Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

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

The work of Christ sets you free from sin’s penalty. So rather than turning away from God, you can turn toward Christ precisely when you might be tempted to hide from him. You can boldly approach his throne with confidence because you remember you are completely covered by Christ’s righteousness. Only those who believe can obey.

You can choose instead to draw on Christ’s strength, and you will find that you are strengthened. You can take one step, even in the dark. You can make one new choice. You can hold on for one more minute. Only those who obey can believe.

Many a resolution to read the Bible cover to cover has gotten bogged down and eventually abandoned in the quagmire of Leviticus.

we can best honor the biblical writers by appreciating the one story they were trying to tell. “We forget,” she writes, “that this book was cast upon the waters of history with one very specific, completely essential and desperately needed objective—to tell the epic tale of God’s ongoing quest to ransom his creation.” 2 The Bible is the truest and best of redemption stories.

can all be subsumed under the overarching story of God’s initiative to restore what was lost in Eden.

The Bible is the grand story of God restoring our communion with him. Everything between the opening of Genesis and the end of Revelation is part of God’s plan for how that restoration will take place.

This startling revelation of God’s love—that he did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all—this moment in the fullness of time is itself a means to an even more glorious end: communion with God. All the works of God’s redemption, even creation itself, are but means to this end.

Union with Christ is the “webbing” that holds it all together. Union with Christ is connected to everything else … Every Pauline theme and pastoral concern ultimately coheres with the whole through their common bond—union with Christ.

This means your relationship to Christ is closer, more central, more defining, and more important than any other relationship you have or ever could have—closer than your relationship with your parents, your spouse, your children, even your own body!

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

Our union with Christ, Jesus’s abiding presence in us, is what makes life in the kingdom of God possible for us today, here and now. The union with Christ that John and Paul describe is how the life in the kingdom that Matthew, Mark, and Luke talk about comes to pass.

Take the Sermon on the Mount, for example. The life Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount is impossible on our own. This is kingdom life, and it’s only possible if you are united to the King, which is why, reading the sermon closely, it’s not addressed to all humanity. He addresses this sermon to his disciples.

“Until we are united to Christ, what he has achieved for us helps us no more than an electricity mains supply that passes our house but is not connected to it.”

The church is in desperate need of a way to express the grace of the gospel and the demand of the gospel in a way that enhances both without canceling either.

The letter of James is a litmus test—are you in Christ? If you are, then James becomes encouraging, even beautiful to you. You can persevere under trial (ch. 1), have a living faith (ch. 2), tame your tongue (ch. 3), rest in not knowing what tomorrow will bring (ch. 4), and love the poor (ch. 5), because you are married to Christ. James describes the life that Christ died to enable you to live.

If you are united to Christ, then from him come both grace and demand, which together lead to a life of joy.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. [You hear the grace in this.] If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. [You hear the demand following right after. And then you hear the consequence.] These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

The Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of Man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality.

Jesus] became man that we might become divine.”

We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body—in short, because He deigns to make us one with him.

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, to share in what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us … for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him … To sum up, the Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ effectually unites us to himself.

For Calvin, the mystery of our spiritual connection to the living, incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Lord is what it means to be “saved.”

As a movement concerned with earnest personal experience of God, biblical orthodoxy, and simplicity of worship, the Puritan emphasis on union with Christ for individual piety should make sense to us by this point in our historical tour.

“Being in Christ, and united to him, is the fundamental constitution of a Christian.”

Union with Christ is really the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only in its application but also in its once-for-all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ.

Union with Christ is the fountainhead from which flows the Christian’s every spiritual blessing—repentance and faith, pardon, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification.

True human happiness cannot be found or experienced apart from God’s glory. “Therefore God’s glory and human flourishing are one and the same.”

Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. … The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

The heart of the good news is our union with Christ and our communion with God. It is the arc of the entire biblical narrative and the core truth of the whole Bible’s teaching concerning salvation.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

Union with Christ is an enchanted reality. It tells us that the most important things about our lives cannot be seen or touched with our senses. It tells us that there are extraordinary depths running just below the surface of our lives, which is an overarching reason it doesn’t enjoy a more robust reception today.

However, while in some times and places a culture will collectively urge people to subordinate their personal desires in favor of the family, the group, or the nation, it’s fair to say our particular culture feeds and nourishes our self-centeredness, encouraging us to enthrone ourselves as the sovereign of our own lives. Do your own thing. What was once seen as the deadliest of sins—pride—is now embraced and cherished as essential to human flourishing: embrace yourself, express yourself, promote yourself.

To an age that embraces self-promotion as fervently as our own, union with Christ will come across not only as bizarre and strange but even distasteful and offensive.

Similarly, when Christ unites himself to us, as a bridegroom to a bride, our sense of self must necessarily change. Nothing humbles us, nothing puts us in our place like union with Christ. And because humility is not something we naturally gravitate toward, especially today, it’s not surprising that union with Christ has been pushed to the periphery.

It follows that where the Spirit is not cherished, or is unknown, neither will union with Christ be understood or enjoyed.

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.

As we communicate ideas today, simplicity is “in.” 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.

This loss of mystery reveals itself in our pragmatically driven churches.

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

Union with Christ is strong precisely in those places where we in our secular age tend to be weak. 30 It gives us an ability to speak into the void created by our disenchanted, self-centered world, which has only narrowed our vision and caused us to forget who we are.

We love these stories, he claims, because they are hints and echoes of the one true story we were made to hear: the gospel, the most magical story of all. 31

The peculiar quality of the “joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth … The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.… This story begins and ends in joy.… There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.

For it’s not so much what happens to you that defines you, as how you interpret what happens to you.

Each in the cell of himself Is almost convinced of his freedom.

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.

In Christ, you are significant—he makes you so. In Christ, you are secure—he gathers you to himself and keeps you safe (Isa. 40:11). In Christ, you are accepted. But that acceptance no longer has to be earned or maintained; it is granted by grace and guaranteed in Christ.

That’s the freedom from anxiety the gospel gives. You have already been chosen and crowned in Christ, so now you can do what you do with all your energy, delighting in whatever gifts God has given you for the benefit of serving others.

Union with Christ tells you that Jesus is the center and circumference of authentic human existence. Jesus is the center—we can’t understand ourselves without understanding who he is and what he has done for us. And Jesus is the circumference—he sets the boundaries of what it means to be human. Your real identity, your real self, is waiting to be found in him.

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!