Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

by Rankin Wilbourne

We must use our imaginations if we want to fully inhabit and experience the Christian life.

How can we connect the grand, high promises of God to the gritty details of our daily lives? How

“Union with Christ is the greatest, most honourable, and glorious of all graces that we are made partakers of.”

But the man Jesus Christ was the truest human, perfectly dependent on his Father, perfectly humble, obedient, strong, and kind. Christ in us now labors to make us more human, not less, and that’s a good thing. Something has changed, and is changing, in us.

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.

“Only those who obey can believe, and only those who believe can obey.”

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

But rather than leave Adam and Eve to their shame, God mercifully seeks them out. God’s first words to them after their betrayal are not “What have you done?” but “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9).

Where are you? That may be the best three-word summary of the Bible in the Bible.

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.

It is a beautiful dance: our highest joy is found in God’s glory, and God is most glorified in us when we find our highest joy in him. And

“The ultimate end of creation, then, is union in love between God and loving creatures.”

As Augustine urges, “We have heard the fact, let us seek the mystery.”

He concludes that increased choices have led to increased expectations of how good a good choice should be (with so many choices, surely one of them is almost perfect), which leads to increased dissatisfaction with whatever choice you end up making.

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.

You don’t have to “white knuckle it,” as if it’s up to you to hold on to him. We have Christ within us. “Do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Cor. 13:5). We can’t be reminded enough that though Christ is physically present in heaven, he is spiritually present with all those who are “in him” (1 John 5:20). To belong to Christ means to have his Spirit, and to have his Spirit means having the risen, ascended, reigning Christ within you, wherever you are.

As your high priest, he gives you the security that you always stand safe. As your sympathetic high priest, he gives you comfort that somebody understands. As your willing advocate, he gives you confidence, even boldness, before God. As your trailblazer, he gives you assurance that you’ll make it. And along the way, he gives you hope that behind every sickness there will be healing and that every longing for a better world will be repaid. All this because Jesus is in heaven—at the right hand of God.

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” 1 The Bible calls us to rest in Christ (Matt. 11:28) and, at the same time, to “strive to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11).

Or can you at least pray, with St. Teresa of Avila, “Oh God, I don’t love you, I don’t even want to love you, but I want to want to love you”? If

But union with Christ does guarantee that God always hears our prayers. 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 Union with Christ reminds us that the real reward of prayer is not what we’re asking God for. The real reward of prayer is communion with God, made possible by our union with Christ (Heb. 4:16).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes one reason we need to abide in community: The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. 16

You are utterly dependent on a power outside of you. Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). It’s a terrifying truth, but in order for it to become life giving to us, we have to be made aware, sometimes painfully so, that we can’t coerce or control God by our own frantic maneuvering.

You must wait on him because he is God. He is not in our service. We are in his. Waiting on him means … waiting on him. How else would we learn to wait? Waiting on God is critical to knowing God (Ps. 130:5–6) because it teaches us that we are not God.

The most important seasons of growth will often be the ones you feel the least growth. The doldrums. They are training you to put your trust in the wind.

You are drawing near to the one who is already near, singing praises to him who is already singing over you (Zeph. 3:17). You are blowing on the embers of God’s white-hot love for you so that the truth of it might catch fire that day. But most of all, you are consoled that even when you don’t feel its warmth or see its light, the fire is still burning, inextinguishable (Luke 3:16; John 1:5).

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.

Jesus lived a perfect life and terrible things still happened to him. Jesus was the only one who ever trusted and obeyed God perfectly, yet he nevertheless was made to walk the way of suffering unto death, leading George MacDonald to conclude, “The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.” 5