Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

This book will require you to use your imagination because union with Christ is an enchanted reality. And we live in a disenchanted world.

imagination is used to image anything that is real but not visible. It’s not just your imagination; it’s your imagination!

When they tell us to “fix our eyes … on what is unseen” (2 Cor. 4:18 NIV), it is our imagination that must respond.

We may know what God has saved us from, but have we lost sight of what God has saved us for?

Christianity is a life of faith, but it’s a life of faith.

“God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:9).

Eternal life begins in this life when Christ joins his life to yours (John 17:3).

Having the courage to recognize it and admit it is the first step in this gap being closed. You must mind the gap.

The greatest treasure of the gospel, greater than any other benefit the gospel brings, is the gift of God himself. Is it any wonder, then, that twentieth-century writer John Murray concluded, “Nothing is more central or more basic than union with Christ … it is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation.”

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.

When God looks at you, he sees you hidden in Christ. This is freedom. This is confidence. This is good, good news.

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.

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.

Faith fixes your eyes on Christ and rests in him.

It is the perfect Christ who saves us, not our imperfect faith or our imperfect obedience.

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.

“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Phil. 3:12 NIV).

When anxious and distressing feelings arise, you can know you are not alone. You are in Christ:

You can choose instead to draw on Christ’s strength, and you will find that you are strengthened.

Our union with Christ is real, but invisible. We must use “the eyes of [our] hearts” (Eph. 1:18) to look not at what is seen, but what is unseen (2 Cor. 4:18).

You can cling to him and find that he is a complete savior—he frees you from sin’s penalty and power—that is the double grace! And life is not possible without both.

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.

You are not, you cannot be, self-made. Union with Christ tells you that you can only understand who you are in communion with God and others. And that is a wildly countercultural claim.

For it’s not so much what happens to you that defines you, as how you interpret what happens to you. 5 Your mindset is the lens through which you see the world and yourself.

God the Creator clearly delights in our unique particularity. From sunsets to snowflakes, he makes endless variations of beautiful things for the sheer joy of it. He never repeats himself and never runs out of ideas. He is the master artist, an infinite creator, not a factory. We can see from looking around us in the world that his goal is not uniformity.

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

To have as our goal that Christ be formed in us (Gal. 4:19) makes ordinary life exciting,

Holiness is like broccoli for many of us.

Remember, union with Christ means that when God looks at you, he sees your life hidden in Christ’s perfect life and perfect obedience. It is finished. Thank God!

Not only is Jesus our high priest; he is our sympathetic high priest.

“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).

“If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3).

That means justice and care for the poor, the orphan, and the widow are always on God’s mind because Jesus is always in his presence.

Jesus reminds us, “the wind blows where it wishes” (John 3:8).

Nevertheless, we must always keep pressing on to know him (Hos. 6:3).

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).

Life with God is not like a motorboat, where we are in control of the power and direction. But neither is it like a raft, where we just sit back and are carried along. It’s like sailing. While we can’t control the most important thing—the wind that makes us move—that doesn’t mean there is nothing left for us to do. We have to draw the sail to catch the wind. We must labor to be brought near.

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.

There is nothing more liberating or life giving than knowing that God has pronounced you innocent—legally innocent—now that you are united to Jesus Christ.

This is how you keep in step with God’s Spirit: faith and repentance.

The more you obey God, the more you will believe God.

And the more you believe God, the more you will want to obey him.

God relates to me by his grace, not by my performance.

Peterson says meditating on God’s Word is like what a dog does with a bone. 4 By prayer and through the Holy Spirit, you gnaw and chew on God’s Word until it metabolizes and gets into your bloodstream. You take it in, and you expect it to nourish you.

Union with Christ is how the Bible comes alive.

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.”

The real reward of prayer is communion with God, made possible by our union with Christ (Heb. 4:16).

The Sabbath is a gift God gives his people to commune with him in weekly worship together,