The soul never thinks without an image.
Aristotle
“Once upon a time, Tommy opened a door.” 1 This is all a three-year-old needs to be drawn in, G. K. Chesterton claims. A very young child’s imagination is so strong he doesn’t need much of a story to be engaged.
But as we get older, we require more details and more action to ignite our imaginations (“Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon” might work for a seven-year-old, Chesterton suggests). 2 The younger we are, the less we need in order to be captivated. Our imaginations were stronger when we were children.
Storytellers and poets have long known that imagination touches something deeper than our thoughts. “God loves you as you are, not as you should be”—as consoling and true as that might be—won’t reach us in the same way as a story that begins, “A certain man had two sons …” (Luke 15:11 KJV).
This book will require you to use your imagination because union with Christ is an enchanted reality. And we live in a disenchanted world.
But before you set this book aside as something for “creative types” or someone not you, we need to talk about this word imagination. Because as much as we prize it, we often clip its wings. We hear “imagination” and think it’s about fiction and fairy tales, a child’s business, or things not real. Hence our phrase, “Oh, that’s just your imagination.”
But I’m using the word in a larger, more human sense. Imagination is that distinctly human capacity by which we image anything and everything that is not immediately visible to our eyes. Where did you last set down your keys? What would you like to have for dinner tonight? What color are your mother’s eyes? (This requires imagination unless you’re looking at her.) Whether you’re aware of it or not, you use your imagination all the time.
Imagination is also an integral part of science. Isaac Newton saw the apple fall, as many had before him, but he used his imagination to discover the fact of gravity. Any invisible force, anything conceptual, requires us to use our imaginations to engage with and understand. This might explain why Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” 3 More than merely seeing what is unreal or fantastic, imagination is used to image anything that is real but not visible. It’s not just your imagination; it’s your imagination!
Most important, imagination is necessary to know and enjoy God. How else can we relate to the true God, “whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16), than by using our God-given imaging capacities—our imaginations? We must use our imaginations if we want to fully inhabit and experience the Christian life.
If language like this makes you nervous, please notice that the Bible, from beginning to end, calls to our imagination. When Moses tells the people to say from generation to generation, “It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt” (Exod. 13:8), he is calling them to use their imaginations—to put themselves in the Exodus story and to make it their own. When you read a parable of Jesus and try to tease out what it might mean for you, you are using your imagination.
When the New Testament writers ask us, “Set your minds on things that are above” (Col. 3:2), it’s not a command to crane our necks and look at the skies, but to look for a reality beyond what we can naturally see. When they tell us to “fix our eyes … on what is unseen” (2 Cor. 4:18 NIV), it is our imagination that must respond.
Or, take that most frequent biblical command to “remember.” “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). You can’t remember without engaging your imagination. And that tragic refrain “But they forgot” (Judg. 3:7; 1 Sam. 12:9; etc.) can be diagnosed as a failure to call to mind, that is, a failure of the imagination.
In this book, we will excavate a forgotten treasure, the reality of union with Christ. Why would something so valuable need to be excavated? In a later chapter, I’ll offer several suggestions as to why, on the whole, we have lost union with Christ as a controlling lens for how we think about the gospel and salvation; but here I’ll offer just one.
The biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann claims, “The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination, so that we are too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.” 4 I think he might be right. And if Chesterton is right as well, and you are older than three (highly likely if you are reading this), then your imagination is already somewhat diminished, or at the very least, out of shape.
One way to think about the Christian life—not the only way, but a powerful and too-little-used way—is that believing the gospel means having your imagination taken captive and reshaped by a new story. And perhaps this is a child’s business, and at least part of what Jesus meant when he said, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). So let’s do some imaginative work together.
Most of us have wondered, at one time or another, if we were switched at birth. “Are those really my parents?”
Now, imagine your parents are mean and critical, that you have always been a disappointment to them and they to you. But then, one day, you find a dusty trunk in the attic. You quietly pick the lock and open the trunk and discover papers that prove you had, in fact, been abducted as a baby. These aren’t your parents after all—why, they’re criminals!
You discover that your real mom was a painter at the Sorbonne in Paris and your real dad was a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and a professional baseball player. And you say to yourself, “Of course, this explains everything! I am extraordinary! I knew it all along.” You also read that they are fabulously wealthy and have a lavish inheritance waiting for you.
It’s a fantastic story, but you get it. Such a discovery would cause you to reinterpret everything about your life: where you came from, your true identity, your capacities and capabilities, the resources available to you, your future, and your destiny. After that day, your life would never be the same. You would come down from that attic with new eyes for everything and everyone. Your whole life would feel new, changed, and invigorated.
But here’s the thing—it had always been true. It was the truth underlying your life even before you discovered it. It was rooted in history, and you had the DNA to prove it. It was true while it was hidden from your sight. But it didn’t change your life until your eyes were opened to it. 5
This book is like opening that trunk.
Union with Christ tells you a new story about who you are. If you are “in Christ,” you too have been given a new identity. God has called you into a new life, rooted in a history that predates you, anchored in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. You discover who you are “in Christ,” and you are given the DNA to prove it, the Holy Spirit. You once were lost, but now you are “found in him” (Phil. 3:9).
This truth can change everything for you, but living in this new reality will require your imagination. The Christian message is simple enough for a child to understand. At the same time, the Bible says that because of the new life you have been given in Christ, “from now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16 NRSV). Coming to see your union with Christ is like finally putting on a pair of desperately needed glasses—Wow! Look at that! We see ourselves, and everything else, with new eyes.
I’m starting this book on union with Christ by talking about imagination because you will need yours, even to answer the question, what is union with Christ?
