Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

Does a new wife keep a copy of her marriage license on her bedside and take it up and read it over every morning and evening? It’s true, it’s true, I’m legally married. Wow. No, what turns a legal truth into a living one is living in that new relationship. It’s a product of living out of your new identity. How do we know we are doing that? How do we know we are growing in our new identity in union with Christ? Here are two tests and one exercise.

Test 1: Radically Threatening The first test by which you can determine whether the radical nature of union with Christ is sinking in is to ask this: Are you threatened by it?

Before Orphan Annie could allow herself to be adopted by Daddy Warbucks, she had to first give up hope of her parents coming back for her.

Test 2: Radically Comforting Why would you ever choose something so traumatic? Because otherwise you’ll never be able to escape from what journalist Malcolm Muggeridge calls “the tiny dark dungeon of the ego.” 29 Only another, coming in from outside of our lives, can set us free from our obsessive self-concern.

An Exercise: Reframe the Conversation You can exercise your new identity as one who is united to Christ by reframing the conversation inside your head. The constant voice that narrates your life, that begins speaking to your soul when you wake up each morning, naturally talks in terms of “I”—What do I want to do? What does this mean for me? … I think I need to … I … I … I … But you can practice the truth that Christ has married his life to yours by including him as your constant conversation partner. What should we do? What are you trying to teach me?

These L’Arche communities spread throughout the world, and it was to one in Toronto called Daybreak that Henri Nouwen came in 1986.

He finally found the fulfillment he craved when he came to the end of placing any confidence in himself.

Do you see, then, how amazing, even revolutionary, the Bible sounded to those who heard it in this context? To those for whom the king, and only the king, was the “image of god,” to hear Genesis 1:27 say of all men, and women, “In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” must have been astounding. They would hear the Bible saying that every one of you is created to be royalty, walking images of the true God, all over the earth. You. Me. 8

Perhaps this is why we yearn to be significant, for someone who matters to say to us, “You are so special.” This isn’t mere sentimentality. It reaches down into the roots of what we were made for.

we can agree something is amiss. George Saunders, a contemporary writer, recently gave a commencement speech that went viral. He asked the graduates of Syracuse University what he called “the million dollar question … What’s our problem?” Saunders said,

12

Love is the seed in you of every virtue And of all acts deserving punishment. 14

It may not seem like much printed on this page, but those lines changed my life. Everything we do, Dante is saying, the good things or the bad things, every virtue or vice, we do for love. We are lovers. We are creatures of desire. It’s simply a question of where that desire is directed. Dante was the one who showed me that sin was not the breaking of rules so much as my misdirected love. My desire was not the problem, but I desired the wrong things. For Dante, sin is loving the wrong things, or to be more precise, loving the right things in the wrong way. 15

Now here is a definition of sin that is old yet thoroughly modern (and thoroughly biblical). Jesus says he is “the true vine” (John 15:1), implying that there are other vines from which we will strive to take life and sustenance. Sin is abiding in something other than Jesus to give us significance and joy. In terms of our last chapter, sin is constructing an identity around anyt...

Jesus not only shows us who God is; he shows us who we, as human beings, are meant to be. Jesus is the perfect image of God, not defaced by sin.

Christ now sets you free to be your true self: the self you are by grace, not the self you are by nature.

“Where am I headed?” You no longer have to rack your brain or wait for an answer to fall from heaven. You never need to feel aimless again. Jesus came from heaven in order that the image of God might be restored in you.

This is the destiny God sets for each one of us—to more and more discover who you truly are as you more and more give yourself over to him. This is identity (you are created uniquely by God) and destiny (to have the image of God restored in you) and what to do along the way (walk in the good works he prepared beforehand) all in one.

Boasting in Your Weaknesses When you know that your destiny is to have the image of God uniquely restored in you, and you hear Jesus say, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), it ceases to sound like a threat and becomes instead a doorway to “I can do all things through [Christ] who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13).

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.

Rejoicing in Your Suffering Everything that happens to us, good and bad, and everything we strive for, can now be interpreted through this new prism—the image of God being restored in you.

Reassessing Your Wins How do you measure success? How do you know when you “win”? With this new horizon, Paul doesn’t just say that his past accomplishments are as nothing compared to “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:8). He says more than this: “Whatever were gains to me I now consider loss” (v. 7 NIV). It wasn’t just that those former wins don’t compare; it’s that he considers them losses because they distracted him and kept him away from his true glory and highest good: knowing Christ.

Your win is learning how to love. And your greatest losses are your failures to love.

To be holy means to be set apart for God’s purposes, which is why in the Old Testament inanimate objects, such as bells or pots, are sometimes referred to as “holy” (Zech. 14:20–21)—not because the pots or bells were morally pure, but because they were wholly consecrated to God’s use. Set apart for God.

When used in reference to human beings, holiness means to be set apart to reflect God’s character in all of our ways—his goodness and love, his kindness and compassion, his concern for justice and the poor.

assume: if God’s life has indeed come into our lives, then our lives will necessarily reflect the light of God’s life.

