Dimensions of Our Union

We mustn't think of union with Christ as a theological idea. We must learn to think of union to Christ as we're married to Him, we live with Him, He knows us best, He's been there, He understands, and living therefore in communion with the One to whom we are united is surely the highest privilege we could ever have in this world. Early in my church experience, there was no real discussion about our union with Christ.

Instead of them explaining that Christians live in Christ and that ultimately every spiritual blessing is found in Christ, I would hear them encouraging people to accept Jesus into their lives. That's why I'm so thankful that you're hearing Sinclair Ferguson's series, Union with Christ, this week on Renewing Your Mind. Understanding who we are in Christ changes how we live. It changed my life and it should lead to a greater worship of God. As Dr. Ferguson said, we mustn't think of our union with Christ as a theological idea. It's a reality for Christians.

So here's Dr. Ferguson as he continues this important series. Now we are turning to think just a little in this study about the dimensions of our union with Christ. And I want us to think about various passages, but in a way we could sum this up in Paul's words in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 17.

If you became a Christian in roughly the same generation as I did, then this would have been one of the very first verses you would have been encouraged to memorize. And it appears in different translations and different ways. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation or he is a new creature.

And I'll comment later on on that particular kind of translation. What does it mean to be in Christ? If you think about the way in which we are taught the blessings of the gospel – justification and adoption and sanctification – we're often taught those blessings as though they came to us in a kind of straight line. Sometimes it's been called the golden chain. God's election leads to our regeneration, leads to our coming to faith in conversion, leads to our justification, leads to our sanctification, leads to our perseverance, leads to our experience of glory. And we think about these different aspects of our salvation belonging to a straight line being linked together in a chain. And that can be a very helpful way for us to think about the blessings of the gospel. We often speak about this golden chain. There is, however, sometimes a liability to that because if you think about it, there is something missing when I say election, regeneration, conversion, justification, adoption, perseverance, and glory.

What is missing? Well, I haven't mentioned the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, sometimes when Christians think this way, there is a tendency for them to divorce the blessings of the gospel from the person who is the gospel, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, what Paul does here in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 is really essentially say to us that once you are in Christ, all of these blessings are already yours.

They don't follow one another as links in a chain. They are all yours. They may be experienced progressively, but they are actually all yours already. Even glorification in a sense is yours already because you remember how he says in 2 Corinthians 3 that we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another. We sometimes sing, heaven came down and glory filled my soul. And it's this perspective that we are thinking about in these studies that when we are in Jesus Christ, in and with Jesus Christ, all the blessings of the gospel are ours. I think this may be one of the reasons why the New Testament writers use the illustration of marriage. If you asked a sensible married man, what do you love most about your wife? If he said her beauty or her cooking or her skills at golf, then he would be missing the main point, wouldn't he? What a right-thinking married man most enjoys about his wife is that he's married to her.

And being married to her, all of these dimensions of her life become his, and of course, the other way around. And it's this way when we come into the gospel, when we come into understanding that we are in Christ, united to Christ, we realize that we are not looking outside of Christ for the blessings of God's grace. All of those blessings are ours in Christ.

He is the center of everything. And so, we never lose this central focus on the person of the Lord Jesus. And the truth of the matter is that evangelical Christians have often done that. You will often find listening on the radio or watching television that you're being offered blessings, but very frequently you are not being offered Christ Himself. And this is the big point for the Apostle Paul, that our union with Christ is the reality that undergirds all of these blessings. And if we are to have them, we must have Christ. If we are to enjoy them, we must know that they are all found in Jesus Christ because we have been united to Him by the ministry of the Holy Spirit and by our response of trusting in Him and through faith getting into Him.

This was a huge reality for Paul. He illustrates in a very dramatic way in a passage that I have always found is a passage difficult to read in the assembly of God's people because it says such shocking things. I'm thinking about what Paul says to the Corinthians. When you remember the Corinthians, some of them were going to prostitutes. And he says, you need to understand this. Because you are bound to the Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, you cannot leave Jesus Christ out of the brothel when you go into it.

And you see the pressure He is placing upon them. He is saying to them, if you are really united to Christ, don't you see what you are doing? You can never be separated from Christ. You cannot live this part of your life united to Christ and then conveniently be disunited from Christ and then again be united to Christ. What you are actually doing, think of it this way, he says, what you are actually doing when you sin in this way is essentially saying to Jesus, come Jesus with me because you are with me and I'm united to you.

