That is, faith in the Son of God. Important textual evidence may be cited (cf. p. 10) for reading “faith in God and Christ.”

 That is, this present life. The Christian is still in the world, though not of it (John 17:11, 14).

 This is the secret of a successful Christian life—Christ abiding within and living out in us the same perfect life that He lived here on earth. The love of Christ constrains him (2 Cor. 5:14), and the righteousness of Christ becomes a reality in his life (Rom. 8:3, 4).

The Greek translated “nevertheless I live; yet not I,” may also be rendered, “it is no longer I who live.” Both are appropriate to the context, and either way the sense of the statement as a whole is unchanged.

 While dead to some things, Paul was very much alive to others. He was as active after conversion as he was before, for the life of a Christian is not one of inactivity. Jesus spoke of this new life as a more abundant life (see John 10:10). Since Jesus is the source of life, there can be no true appreciation of life apart from Him.

 That is, Paul had accepted the atonement provided by Christ’s death upon the cross (see Rom. 6:3-11; Phil. 3:8-10). He considered himself as dead to sin, to the world, and to man-devised methods of attaining to righteousness, as if he had actually been crucified. These methods no longer appealed to him, and in his heart there was no response to them.