United with Christ

Day by day in our Christian lives as we awake, as we go to bed, when we reflect on ourselves, we need to remember that's who we are. We are men and women as believers, teenagers as believers, boys and girls as believers who have this fundamental personal identity. I am someone in Christ Jesus. There is a crisis of identity in the world today. The question of the day is, what do you identify as?

And this is the world that the next generation is growing up in. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thank you for joining us today for Renewing Your Mind. Since then, it has never been more pressing for Christians to know their identity as believers, adopted children of God. Ligonier Teaching Fellows Sinclair Ferguson addressed the issue of identity during our 2023 national conference. Thousands gathered in Orlando, including many families and young people, to hear that our fundamental identity is that we are those who are in Christ.

Here's Dr. Ferguson. Our heavenly Father, we thank You for being able to gather as Your children and to sense in the joy of our fellowship and the cleanliness of the language and the opportunity to meet old friends and make new friends, all of whom have come to know You and trust You and love You, and some who may be in the process now of coming to know and trust and love You. We thank You for Your attendance with us, Your visitation of us in these days through Your Word and by Your Holy Spirit, and for the exaltation of our Lord Jesus Christ in our midst. We pray as we come to these concluding times, as we look forward to the final singing of Your praise and the adoration of our Lord Jesus Christ and the anticipation of glory, that truly even in these minutes, our Savior will come to us, and in His presence, heaven will come down, and we may have some sense that glory is filling our souls. So here is as we pray and help us, we ask in Jesus our Savior's name.

Amen. Well I have the subject of union with Christ, and there are two ways of handling this subject. If you know your English vocabulary well, one is to give you a vista, that is a narrow perspective, beginning perhaps and ending with just one passage of Scripture, and the other is to take a wide panoramic view.

And I want to combine those two approaches, first of all by giving you a vista in one text of the New Testament, and then spending the rest of our time on a panoramic view. And one text is one that's very familiar to you, 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 17. The Apostle Paul says, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, or more literally, if any in Christ, new creation.

If any in Christ, new creation. Christians I think are prone in reading that text to focus on the new creation, and perhaps slide over the any in Christ. And I think that's partly because most Christians, I suspect, do not think of themselves fundamentally as those who are in Christ. They think of themselves as if they are asked fundamentally as Christians. And perhaps it never dawns on them that it is just possible that no one in the New Testament era, if asked about themselves, would have described themselves as a Christian. The term is used only three times in the New Testament, and it looks to me as though on each occasion they were called Christians first in the church at Antioch by outsiders. Paul was asked, do you remember, do you think you can so easily make me a Christian? And Peter speaks about suffering as a Christian, that probably originally the word Christian was not a term invented by believers, but invented by unbelievers and opponents, just as actually the word Puritan was used in the 16th and 17th centuries. Those we call Puritans virtually never described themselves as Puritans.

It was a demeaning word, a curse word. It was like the way people spit out the word fundamentalist today. And so from one point of view, it's very surprising that we all speak about ourselves as Christians, and yet when you probe Christians, actually a relatively small number seem to think of themselves most fundamentally as those who are united to Jesus Christ and are described in the pages of the New Testament as those who are in Christ. But once you notice that is the way the New Testament and especially the Apostle Paul describes the Christian believer, you realize that that expression and variance of it all over the apostolic letters.

The Apostle Paul uses that language or a variant of it in Christ, in Christ Jesus, in Him over 200 times in the course of 13 mainly relatively short letters. And that itself should indicate to us how important it is that day by day in our Christian lives as we awake, as we go to bed, when we reflect on ourselves, we need to remember that's who we are. We are men and women as believers, teenagers as believers, boys and girls as believers who have this fundamental personal identity. I am someone in Christ Jesus.

I must say I was rather slow to understand that. I started reading the Bible I think when I was nine, probably when I was somewhere near 14, maybe 15. I was reading Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 12 verse 2. Well, you remember he says, I knew a man in Christ once. And for ages afterwards I kept going back to that passage and asking the question, who was this anonymous man in Christ that the Apostle Paul said he once knew?

