Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

Salvation is not mostly a matter of relocation; it is a matter of transformation. It does not consist primarily of ending up in the right place, but being made into the right person.

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

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

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. Your life, your story, becomes enfolded by another story—Another’s story. That’s one way to define faith: faith means finding your identity in Christ.

Christ dwelling in us by his Spirit is a guarantee that we can and will change.

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.

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.

Only those who believe in his grace will have the power to obey him.

Only those who obey will have the power to believe.

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

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

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.

Her name was Felicitas; she was a Carthaginian; she lay in prison; there she bore a child. In her pain she screamed. The jailers asked her how, if she shrieked at that, she expected to endure death by the beasts. She said: “Now I suffer what I suffer; then another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him.” 11 This sense of another in me, says Williams, “in a sentence defined the Faith.” 12 And so from the pens of the theologians to the cries of the martyrs, we can see that union with the indwelling Christ was the sum and substance of the gospel in the early church.

Owen’s great burden and emphasis in helping us to understand what it means to be a Christian is to say: Through the work of the Spirit, the heavenly Father gives you to Jesus and gives Jesus to you. You have Him. Everything you can ever lack is found in Him; all you will ever need is given to you in Him … For the Father has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”

By looking at the change in responses over time, a recent study shows a 30 percent increase in narcissism over the last thirty years. Even more striking, in the 1950s, 12 percent of teens agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” In the 1980s, just thirty years later, 80 percent of teens agreed with that same statement. 15 By our own reckoning, we live in an increasingly self-centered world.

Perhaps, then, another reason it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to embrace union with Christ is because it displaces us from the center of our own lives, where we naturally love to be. It tells us that the most important part of our identity comes from outside ourselves and that, therefore, our posture needs to be one of dependence and vulnerability, of waiting and trust. To an age that embraces self-promotion as fervently as our own, union with Christ will come across not only as bizarre and strange but even distasteful and offensive.

J. I. Packer compares the Holy Spirit to a floodlight in front of a house. The floodlight exists not to draw attention to itself but to illuminate the house. In the same way, the Holy Spirit’s primary work is to shine light on Jesus and glorify God the Father. 18 This is why Dale Bruner calls him “the shy member of the trinity.” 19 But when this primary focus is lost, union with Christ will be lost as well.

This loss of mystery reveals itself in our pragmatically driven churches. See our tendency to want every sermon to “make it practical,” to give us action steps or things to do. See our prayer lives, too often narrowed to to-do lists for God. See the rise of church shopping, church hopping, worship wars, and other evidences of the language of commerce and ownership invading our spiritual lives.

Union with Christ says that Christ is not simply at the center of our lives; he is at the center of all creation and holds all things together, visible and invisible (Col. 1:16). He is “before all things” (v. 17), the creator of all things (John 1:3), the sustainer of all things (Heb. 1:3), and the one in whom all history finds its purpose (Eph. 1:10). This is the Christ to whom we are united!

As Augustine urges, “We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.” 28 We rarely hear language like this in churches today. But where mystery is explained away rather than embraced, where heavenly participation is clarified (“Now I’m not saying …”) rather than celebrated, union with Christ will not be widely known or enjoyed. It will remain “the most important doctrine you’ve never heard of,” 29 and we will be much poorer for it.

Identity—Who am I? Destiny—Where am I headed? Purpose—What should I be doing? Hope—What can I hope for along the way?

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.

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. Your identity, therefore, is formed by your mindset. And you can change your mindset, says Stanford social scientist Carol Dweck. 6 But again, why would you want to? For you to want the new mindset Christ offers and the new identity it confers, you have to see it in sharp contrast, even collision, with the mindset you’ve previously been living under. You have to see it as a more attractive, more compelling option.

Choose Your Own Identity’s accent on unlimited freedom often leads to paralysis. Take your career. No one wants to go back to the days of “My daddy was a farmer, so I must be a farmer.” But when you can do anything, and it’s up to you to choose, then that long list of possibilities, coupled with the significance of your choice, can be paralyzing. The weight of the possible is heavy indeed.

Take the film Frozen again for a moment (yes, I’ve seen it a few times). The irony of Princess Elsa’s chart-topping song “Let It Go” is that she is singing about her choice to exercise her power to be free, while (please notice) she is locking herself inside an ice prison of her own making! She sings, “I’m free!” while ensuring that she won’t be.

In Christ, you are accepted. But that acceptance no longer has to be earned or maintained; it is granted by grace and guaranteed in Christ. This doesn’t mean you stop working, but it does mean you now work in a totally new way. You no longer work for approval; you work from approval.

Barry Schwartz concludes his TED talk on the paradox of choice with the image of a fish in a fishbowl, and he asks: How free is that fish? Yes, of course the fish is confined, but to shatter the fishbowl, to remove all constraints, would not improve the fish’s situation. In fact, it would destroy him. Schwartz says, “The absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, for disaster.” And then ends flatly, “Thank you very much.”

