To be your true, whole self, you need more than self-discovery: you need Jesus. Galatians 2:20 shows that Jesus' death in the past frees us from our old, broken selves, and his life in the present fills us with a new, whole life now.This one verse holds the key to a question every person eventually asks: who am I, really, and how do I become whole?
Who am I, really?
Most of us carry around several versions of ourselves. There is the version we show our family, the version our friends see, the version that turns up to work on a Monday morning. There is the version of us that is happy and the version that is sad. Underneath all these versions, though, is a harder question. What is the bottom layer? What is the part of you that is always you, no matter who is watching?
The Apostle Paul wrestled with this same question, not as a philosopher but as someone who had been utterly changed. Writing to a church in the ancient city of Ephesus, he described his own identity in a single, dense sentence in Galatians 2:20. He wanted that church, and every church that would read his letter afterwards, including a church in Manchester nearly two thousand years later, to understand what it means to have a true and whole self.
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Two ways to miss out on a whole life
There are two tragic ways to go through life without ever finding this wholeness. The first is to never really engage with who you are at all. You drift, you cope, you get by, but you never ask the deeper questions about your own heart. That is a tragedy, because you make it all the way through life without ever truly knowing yourself.
The second tragedy is different, and in some ways more subtle. You can know exactly who you are, you can be entirely authentic, and still be only half a person. You can live truthfully according to your own instincts and desires and still end up broken, hollowed out, incomplete. Authenticity on its own does not guarantee wholeness.
God does not want either of these outcomes for us. He wants us to know our true selves, yes, but he also wants us to be whole. Because we cannot achieve that wholeness on our own, he offers to give it to us. Galatians 2:20 explains exactly how.
The past tense: freed from our past selves
Paul begins with an extraordinary claim: he has been crucified with Christ. This is not a feeling or a metaphor for effort. Paul is stating a historical fact about what happened to him the moment he put his trust in Jesus. When someone first believes, they are, in a spiritual sense, joined to Jesus' death, and everything in them that was broken and destructive is put to death along with him.
The Bible's word for that brokenness is sin. Sin is not simply a list of naughty behaviours. It is whatever holds us back and keeps us in chains: the harsh word we regret, the jealousy we cannot shake, the quiet drift through life without ever thinking much about God at all. Sin is also behind the harm that has been done to us by others and by the world around us. It is, as the sermon this post is drawn from put it, humanity's dark heart pumping out toxic waste into a world that was designed for beauty.
Here is the difficulty. If we are the ones who are broken, we cannot be the ones who fix it. Imagine being lost in the woods, using a broken compass to try to find your way home. Using that same compass more carefully will not help, because the compass itself is the problem. Our own hearts, left to themselves, are that broken compass. And looking to another person for rescue does not solve it either, however loving they are, because they are carrying the very same broken compass we are.
This is why Jesus' death matters so much. On the cross, Jesus did not simply demonstrate love and ask us to try harder to imitate him. He actually took the broken, sinful parts of us and put them to death. Paul's words are personal: Jesus died for me, specifically, not just for a hypothetical crowd of humanity. If you have felt the weight of your past mistakes, replaying them, unable to let them stay in the past, this is remarkably good news. If you want to think more about how our own failures relate to the failures done against us, our article on sin explores this in more depth, describing sin less as a checklist of bad deeds and more as a deep distrust of God that produces selfishness and harm.
Sin functions like chains. It holds us back, and left to ourselves, we either wear those chains forever, growing more tired as we drag them through life, or Jesus removes them entirely. His death did not make our freedom merely possible. It accomplished it. When Jesus died, his final words were not "what a great opportunity", they were "it is finished." The work was done.
The present tense: alive to a whole life now
If the broken, sinful parts of us have genuinely died with Christ, then something remarkable follows: there is room for something new to live in their place. Paul puts it like this: he no longer lives, but Christ lives in him.
Left entirely to ourselves, our default setting is self-focus. We become full of ourselves, because a vacuum will always be filled by something, and if it is not filled by God, it will be filled by us. But Galatians 2:20 promises something better. It is possible to be filled, not with ourselves, but with Christ. God himself, not as a distant idea but as a living presence, at work in the ordinary and extraordinary moments of everyday life.
This does not make the Christian life easy so much as it makes it possible. It is not that living God's way is difficult to understand, it is that it is genuinely impossible without God doing the work in us. And it is worth it, because anything truly worthwhile in life requires effort. A pianist called Yirui Weng offers a striking illustration of this kind of change. She grew up with no interest in faith at all, but while learning a piece by the composer Vivaldi, something in the music captured her. She found herself drawn towards a beauty she could not create or explain on her own, and that search eventually led her to Christian faith. For Paul, for Yirui, and for every Christian since, this is what it looks like when Christ lives through a person: being changed by a beauty from outside yourself that you cannot resist investigating further.
