Cal writes in to ask, "Pastor John, I'm right now reading through your book, 'Don't Waste Your Life,' and I have a question about Galatians 6:14 and boasting only in the cross. Specifically, what does it mean to be dead to the world?" Let me get the verse right in front of us so we can hear how that phrase occurs.

"Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world." So the question's coming, I think, from that last phrase, "I am crucified to the world," or "I am dead to the world." So my first question is, even before I ask, "What does it mean to be dead to the world?" is, "What does it mean to be dead?" And I think, in Paul's mind, that idea of Christians being dead starts with Jesus' words in a bunch of places in the Gospels, like Luke 9, where he says, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be killed, and on the third day be raised." And he said to all, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." Now when Bonhoeffer read that, remember, he said, "Jesus was saying, 'When I call you, I bid you to come and die.'" So to take a cross means to die.

So to follow Jesus is to experience a kind of death. And the way he says it in Luke 9 is, it's a daily taking up of the cross. So there's a daily dying going on. And then when Paul picks that up, I think, for example, when he describes baptism, he says, "We were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life." So at the point of conversion and faith, signified in the waters of baptism, we are being united to Christ, and when we're united to Christ, the death that he dies, we die.

In fact, the very next verse, I think, in Romans 6, verse 5, makes that connection with union with Christ. If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. So we died when we were united to Christ, and we were united to Christ when we believed in him and signified that in baptism.

And so for me, the next question becomes, "So who died?" I'm a living... I'm talking to you right now, and Cal wrote and asked the question, so he doesn't sound dead, he's thinking. So who actually died? So let's go back to Galatians, and Paul, I think, answers that, helps answer it anyway, when he says in chapter 5, "Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires." So the old me, which Paul calls the flesh, that self-reliant, proud, idolatrous, world-loving, world-worshiping self, died when I trusted Christ, because I was united with him in his death, and when he died, I died, and the part of me that dies is the old unbelieving, self-reliant self.

And a new person comes into being, and who's that? And Galatians gives the answer again. I think, I mean, one of my favorite verses in all the Bible, ever since I was a sophomore in college, has been Galatians 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." So it sounds like the new person who's alive is Christ, but then it says, "And the life I now live..." So, "Oh, I thought I was dead." No, you're not dead, because as Christ lives, you're alive.

How? The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith, in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. So the new me is not the old unbelieving, selfish, self-reliant, world-worshipping me. It's the new trusting in Christ, enjoying the life of Christ in me person.

So there's this new creation, there's this new Cal, this new Tony that has come into being, and it's marked mainly by "I live by faith." And I think faith is not only trusting that he died for me, but trusting him for all that God is for me in him.

He has become my world. He has become my treasure. He has become my satisfaction. So now I go back. After all that, I go back to Galatians 6:14, where it says we're dead or we're crucified to the world, and I think that means my flesh once loved the world.

Back in verse 24 of chapter 5, it said it died with its passions and its desires. My old flesh just loved the world, craved the world, depended on the world, needed the world, worshipped the world as its God and its satisfaction. And now all that died, and the world now has been crucified to me as a God.

So if you say, "What sense does the world die to me?" I said, "The world once was a God to me. It once was my life, and I killed it. I crucified it. I put it to death with its desires, and my flesh died. So my dying to it and it dying to me is the same reality.

I killed this pseudo-reality called the world, which was posing as an all-satisfying God to me, and my old, blind, foolish self who worshipped this world died when I died with Christ." And here's just one...when I think about this, I want to make one qualification because God made the world.

The world is not evil. Material is not evil. Physicality is not evil. God meant the world to be not our God but a gift. And so maybe the simplest way to say it is that when you come to Christ and the old world-worshipping self dies, what comes alive is a self of faith in Christ that receives the world no longer as a God but as a gift.

So I would say directly to Cal, every time the world starts to claim for itself more than it is, tell it, "World, I'm dead to that pseudo-claim. Jesus is my treasure now. He died to have me, and he died to give himself to me as my all-satisfying treasure. So world, I'm dead to you, and you're dead to me as a God, and I now come to you no longer as my God but as a gift from my loving Savior.

And every time you come to me now, I'm going to see Him in you, and if I can't see Him in you, I'm going to reject you." Thank you, Pastor John. You can download the book, "Don't Waste Your Life," for free at DesiringGod.org. Click on the resource library and then click on "Books." At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free books and articles and other resources from John Piper.

I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.