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One of the most common metaphors for life with God in the Bible is not sailing, but walking (e.g., Eph. 5:15; Col. 2:6). It seems rather simple, even trite, after the grand high call to know Christ. After all, nothing is more pedestrian than walking. Even a toddler can do it; but it makes an instructive point. Life lived in communion with God is not meant to be rare or extraordinary. It’s not the reward of some secret knowledge. The Bible doesn’t say, “Grasp the secret of the Spirit”; it says, “Keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25). Walking. Keep in step.
What do we hope for? Isn’t it this? We hope that God really is as great and good as he says he is. Or as King David says in Psalm 56:9, “This I know, that God is for me.” Being able to say, come what may, this I know, that God is for me—this is the life of faith. How can we have a
Rather, repentance is turning back to God in all of life. If sin is running from God to get control of our lives, then repentance is turning back to God and yielding control to him.
Every morning I wake up and find my heart has reverted to its default position: I need to prove myself today, handle things, make a name for myself. Part of “preparing my mind for action” is choosing instead to reorient myself toward God and his mercies, which are new every morning; to remember God relates to me by his grace, not by my performance. That is, I must start each day with my union with Christ. I must breathe in faith—I am in Christ and Christ is in me. God is good, God is in charge, and God loves me. Above all, what will make this day a good day will be abiding in Christ today,
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Do you approach the Bible with the expectation that the same Spirit who inspired these words once, long ago, is the same Spirit who is in you now, speaking to you and illuminating these words for you?
Why should we have to keep asking God for what he already knows we need? Perhaps the question is, do we know what we need?
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.” 7 Because God is better than anything we could be asking for, better even than life itself (Ps. 63:3–4), the call to persist in prayer is not for God’s sake, but for ours—to train and purify our desires. Prayer is integral to abiding because the real point of prayer is not something but someone. 8
As Søren Kierkegaard put it, “This is our comfort because God answers every prayer, for either he gives what we pray for or something far better.” 9
How can we abide in Christ if we don’t abide in what the Bible calls “the body of Christ” (see 1 Cor.
When the horizon of communion with God is lost, you can be doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. You can be drawing the sail routinely and still be stuck. If you don’t keep this great end before you, then you are bound to get discouraged and grow weary in these practices.
The doldrums are an important, even necessary, part of learning to abide. They protect us from the dangerous temptation of enthroning our experience of Christ over the real Christ. See, if you always got a high, or a spiritual surge, every time you drew the sail, it would be easy to shift into pursuing your own immediate gratification instead of pursuing Christ. It might become less about the horizon and more about another spiritual jolt. In the name of seeking God, you’d be using God to help you maintain a sense of control over your own life.
Waiting on God is critical to knowing God (Ps. 130:5–6) because it teaches us that we are not God.
To be clear, the love of God for us does not change, but our experience of his love does. Jesus says, “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him” (John 14:21). Jesus is saying that the way we respond to God will affect our experience of him. If we trust God and obey him, then Jesus promises he will “manifest” himself to us. He will make himself more apparent. Jesus couldn’t be clearer that we will know God better by obeying him more.
Now why is this distinction between union and communion so important for us? Because we naturally fall into the trap of assessing the security of our union (Does God really love me?) on the strength of our communion (How am I feeling? How am I doing?).
Union Is the Secret to Communion
And to gather together the themes of the four basic questions we addressed in part 3: when you know that you are not your own (chapter 7); when you know that Christ sets the horizon for your life (chapter 8); when you know that pursuing him gives purpose to each new day, not in fear of what you lack, but in the freedom of what you already have (chapter 9); when you know that Christ not only sets the horizon and charts the path but is himself in the boat with you (chapter 10); and when you know that your heart is not the compass he sails by but rather his own constantly faithful heart, then the
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Do you want to know Christ’s power? The power of his resurrection is the power that overcame death. Who wouldn’t want that power for their lives? And yet, we typically use power to make ourselves safe and comfortable. Christ’s is a decidedly different kind of power. Paul says that the power of Christ is inseparable from participation in his sufferings, that the way to know Christ is the way of becoming like him in his death. Do you really want to know this Christ?
Christ Is in You If we are united to Christ, we are united to “a man of sorrows, … acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3).
Paul didn’t just resolve to know Christ. He resolved to know “Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Is this the Christ you know? How is this helpful? Why is this
Moreover, knowing how much Christ suffered while he was sinless shows us that a life of trust and obedience, a life of striving to please God, does not exempt us or release us from a life of pain and suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? The Bible doesn’t give us an airtight answer to this. Instead, it gives us a perfect person to show us that no life, not even the best one, is exempt from pain and suffering.
But suffering also makes the art of abiding (believe and repent, again and again) and the ordinary means of abiding (prayer, meditation, worship, and community) as needful and essential to us as medicine is to someone who is ill. Suffering, like an illness, teaches us how much we need our medicine each day to become and remain healthy.
It’s Not Your Party, but You’re Invited We don’t usher in or build up the kingdom of God; we witness to it, with the cross before us as both our message and our means. It’s not our party. We are not the guests of honor. But we are invited to participate in what Christ has done and what Christ is doing. And we do so in the humble confidence that the kingdom of God “is not,” as one missionary statesman puts it, “a candle we kindle and carry, shielding its flame from the wind. It is the light that already shines on our radiant faces, turned toward that dawning glory that is already lighting up
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This means that all the events of our lives—from before our birth to beyond our death—find their meaning and coherence only as they are related to Christ. Every fact of our lives is to be interpreted in light of our union with Christ. Every trial, every suffering, every gift, and every blessing—everything that happens to us takes place within this canvas.
How many times have you read a story of someone who endured some terrible suffering and, years later, said, “Though I never would have chosen this, I wouldn’t trade it now for anything, because of what it has turned into in my life”? If that is the perspective that a few years or decades can give, imagine pulling back your perspective to eternity.
Union with Christ shows us truth is not an abstract idea to be understood. Truth is a Person to whom we are united and in whom our lives are rooted and grounded in love.
