Union with Christ

Introduction

Originally when I was preparing to speak this week, I was planning to move onto chapter four of Ephesians and talk about unity in the body of Christ. In large part, this is the ultimate reason why I wanted to preach out of the book of Ephesians becasue I beleive that it is critical that the church be united in heart and mind as we prepare to come back together again. It’s been a year of deep and bitter divisions in our nation and sadly the church has not been an exception to these conflicts in our society. And so it makes perfect sense that we should talk about the need for unity in the church. But God reminded me this week that before we can even hope for unity between believers, there is a crucial prerequisite that must first be met in our own hearts and that is to be united with Christ. Before we can become one with each other, we must first become one with Christ. This is the very order that Jesus gives to us in the gospel of John.

John 17:23 ESV

I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

Unity with Christ is the only way that Christians can become perfectly one with each other and that is the order that the apostle Paul takes. Before his important teaching on the unity the church, he first prays for our union with Christ. This is the passage that we want to look at this morning:

Ephesians 3:14–19 ESV

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

For many Christians, their understanding of the gospel is largely limited to an event that lies outside of their own personal being, separated by time and space. The modern view of Christianity is if I simply believe in this event that happened over two thousand years ago, then I will be saved and secure a ticket to heaven. Unfortunately from that perspective, the gospel is something that doesn’t make that much of difference in our everyday lives. It leaves us with a huge gap between our belief in the finished work of the cross and then having to wait for eternal life. I think this is one of the main reason why Christians today laregely live ineffective and powerless lives. This gap between the cross and the life to come was meant to be filled by what older generations of Christians referred to as our union with Christ.

There are two questions that we want to answer in the rest of the message?

What is our union with Christ?

Why is it so important to the Christian life?

There are two essentials parts to understanding our union with Christ. The first part is that we are in Him and the second part is He lives in us.

Colossians 3:3 ESV

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

To be found in Christ, to have your life hidden in Him is the only way that you can stand before God justified and accepted. From a biblical definition, justification means you have been acquitted of all your sin and by God’s grace, you are accepted as perfectly righteous, as if you have never had a moral failure in your life. I know that the doctrine of sin is not popular these days but acknowledging our sinfulness is the only way to fully realize our need for a Savior. Think of how much of your life is hidden from others. If people knew your deepest and darkest thoughts, who would continue to accept you? If your life was an open book and we had complete access to everything that you have ever done, would you feel comfortable disclosing those facts even to those closest to you, your parents, your friends, your own spouse?

And sometimes keeping things in secret, is actually to the benefit of those relationships. After counseling so many people, I get to hear some of the craziest things that people are struggling with and one incident that I can recall vividly even though it’s been many years is a confession from a nice, kind, caring Christian women that she has had occassional thoughts of driving her car into a crowd of people and seeing what would happen. She clarified very strongly that she would never do it but it bothered her that she would even have those kinds of thoughts. For obvious reasons, she hid that from everyone else but she mistakenly told her husband and he is the one who made her come see me because he wanted to make sure that he didn’t marry a psychotic killer. Truth be told her husband was no saint either and that is exactly the point, we all have things that we are trying to hide from others and if we were perfectly righteous, well then we would have nothing to hide.

That is the whole point of the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, because of sin, we now feel this need to hide from one another and more importantly to hide from God. Obviously, we don’t literally jump into a bush to hide from God’s presence but we hide ourselves in our work, in our relationships, in our principled living, and our concern for justice and we assume that this will be good enough to hide all that sin and justify us before God. And what the gospel makes clear is that nothing you can do will ever justify you before a holy God who requires moral perfection as a condition of His acceptance. So how can we overcome this impossible dilemma? Well instead of trying to hide ourselves in these things that continue to expose our sin, by faith we can hide ourselves into the perfect righteousness of Christ. When our lives are hidden in Christ, God no longer sees our sin but only the goodness of His Son.

