Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

Union with Christ means the reality of knowing God and living in communion with him doesn’t begin when you die. Eternal life begins in this life when Christ joins his life to yours

Just as our loss of union with Christ as a controlling lens has had real negative repercussions, so its recovery holds such potential for hope and healing.

The presence of God is not the same as the sense of the presence of God.

It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us.

What is primary, Lewis is saying, is the reality of Christ’s presence, sometimes in spite of our experience.

It is not the quality or degree of our faith that matters as much as our being united to the object of our faith, the perfect Christ. It is the perfect Christ who saves us, not our imperfect faith or our imperfect obedience.

Otherwise, we run the risk of reducing the glory of our salvation in Christ to the smallness of our individual experience

let us always remember that the Christ we experience is always greater and more marvelous than our experience of him.

We understand, however, that it’s one thing to know something and another thing to know it. This

one we will call the way of extravagant grace, “just believe,” and the other we’ll call the way of radical discipleship, “just obey.”

found in Bonhoeffer an answer as to why I felt uneasy: “The only man who has a right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.”

“The word of cheap grace has been the ruin of more Christians than any commandment of works.”

Willard accuses the church of truncating the gospel, turning it into what he calls “a gospel of sin management.”

Obey your Lord, because the cost of not following him is in every sense greater than the cost of discipleship that Jesus demands.

Which is it: come and rest or come and die?

“Only those who believe obey” … and “only those who obey believe”

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

The problem with either “just believe the gospel … more” or “just obey your Lord … more” is that alone, they leave us focusing on ourselves as the real agent of change.

inspires him to pursue Christ, who has already taken hold of him.

We become enslaved whenever we seek to salve our pain and heal ourselves with anything other than Christ. We become addicts to sin.

Union with Christ—not only is it in the Bible, but it’s what the Bible is all about!

We like sound bites that we can possess quickly and digest easily, as opposed to nuance and depth that we must wrestle with at length.

recovering a sense of mystery is “the most urgent task facing the church today.”

This loss of mystery reveals itself in our pragmatically driven churches. See our tendency to want every sermon to “make it practical,” to give us action steps or things to do. See our prayer lives, too often narrowed to to-do lists for God. See the rise of church shopping, church hopping, worship wars, and other evidences of the language of commerce and ownership invading our spiritual lives.

When we make the gospel primarily about us, we make it small.

sin is loving the wrong things, or to be more precise, loving the right things in the wrong way. 15

Sin is abiding in something other than Jesus to give us significance and

In following Christ, we don’t become something less than ourselves. Nor do we become something more than human. We become more and more human, more and most ourselves.

Without becoming gods, yet we are becoming more and more like the God-man, Jesus. In Christ, you are becoming more and more like God’s vision of you, for you.

You can boast in your weaknesses because you see them move you further along toward your goal of being dependent on God. You don’t just learn from them; you learn by them.

It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

Leo Tolstoy once defined boredom as “the desire for desires.” With this new horizon, how could we ever again be bored or aimless?

Holiness is like broccoli for many of us. We know we’re supposed to want it, but we don’t, not really.

It’s Undesirable Even the word holiness has

The call to be holy is often viewed as a big no to anything pleasurable or fun. It may retain the sense of being set apart, but not in a good way.

It’s Unnecessary

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

It’s Unattainable

Holiness is not a no to happiness but a resounding yes.

Jonathan Edwards says that God’s holiness is the most beautiful thing about him:

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

Your destiny is for the image of God to be restored in you.

Once again, union with Christ is the answer to our riddle.

Union with Christ Is the Engine of Holiness

“You are in Christ” gives you assurance. “Christ is in you” gives you power.

In calling us to be holy, God isn’t asking us to make up something lacking in us. We don’t obey from a deficit. We obey out of fullness. And that makes all the difference, as we’ll see in a moment.

No one can attain any degree of holiness without God working in his life, but just as surely no one will attain it without effort on his own part. God has made it possible for us to walk in holiness. But He has given to us the responsibility of doing the walking. 15

One of the reasons why holiness is so scary or unattractive for us is that we see it as a bar we can never reach or yet another thing we’ve failed to do.

We see that God is making us beautiful because he is making us like him and he is committed to us over the course of the whole journey.

without something beyond us, outside ourselves, there can be no atonement.