Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

We think of faith as what we’re supposed to believe rather than the mental map about how things are that we carry with us and inevitably live from.

One way to think about the Christian life—not the only way, but a powerful and too-little-used way—is that believing the gospel means having your imagination taken captive and reshaped by a new story.

But it didn’t change your life until your eyes were opened to it.

It is revealing that the writers of Scripture, even Jesus himself, resort to word pictures, similes, and metaphors to capture the mystery of union with Christ. The number of metaphors employed tells us that this is important; the variety of metaphors tells us that it is far reaching. But the fact that similes and metaphors—the language of poetry—must be used at all tells us there is no way to get at this truth directly. Images are necessary. Your imagination must be engaged for you to lay hold of your new life in Christ.

I had seen enough of Jesus to spoil my enjoyment of the world but not enough to be content with Jesus alone. And I didn’t know how to move forward.

Being a Christian is not about absorbing certain doctrines about God. Nor is it about being a better or different kind of person. The goal is having a personal, vital, profoundly real relationship with God through Christ by the Holy Spirit. The goal is enjoying communion with God himself. Union with Christ is not an idea to be understood, but a new reality to be lived, through faith.

When I base my Christian life on my Christian experience, I become locked in the labyrinth of my own performance. I am only as sure of God as my current emotions and obedience allow. My eyes are fixed on myself.

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.

Willard accuses the church of truncating the gospel, turning it into what he calls “a gospel of sin management.” 14 He claims that we have reduced life with God to a “bar-code faith,” 15 wherein simply by our verbal confession, we exchange our sins for Christ’s righteousness and thereby acquire our ticket for heaven when this life is over.

Undiluted grace and uncompromising obedience meet in the person of Jesus. He is always full of both.

Scougal’s answer was that true Christianity consists not in the trappings of religion, not in going to church or in the saying of prayers, not in the making of orthodox affirmations or any external form. Rather, Scougal wrote, true Christianity consists in a “union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the apostle’s phrase, it is Christ formed within us … a divine life.” 2

Historian Donald Fairbairn traces the theme of communion with God through the writings of the church fathers in order to demonstrate why the early church did not struggle as much with what we struggle so mightily with today—integrating theology into our daily lives: They were able to articulate the connection between the doctrines of the faith and the Christian life in a clearer and more persuasive way than we are usually able to do.… The way the early church avoided the problem of divorcing doctrine from Christian life was by understanding all of Christian life in direct connection to God’s life.… Doctrine, as they understood it, pointed beyond itself to God, in whose life human beings are called to share. 10 For the early church fathers, the incarnation and its continuing importance were central to the idea of salvation because knowing God was not merely a theological exercise but an invitation to commune with God. Theology meant understanding your life as enfolded within God’s own life.

Luther is famous for his formula simul iustus et pecator (“simultaneously righteous and sinner”), but while we remember the formula, we may forget that he grounds it here in union with Christ! The mystery of the marriage union between Christ and the soul is what allows sinful people to truly possess Christ’s righteousness and allows Christ to take upon himself our sin, death, and condemnation. 18

We must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us.

Writer J. I. Packer summarizes, “The thought of communion with God takes us to the very heart of Puritan theology and religion.”

For Owen, nothing is more practical to the Christian life than understanding this vital union and understanding that it is not abstract, but real and personal.

Everything you can ever lack is found in Him;

It is a beautiful dance: our highest joy is found in God’s glory, and God is most glorified in us when we find our highest joy in him. And it is at the cross of Christ that we see God’s glory most clearly because the cross is our best picture of who God is: God providing from within his own life the gift of bringing us back into his life.

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?

“How much larger your life would be,” Chesterton says, “if your self could become smaller in it.”

It seems that if we take mystery and enchantment out of our intellectual diet, we become starved for it.

In his book Heavenly Participation, Boersma says that recovering a sense of mystery is “the most urgent task facing the church today.” And yet, he laments, To speak of creaturely participation in heavenly realities (“heavenly participation”) cannot but come across as outlandish to an age whose horizons have narrowed to such an extent that bodily goods, cultural endeavors, and political achievements have become matters of ultimate concern. 23

As Augustine urges, “We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.”

Union with Christ doesn’t narrow your world. It opens the door to a world larger and more exciting, more mysterious and more dangerous, than you ever imagined. But in order to live in it, your imagination must be captured by a new story so that you too can keep pressing onward and upward toward life in this new world, even today as you walk with both feet on the ground.

Perhaps the theme of identity dominates our stories because the search for identity dominates our lives.

Union with Christ gives you a completely new self-understanding found outside of yourself in Christ. Union with Christ gives you a new identity. In fact, that’s one way to define the Christian faith: faith is finding your identity in Christ. 4

gives you a new identity; it gives you a new mindset, a new grid through which to filter everything that happens to you. For it’s not so much what happens to you that defines you, as how you interpret what happens to you.

Your mindset is the lens through which you see the world and yourself. Your identity, therefore, is formed by your mindset.

Perhaps the clearest picture of the mindset of our day is our love affair with Apple. It’s no coincidence that the bitten apple has become the iconic symbol of modern Western culture, because it represents what’s most valued among us: autonomy and independence. After all, they don’t call it a wePhone.

Oh please...

He concludes that increased choices have led to increased expectations of how good a good choice should be (with so many choices, surely one of them is almost perfect), which leads to increased dissatisfaction with whatever choice you end up making. “Expectations have gone through the roof,” 16 and with them our rising discontentment. Take dating and marriage. With such high expectations going in, it’s hard not to slip into thinking, “if only” you’d made a different choice, then you’d be happier. And you might be. But when you pit the imagined possibilities of what you don’t have against the real limitations of what you do, it inevitably leads to dissatisfaction with whomever you choose. Or, it might make you reluctant to choose at all—commitment phobic. So, Schwartz concludes, even though we have it better than we ever have, we’re less content than we’ve ever been.

The irony of Princess Elsa’s chart-topping song “Let It Go” is that she is singing about her choice to exercise her power to be free, while (please notice) she is locking herself inside an ice prison of her own making! She sings, “I’m free!” while ensuring that she won’t be. From Frozen to Pinocchio, autonomy can’t break the curse. It only ends up imprisoning you in the labyrinth of your constantly shifting desires.

As long as your will is set on following Christ, you can rest in the choices you make.

This is the precious biblical truth of justification (Gal. 2:16). You no longer have to justify your life. You don’t have to worry, like Jay Gatsby, about others thinking you’re a nobody. You don’t have to go the distance, like Rocky, to prove you’re not a bum. Christ marries himself to you, and in a wonderful exchange, you give him all your sins and he gives you all of his righteousness.

whether the radical nature of union with Christ is sinking in is to ask this: Are you threatened by it? Before you can rest in the comfort of your new identity in Christ, you have to sense how frightening it can be. Union with Christ gives us a new identity, but to accept it requires leaving behind the life we have always known.

Jesus will not be an accessory to your identity.

with Christ is replacing our former, self-made identity: Are you comforted by it? Are you experiencing the freedom and confidence union with Christ brings?

“You are not your own” means you are no longer on your own.

What should we do? What are you trying to teach me?

Jesus not only shows us who God is; he shows us who we, as human beings, are meant to be.

To restore to us our created dignity, God became one of us.

Jesus came from heaven in order that the image of God might be restored in you. And because of Jesus, we now know what that image looks like. He rescued you in order that you might become fully human. This idea is captured in a single verse: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29). Why are you here? To become like Jesus. Why are you here? To become a human being.

But our self is not obliterated by our union with Christ; our self is fully realized.

We can see from looking around us in the world that his goal is not uniformity.

This is the destiny God sets for each one of us—to more and more discover who you truly are as you more and more give yourself over to him.

Walker Percy reminds us that this glorious destiny must take a very mundane shape.

Leo Tolstoy once defined boredom as “the desire for desires.”

Holiness is the great end underlying everything God has done for us in Christ.

In rightly emphasizing what God has saved us from, too often we lose sight of what God has saved us for.

You’ll never want holiness until you are convinced that it’s not meant to be a burden.

that it will not float away or be overturned, so our union with Christ gives us confidence that our holiness does not fall with our failures or rise with our successes.