Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

“The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination, so that we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.”

It is revealing that the writers of Scripture, even Jesus himself, resort to word pictures, similes, and metaphors to capture the mystery of union with Christ. The number of metaphors employed tells us that this is important; the variety of metaphors tells us that it is far reaching. But the fact that similes and metaphors—the language of poetry—must be used at all tells us 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.

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. If you are united to Christ, you are a citizen of heaven (Phil. 3:20). Present tense. You have “every spiritual blessing” (Eph. 1:3). You participate in heavenly realities even as you walk around with both feet on the ground. Today we do this by faith in what is unseen. It requires our imagination. But one day it will be by sight, when we see him face to face (1 Cor. 13:12).

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

John Newton was a pastor in Olney, England, in the eighteenth century, and he wrote what is probably the most famous hymn of all time, “Amazing Grace.” Its theme of redemption is one Newton knew quite well. As a young man, he was a sailor, and even among this rough bunch he had earned renown, in one captain’s words, as the most profane man he had ever met. After deserting the Royal Navy, Newton got into the slave trade. During a violent storm at sea in 1748, Newton cried out to God, and not for the first time found religion. But this time something real had happened in his heart, and Newton’s life began to change. He stopped drinking and gambling, and began to pray and read the Bible. Yet he continued in the slave trade for several more years. 2

it was a long journey between “now I see” and seeing clearly.

It wasn’t until 1788, forty years after God’s grace found a wretch like him, that Newton would write, “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.” 3 There were forty years between his conversion and his conviction regarding the slave trade, forty years for the gospel to do its deep work in his heart. The grace was amazing that first day, but it took years to take root and blossom. And this for the man whose name is synonymous with amazing grace. Forty years—that’s quite a gap.

It’s been said, “The longest journey a man will ever make is the journey from his head to his heart.”

I’ll never forget the first sermon I ever preached. As I stood at the door afterward, greeting people on their way out, one older man patted me on the shoulder as if I were a young Cub Scout and said, “Well, that was a nice sermon. Now, back to the real world.”

Ernest Hemingway ended his novel The Sun Also Rises with the line “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

“Our only health is the disease,” wrote T. S. Eliot in one of his poems, “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.”

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

“How few of [us],” Owen wrote, “are experimentally acquainted with this privilege of holding immediate communion with the Father in love.” 18 We may pray to Our Father, Owen is saying in seventeenth-century language, but so few of us actually experience loving communion with him.

John Owen was also a pastor, and when he wrote “how few of us,” he was including himself. Elsewhere he wrote, “I myself preached Christ some years, when I had but very little, if any, experimental acquaintance with access to God through Christ; until the Lord was pleased to visit me with sore affliction.” 19

John Calvin wrote: For my own part, I am overwhelmed by the depth of this mystery, and am not ashamed to join Paul in acknowledging at once my ignorance and my admiration … whatever is supernatural is clearly beyond our own comprehension. Let us therefore labor more to feel Christ living in us, than to discover the nature of that intercourse.

I have a friend who used to be Mickey Mouse. She was the person inside the costume at Disneyland. Reflecting on her time “in Mickey,” she said, “Growing up, I thrived on behavior modification. I thought: If I’m good, I will be loved. If I’m bad, I will be rejected. I learned to wear a mask—not to show what was really going on. My core beliefs were that I was not worthy, accepted, or loved, so I would clamor and manufacture ways to elicit the positive responses I wanted from people. When I put on Mickey’s costume, I got that positive response times a hundred.” She felt safe and loved, covered in Mickey’s “righteousness.” But she also gained a new sense of what it means to be in Christ. She recalled praying, “Lord, is this what it’s like to have masses of people run towards you with joy, excitement, and eagerness?”

Illustration!

To be found in Christ means you don’t have to prove yourself anymore. Your frantic attempts to find or craft an acceptable identity, or your tireless work to manage your own reputation—these are over and done. You can rest. In Christ. You don’t have to be intimidated by anyone, ever. Who are you? You are in Christ! And you no longer need to fear the judgment of God (1 John 4:18). When God looks at you, he sees you hidden in Christ. This is freedom. This is confidence. This is good, good news.

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.

“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.”

With that in mind, consider two superheroes, Batman and Spider-Man. Batman is a rich and strong man with lots of cool gadgets. His superpowers stem from his external possessions. Spider-Man has a few accessories as well, but he is a superhero because of the spider powers he obtained when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. His nature has been changed. He now has a new power accessible to him, within him. 9 Christ in you makes you more like Spider-Man than Batman. Something alien to you, from outside of you, has entered into you and changed your nature. You now have power that you did not have before. The trouble with this analogy is that Spider-Man became something more than human, while we instead are being restored to our full humanity. We are becoming more like Christ.

And the reality will always be greater than our experience or understanding of it. C. S. Lewis said it well (of course): The presence of God is not the same as the sense of the presence of God. The latter may be due to imagination; the former may be attended with no “sensible consolation” … The act which engenders a child ought to be, and usually is attended by pleasure. But it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure there may be sterility: where there is no pleasure the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super-added gift for which we give thanks when it comes. 10

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.

It is not the quality or degree of our faith that matters as much as our being united to the object of our faith,

Now, objectively, they were no more married on the last day of their life together than on their wedding day, seventy years before. When the minister first pronounced them “man and wife,” they were fully and completely married. Legally, they became a new entity, a married couple. They shared a family name. Their most significant possessions were no longer “his” or “hers,” but “ours.” They began to be “one.” 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.

that you … may have strength to comprehend … and to know the love of Christ

and what are they about? Union with Christ!