The Bible uses marriage and adoption to describe how your union with Christ changes your identity. Both of these metaphors include a legal aspect and a relational one.

In his groundbreaking book, The Liberating Image, Richard Middleton shows that the term “image of god” was a familiar one in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. But the phrase had a specific meaning: the king was the “image of God” and no one else. The king was thought to be god’s representative on earth. So if you wanted to honor god, or the gods, you had better honor the king, the “image of god.” 6 Moreover, if a king reigned over larger regions than he could visit regularly, he would erect statues, images of himself, to represent his rule and reign to his subjects who could not see him in person. So in the ancient world, when a person heard the phrase “image of god,” that’s what came to mind—the king and his statues spread throughout his empire. 7 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

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.

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

But our self is not obliterated by our union with Christ; our self is fully realized. 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.

Instead of feeling shame, you can come to boast in all the things that remind you of how far you fall short. “The pain of having arrived at the utter end of any confidence in myself had brought me into the heaven of God’s love and care,” says writer Leanne Payne. 24 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.

Far from being optional, holiness is expected, even necessary for our salvation. “Without holiness no one will see the Lord,” the book of Hebrews warns (12:14 NIV). This is not a reference to the holiness of Christ being credited to us from outside of us by faith (which Hebrews does talk about elsewhere). This verse is talking about our personal holiness and what the biblical writers with one voice assume: if God’s life has indeed come into our lives, then our lives will necessarily reflect the light of God’s life. Martin Luther and John Calvin, who both emphasized the necessity of “faith alone” for salvation, also both made it clear that faith never exists “alone” in the life of a believer. “We are saved by faith alone, but saving faith is never alone.”

You’ll never want holiness until you are convinced that it’s not meant to be a burden.

When it comes to a life of holiness, our anchor is being united to Christ and the holiness Christ has already achieved for us. Just as an anchor gives a ship confidence that it will not float away or be overturned, so our union with Christ gives us confidence that our holiness does not fall with our failures or rise with our successes. It’s not up to you to keep it up.

But union with Christ is not only the anchor; it is also the engine of our holiness. The gift of holiness in Christ doesn’t make the pursuit of it unnecessary. We are to be holy as God is holy (Lev. 11:44). That’s a command. We are to “grow in … grace and knowledge” (2 Pet. 3:18); we are to “grow up in every way into him” (Eph. 4:15). We are to be “transformed by the renewal of [our] mind” (Rom. 12:2).

“Jesus is a complete Saviour. He does not merely take away the guilt of a believer’s sin, he does more—he breaks its power.”

“I wish God would put your heart in some of my players’ bodies.” And that’s exactly what God has done for us. He’s taken the heart of Christ and placed it in all his players. Do you see what power we have?

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.

Jerry Bridges provides a summary: No one can attain any degree of holiness without God working in his life, but just as surely no one will attain it without effort on his own part. God has made it possible for us to walk in holiness. But He has given to us the responsibility of doing the walking.

One of the reasons why holiness is so scary or unattractive for us is that we see it as a bar we can never reach or yet another thing we’ve failed to do.

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. He wants us not simply to press on but to soar. He wants holiness for us, for our joy. Now my child can ride with me. When you fall, God rushes to you in love and cares for you. But because he loves you, he doesn’t want you to keep falling.

He reminds them of their identity in Christ and then calls them to holiness. “That’s not who you are,” he’s saying in effect, “and that’s not how you need to live any longer.” 16 As opposed to simply saying, “Don’t do that,” when you battle temptation, instead call to mind your union with Christ. Use the presence of Christ to stand firm against anything that threatens you.

In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, MIT professor Sherry Turkle observes: We are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face.… As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude.… Teenagers would rather text than talk. Adults, too.… We build a following on Facebook … [but] wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae … Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone.

C. S. Lewis shows us the folly of this assumption: 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

We are not alone. He knows our frame because he assumed it. He knows we are dust because he became it. And now dust sits on the throne of the universe. Our savior is not an idea. He is a real person, able to sympathize with real people.

Labor to Be Brought Near

But if we passively wait for an experience of Christ’s presence to fall afresh on us each morning and it doesn’t, or if we don’t feel his presence, then we will complain of periods of being “dry.” We might be tempted to blame this dryness on someone else—our church, our friends, even on God himself. But perhaps the reason is because we are not laboring to be brought near. 6 Granted, there could be other reasons why we might feel “dry,” many of which are completely out of our control. Seasons of burnout and exhaustion will happen and will require resting with God or a new routine of seeking his face. Nevertheless, we must always keep pressing on to know him (Hos. 6:3).