That’s what it means for us to live a holy life—to see the beauty of Jesus and follow after him.

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

In Christ, “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” (6:11). In this sense, holiness is not something we achieve; it is something we receive by faith in total.

Union with Christ Is the Engine of Holiness

God said to them, “I’ve set you apart; now live like it. I’ve made you holy; now be holy. I’ve redeemed you and set you free; now go live as free people, not as slaves. It’s done.

The presence and power of Jesus now dwells within you by his Spirit. That’s why he’s called the Holy Spirit, because he is none other than the presence and power of the obedient Christ himself.

“Many acknowledge that we are justified by the righteousness of Christ, but seem to think, at least they act as if, they must be sanctified by a holiness they themselves have acquired.” 12 This has been called “the key error of the Christian life,” 13 grounding our confidence before God and others on the sinking sand of our shifting performance.

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.

Becoming holy (sanctification) is by faith alone. Christ is the root and only source of our holiness.

How can you remember Dad’s got me? What reminds you that he is right there with you? That his affection for you does not change when you “fall off your bike”—if anything, it grows warmer as he rushes to you in compassion? Well, why did I want Jack to learn how to ride his bike? Not only so he can one day deliver newspapers and start paying rent, but also so he can know the joy of feeling the wind in his hair and so we can ride our bikes together. His little legs can’t keep up with me when we walk or run, but on wheels my son and I can experience more life together and enjoy each other’s company. We can ride to the ocean. God wants us to grow in holiness, not as some sort of test or punishment, not even just as preparation for the future, but because he wants us to enjoy life with him more. The more we grow in holiness, the more we can enjoy his presence.

Do you see? These commands are not burdens; they are the path to life. They are the means God has provided us to abide in his love, which is why Jesus says in John 15:10, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”

There are no happy disobedient Christians. If you are content in running from God’s will for you, you have reason to doubt that Christ’s life is in you.

Because he is God, Jesus is spiritually present everywhere (Matt. 28:20). But because he is man, Jesus is physically present right now in heaven (1 Pet. 3:22). His risen body is in heaven at the right hand of God.

That’s what makes heaven, heaven—the immediate perceptible presence of God. Yes, God is everywhere (Ps. 139:7–12), but heaven is a different dimension of God’s creation, totally pervaded by God’s glory (Acts 7:55). 5 Heaven is the place where God’s

nothing is more needed to lift us out of ourselves than to know we are connected to the heavenly Christ.

It may not look like Christ is ruling the universe. Today it might look like just a crack of light under a door. But the New Testament writers were confident because they knew the light had dawned (Rom. 13:12) and that one day the door will open, and that light, the Sun of Glory, will flood the whole room.

He too offered a sacrifice—not the blood of an animal, but his own. Jesus became both sacrificing priest and sacrificial lamb.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in.… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist. 14

In the incarnation, God took humanity into his being forever. And when he ascended to heaven, Jesus imported flesh and blood for the first time into those holy precincts. He paved the way for us so that when we arrive later, no one will be shocked that the likes of us were invited to this party.

But what union with Christ holds together—and why it gives us unrivaled hope on the journey—is that it tells us that God is for you and with you. He is with you and he is for you.

As your enthroned king, he gives you peace, knowing that he is in full control. As your high priest, he gives you the security that you always stand safe. As your sympathetic high priest, he gives you comfort that somebody understands. As your willing advocate, he gives you confidence, even boldness, before God. As your trailblazer, he gives you assurance that you’ll make it. And along the way, he gives you hope that behind every sickness there will be healing and that every longing for a better world will be repaid. All this because Jesus is in heaven—at the right hand of God.

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” 1 The Bible calls us to rest in Christ (Matt. 11:28) and, at the same time, to “strive to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11). An old Oxford preacher captured

We don’t often hear the complexity today of “labor to be brought near,” but you’ll find it assumed historically by the most stalwart defenders of grace. John Calvin said, “Let us therefore labor more to feel Christ living in us.” 3 John Owen added, “Labor, therefore, to fill your hearts with the cross of Christ.” 4 And Jonathan Edwards exhorted, “We should labour to be continually growing in divine love.” 5

Not only do the voices of history convey this shared responsibility in our spiritual progress, but Jesus describes it too. His word for this dynamic is “abide,” which even in English captures the sense. On the one hand, the word suggests resting and staying, like a child leaning into his mother’s embrace. It’s a posture of reliance for care and even survival, like branches depend on a vine, which is exactly the context in which Jesus uses the word. “Abide in me … As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me” (John 15:4). This is a relationship of utter dependency. As Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (v. 5). On the other hand, abiding is an action. Here is something you must choose to do. Jesus commands us, “Abide in me.” He commands us to rest in him. Like a dog commanded to stay, we must exert ourselves not to become distracted or move away from our Master. And Jesus makes it clear that the amount of fruit that comes out of our lives will be a direct result of how much (John 15:5) or how little (v. 6) we heed his commandments. In fact, he goes on to say, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love” (v. 10).