So I’ll conclude this chapter with my favorite image for union with Christ. It’s from Ephesians 4, where Paul says our union with Christ is a reality we grow up into. We are to grow up “to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children … We are to grow up in every way into [Christ]” (vv. 13–15). The metaphor makes clear that we are already in Christ, definitively and objectively. And now, we are to grow up into him, experientially and subjectively. 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.

The famed novelist Leo Tolstoy says that what really propels people to change, more than our mental resolution (I need to change) is a firm conviction that our lives can’t go on as they have before (I must change or I will die). And yet this man who wrote so beautifully about the development of his characters and the possibility of change came face to face in his own life with a soul-wrenching collision, one in which the determined optimism of “I can change” collided with, and finally yielded to, the defeated resignation of his inability to do so. Tolstoy, remembered today as one of the world’s greatest writers, spent his last year wracked in inner turmoil, torn between his high ideals and the harsh realities of his own home life. 1 Learning more about his personal struggles, I appreciate Tolstoy’s novels and stories even more, because he was wrestling so intensely with something deeply human: all you want to do is change, but you don’t know how to make that happen. It’s easy enough to change your circumstances, but the question often rumbling underneath is, But do people really change? Can I? How?

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.” Not that anyone wants to pit these voices against each other, but we often can’t help but hear them as two different songs playing in our heads. Imagine each of these songs with its own volume knob. As we turn up the volume on one, we often instinctively turn down the volume on the other. Or, if we try to hear them both simultaneously, we may think we have to listen to each at half-volume. We seek some balance and wonder how to hold these melodies together in harmony. This isn’t an academic question. It has everything to do with how we live, how we pray, what we think of when we think about God, and therefore how (and how often) we approach him.

We are all embraced as we are, not as we should be. And everything we have to say about following God begins and ends in that embrace. It’s all of grace.

In the Garden of Eden, this was what the serpent called into question—the goodness of God (Gen. 3:4–6). And that question remains today underneath every temptation we face: Do you believe the Lord intends good for you? If only we could see how much God desires our good, then we would never choose against God’s will for our lives.

At the same time, Jesus himself says to us, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father” (Matt. 7:21).

The lever of “just believe the gospel more” wasn’t working. I couldn’t make the grace I preached about drip down from my head into my heart. I knew the benefits of the gospel, but did I know the Benefactor? I knew the arithmetic of grace, but I wondered if I knew the Author of it.

“It is now understood to be part of the good news,” he laments, “that one does not have to be a life student of Jesus in order to be a Christian.” 16

Only those who obey will have the power to believe.

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.

Several years into my ministry, I read something else Bonhoeffer had written. Though I had read these words before, this time they jumped off the page at me: “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.” 20

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

To illustrate this double grace, Calvin uses a picture from nature—the light and heat of the sun: Christ, our righteousness, is the sun. Justification, its light; sanctification, its heat. The sun is at once the sole source of both such that its light and heat are inseparable. At the same time, only light illuminates and only heat warms, not the reverse. Both are always present, without the one becoming the other. 24

Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount particularly moved Tolstoy. Yet, by any measure, Tolstoy couldn’t live out the demands of Christ. As his wife complained: There is so little genuine warmth about him; his kindness does not come from his heart, but merely from his principles. His biographies will tell of how he helped the laborers to carry buckets of water, but no one will ever know that he never gave his wife a rest and never—in all these thirty-two years—gave his child a drink of water or spent five minutes by his bedside to give me a chance to rest a little from all my labors. 26

Tolstoy himself was deeply troubled over his inability to live up to the Sermon on the Mount. He wrote in a letter to a friend: It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them, and I am ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I was unable to. 27 Tolstoy took the demands of Jesus seriously. When he read the Sermon on the Mount, he didn’t blithely say, “I love the Sermon on the Mount” (like some might say today) as if it were just some impossibly beautiful ideal. Tolstoy took Jesus at his word—“Love your enemy,” “Pray for those who persecute you,” “Do not repay evil for evil”—he heard these with the seriousness they deserve and faced the gap in his own life with ruthless honesty. He didn’t use the grace of Christ as an excuse not to follow him.

You are in Christ: When you feel defeated and ensnared, like you are never going to get over this particular sin, habit, or hang-up; when your enemy accuses you, and your heart tells you to retreat in shame, you can rehearse and remember, “I am in Christ. I am one for whom he died.” 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.

Psalm51

he frees you from sin’s penalty and power—that

Where are you? That may be the best three-word summary of the Bible in the Bible. The whole rest of the book is the unfolding narrative of God’s relentless pursuit to restore humanity, now banished from God’s presence by the presence of our sin, to God’s original intent—unbroken, unhindered communion with him and with one another and with all creation.

So, what is the Bible all about? 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. God’s purposes have never changed. His original intent is his final intent: that the people of God might dwell in the place of God, enjoying the presence of God—this is the arc of the whole biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation.

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. Communion with God—this is what the whole Bible is about!

You are not at the center of this narrative—Jesus is. It’s his party. He is the guest of honor. But because of him, you are invited. You are invited into the grandest party and the greatest community there could ever be: the life of God. You have been given access! Not eventually. Not one day. Now.

Truth is not an abstract idea we ascribe to; truth is a living person we are connected to (John 14:6).

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.

Union with Christ is what makes salvation a powerful, living reality for us. As one writer sums it up, “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.” 15