When Christ moves into a life, he does not merely rent space, he takes up permanent residence, and he is always renovating, always inviting a fuller alignment with himself. This is what a true, whole self looks like in the present: not a self-improvement project, but a life animated by someone greater than ourselves.
How transformation actually happens: living by faith
So how does someone move from their old, broken self into this whole, present life? Paul's answer is straightforward: by faith in the Son of God, who loved him and gave himself for him.
Faith, in the biblical sense, simply means trust. Everybody places their trust in something, whether they call it faith or not. You trust that the chair beneath you will hold your weight for the next twenty-five minutes. The question is not whether you have faith, but what your faith is placed in, and whether that object of faith is actually trustworthy.
Jesus is worth that trust because he is both powerful and personal. Something can be powerful without being personal (the impersonal forces of the universe, or an unaccountable ruler), and something can be personal without being powerful (a kind but limited friend). Jesus is uniquely both: powerful enough to actually deal with sin and death, and personal enough to love individual people specifically, by name.
Paul's language in Romans puts this transformation plainly: count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God, and do not let sin reign over you any longer (Romans 6:11-12). Christians get to be dead to everything in their past that once held them back, and alive to everything in the present that now propels them forward, and all of this flows from trusting Jesus before anything else. If you have wondered whether your own hardships disqualify you from this kind of wholeness, it may help to read is my suffering my fault?, which wrestles honestly with how suffering, sin, and Jesus' rescue fit together.
Becoming part of a family, not just an individual
There is one more dimension to this wholeness that Galatians 2:20 points towards, even if it is not spelled out in the verse itself. The connection a Christian has with God naturally overflows into connection with other Christians. In the New Testament, that connection is expressed through belonging to a local church, as a genuine family member rather than as a customer of a club.
Being part of a club is on your own terms: you decide what you want, you pay for it, and you receive a service in return. Being part of a family is different. It involves surrender, promises, and shared life with people you did not choose for yourself. This is part of what it looks like to live out a whole, transformed identity rather than merely holding correct beliefs privately. If you are curious what that kind of church family actually looks like in practice, our piece on what the church actually is explains it simply: not a building, but a gathered people.
Freed from your past, alive in your present
To summarise the single idea running through Galatians 2:20: Jesus' death in the past frees us from our past selves, and Jesus' life in the present frees us into a whole life now. This is not a call to try harder to become a better version of yourself. It is an invitation to trust someone else entirely, someone who has already done what you cannot do for yourself.
If any of this stirs something in you, a sense that there might be a wholeness available to you that you have not yet found, that response is worth paying attention to. You are far too significant to be filled with anything less than the God who made you. A good Manchester church will always point you back to him rather than to itself, and that is exactly where this verse points too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Galatians 2:20 mean in simple terms?
Galatians 2:20 means that when someone trusts in Jesus, their old, sin-broken identity dies with him on the cross, and Jesus himself comes to live in and through them in the present. It describes both a past event (being crucified with Christ) and a present reality (Christ living in the believer), and the whole verse is anchored in trusting, or having faith in, Jesus.
What does it mean to be "crucified with Christ"?
It means that when a person first puts their trust in Jesus, the broken, sinful parts of who they are, described in the Bible as sin, are dealt with decisively, as though they had died alongside Jesus on the cross. It is not something the believer achieves through effort. It is something that happened to them because of what Jesus did.
How can I find my true self according to the Bible?
The Bible teaches that your true self is not something you invent or discover by looking only inward. It is something you receive by trusting Jesus, who deals with what is broken in you and then lives his life through you. True self-discovery, biblically speaking, always involves this kind of surrender rather than pure self-analysis.
Is it possible to be authentic but still not whole?
Yes. You can live entirely true to your own feelings and instincts and still miss out on the wholeness the Bible describes. Authenticity is about being consistent with your own inner life, while wholeness involves being restored and completed by someone greater than yourself. Galatians 2:20 suggests you need both.
What is the difference between faith and religion in this passage?
Faith, in Galatians 2:20, means personal trust in Jesus specifically, not general religious belief or effort. It is not about following rules to earn approval. It is about relying on someone who has already proved his love, described in the verse as the one "who loved me and gave himself for me."
How do I start living out Galatians 2:20 practically?
Practically, it begins with placing your trust in Jesus rather than in yourself, your achievements, or other people. From there, it grows through ongoing dependence on him, being part of a church community, and allowing your daily choices to be increasingly shaped by his presence rather than by old patterns of selfishness or fear.
Why does the Bible describe sin as chains rather than just mistakes?
Chains capture the way sin restricts and weighs us down over time, rather than being isolated, one-off events. Old regrets, resentments, and destructive habits can hold a person back for years. The Bible's picture of Jesus removing these chains, rather than simply forgiving isolated mistakes, better reflects how deeply sin can shape a life if left unaddressed.
Where can I learn more about this at Redeemer Church Manchester?
You are welcome to explore more articles on the Redeemer Church Manchester website, or to join a Sunday gathering in person to hear more about how Jesus offers freedom from the past and life in the present.