Christ will immediately call our attention to Him. By desiring forgiveness, we will be renewed further in the mind.

The Bible seems to conflict when in some places it says that the converted person is BECOMING perfect, and in other places says that he IS perfect! When we understand soul and spirit, we understand the spirit is MADE PERFECT IMMEDIATELY ONCE AND FOREVER at conversion, but the soul is the part that is BECOMING PERFECT ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS.

So remember all the ramifications of Galatians 2:20. There is no better verse in the Bible to describe what man was, what man is to become, and how man is to live!

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