Of course it's cold in Scotland and the brain works more slowly, but it was some time before it dawned on me. Of course, he's speaking about himself. This is his fundamental way of thinking about himself, that he has been taken out of the old order, the old Adamic family, and he has been transferred into a new family. He is no longer in the land of Adam, a citizen of the country of Adam, dominated by the Adamic nature. He is now in Christland. He is a citizen of Christ's kingdom, and what is most fundamentally true about him is that he has been united to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now I have very little doubt that in a gathering this size, if you think of 6,000 professing Christians, there will be many here who day and daily think about ourselves as men and women in Christ. And it is just possible that there is a younger Sinclair Ferguson, aged 14 or 15, who has never thought about the fact that if we are believers, we are in Christ Jesus and all that this means.

So what I want to try and do in the time that we've got together is to give a kind of map of the New Testament's teaching of what it means when the Apostle Paul says that he is a man in Christ and that if we are believers, we also are men and women in Christ. Think back to a book that I bought for one of our boys when he was young and an enthusiastic golfer. And for his Christmas, I bought him a book by Jack Nicklaus, Golf My Way, I think it was called. And as a good father, I read the book first of all before he got the book to make sure he wouldn't beat me too quickly.

And I was very impressed by Nicklaus' introduction when he said at the beginning of every tour season, he would actually come down from Ohio where he lived to Florida, where his golf coach Jack Grout lived, he would arrange to meet him in the practice area, he would take a golf club with him, and when they got over the pleasantries, he would say to him as a very polite individual, Mr. Grout, please teach me to play golf. And that struck me as a marvelous parable of how we should be as Christians, that we… what he meant was make sure the fundamentals are in place. So no matter whether this is old hat to you, and I have to say it isn't a problem for me to say the same thing to you again, or whether it is new, it seems to me that grasping what it means to be in Christ enables us to learn how to live the Christian life, what will… what will give our lives rhythm and balance and clarity and keep our lives down the center of the fair way of godliness, if I can extend the golfing metaphor without weeping and gnashing of teeth in this gathering. So I want us to think about our union with Christ as our entry into a multidimensional world, our entry into a multidimensional world. And in this world of being in Christ Jesus, in this new citizenship, in His new kingdom, I think there are… there are five dimensions to the new existence, to the experience of the new creation that help us to grasp both the magnitude and the wonder of what it means to be in Christ.

The first of these dimensions is what we might call the eternal dimension. Where did this union with Christ begin? And you remember how Paul emphasizes in Ephesians 1.3 following, that the sheer wonder of God's grace is that God has had deeper magic from before the dawn of time than anything we have ever experienced, because we have been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, united to Christ in the mind and purpose of God. And so he goes on to say, in His love He has predestined us to be adopted out of the old family of Adam and into the new family of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's tragic really when you read these words that people have such hostility and antagonism to those two words.

Isn't it election and predestination? Because they point us to our only hope as men and women who are dead in trespasses and sins, that we have been brought to salvation not because of our capacity to resurrect ourselves any more than Lazarus had capacity to resurrect himself, but because in eternity God in His plan and His mind has set His love upon us. He predestined us in love to bring us into the family of Jesus Christ. Well how do you measure love? You measure love by the gap between the lover and the beloved, don't you? The greater the gap, the greater the contrast, the more amazing is the love. And you measure the love by, this is what the best stories are about, about the obstacles that the lover overcomes in order to win the beloved, the distance the lover is willing to travel to gain the beloved, the sacrifices the lover is willing to make, the gifts the lover is willing to give, the long-lasting nature of the love that the lover has for the beloved. And this is the atmosphere in which the New Testament encourages us to think that if we are Christian believers and in Christ, this did not just begin with our decision to have faith in Christ or even with our own birth, but began in the eternal mind of God so that He would not have His creation come to its consummation without you enjoying the privileges of being the beloved of God united to our Lord Jesus Christ.