Jesus says your relationship with him is like that of branches to a vine (John 15). It’s living and organic, dependent on a source outside of you to sustain you. Grafted into the vine, your very nature begins to change. The lifeblood of another flows within you and gives you life.
The apostle Paul says your relationship with Christ is like the most intimate of human relationships, marriage (Eph. 5). You no longer belong only to yourself. Your identity now includes another; it is broadened from “me” to “us.”
Or, it’s like the relationship between the parts of a body with their head (1 Cor. 12), which if you think about it, is the most essential relationship there is. You can get away from your spouse, even your arm for that matter. But if you get separated from your head, that’s it. Life’s not possible.
The apostle Peter takes a different angle and calls us living stones being built together into a temple (1 Pet. 2). Peter uses this image to describe how, when we are united to Christ, we become integrally connected to everyone else who is united to him, as together we house the very presence of God in this world.
It is revealing that the writers of Scripture, even Jesus himself, resort to word pictures, similes, and metaphors to capture the mystery of union with Christ. The number of metaphors employed tells us that this is important; the variety of metaphors tells us that it is far reaching. But the fact that similes and metaphors—the language of poetry—must be used at all tells us there is no way to get at this truth directly. Images are necessary. Your imagination must be engaged for you to lay hold of your new life in Christ.
Perhaps you are thinking, But why do I need to think this hard about union with Christ? I’ve gotten this far in my Christian life without really considering it—is it really necessary?
If that’s what you’re thinking, let me ask you a few questions. Have you ever wondered, Isn’t there more to it than this? Or have you ever had difficulty connecting what you know to be true about God with how you feel or how you live each day? Have you ever longed to change but just felt stuck?
One of the major arguments of this book is that union with Christ was once considered to be at the very heart of why the gospel is good news. Nothing is more basic or more central to the Christian life than union with Christ.
And yet for many of us, union with Christ might feel vague and shadowy, not central or basic. This has very real consequences for our everyday life with God. As our understanding and appreciation of union with Christ has diminished, so too has our sense of what salvation means. We may know what God has saved us from, but have we lost sight of what God has saved us for?
Becoming a Christian is not simply coming to believe certain things about a God who remains outside of you. And being a Christian is not simply about what you do or don’t do. Christianity is a life of faith, but it’s a life of faith. You have been grafted into God’s own life, invited in to participate in the fellowship of God. “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:9).
Could anything about the Christian life be more precious than this? This is what God has saved you for—communion, relationship, and intimacy with himself. This is what Christ suffered for, “that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). As J. I. Packer put it in his classic Knowing God:
What will make heaven to be heaven is the presence of Jesus, and of a reconciled divine father who loves us for Jesus’ sake no less than He loves Jesus Himself. To see, and know, and love, and be loved by, the Father and the Son, in company with the rest of God’s vast family, is the whole essence of the Christian hope.… If you are a believer … this prospect satisfies you completely. 6
If the presence of Jesus is what makes heaven, heaven, and if union with Christ means that you can have the presence of Jesus dwelling within you now, then do you see what this means? Union with Christ means the reality of knowing God and living in communion with him doesn’t begin when you die. Eternal life begins in this life when Christ joins his life to yours (John 17:3). We can have fellowship with God through Christ (1 John 1:3). We can begin to experience heaven in our lives here and now.
If you are united to Christ, you are a citizen of heaven (Phil. 3:20). Present tense. You have “every spiritual blessing” (Eph. 1:3). You participate in heavenly realities even as you walk around with both feet on the ground. Today we do this by faith in what is unseen. It requires our imagination. But one day it will be by sight, when we see him face to face (1 Cor. 13:12).
Of all the good news the gospel brings, the greatest—and indeed the door to all the rest—is that you can be united to Christ. It’s really possible. Union with Christ is not an abstract idea. It is a powerful reality. And if Jesus has joined his life to yours, then you have been given everything you need for life and godliness (2 Pet. 1:3). But unless you are united to him, all that he has done for you remains useless and of no value to you. 7
This book is divided into four parts. In part 1, we’ll look at what union with Christ is and why we need to recover it. Already I’ve made some pretty substantial claims, including that union with Christ is central to the Christian life but largely misunderstood or overlooked today. So in part 2, I’ll aim to substantiate these claims and offer some ideas as to why union with Christ may be only vaguely familiar to many of us today.
Part 3 addresses how union with Christ gets applied to our lives. You can see in the table of contents how this will play out, but we’re going to frame our discussion around four fundamental questions: Who am I? Where am I headed? How will I get there? What can I hope for? Union with Christ answers each in a surprising way. It gives you a new identity, a new purpose, a new destiny, and renewed hope along the way.
Of course, it’s one thing to have our questions answered, but another to integrate these truths into our lives day by day. That’s part 4 of this book—how to live in union with Christ each day, more and more. Just as our loss of union with Christ as a controlling lens has had real negative repercussions, so its recovery holds such potential for hope and healing. We’ll look at some of the possibilities this recovery holds, specifically how it can help us hold together things that often seem divergent: grace and obedience, cross and kingdom, mercy and justice, the personal Christ and the cosmic Christ.
C. S. Lewis famously said that before he was a Christian, reading the novels of George MacDonald “baptized” his imagination and made it feasible for him to envision a different way of looking at the world. 8 My hope for this book is that it will, in some small measure, do that for you as well—that you will be awakened to your union with Christ and it will ignite your imagination, and alter your vision, until you see yourself and others, God and this world, very differently.
The apostle Paul prays that “the eyes of your heart [would be] enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance” (Eph. 1:18). Paul prays for the eyes of your heart—what are they if not your imagination? My hope, then, is that with them you would see what is true, so that you may know God, and enjoy him, and be filled with hope. This glorious adventure begins in union with Christ.