Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

But it didn’t change your life until your eyes were opened to it. 5

If you have ever asked of the Christian life, “Isn’t there more to it than this?” the answer is yes—union with Christ is the “more to it.”

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

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.”

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The mystery of the marriage union between Christ and the soul is what allows sinful people to truly possess Christ’s righteousness and allows Christ to take upon himself our sin, death, and condemnation. 18

For Calvin, the mystery of our spiritual connection to the living, incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and ascended Lord is what it means to be “saved.” 23

Could anything be more helpful to your daily living and devotion to God than to realize this—that the Father sees you and all you do through the lens of your union and fellowship with Christ? 35

Christ marries himself to you, and in a wonderful exchange, you give him all your sins and he gives you all of his righteousness. 21

As Nietzsche said, “If you have your why for your life, you can get by with almost any how.” 3

As with the Pietà, an enemy has entered into our world and savagely attacked human beings, leaving us damaged and defaced. The image of God in us has not been completely lost or erased, but it has been marred and disfigured. Our enemy is not only outside of us. There is also an enemy within that threatens to undo us. George Saunders calls it “built-in confusions … somehow Darwinian.” The Bible refers to it by a simpler name: “sin.”

You are God’s poem, his work of art. There’s no one else he made quite like you. So when he becomes one with you, he still preserves and delights in your unique particularity. As he restores his image in you, as you become more like his Son, you are becoming more and more yourself—more and more the you God dreamed up when he first dreamed you up.

You’ll never want holiness until you are convinced that it’s not meant to be a burden. Rather, in light of our last chapter, this is what God has created you to be and has now re-created you to become. Your destiny is for the image of God to be restored in you. That’s beautiful. And the path toward that destiny is to follow Jesus today and each tomorrow. “His commands are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3 NIV). But how can this be true? How can holiness become not simply an ideal belonging to Jesus but a reality belonging to us? Once again, union with Christ is the answer to our riddle.

You can place this as the purpose over each new day: pursue holiness, not as a bar to live up to, but as an ennobling compliment to live into. Become a human being today.

You may have never thought about this, but Christ’s resurrection and ascension means Jesus’s physical body is alive somewhere at this very moment. 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.

Sometimes a desire to express what is true about the grace of God—that there’s nothing you can do to make God love you more or love you less—leads to the false assumption that there is nothing then left for you to do.

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

For is anything more narcissistic than to hear, “You are so loved by God that if you were the only person in the world, he would have died just for you?” 7 This is a dangerous half truth, and like any half truth, it obscures something critical. You are so loved by God, but God didn’t die just for you: “God so loved the world” (John 3:16), and God so loves the church, “which he bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28 NIV). But when we make the gospel primarily about us as individuals and the benefits it brings us, is it so surprising that the church comes across as an unnecessary add-on, as excess baggage, as an easy target? Is it surprising that a common sentiment today is “Jesus, yes; church, no,” as if you could have one and not the other?

My hope is that, as we recover union with Christ—the depth and the wonder of it, the mystery and beauty of it—we will recover something greater than we could ever understand. For while it is beyond our understanding (it “surpasses knowledge,” Paul says), it is not beyond our possessing.