And you can see that the power of that illustration that he uses indicates for us what a powerful reality this is in my life. If I'm united to Christ, how it transforms the way I live my Christian life because I'm bound to Him and I don't sever that bond when I fail Him. And therein lies the shame of my sin, but also therein lies one of the great motives for me living a life of absolute faithfulness to Him.

Now, let's think together a little about just how big this union is. When you became a Christian, what was the big motive in your mind? If you went through a real transition, some of you perhaps have never known a day when you didn't know the Lord Jesus, but some of us have gone through fairly dramatic transitions. Why did we come to Christ? Why did people say we should come to Christ? Well, for many of us, it was to get rid of the burden of the guilt of our sin. But then what did we discover? We discovered that coming to Christ was a much bigger thing than we ever imagined. Here some of us are, we've been Christians 20, 30, 40, perhaps 50 years or more, and we're still discovering there is more here than I ever imagined.

Why is this? Well, first of all, because our union with Christ, remember we thought about this right at the beginning, is rooted in God's eternal purposes. We are, says Paul in Ephesians 1, chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world that we might be for the praise of His glory and for the praise of His glorious grace. Now what does this underline for us? It underlines for us that our union with Christ, which we experience through faith, is not first of all grounded on my faith. And this is a tremendous encouragement to us. Our faith falters, but that doesn't mean our union with Christ falters because our union with Christ is grounded in God's eternal purpose.

And you see, this opens up for us not only security, it opens up for us doxology, doesn't it? To think that from before the foundation of the world, He had set His heart upon me. That whenever He saw the coming work of the Lord Jesus Christ, in some way beyond my imagination, He saw that I was united to Jesus Christ.

That He would never think of Jesus Christ without thinking of me, and He would never think of me without thinking that one belongs to my Son, Jesus Christ. So there is a dimension of our union that is rooted and grounded in God's eternal purpose and God's eternal love. But secondly, there's another dimension to our union with Christ, and that is that it's grounded in Christ's incarnation. It's not just that God has this idea that we are united to Christ. It is that He sent His Son into the world in our flesh and blood in order that His Son might be bonded to sinners. This is the meaning of the incarnation. This is why Jesus took our flesh, and this is emphasized by Paul again and again, that God did what the law could not do because of the weakness of our flesh. So He sent His Son into our flesh in order to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and to bind us to Himself in order that, as the New Testament says, He might be the archegos of our salvation, that in our flesh He would do what we have failed to do in order that for us and then in us He might do all that would be needed for our salvation. Jesus came into the world, the Son of God took our flesh to bind Himself to us, to be flesh of our flesh, to be born of our bones. And of course, the New Testament teaches us this is such a real thing. Sometimes if I'm reading Luke chapter 2 to a congregation and come to those words at the end, Jesus is twelve years old, and He is lost in the temple, and then He comes home, and then Luke summarizes Jesus from the age of twelve to the age of thirty.

We know nothing whatsoever about Jesus between the ages of twelve and thirty except this, that He grew in stature. Well, you would expect that. He grew in favor with man.

You would expect that. But there's something that many Christians wouldn't expect. He grew in favor with God. And I sometimes say, if the Jesus you believe in was not capable of growing in favor with God, you do not believe in the Jesus of the Gospels. But I find many Christians do not believe it was possible for Jesus to grow in favor with God. But Luke tells us He grew in favor with God. He was more in favor with God when He was fifteen than He was when He was twelve. He was more in favor with God in the River Jordan than He was when He was a twelve-year-old in the temple. He was most in favor with God when He cried out on the cross, my God, why have you forsaken me? That was the point at which He was most in favor with God.

How do I know that? Because Jesus Himself told us, the reason the Father loves me is because I lay down my life for the sheep. I sometimes think if there was any moment in the history of the life of Jesus when the Father was quietly singing, my Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine, if ever I loved thee, my Jesus, tis now, is at the very moment when because of His obedience to His heavenly Father, He was bearing the wrath of God upon His soul, becoming obedient to death, even the death of the cross. And all of this underlines for us, of course, how deeply the Lord Jesus united Himself to us in order that He might live our life and truly die our death and then as the risen Savior bring us into a living union with Himself.

It is marvelous to think, you know, this is something that the early Christians wrestled with for almost the first five hundred years of the church's history. How do we accurately describe the Lord Jesus Christ so that we understand how amazing it is that we are united to this Savior who really is able to save to the uttermost all those who come to God through Him? And it's because not only did God in His purposes unite us to His Son, but His Son united Himself to our flesh. There is no moment of our lives, no experience that we can have that we can say to Jesus, well, this is something you don't understand.

