Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

This is what God has saved you for—communion, relationship, and intimacy with himself.

I was like one of those giant inflatable Gumby-men you see at the used-car lot. My heart would rise and fall depending on how many deals I had closed. When I was successful or applauded, my heart would swell. When I was criticized or failed at something, I would deflate in disappointment.

I had seen enough of Jesus to spoil my enjoyment of the world but not enough to be content with Jesus alone.

How can we connect the grand, high promises of God to the gritty details of our daily lives? How can we get the beautiful truths we hear on Sunday to sustain us on Wednesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m., so we don’t rise and fall like inflatable Gumby-men?

It’s been said, “The longest journey a man will ever make is the journey from his head to his heart.” This book is about that journey and the unparalleled power of our union with Christ to help us along the way.

The greatest treasure of the gospel, greater than any other benefit the gospel brings, is the gift of God himself.

In all his letters, the apostle Paul never once uses the word “Christian.” Rather, his most common descriptor for those who follow Christ is that they are “in Christ.”

To be “in Christ” means that Christ represents his people. Scholars sometimes refer to this under the heading of a “corporate personality,” 3 a leader who represents a people or a group.

Paul actually invented new words to describe this new reality. The phrases “crucified with,” “raised with,” “buried with,” and “seated with” are each a single word in Greek beginning with the prefix syn, meaning “with.” Those words didn’t exist before Paul coined them. But something so unique had happened that there were no words for it!

Faith is how union with Christ becomes operative and powerful in your life. Faith is a God-given gift that allows you to take hold of God’s having taken hold of you. If you are in Christ, this is now the defining truth of who you are. Your life, your story, becomes enfolded by another story—Another’s story. That’s one way to define faith: faith means finding your identity in Christ.

“It is to your advantage … for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Why was it to their advantage? The only thing that could be better than having Jesus with you, beside you, would be having Jesus within you, wherever you are and wherever you go.

It was also how Jesus could promise what might seem impossible, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12 NIV). 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.

But if the Spirit dwells within you, consider what you do have. “Having the Spirit,” Sinclair Ferguson wrote, “is the equivalent, indeed the very mode, of having the incarnate, obedient, crucified, resurrected and exalted Christ indwelling us so that we are united to him as he is united to the Father.” 6

Christ dwelling in us by his Spirit is a guarantee that we can and will change.

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.

I want you to experience the living presence of Christ as integral to your salvation. But your experience is not primary. What is primary, Lewis is saying, is the reality of Christ’s presence, sometimes in spite of our experience.

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.

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.

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!

Imagine a little boy wearing his father’s dress shirt. He is already fully clothed, you could say, but he’s still just a little boy. He’ll have to grow up into this new covering until it fits him. In the same way, we are already completely clothed in Christ and his righteousness, but life in Christ is one of growing up into this new reality until it fits us. You are not striving to attain it. You are striving to lay hold of what is already yours. You are growing up into it.

Wise spiritual counselors give us conflicting advice about the root of the problem and the way to move forward. In the main, there are two dominant voices on offer today—one we will call the way of extravagant grace, “just believe,” and the other we’ll call the way of radical discipleship, “just obey.”

The true self is beloved by God and has done nothing to earn or deserve it. The false self draws its identity from past achievements and the adulation of others.

The two sons represent the two different audiences listening to Jesus’s story: the moral failures gathering around Jesus (“the tax collectors and sinners” of Luke 15:1) and the morally upstanding (“the Pharisees and the scribes” of Luke 15:2), whose very virtue keeps them from seeing how much they too need the grace of God. “So [Jesus] told them [both audiences] this parable” (Luke 15:3) about two different ways of running from God.

As a Lutheran pastor, working in the tradition of the preacher of grace par-excellence Martin Luther, Bonhoeffer had asked, “What happened to all those warnings of Luther’s against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living?”

These writers were some of my heroes and men of deep personal piety. But for my part, I lacked a category to hold these voices together: the gospel of extravagant grace that requires nothing from us and the gospel of radical discipleship that demands everything of us. Which is it: come and rest or come and die?