Now let me just give you a silly and imperfect analogy of how this works. When you take your kids to Disneyland and you see Mickey Mouse, no one thinks about the person inside the costume. You don’t hold your children back and warn them about the evil teenager that is just doing this for the money and doesn’t care really care about little kids. In the magical kingdom, you suspend your judgment and you give grace to that punk teenager because whoever is in there is now hidden by the persona of Mickey Mouse. That person doesn’t deserve the adoration of thousands of children that will come into the park. That employee hasn’t done anything to warrant being the center of countless numbers of family pictures. It’s only becasue their life is hidden inside this costume that they receive these benefits. Obviously this is not a perfect analogy, but hopefully you get the point. When the Apostle Paul writes that believers can receive strength from God according to the riches of his glory, it’s not becasue we have earned these benefits by our own deeds but rather God has given us these blessings becasue the darkness of our sin is hidden, completely eclipsed by the glorious light of his Son.

But there is a second part involved in our union with Christ and that is that He lives in us. Earlier in the book of Colossians, Paul tells us that

Colossians 1:27 ESV

To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

For many people, Christianity is simply a means for personal development, to make yourself better, to become a good, moral person. That is a subtle but a dangerous distortion of the gospel. God certainly wants us to grow in goodness but His definition of goodness is far higher and more noble than our own arbitrary human definitions of good. In the past year, the bar for human goodness has been dramatically lowered. If you wear a mask, stay six feet away from others, and make sure that you deal with your racism then you are a good person. And I want us to compare that low bar to what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect. This means loving your enemies, showing compassion to those who have wronged you, keeping our hearts free of anger and judgment, having no thoughts that make another human being an object of your lust, showing kindness and mercy to anyone who has need. This is what it means to be rooted and grounded in love.

That is what God requires of us and you can reject those standards as being too idealistic and out of reach of the normal human condition or you can make this simple confession: I cannot in my flesh become this person that Jesus describes therefore I must be crucified with Christ so that I no longer live but Christ now lives in me. Theses verses from Ephesians represent the key to authentic Christian living: that God would grant you to be strengthed with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

The most important work of the Holy Spirit is to transform your inner being so that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself. And through the Holy Spirit, Christ comes to dwell in our hearts so that we can be changed from the inside out. From the biblical sense, the heart represents the center of all of our desires, our will, our feelings, and even our very thoughts.

Mark 7:21–23 ESV

For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

According to the Bible, the heart is the center controlling everything else in your life and if Christ is not dwelling in your heart, it means nothing in your life can be transformed by his loving presence. This is why so many Christian leaders throughout history have viewed this doctrine as the key to the Christian life, the very thing that allows the springs of living water to flow out of your soul.

John Calvin - First, we must understand that 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. Therefore, he had to become ours and to dwell within us.”

In our spiritual formations class here at Radiance, I teach this principle using this simple circular diagram where the Word and the Spirit come into the heart so that Christ can take permanent residence there. And from that transformed heart where Christ dwells, we can begin to have the mind of Christ in our thoughts.

1 Corinthians 2:16 ESV

“For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Romans 12:2 ESV

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

As Christ’s presence in our hearts changes the way we think, we are then transformed by the renewing of our minds so that in our body, we can live as He lived. Relationally, we can love as He loved. And most importantly in our soul, we can be filled with all the fullness of God as we come to know the love of God that surpasses all knowledge. It’s plain to see that union with Christ is at the core of a right understanding of the Christian faith.

John Murray - “Nothing is more central or more basic than union with Christ…it is the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation.”

Unfortunately, Christians today have largely forgotten, ignored, or dismissed their union with Christ as something too mystical or irrelevant for their lives and this has come at a great cost to actually living out a robust faith that attracts the attention of the world. The reason why union with Christ is central to our salvation is the fact that it brings two equally essentials parts of the Christian faith into unity.

1. Being in Christ places our sin under God’s extravagant grace (Takes away our guilt)

2. Christ in you provides God’s power to overcome sin (Allows me to grow in holiness)

For us to understand how these two sides of salvation work together, we need to look at the two common mistakes that people have made regarding the Christian faith. The first mistake is the abuse of God’s grace and to even use His patience and forgiveness to justify our sin. Dietrich Bonhoeffer labeled this error in Christians as “cheap grace”. The comedian Emo Phillips, has the perfect quote that highlights what cheap grace looks like in those who have a distorted view of Christianity.

“I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.”

