When I was in junior high school, I played football on an organized team for the first time. And my size gave our team a distinct advantage. I was the smallest player on the field. I was so small, in fact, that when I had the ball, the opposing team had a difficult time tackling me because they could hardly see me.
In crucial situations when we had to have the yards, our go-to play was called “Refrigerator Right” (in honor of Chicago Bears defensive-lineman-turned-running-back, William “The Refrigerator” Perry). Coach Junior set Andrew, the biggest guy on our team, in front of me as a blocker, and the quarterback handed me the ball. With Andrew leading the way, one man made a way for another. I was completely obscured by his strength and powerful work, but running to freedom. Everything that was supposed to hit me hit Andrew. He blazed a path for me against hostile forces. He made a way to glory. I was hidden in him.
The Bible says that those who belong to Christ are so intertwined with his life that when he died, we died with him. “For you have died,” Paul wrote to his very living audience, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Everything that was supposed to hit us, even the judgment of God for our sins, hit Jesus. He blazed a path against hostile forces, seen and unseen. He made a way to glory. One man made a way for all to live (1 Cor. 15:22). We are hidden in Christ. That’s one picture of union with Christ.
You may be thinking, okay, okay, you’ve given me several pictures now. Vine and branches, stones in a temple, marriage even, and now junior high football. But what exactly is union with Christ?
The Bible calls God’s plan to restore humanity to himself “the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed” (Rom. 16:25–26). Even in being disclosed, it remains a mystery. “This mystery is profound,” the Bible says, talking about the union between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32).
Explaining a mystery is like explaining a joke. If you do that, you kill it. So here we have a tension. I want to be as clear as I can while still holding on to the fact that this is a mysterious reality.
There are other mysteries essential to the Christian faith—how Jesus could be fully God and fully man, how God could be one and yet exist in three persons. Even though we don’t fully comprehend these mysteries, we are still compelled to speak of them in wonder. It is the same with our union with Christ. John Calvin wrote:
For my own part, I am overwhelmed by the depth of this mystery, and am not ashamed to join Paul in acknowledging at once my ignorance and my admiration … whatever is supernatural is clearly beyond our own comprehension. Let us therefore labor more to feel Christ living in us, than to discover the nature of that intercourse. 1
It makes sense that our human understanding could never fully encompass our union with Christ. But the fact that we can’t get to the bottom of this ocean doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put our feet in, or even swim. So let us strive to understand and experience, taste and enjoy, all we can of this union while remembering that the Christ we experience is always better and more beautiful than our own personal experience of him.
Since union with Christ is irreducibly mysterious, I hesitate even to try to describe it simply. But because it is biblically so prominent, yet only vaguely familiar to most of us, we need to take a few steps back and define our terms. We must begin somewhere. So, to consider the question what exactly is union with Christ? let’s start here: union with Christ means that you are in Christ and Christ is in you.
In all his letters, the apostle Paul never once uses the word “Christian.” Rather, his most common descriptor for those who follow Christ is that they are “in Christ.” It can be easy to read over that little phrase. Yet it is impossible to overstate its significance for Paul. One New Testament scholar says, “Being ‘in Christ’ is the essence of Christian proclamation and experience … Without treating the ‘in Christ’ motif we miss the heart of the Christian message.” 2
What does it mean to be “in Christ”?
To be “in Christ” means that Christ represents his people. Scholars sometimes refer to this under the heading of a “corporate personality,” 3 a leader who represents a people or a group. As part of a representative democracy, Americans appreciate how representation works. Our elected leaders represent us; their actions speak for us. Or we can think of a sports team. When the forward on a soccer team scores the winning goal, that goal and the victory are credited to the entire team, even to the players sitting on the bench, even to the fans sitting in the stands or sitting on their sofas at home—even to those fans who didn’t see the game (“You mean we won?”). They all participate in another’s triumph.
Or take the story of David and Goliath. Have you ever wondered why only two warriors fought that day when the entire armies were gathered there against each other? The giant Goliath was chosen to represent the Philistines, Israel’s enemy. He issued a challenge: “Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us” (1 Sam. 17:8–9).