Those of you who love Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, whether you've read the book or seen any of the thousand movie versions, you remember how Elizabeth Bennet's sister asks her when her disposition towards Mr. Darcy changed, and she says, I think it was when I saw Pemberley, his magnificent mansion. And this is a very different kind of love, isn't it? This is a love that as one great theologian has said, has no end because it actually had no beginning. If we speak about its beginning, it is in the mystery and the deeper magic from before the dawn of time in the heart of our eternal heavenly Father, so that as Calvin says I think helpfully in the Institutes, there is of course this paradox that He loved us even when He knew that He hated us. And so we need to rest in this, that our union with Christ is first of all anchored in the eternal heart of God, and therefore it has an eternal dimension and an eternal foundation.

Second it has an incarnational dimension, or what the theologians have often called a federal dimension. That is, it begins in the heart of God and then it is anchored in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the way in which He joined us, took our flesh in order to become our representative. And this of course is part of the wonder of what the prologue to John's gospel tells us, isn't it? That the one who was face to face with God in the wonder of that eternal sublime fellowship of Father and Son came and while he was still face to face with God, came face to face with us and lived out the whole of his life from the moment of his conception right through to his ascension where he still wears our human nature and will do so perpetually. He furthers the eternal plan of God in our union with Him by uniting Himself with us in our human nature, and in our human nature against all the odds in the context of a fallen world, a world in which ultimately He will be completely alone. He undoes what Adam did and does what Adam was meant to do.

This of course is what Romans 5, 12 to 21 is all about. It's about the way in which the tragedy of Adam's fall is responded to by the super abundant grace of the obedience of our Lord Jesus Christ, what theologians often call His active obedience, that every stage of His life and ministry He was undoing what Adam and we have done and doing what Adam and we have failed to do as our representative. The New Testament uses the word archegos to describe Him as the one who goes where no man has been able to go so that joined to Him, those who belong to Him may go where He has gone. And so this idea of union with Christ that's anchored in the mind and will of God is enfleshed in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. As one of the early fathers of the church, Irenaeus said, he became an infant for infants, a boy for boys, a young man for young men, going through to full maturity so that where our representative head, Adam, failed and in Him, as Paul says, we all sinned and failed and died in our representative Jesus Christ, joined to Him in the mind of God, joined to Him in the plan of God. And clearly, according to Jesus' prayer in John 17, joined to Him in the mind of our Savior who prayed not only for His contemporaries but also for those who would believe in Him like ourselves through the apostolic Word. He did all this for you because He had united your flesh to Himself in order that as an incarnate man for fallen human beings, He might do for you what you cannot do for yourself. And as the representative to whom you're united in the mind of God and will be existentially united by the Holy Spirit, everything you need for life and salvation is found in Jesus Christ.

The redemption, says Paul, is in Him. And so, somewhat contrary to the language that was used to draw me to Christ, that I was invited to let Jesus into my heart. The emphasis of the New Testament, while it does speak as we will see about Christ indwelling us, the emphasis of the New Testament is that we need by faith to get out of ourselves and into this Jesus Christ. And that's part of the power of the gospel, that actually our Reformation and Reformed tradition is well understood.

Remember how Luther says, is often said from this platform, either here or wherever it is, the basic problem is that we are incur vatus in se. And what the gospel does and the power of the Holy Spirit is to draw us from trusting in our own resources to the resources that there are for us embodied in our Savior Jesus Christ. That's why, as many of you know, there is this little expression used in the New Testament that is apparently, the grammarians tell us, used nowhere else in classical literature that the Christian believes into Jesus Christ, pistueine ace into Jesus Christ. And that, of course, is the third dimension of our union with Him, forged in eternity, embodied in the incarnation in Christ's federal representation of His people. And then what we might call the spiritual dimension of union with Christ.