Of course, He did not experience identically what we experience, but in everything He experienced, He went down far deeper than we ever experience in binding to Himself our humanity so that He might be a faithful and merciful High Priest. We do not have a High Priest who is completely unable to understand what it's like for us because He was tempted in all points like as we are. So, my friends, we mustn't think of union with Christ as a theological idea. We must learn to think of union to Christ as we're married to Him, we live with Him, He knows us best, He's been there, He understands, and living therefore in communion with the One to whom we are united is the highest privilege we could ever have in this world. So, our union with Christ is grounded in God's eternal election. It's grounded in Christ's incarnation, but it's also grounded in our bonding of ourselves to Him in faith.

And here's a very interesting thing in the New Testament, I think it's a very striking thing, that the New Testament surveys the whole of our lives in all of its little details and says, we experience these things in Christ. So, it's in Christ that we are free from our bondage and sin. It's in Christ that we live to the praise of God's glory. It's in Christ that we marry. It's in Christ that we welcome one another. It's in Christ that we speak and have wisdom. It's in Christ that we shall die. It's the dead in Christ who will rise. Our bodies have become members of Christ, says the New Testament.

And undergirding all this, as I say, is language that is completely unique. Apparently, it does not occur anywhere else in ancient Greek. The Apostle Paul speaks not just about believing in Christ or believing on Christ, but believing into Christ. Pistuin, the verb to believe, is into Christ. And apparently, there is no other example in all the literature of antiquity of one person believing into another person. Paul may have invented this use of language to indicate to us that, yes, we do believe on Christ, we do believe about Christ, but actually real faith gets us into Christ, brings us into union and communion with the Lord Jesus Christ so that we become one with Him. We're not confused with Him. We are always ourselves, but we become one with Him in the same sense, or perhaps more accurately to say, in a sense analogous to the way in which a man and a woman become one flesh.

There's still two different people, but there is this mystery about which the New Testament speaks, and you remember how Paul puts it in Ephesians 5. After all this wonderful teaching about the relationship between a husband and a wife, he comes out with this amazing statement. I'm actually speaking here about Christ and His church. There is this analogy between marriage and union with Christ.

Now, we tend to think this way. Union with Christ is like marriage. Paul thinks the other way around. Marriage, he says, is like union with Christ. The big thing is this marvelous union that believers have with the Lord Jesus.

And as we'll see, he goes on in different places to explore the dimensions of this union, how permanent it is, how wonderful it is. But here is how he puts it in 2 Corinthians 5.17, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, or I think more accurately translated, if any, in Christ, new creation. I don't think Paul is saying, if you're in Christ, you are a new creation or a new creature.

That may be true. I don't think it's the truth of this text. I think the truth of this text is when you're in Christ, you have taken a step into a new world order altogether where everything is different. People have often said to me, well, you've lived in Scotland, you've lived in the United States, what's the difference?

My standard answer, everything. Absolutely everything is just that bit different. And isn't that true about what it means to be a Christian and to be united to the Lord Jesus Christ? It isn't just that there are some things you no longer do, although that may be true, or some things that you do, that may be true.

It is that absolutely everything is transformed. I remember as a youngster when I first came across this verse because it struck me as being so illuminating of my experience in becoming a Christian. Remember a hymn that we used to sing that had these words in it, something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen.

And I thought that's exactly what has happened to me. I'm seeing this world through different eyes. I didn't understand then what I think I've begun to understand now, the reason I understand this world through different eyes is actually because I belong to another world altogether, because if anyone is in Christ, new creation. John Calvin puts this wonderfully in his Institutes of the Christian Religion when he says, as long as Christ remains outside of us and we are separated from Him, all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us, because He came to share with us what He has received from the Father in order that it might become ours and that He might dwell with us and within us. That is union with Christ.

The reason I understand this world through different eyes is actually because I belong to another world altogether. What a profound quote there from Sinclair Ferguson. I know I wish I had heard that truth as a young Christian and perhaps there's someone that comes to mind that you could share today's message with. Today's episode of Renewing Your Mind is available at renewingyourmind.org or wherever you listen to podcasts. This complete 12-part series with Dr. Ferguson is wonderful for individual study and personal growth but may also be something that you'd like to study with your small group or your adult Sunday school class. Remember when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, in addition to the complete series, you'll receive digital access to the study guide to help you in a group setting or as you lead your family through the material.

Call us at 800 435 4343 or give your gift securely online at renewingyourmind.org. In reality, every one of us is either united to Christ or united to Adam. That's what Dr. Ferguson will consider tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. you