So, young David represented all of Israel. In what should sound like a familiar story, the young shepherd boy from Bethlehem, who would be king, fought as a champion on behalf of all the people. He was their representative. And David’s victory was credited—it was imputed—to those he represented. All of Israel, we could say, was “in David,” even though they themselves were not active participants in the battle.
In the same way, Christ represents those who place their faith in him. If we are united to Christ, then we are united to him in all that he has done for us. Christ represents those who come to be his so thoroughly that we are said to have been “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20), “buried … with him” (Rom. 6:4), and “raised with Christ” (Col. 3:1). We are even “seated … with him in the heavenly places” (Eph. 2:6) now as we walk about with both feet on the ground.
Paul actually invented new words to describe this new reality. The phrases “crucified with,” “raised with,” “buried with,” and “seated with” are each a single word in Greek beginning with the prefix syn, meaning “with.” Those words didn’t exist before Paul coined them. But something so unique had happened that there were no words for it! A new vocabulary was necessary. It was the only way he could describe who he had become because of Jesus.
When we are in Christ, every part of Christ’s life, not only his death, has significance for us. We share in his life and obedience, his death and his resurrection, even his ascension! We participate in another’s victory. All that is his becomes ours. 4 How can such things be? God in Christ assumed our full humanity to heal our full humanity. He came all the way down to blaze a trail all the way back—for us to live in the presence of God. This means our union with Christ is rooted and grounded in Christ’s union with us in the incarnation. And so Charles Wesley’s words in the old hymn may now come into sharp focus: “Made like him, like him we rise; ours the cross, the grave, the skies!” 5 Alleluia!
There is no place in the Bible that captures union with Christ more succinctly than Galatians 2:20. Listen closely to what Paul says of himself here, because if you are in Christ, you too can say with him:
“I have been crucified with Christ.”
Notice the verb tense “have been” is present perfect—something that happened in the past with continuing present effect. If you are in Christ, then you are united to him in his death and crucifixion. When he died, you now share in that death.
“It is no longer I who live.”
The person I was before I knew Christ is no longer the person that I am. The Christian life is not a self-improvement project. It’s not about reforming the old self. We are talking about a new self. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17).
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
In a moment, we will get to what it means that Christ now lives in you.
“And the life I now live in the flesh.”
Legend has it that Paul was a short man. When he says, “The life I now live in the flesh,” he knows that he’s still uniquely himself, diminutive and bold. His body and his personality have not changed. But in another sense, his person has been changed fundamentally.
“The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.”
Faith is how union with Christ becomes operative and powerful in your life. Faith is a God-given gift that allows you to take hold of God’s having taken hold of you. If you are in Christ, this is now the defining truth of who you are. Your life, your story, becomes enfolded by another story—Another’s story. That’s one way to define faith: faith means finding your identity in Christ.
“I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Paul is unusually personal here because he wants it to be utterly personal for you. He wants you too to be able to say, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
I have a friend who used to be Mickey Mouse. She was the person inside the costume at Disneyland. Reflecting on her time “in Mickey,” she said, “Growing up, I thrived on behavior modification. I thought: If I’m good, I will be loved. If I’m bad, I will be rejected. I learned to wear a mask—not to show what was really going on. My core beliefs were that I was not worthy, accepted, or loved, so I would clamor and manufacture ways to elicit the positive responses I wanted from people. When I put on Mickey’s costume, I got that positive response times a hundred.” She felt safe and loved, covered in Mickey’s “righteousness.” But she also gained a new sense of what it means to be in Christ. She recalled praying, “Lord, is this what it’s like to have masses of people run towards you with joy, excitement, and eagerness?”
This is another way to picture what it means for you to be in Christ. You are completely safe, hidden in him. He represents you before the Father. He covers you—your sin, your shame, your weakness. But he covers you in a very real way, not as a temporary fiction. Being “in Mickey” (or any other mask we hide behind) is to masquerade in a false identity. But being in Christ is to discover our true, God-given identity. You are alive in him, moving with him through this world, clothed in all his benefits and blessings. You are in Christ.
To be found in Christ means you don’t have to prove yourself anymore. Your frantic attempts to find or craft an acceptable identity, or your tireless work to manage your own reputation—these are over and done. You can rest. In Christ. You don’t have to be intimidated by anyone, ever. Who are you? You are in Christ! And you no longer need to fear the judgment of God (1 John 4:18). When God looks at you, he sees you hidden in Christ. This is freedom. This is confidence. This is good, good news.