Thirdly, where the word spiritual has a capital S, when we are united to the Lord Jesus by the present ministry of the Holy Spirit. And this is what the Spirit is given for as Jesus Himself teaches us, isn't it? When the Spirit comes, He says to the disciples in the upper room, what He's going to do is He is going to show me to you. And not only show me to you, but He is going to come in the sheer mystery of His ministry and bring you so that you believe into me. And as you believe into me, all that is in me for you, new life, justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, glorification, it's all in Jesus Christ for us. And so our great need is to flee from ourselves into Christ and find in Jesus Christ an ocean of grace, sufficient for all of our needs and ultimately sufficient to bring me into His eternal presence.

Now this is a vast subject on its own, so let me just touch on one subsection of it. What happens to us when we are personally, spiritually united to the Lord Jesus Christ? There are several important places where Paul expounds this. One, of course, is in Romans chapter 6. And if we can summarize the power of what he says there, in which he's really saying to the Roman Christians, dear ones, don't you understand the inner significance of baptism? Your baptism was not a sign of a big decision you made.

Your baptism was a sign of what is for you through faith in Jesus Christ. And what is it that's for us in Christ in Paul's emphasis in that context? It is, he says, that we have died to the dominion of sin.

It no longer reigns over us. And while we are not yet free from the presence of sin, we no longer live in the kingdom of sin, and we are no longer under its authority. And of course, in a way reflecting on one of the questions here earlier on, that's what Satan presses against when we sin and fall.

He says, you poor, depressed Christian, there you go. You're under the dominion of sin. And as we grasp what it means to be in union with Christ, we understand I cannot any longer be under the dominion of sin because I'm in Christ. And He is no longer under the dominion of sin in death.

He died to sin once for all, and I'm united to Him in His resurrection. That's irreversible. I am no longer the man I once was. I'm no longer the person I once was in Adam. And this of course is what he says.

He says, well, what is it that's happened to you? And he says, doesn't he here in Romans 6 and verse 6, the old man that you were in Adam has been crucified with Christ so that the body of sin, that is to say I think this body dominated by sin, this body under the dominion of sin, so that the body of sin might be released, might be freed from sin's dominion, so that we would no longer serve sin, but serve our Lord Jesus Christ in righteousness and holiness. And this is such a staggering thought. I think Paul realized that if the Roman Christians hadn't fully grasped the meaning of their baptism, this was a staggering thought that this was their new identity in Christ. But he goes on to say if that's your new identity, that sin has no dominion over you, then here is the exhortation. Therefore, consider yourself as someone who has died to sin and been raised to newness of life, and don't let sin reign over you.

Now for many of us as Christians, I think because we are so often turned back in upon ourselves, this can… this can be a difficult thing to grasp, but think about it this way. Forgive me for a racial illustration. It's my own race. Many years ago, the president of the seminary in which I was teaching addressed me on the seminary campus, and he said, Sinclair, have you become an American citizen yet? Now let me pause here. It is not sin for someone British to become an American citizen, because as Dr. Thomas knows, you can retain your British citizenship.

Okay? But my instinctive response to him was to say, well, why would I want to become an American? I'm Scottish. And I suppose you would feel the same way if our late majesty had offered you… now I know some of you would have taken it at a grab if she'd offered you citizenship.

Now wait a minute until the bill for a couple of hundred years back taxes arrived, and we wanted our tea back. But we've all got that basic instinct, haven't we? This is who I am. And that's what Paul is driving at, and it's so important today isn't it? We're in a world in which our young people are being encouraged to try and find out who they are.

And if anything is a stabilizing and wonderful revelation to a young Christian believer in this world, it's surely this. The newest Christian, the simplest Christian, even the struggling Christian is able to say on the basis of the New Testament's teaching, but I know who I am. I'm a citizen of another kingdom.

I live in this world with its laws and atmospheres according to the laws and atmospheres of another kingdom. And it's one of those strange things about our own nationality that we… we simply assume that our nationality is the best nationality in the world. We don't want another nationality because we know who we are. And that's what Paul is driving at here because our baptism is really a naming ceremony, isn't it?