The call to be radical can make you exhausted, but the call to be ordinary can make you apathetic.

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

because of your union with Christ, these songs of “Extravagant Grace” and “Radical Discipleship” can no more be separated in your life than Christ himself can be torn in two. 22 These two melodies meet in harmony in him in whom they have always met.

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. There’s something we need to do, even if that something is do nothing but believe.

The point of Tolstoy’s story is not “don’t seek Christ’s kingdom with all your heart or you too will be devastated.” For Jesus says in that very sermon, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33). The question is: How can we do that in a way that leads to life instead of in a way that leads to exhaustion and cynicism?

You may not renounce God, but it’s clear that God is not your real god. He’s not the one you reach for when your heart is troubled. Something else is. And this something else is stealing your life from you. Even more maddening, it’s with your permission!

Union with Christ is the song we need to recover and hear today as the heart of the gospel. The song of grace without union with Christ becomes impersonal, a cold calculus that can leave you cynical. The song of discipleship without union with Christ becomes joyless duty, a never-ending hill that can leave you exhausted.

The main idea of this chapter is simple but revolutionary. Union with Christ gives you a completely new self-understanding found outside of yourself in Christ. Union with Christ gives you a new identity. In fact, that’s one way to define the Christian faith: faith is finding your identity in Christ. 4 Against the prevailing mindset of our day—you are what you make of yourself—union with Christ tells you that you can discover your real self only in relation to the One who made you.

Paul is saying union with Christ not only gives you a new identity; it gives you a new mindset, a new grid through which to filter everything that happens to you. For it’s not so much what happens to you that defines you, as how you interpret what happens to you.

David Brooks labels it “the Big Me.” 8 Philosopher Charles Taylor calls it “the culture of authenticity.” 9 Alternately named the iWorld, 10 Expressive Individualism, 11 or the Age of the Selfie, this mindset assumes we each have a true, authentic self hidden within us and the path to human flourishing involves discovering and expressing that true self. We must be free from any external authority or expectations that might constrain who we really are.

First, Choose Your Own Identity’s accent on unlimited freedom often leads to paralysis. Take your career.

Second, and closely related to the first, this mindset leads to greater anxiety.

Third, having more choices actually makes us more discontent.

Fourth, the freedom-enthroning narrative of Choose Your Own Identity ends up robbing us of the very freedom it promises.

Fifth, this mindset affects how we view God. Choose Your Own Identity leads us to treat God as “a convenient, yet distant deity.” 19 We may co-opt God into our plans, but we don’t want him making plans for us.

Scholar Todd Billings points out that union with Christ is strong precisely where our modern secular Western mindset tends to be weak.

First, to our paralysis. Union with Christ gives us permission to rest.

Second, to our anxiety, to that old way of trying to justify our existence by our own work. Union with Christ tells us “You have died” to that way of living.

American Idol was one of the most popular television shows of all time, and for the contestants, one of the most nerve jangling. A single missed note could cost you the competition, but winning could change the course of your life. At the end of each season, when the competition was over and the winner had been crowned, she took up the microphone and sang one more time. But she was no longer singing to win; she was singing because she had won. It was no longer a contest. She had nothing more to prove or earn. Instead, the chosen and honored performer could sing with all her heart, delighting in her gifts for the benefit of others. That’s

Third, to our discontentment and dissatisfaction, one united to Christ can say, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.… In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Phil. 4:11–12).

Fourth, to our longing to be free.

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.

Fifth, to a God who is convenient, yet distant. Union with Christ says God is closer and more intimate than we ever imagined. He’s not a stagehand in the play you are writing and starring in. You are no longer the star of the show. It’s not about you. He displaces you from the center of your life.

If you are in Christ, your life and your story become enfolded by another story, Another’s story. You don’t have to discover or craft, create or achieve, invent or reinvent your own identity. Your identity is found not deep within yourself but outside of yourself. Your self-understanding becomes inseparable from who God says you are in Christ. Who are you? Your identity is no longer a construct of your own preferences and choices, accomplishments or affiliations. You no longer stand alone. You no longer get the credit or the blame, the applause or the jeers.