My oldest son is six years old. The other day in the car, he must have been thinking about union with Christ, because he asked my wife, “So, Mommy. It’s like this—Jesus lives inside me, and God lives inside my sister, and the Holy Spirit lives inside my little brother, right? But then who lives inside you and Daddy?”
It’s not an unreasonable question. What does the Bible mean when it says Christ is in us? How can a person who lived two thousand years ago live inside another person now, much less live inside millions of people who follow him?
Jesus lives on in his followers in a way different from any other religious figure. Buddha, for example, lives on in the lives of his followers today through his teachings. That’s how he is connected to them. But Christians believe that Christ is alive today, radically affecting his followers beyond merely the example of his perfect life or his impressive teachings. How, exactly, are Christ’s followers connected to the Christ of history? The Bible teaches us that not only are you in Christ, but also Christ is in you.
In the gospel of John, as Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, he called this bunch of grown men “little children.” “Little children, yet a little while I am with you … ‘Where I am going you cannot come’” (John 13:33). This would be shattering news to these men who had left everything to obey Jesus’s call to “follow me,” now to be told that they could follow him no further. Yet Jesus continued, “Let not your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1). How could their hearts not be troubled when Jesus had just told them he would be going away?
A few verses later, Jesus picked up the children metaphor again and surely confused his friends: “I will not leave you as orphans” (John 14:18). And “orphans” must have felt like the appropriate word to them, the epitome of one alone. If you leave us now, Jesus, who else do we have? And what are you saying? Are you leaving us, or will you never leave?
Even more baffling, in this same conversation Jesus said, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away” (John 16:7). How could this be true? What could possibly be better than having Christ beside them, day after day?
Jesus told them, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth … You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you” (John 14:16–17). Much ink has been spilled attempting to translate the Greek word here translated “Helper.” It is variously translated “Comforter,” “Counselor,” “Advocate,” and “Friend.” In fact, so much attention has been placed on this word that the word just before it can be easily overlooked. “Another”?
Up to this point, who has been their constant comforter, counselor, advocate, and friend? Could there be “another” like Jesus?
Yes. The Holy Spirit. Jesus promised that when he went away the Holy Spirit would come. And the Spirit would come in such a way that Jesus said, “It is to your advantage … for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Why was it to their advantage?
The only thing that could be better than having Jesus with you, beside you, would be having Jesus within you, wherever you are and wherever you go. And that is what we have, those of us who are united to Christ. You have “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). This was how Jesus could truthfully promise his disciples, “I am with you always” (Matt. 28:20) right before he ascended to heaven and disappeared from their sight. It was why he could tell them, “Let not your hearts be troubled.… I will not leave you as orphans” (John 14:1, 18) on the very night he announced his departure.
It was also how Jesus could promise what might seem impossible, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12 NIV). During his earthly life, Jesus’s presence was localized to his physical body. He experienced our frustration of being only in one place at one time. But now that he dwells within his disciples by his Spirit, his ministry—his power through his people—is multiplied exponentially.
To be united to Christ is to have the Spirit of Christ within you. The Spirit is the real, living bond between Jesus and us. If you do not have the Spirit, then you do not have Christ (Rom. 8:9). But if the Spirit dwells within you, consider what you do have. “Having the Spirit,” Sinclair Ferguson wrote, “is the equivalent, indeed the very mode, of having the incarnate, obedient, crucified, resurrected and exalted Christ indwelling us so that we are united to him as he is united to the Father.” 6
When Paul asked, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16), you can be assured that his first readers were even more baffled than you might be. For them, the temple was the unique dwelling place of the one God, the meeting place of heaven and earth, kept protected behind curtains and approachable only through elaborate sacrifices, only once a year, and only by the high priest. The idea that God would—or could—dwell inside his people was, and is, difficult to grasp, even mind bending.
No wonder Paul ended one of his letters by asking, “Do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Cor. 13:5). I’m suggesting that no, we don’t realize this about ourselves. This is “mysticism on the highest plane,” 7 as one writer called it. “That mystical union,” 8 said another. And by definition, what is mystical is hard to fathom. But it is true—Christ Jesus now dwells within his followers. Christ’s power and life enter into our lives to transform us, not only to deal with (atone for) our past, but also now to liberate us with a strength and power and dignity unlike any other.