In this extreme case, it seems ridiculous and even presposterous but how many of us go down this same line of thinking to excuse the sin in our lives. I aked God to give me fulfillment, but I know that he doesn’t work that way so I’ll make work an idol and ask for forgiveness later. I asked God for peace but I know that he doesnt work that way so I’ll drink and medicate my pain and ask for forgiveness. I asked God to take away my loneliness but I know that he doesn’t work that way so I’ll get involved in some bad relationships and I’ll ask God to forgive me later.

These individuals have applied God’s grace to cover their sin but in their lives they have no power over sin. It’s the error that Paul fears most in regards to the doctrines of grace in his letter to the Romans:

Romans 6:1–2 ESV

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

If we are honest, this is the error that we are most prone to here in the Bay Area. We cheapen his grace by acting like impostors inside a very nice Mickey Mouse costume. But we are not hidden inside just a Christian costume, we are hidden by Christ who shielded us by his own blood. He hid us from the scorn of the crowds. He hid us from the whips that lashed across his back. He hid us from the nail on the cross. He hid us from the rightful judgement of God. We don’t want to cheapen this extravagant grace of God and make it nothing more than a Mickey Mouse costume that hides an impostor inside. We have to grow into the likeness of Christ. (That is why he did what he did)

But as a reaction against the cheapening of God’s grace, some Christians fall into the second mistake which is a life of religous performance. I don’t know if you all remember the WWJD campaign some years back. People would wear bracelets, t-shirts, and bumper stickers trying to remind themselves of “What Would Jesus Do”. It was pretty catchy and I’m sure it made some Christian merchandizing company’s a lot of money but theologically it’s a bit weak. I agree that we should try to live like Jesus but at the same time, we cannot make the mistake that Jesus is just an example to follow like Gandhi or Buddha or even the prophet Mohammed. Not to disparage these historic figures but Jesus claimed to be so much more than an example to follow. He is not a great religious teacher that came to give us some moral lessons to live by. The ability to follow Christ is not found in our own strength but only by the power that comes through his Spirit in our inner being.

The verses about dying to ourselves, giving up everything to follow Christ, and picking up our cross daily may resonate with some of us and so we are tempted to run harder, serve more, give all that we can. That is until we burn out and then suddenly we are left wondering where the joy of following Jesus went. In that moment, we can find ourselves crushed by the sin that we couldn’t overcome, jaded by the fact that we could not follow Jesus as radically as we thought we could. (Though this is not as common here in the Bay Area but I have seen a few people take up the call of Christ only to be devastated by their inability to live up to what they believe were God’s demands.) Often these individuals are doers and they don’t pause long enough to realize that all their doing is by their own strength and not by the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the end, it becomes hard for these individuals to receive what Paul says in Romans 8:

Romans 8:1 ESV

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

This is a nice way of saying that you are a religious legalist and though you may look mature on the outside, it is not driven by a spiritual maturity inside. Jerry Bridges describes this danger like this:

To the degree that we feel we are on a legal or performance relationship with God, to that degree our progress in sanctification is impeded. A legal mode of thinking gives indwelling sin an advantage, because nothing cuts to the nerve of the desire to pursue holiness as much as a sense of guilt. On the contrary, nothing so motivates us to deal with sin in our lives as does the understanding and application of the two truths that our sins are forgiven and the dominion of sin is broken because of our union with Christ.

Conclusion

Interestingly enough, the answer to the two greates errors of the Christian life is found in this one glorious doctrine. This is why John Calvin called our union with Christ, the double grace of God. Because in the times that we are tempted to cheapen God’s grace and to allow sin to remain unchecked in their lives, we realize that Christ is constantly knocking on the door of your heart so that he can increase his presence in your heart. But at the same time it keeps us from turning the glorious privilege of following Jesus into an endless list of tiring religious duties. God has called us to so much more than that! And in those times that we are tempted to turn the Christian life into a self-motivated religious performance, being in Christ means you will always be accepted by the Father even when you fail and He alone will strengthen you with power through His Spirit.

Our union with Christ is the key to this Christian life becasue that is where the extravagant grace of God and the radical call to discipleship come perfectly together in all those who are being changed from glory to glory.