More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 6 - June 1, 2019
Perhaps one of the greatest barriers to faith is not the things we don’t know but the things we think we know yet we’re wrong about. We think of heaven as the pleasure factory rather than life with God. We think of salvation as being able to avoid pain rather than being made right. We think of the gospel as the minimal entrance requirements for getting into heaven rather than the announcement that life with God is now possible on earth through Jesus. 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
...more
Human beings were created to live in what Dallas Willard called “reciprocal rootedness.” We are made to be alive spiritually.
this happens when we are immersed in Jesus the way a dolphin is immersed in the ocean,
Most important, imagination is necessary to know and enjoy God. How else can we relate to the true God, “whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16), than by using our God-given imaging capacities—our imaginations? We must use our imaginations if we want to fully inhabit and experience the Christian life.
You can’t remember without engaging your imagination.
Union with Christ tells you a new story about who you are. If you are “in Christ,” you too have been given a new identity. God has called you into a new life, rooted in a history that predates you, anchored in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
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.
We may know what God has saved us from, but have we lost sight of what God has saved us for?
What will make heaven to be heaven is the presence of Jesus, and of a reconciled divine father who loves us for Jesus’ sake no less than He loves Jesus Himself.
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 (John 17:3). We can have fellowship with God through Christ (1 John 1:3). We can begin to experience heaven in our lives here and now.
Of all the good news the gospel brings, the greatest—and indeed the door to all the rest—is that you can be united to Christ. It’s really possible. Union with Christ is not an abstract idea. It is a powerful reality.
But this question of how to close the gap between our faith and our real lives remains one of which I’m always mindful. How can we connect the grand, high promises of God to the gritty details of our daily lives?
“I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument, in a business at which my heart now shudders.”
How do I connect God to my daily life?
“Our only health is the disease,” wrote T. S. Eliot in one of his poems, “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.” 5
First, 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. Therefore … he had to become ours and to dwell within us. 6
“That indwelling of Christ in our hearts … that mystical union [is] accorded by us the highest degree of importance.” 7 “By virtue of the believer’s union with Christ, he doth really possess all things.” 8 “Being in Christ, and united to him, is the fundamental constitution of a Christian.” 9 “Union with Christ is right at the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation.” 10 “There are no benefits of the gospel apart from union with Christ.” 11 “Union with Christ is the fountainhead from which flows the Christian’s every spiritual blessing.” 12 “Union with Christ is theological shorthand for
...more
Communion between God and man is the end to which both creation and redemption are the means; it is the goal to which both theology and preaching must ever point; it is the essence of true religion; it is, indeed, the definition of Christianity.
The greatest treasure of the gospel, greater than any other benefit the gospel brings, is the gift of God himself.
But my primary interest is not to solve a riddle or right a historical wrong, but rather to help us connect God to our daily lives.
Our neglect of union with Christ explains the gaps between our faith and our lives. When the work of Christ for us becomes abstracted from the person of Christ within us, is it any wonder there is a chasm between our heads and our hearts or between our beliefs and our experiences? Is it surprising that we feel frustrated and cynical or tossed to and fro?
Union with Christ needs to become again what it once was, “of highest importance.”
Union with Christ is the thread that holds it all together.
But the fact that we can’t get to the bottom of this ocean doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put our feet in, or even swim.
You are alive in him, moving with him through this world, clothed in all his benefits and blessings. You are in Christ.
During his earthly life, Jesus’s presence was localized to his physical body. He experienced our frustration of being only in one place at one time. But now that he dwells within his disciples by his Spirit, his ministry—his power through his people—is multiplied exponentially.
Christ dwelling in us by his Spirit is a guarantee that we can and will change.
Something alien to you, from outside of you, has entered into you and changed your nature.
You are more and most yourself when united to Christ. He covers you, he shields you, he represents you before the Father. He also fills you, illuminates you, and animates you, making you more yourself and more human than you could ever be on your own.
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.
But subjectively, their experience of this new identity grew over time. The sentence finishing, mind reading, need anticipating, thinking of the other before themselves—that grew with the years. And just as in a long marriage, your experience of being found in Christ is something that will grow over time. Christ has wed himself to you. This is not just a declaration to agree with. It is an objective reality to live into. He has fully atoned for you, and he is now with you, assuring you that with him, you have the resources to overcome anything that threatens to overwhelm you.
The Father loves you “even as” he loves his own son because all that belongs to the son he now shares with all those who are united to him. Whatever is true of Jesus in God’s eyes is now true of you. That’s union with Christ.
Here are two of the greatest prayers of the Bible, John 17 and Ephesians 3, and what are they about? Union with Christ! They are prayers that we would know—beyond mere intellectual comprehension—and experience our union with Christ. Thanks be to God!
You are not striving to attain it. You are striving to lay hold of what is already yours. You are growing up into it.
Christians are supposed to be set apart by their love for one another and the world, but it’s fair to say that’s not what Christians are known for today
“But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him”
The prodigal son breaks the rules while the elder brother keeps them all (“I never disobeyed your command,” Luke 15:29), but both are running from the Father to get control of their lives.
His very complaint makes it clear that in his own dutiful, obedient way, the older son has also been avoiding his father all of his life.
If only we could see how much God desires our good, then we would never choose against God’s will for our lives.
Only those who believe in his grace will have the power to obey him.
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. Cheap grace means … the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance … grace without discipleship, grace without the cross … Those who try to use grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves
“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.”
The call to be radical can make you exhausted, but the call to be ordinary can make you apathetic.
“Only those who believe obey” … and “only those who obey believe” … If the first half of the proposition stands alone, the believer is exposed to the danger of cheap grace, which is another word for damnation. If the second half stands alone, the believer is exposed to the danger of salvation through works, which is also another word for damnation.… It is all-important that the pastor should be ready with both sides of the proposition: “Only those who obey can believe, and only those who believe can obey.”
Extravagant grace and radical discipleship meet in the person of Jesus himself.
Undiluted grace and uncompromising obedience meet in the person of Jesus. He is always full of both.
As we have emphasized, becoming a Christian means more than believing Christ did certain things for you long ago.
So when we are united to this Jesus, we have full access to his amazing grace that covers us and we have full access to his power that enables us to obey his commands.
