Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

No God, no atonement. We may yearn for it, but that’s all we can do.

Your faith is absolutely necessary, but it is the object of your faith, not the strength of it, that matters most.

Labor to Be Brought Near

Your life with God is all of grace. Period. And God’s grace invites, even requires, your participation. “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”

God is the one who changes us. These means put us in the place where God can work within us. They are ordinary means God has provided for us to experience his extraordinary grace.

This doesn’t mean you always experience the feeling of God’s presence. You can’t control the wind! But it does mean you can always hoist the sail and come into his presence expecting to hear a word from him.

By prayer and through the Holy Spirit, you gnaw and chew on God’s Word until it metabolizes and gets into your bloodstream. You take it in, and you expect it to nourish you.

like opening a “toolbox” for navigating life’s problems (though it certainly does teach us about how to live). It is, rather, one of the essential means God has provided to communicate the wonder of his presence to us.

Union with Christ is how the Bible comes alive. The Bible is no longer just words on a page, and the call to meditate on it is not simply a call of duty. This is bread for your journey. Jes...

we learn to pray by praying.

Oswald Chambers once said, “The greatest enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but good choices which are not quite good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.”

Union with Christ reminds us that the real reward of prayer is not what we’re asking God for. The real reward of prayer is communion with God, made possible by our union with Christ

When you remember that these means are precisely that—means to an end; when you remember that you are not looking for an experience (which may or may not come) but communing with God, who is always there; when you remember that there will be doldrums, then you can be assured that the most important times of meditation and prayer, worship, and community may in fact be the times you enjoy them the least. Take heart.

Keep Drawing the Sail

“A small task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”