We are named for the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, but we are so prone to a kind of spiritual amnesia that we forget who we are and then the devil comes in and we need to recover this, that we are men and women and young people in Christ Jesus. And we have a very special citizenship that frankly makes us sound strange in the world. I've said often enough that one of my slightly dark pleasures in living in the United States has been riding on elevators and engaging in conversation with people and then getting out of the elevator and the shy Americans who have been in the elevator pluck up the courage to say, well, where do you come from? And I've loved just to turn around as the doors are closing and say, Columbia, South Carolina, because they realize that there's something about me that doesn't seem to belong here.

And because of the oddity of many American minds, they find the Scottish accent attractive because they don't know they have an accent of their own. And that's really what Paul is driving at here. It's our consciousness of our identity that gives the life that we live the atmosphere of the kingdom to which we belong. So this union is eternal.

It's incarnational or federal. It's spiritual. It's a bond created in our regeneration and faith by the Holy Spirit.

And the fourth dimension is this, it's mutual. Isn't it a very beautiful emphasis in the New Testament, isn't it? That we dwell in Christ, but also Christ dwells in us. That beautiful revelation the Lord Jesus gave to the disciples in the farewell discourse to stabilize them when He looked forward to the coming of the Holy Spirit and said, you know, when the Spirit comes, you will begin to understand that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and it doesn't stop there, because by the indwelling of the Spirit in your life, I will come to dwell in you. And it goes on in John 14, doesn't it, to say this… this meltingly beautiful truth, that when we love Him, the Spirit will come and indwell us, and the Father and the Son will make their home in us, make our lives as it were lives where God is comfortable to dwell. And most of the New Testament focus on this is in the reality that the Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in us. I've been crucified with Christ as Paul, and yet I live, but not I, but Christ lives in me. Paradoxically, that is the ultimate explanation for the struggles of the Christian life, isn't it? This tremendous paradox that you find in Paul in Galatians 2.20, Christ lives in me. And then his words in Romans 7, sin dwells in me. We are delivered in union with Christ. We are delivered from the dominion of sin, but we're not yet delivered from the presence of sin. And it shouldn't therefore surprise us that there is what the Westminster Confession calls an irreconcilable war that we fight all through this life because we are those in whom the Lord of glory dwells and yet simultaneously sin dwells.

But He is the conqueror, and that's the great thing. And we need to think about this fourth dimension of union with Christ, not just that we are united to Him, but that He in His grace and mercy and the mystery of the person of the Holy Spirit has come to indwell us. And there are not 6,000 Holy Spirits in this room, but this mystery that every single one of us who is united to Christ is indwelt by the same Christ, by one and the same Spirit.

No wonder we love to be together. No wonder it can be said about us for all our sin and failure. See how these Christians love one another. I've never forgotten as a youngster, I think I was maybe 15, at most 16, hearing a sermon from my local minister, and the words at the end of Colossians 1, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

And I will not try to do it, making sure as I left church no one was around and dancing home at this thought that poor me, a young teenager, was indwelt by the Lord Jesus Christ in the beauty, the majesty, the life-transforming sense of who am I, that I am one who in His grace the Lord Jesus by His Spirit has come to dwell, and not only in me, but also in all those who love Him. So yes, eternal dimension, federal dimension, spiritual dimension, mutual dimension, and then best of all, eschatological dimension. I never use the word eschatological when I'm preaching, but this is a Ligonier conference.

And if that's too long a word for you to take in, the eternal dimension. This is a union that will never end. It will no more end than Jesus will slough off the humanity that He assumed in the womb of the Virgin Mary that He wears in heaven now for our sake and will wear for all eternity as the guarantee that He will save us forever.

And this is what we want to think about as our conference comes to an end. Remember how He puts it in Colossians 3.4, He's spoken about union with Christ, union with Christ in His death, in His burial, in His resurrection, in His ascension. And then He says this, and when Christ appears, you and I will appear with Him. If I can put that in a way that is hyperbolic, we might say that when the Father says to the Son at the consummation, my beloved Son, go. The beloved Son will say to His Father, but Father, we agreed that I would not appear without them. That's how profound His love is for you. That's why we know He will never let us go. That's why this union is so significant to us. Because on that day, as John says, you remember in 1 John chapter 3, it does not yet appear what we shall be. Yes, we are His children now, but it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know this, when He appears, we shall be like Him. I love the little expression John Cotton, the old in the New England Puritan, uses in his commentary on 1 John when he makes this very striking, succinct statement, this reproveth men's squint looking.