Christ dwelling in us by his Spirit is a guarantee that we can and will change. We are adopted into God’s family, and not in name only. The Spirit in us now guides and forms us more and more into the family likeness. The same Christ who overcame every temptation and was perfectly obedient—that Jesus is in you now. The Jesus who had compassion on the crowds and who healed the sick—that Jesus is in you. The humble Jesus who led as a servant, who washed his disciples’ feet—he’s in you. The Jesus who repeatedly shattered racial barriers with his teachings and in his life—that Jesus is in you. The Jesus who suffered and loved to the end—he dwells in you. And the Jesus who was raised to new life—that Jesus is living in you right now!
Do you realize what resources you carry around with you? Do you realize that you are never again alone to face whatever you are facing? This is why Paul prays for us, “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (Eph. 1:18–19 NIV).
Jesus was the perfect human. He was fully human, subject to all our temptations and indignities, but he lived the perfect human life. He is what human is supposed to look like. We often think of human as inherently flawed, as an excuse for our shortcomings: “I’m only human, you know.” 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.
With that in mind, consider two superheroes, Batman and Spider-Man. Batman is a rich and strong man with lots of cool gadgets. His superpowers stem from his external possessions. Spider-Man has a few accessories as well, but he is a superhero because of the spider powers he obtained when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. His nature has been changed. He now has a new power accessible to him, within him. 9
Christ in you makes you more like Spider-Man than Batman. Something alien to you, from outside of you, has entered into you and changed your nature. You now have power that you did not have before. The trouble with this analogy is that Spider-Man became something more than human, while we instead are being restored to our full humanity. We are becoming more like Christ.
So that’s what union with Christ means. You are in Christ and Christ is in you. Simple, right?
I don’t think it’s preacherly hyperbole to say that you will never hear something more amazing in your entire life. Union with Christ touches on the highest and most profound truths of the gospel and at the same time reaches down into the depths of the human heart to fill us with more joy and hope, more comfort and strength than anything else ever could. Is there any truth we more need to lay hold of today than our union with Christ?
In Christ, like in that Mickey costume, you are hidden and secure. Christ in you, by his Spirit, dwells and gives you new life and power to change. And all this happens without obliterating you as you. You are precious and unique—God dreamed up the one and only you and knit you together himself—but he created you to be united to him. You are more and most yourself when united to Christ. He covers you, he shields you, he represents you before the Father. He also fills you, illuminates you, and animates you, making you more yourself and more human than you could ever be on your own.
This is a stunning reality. We have spent some time thus far defining union with Christ, but I’ve done so at the risk of misleading you. Being a Christian is not about absorbing certain doctrines about God. Nor is it about being a better or different kind of person. The goal is having a personal, vital, profoundly real relationship with God through Christ by the Holy Spirit. The goal is enjoying communion with God himself. Union with Christ is not an idea to be understood, but a new reality to be lived, through faith.
And the reality will always be greater than our experience or understanding of it. C. S. Lewis said it well (of course):
The presence of God is not the same as the sense of the presence of God. The latter may be due to imagination; the former may be attended with no “sensible consolation” … The act which engenders a child ought to be, and usually is attended by pleasure. But it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure there may be sterility: where there is no pleasure the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super-added gift for which we give thanks when it comes. 10
I want you to experience the living presence of Christ as integral to your salvation. But your experience is not primary. What is primary, Lewis is saying, is the reality of Christ’s presence, sometimes in spite of our experience.
To put it another way, the faithfulness of God is not dependent on the strength of your faith. In one of her letters, Flannery O’Connor wrote that her faith “rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea.” 11 Our faith is indeed fickle and wavering, but God’s love is constant and steadfast. 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.
The gospel, the good news, is the way the Holy Spirit turns our eyes away from ourselves and onto Christ. The gospel brings you into union with Christ. Christ enters your heart and gives you faith. By that faith, you receive Christ and all his fullness. Faith fixes your eyes on Christ and rests in him.
The wonder of our union with Christ is not reducible to our experience or understanding of it. And isn’t this wonderful news considering what O’Connor and Lewis are saying? It is not the quality or degree of our faith that matters as much as our being united to the object of our faith, the perfect Christ. It is the perfect Christ who saves us, not our imperfect faith or our imperfect obedience. 12
We must be relentless about this. Otherwise, we run the risk of reducing the glory of our salvation in Christ to the smallness of our individual experience of him. So, as we explore the wonder and mystery of union with Christ together, let us always remember that the Christ we experience is always greater and more marvelous than our experience of him. 13
My grandparents both died in recent years. They were married for seventy years. I called them Dear and Hacko—“Hacko” was my childish mispronunciation of my grandfather’s middle name, and “Dear” because Hacko said that his wife was too pretty to be called anyone’s grandmother. They were so close to each other that I can hardly speak one of their names without the other’s.
Dear and Hacko were deeply in love. After so many decades together, they could finish each other’s sentences. Dear could probably tell you, verbatim, all of Hacko’s many stories. And boy, was he a storyteller! It’s an inherent part of being a southern man, but Hacko was uniquely gifted in this capacity. Hacko could no doubt tell by the tone of Dear’s voice or the tilt of her head what she was about to say to him as well. They felt each other’s joys and pains, successes and failures. They always turned to each other, included the other. It would be foreign to one of them to make a plan that didn’t include the other. They had lived life together for so long that they truly became one.
Now, objectively, they were no more married on the last day of their life together than on their wedding day, seventy years before. When the minister first pronounced them “man and wife,” they were fully and completely married. Legally, they became a new entity, a married couple. They shared a family name. Their most significant possessions were no longer “his” or “hers,” but “ours.” They began to be “one.”
But subjectively, their experience of this new identity grew over time. The sentence finishing, mind reading, need anticipating, thinking of the other before themselves—that grew with the years. And just as in a long marriage, your experience of being found in Christ is something that will grow over time.
Christ has wed himself to you. This is not just a declaration to agree with. It is an objective reality to live into. He has fully atoned for you, and he is now with you, assuring you that with him, you have the resources to overcome anything that threatens to overwhelm you.
I’ve noticed, over the years, that when I say, “You are in Christ and Christ is in you,” people are still scratching their heads and asking, “Yes, but what does that mean, practically speaking?”
Jesus knows it can be hard to believe that you are in Christ. Perhaps that’s why he prays for us in John 17, that “just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us … I in them and you in me … so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:21–23).
The Father loves you “even as” he loves his own son because all that belongs to the son he now shares with all those who are united to him. Whatever is true of Jesus in God’s eyes is now true of you. That’s union with Christ. Union with Christ means you are in Christ. And Christ himself prays for us to know we are hidden in him—and promises that he “will continue to make it known” (John 17:26).
It can also be hard to believe that Christ is in you. So that’s why Paul prays for us in this way in Ephesians 3: “[I pray] 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 … may have strength to comprehend … and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (vv. 16–19).
You might find it strange that Paul prays for something that is already true—“that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith”—since he is writing to Christians, who by definition are those in whom Christ dwells. We understand, however, that it’s one thing to know something and another thing to know it. This is a prayer for what can be called experiential knowledge, “to know … that [which] surpasses knowledge” (v. 19).
Here are two of the greatest prayers of the Bible, John 17 and Ephesians 3, and what are they about? Union with Christ! They are prayers that we would know—beyond mere intellectual comprehension—and experience our union with Christ. Thanks be to God!
I’ve tried to say as clearly as I can what union with Christ entails. And yet, we will never move beyond the need for images and imagination. So I’ll conclude this chapter with my favorite image for union with Christ. It’s from Ephesians 4, where Paul says our union with Christ is a reality we grow up into. We are to grow up “to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children … We are to grow up in every way into [Christ]” (vv. 13–15). The metaphor makes clear that we are already in Christ, definitively and objectively. And now, we are to grow up into him, experientially and subjectively.
Imagine a little boy wearing his father’s dress shirt. He is already fully clothed, you could say, but he’s still just a little boy. He’ll have to grow up into this new covering until it fits him. In the same way, we are already completely clothed in Christ and his righteousness, but life in Christ is one of growing up into this new reality until it fits us. You are not striving to attain it. You are striving to lay hold of what is already yours. You are growing up into it.