Excerpt from Wayne Barber’s book The Rest of Grace (Harvest House Publishers, 1998)

We can’t live the Christian life. We try and we try. We read books about how to achieve it, we go to seminars that claim to reveal the secrets, and we listen to preachers tell us how…The fact is, we can’t live the Christian life, so we have to let Christ live it in us.

Christ is our life. He didn’t just give us life; He is our life. As we learn to let Christ be in us what we are not, the Christian life begins to take place in us. That to me is the basis of my entire ministry.

A frustrated believer is in a wonderful place, because he or she is ready to discover the truth about living like Jesus Christ: he can’t do it on his own. Once he realizes this truth, he is ready to hear the good news that Christ can start to live in him.

Many Christians want to rejoice that they’ve been saved from their past, saved from their mistakes, saved from their sins. But we’ve also been saved to something …a new life in Jesus Christ.

Paul showed the Roman believers that they were new creatures: “For if we have become united in Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection” (Romans 6:5). The word united is an intimate word. It means to be blended together, much like a baker blends the various ingredients together to create something new. Christ’s life has been “baked” into us, if you will. That’s why I like telling people in churches that we are “biscuits” for Jesus.

Paul continues telling the Romans, “…knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin” (Romans 6:6). The old man is dead. What I was in Adam I can never be again. I call this principle “the Christ life.” We have to realize that we can’t, but He can. Galatians 2:20 says, “I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” It is His life living in me.

If I exchange my life with Christ’s life, the exchange takes place when I’m willing to make the choice to surrender. It is no longer me, but Christ living in and through me. As Christ said, no one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). No one can serve Christ and himself. There has to be a choice on my part to surrender to him.

When you come to understand grace, you realize that nothing has changed as far as what God demands. What has changed is who is qualified to meet those demands, and you discover it is Christ and Him alone. Our responsibility is not to be perfect, not to win the victory, not to fulfill the law, but to yield to Christ, for He alone is our perfection, our victory, and our fulfillment of the law.

Paul said, “I glory in the cross of Christ alone” (Galatians 6:14). By this he meant that he found identity in the cross. Our identity is not in what we do or in what we think we are. Our identity is that we are believers in Jesus Christ. The word for “glory” is doxa, which means the “recognition” or “worth” of something. Your worth can only be found at the cross, where we died in union with Christ. When we are willing to die to ourselves and our agenda…then we can glory in the cross. Then all our glory will be pointed toward Him and not toward us.

Until we are willing to take our place with Him on the cross and find our identity not in ourselves but in Him, then we cannot glory in the cross. By doing so we become enemies of the cross (Philippians 3:18). Most doctrine gets off centered when people don’t understand the importance of the cross in the life of the believer.

It’s amazing what happens when you begin to understand these truths. You start seeing things differently. Your outward characteristics become transformed by His inner presence. Gradually, like the lifting of a fog …you see what’s been there all along – victory and fulfillment you’ve been seeking.