And we need this, don't we? Because we've all got squints. We've all got eyes that are so easily diverted just to the side or just underneath, and we're taken up with lesser things. And John is saying, yes, in the midst of all the struggles, in the midst of all the antichrists, in the midst of the darkness, yes, we are already the children of God, but we are passed by day and daily by men and women and young people who do not see it, but one day it will be visible to all creation. It does not yet appear what we shall be, but when He appears, we who have been united in the mind of God, united to Him in His flesh, united to Him by the Holy Spirit, indwelt by Him. If I can put it this way, all that He has made us within will be turned outside, and who we really are will be clear to all. I'm sure you love to think about this as you ask questions like, will we recognize one another in heaven?

And the answer is, yes, we certainly will, but perhaps not immediately. I see people at conferences, and sometimes I say to them, but you weren't dressed like this the last time I saw you in church on Sunday. And I wonder if it would be like that. Just a moment until we… Oh, so that's who you really were. That's who you really were. I don't know if there are apologies in heaven, but maybe if there's a little opportunity we'll be able to say, you know, I'm sorry I didn't see that. I was blind to all that God's grace was doing in you, but now I see. It now appears to me who you really are.

And I'm sure that person will say to you, I was thinking exactly the same thing about you. And then our Lord Jesus' prayer in John 17.24 surely will be answered. I'm praying that they may be with me where I am to behold my glory, the glory you've given to me and your love for me from the very foundation of the world. And as they see me in my glory, that glory will be reflected in their beings, and their union with me will have come to its final glorious consummation. As I said, I think this is so important for us today, and especially for those of us who are perhaps teenagers, students, faced with a world that tells us to choose our identity from all these different kinds of options. And you'll notice they're all sexual options, part of the idolatry of this world.

They have nothing to do with character, nothing to do with transformation of life, nothing to do with the gospel. And my dear friends, especially those of you who are younger than all of us who are teaching fellows, when this grasps you, it is inevitable there will be those who in their confusion, distress, and disorder will ask the question, where do you really come from? And you'll be able to say, I come from Jesus Christ. And then that day will come to pass for which we long, yes long even with Charles Wesley, love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down, finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless, let us be, let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee, changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise.

That's the kingdom to which we are going, but it's the kingdom to which we already belong. So by God's grace as we listen to Christ being praised at the end of this conference, let us go with our heads held high knowing that to be a Christian is surely the most wonderful thing in the world because here already we are in Christ, and there forever we shall be with Him. Let's pray together. Our Lord Jesus, we thank You for the way in which You came from heaven to earth for us, to make us Your bride, to bring us to Yourself, to fill us with Your grace and love. We pray for one another as You have been with us and blessed us, that all we have sensed here of the power of Your Word and the graciousness of Your presence and the love of the brothers and the sisters will remain with us as nourishment for the journey that lies ahead. And this we pray in our Savior's name. Amen.

That was Sinclair Ferguson, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. At Ligonier Ministries, we gather people together at in-person events because we believe that iron sharpens iron, and that as R.C. Sproul used to say, the most important thing that Christians, those within the church, need to know is who God is. And one resource to help you do that is Dr. Sproul's book, Everyone's a Theologian. And we'll send you a copy for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Across 60 chapters, Dr. Sproul lays out what it is we believe as Christians and why we believe it. So give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800-435-4343.

And while you wait for the book to arrive in the mail, you'll have access to the digital edition as well in your Ligonier Learning Library. One of the highlights of our conferences is our Q&A sessions where our attendees get to put their questions before our conference speakers. Well, tomorrow you'll hear a Q&A session where we gathered all of our teaching fellows together to answer your questions. And you'll hear that tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind.