Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

And as long as the Holy Spirit remains unknown or underappreciated, or where his primary role is obscured, so too will union with Christ be minimized and marginalized. The end result of all this is that both Pentecostals and Presbyterians downplay union with Christ, but for entirely different reasons. 22

As long as your will is set on following Christ, you can rest in the choices you make. You don’t have to be frozen in fear because your life is no longer in your own hands. You can surrender your plans to Christ, who has joined his life to yours.

I. Packer comments, “Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.… Adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel offers.” 26 But by now you can see that this most precious gift of adoption flows out of what is even more basic and most precious, union with Christ. If you are united to him, “you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

Paul says that the power of Christ is inseparable from participation in his sufferings, that the way to know Christ is the way of becoming like him in his death. Do you really want to know this Christ?

If we are united to Christ, we are united to “a man of sorrows, … acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). We are united to a suffering servant. How could we expect not to suffer if we are united to one who suffered so much? The Bible dares to say of Christ that “he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). If God’s own Son, who was perfect, had to learn obedience through what he suffered, how much more necessary must it be for us to learn to trust God through what we suffer? Jesus reminds us, “A servant is not greater than his master” (John 15:20). Pain and suffering were not just something that happened to Jesus. Pain and suffering marked his life. “He was not only continuously afflicted, but his whole life was a perpetual cross.” 2 That means the crucifixion isn’t just something that happened to Jesus—the crucifixion is who Jesus is. To know Jesus is to know his cross and to carry your own. Apart from carrying this cross, you cannot know this Savior, nor be united to him. The Christ in you is indeed triumphant and victorious, but, again, he is “a man of sorrows, … acquainted with grief.” Paul didn’t just resolve to know Christ. He resolved to know “Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Is this the Christ you know?