One with My Lord (eBook)

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Found in Christ

. . . in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.

Philippians 3:8–9

I can pinpoint the exact moment I finally had to admit I was middle aged. I was traveling through London and needed to make a quick connection at Paddington Station. The plan was to bound up the stairs from the underground station, glance quickly at the main departures board to check the platform of my connection, and get to the train just in time to board before it left—and to do all this without having to break my stride. In reality, I did bound up the stairs from the underground. I did glance at the departures board. And then I stopped.

I couldn’t read any of the information on the board. It was a digital display. All the characters had a blurry halo; I could make out the individual letters and numbers only by walking right up to the board and squinting hard at it. (Amazingly, I made my connection—if barely.) For years I had prided myself on having great eyesight. Now I knew I needed glasses.

But I hadn’t realized just how much I needed them.

When I finally got them, I could see the departures board at Paddington Station. But what surprised me was just how clearly I could now see everything else. It was like the whole world was now in high definition. I could now see distant trees and buildings in crisp detail. Everything was now more focused, much clearer.

Spiritual Spectacles

I had a similar experience when I started reflecting on two words that occur together repeatedly in the New Testament—“in Christ.” These words are used to describe the true reality of Christian believers. It is a doctrine theologians call union with Christ, the idea that when people come to faith in Jesus, they are united to him spiritually. They are not just followers of Christ; they are in some sense now situated in him.

This idea is key to understanding the heart of the Christian faith. It brings it all into much better focus. What had seemed to me somewhat blurry truths and concepts now had a sharper definition. The contours of the Christian landscape were easier to see. The connections between different parts of Christian truth were now more obvious and vital. I now had a clearer vision of things.

Lens seems to be the right word for thinking about it. I knew, at some level, that I had a relationship with Jesus and that this meant being deeply connected to him. I had seen the “in Christ” language and related expressions throughout the New Testament. But I had never thought to dwell on them and consider what they might mean. As I started to look at this concept, I found myself looking through it: seeing everything else through the lens of this truth. It changed my whole world.

When I first became a Christian, I was primarily thinking in terms of being a follower of Jesus. I knew he was my Lord and Savior. I knew he would do a far better job of running my life than I could. I knew that he had died for me and risen again, that I could trust him with my life. All that was true, gloriously so. But I didn’t really understand how it all fit together. There was Christ, somewhere over there, and here was I, at a distance, wanting with all my heart to keep up with him. I knew who he was and what I was called to. I knew that somehow he would help me be a follower. But that’s as far as I could understand it. Conceptually, it was as if Jesus was at the other end of the universe from me, and I was always going to struggle to follow him at such a distance.

A Preferred Designation

One of the surprises when we turn the pages of the New Testament is how little the word “Christian” comes up. Given that this is the book for Christians, you would expect it to be littered with references to Christians and Christianity.

In fact, the word “Christian” appears only three times, the first of which is as a nickname for these new followers of Jesus: “And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26). Many think this was initially intended to be demeaning, the equivalent of “little Christs” or “Christlings,” but it evidently stuck and—whatever the intentions—clearly was no great embarrassment to Christians, as we’ve happily carried the label ever since.

But whereas the word “Christian” is used only three times in the New Testament, the language of being “in Christ” and related expressions (e.g., “in him”) occur many dozens of times. Paul alone uses this terminology more than 160 times. You can open the Bible on the page of virtually every New Testament letter and see this language, often several times. This is the New Testament’s default way of speaking of followers of Jesus. A few examples will show us how striking this pattern is.

At one point in his writing to the Corinthians, Paul describes an anonymous Christian man:

I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. (2 Cor. 12:2–4)

Paul is talking about a (so far) nameless Christian who has been given a unique spiritual experience. Paul is a little fuzzy on some of the details. This man saw something of “the third heaven,” but Paul doesn’t know if it was a vision or whether he was literally there in person. Twice he admits, “I do not know, God knows.”

We might think that uncertainty understandable if this were someone else’s experience and if Paul were only describing what he had heard secondhand. But Paul goes on to show that he has actually been talking about himself. He talks about “the surpassing greatness of the revelations” and how easily he might have become conceited by seeing them (2 Cor. 12:7). Paul had been given backstage access to parts of heaven no one else normally gets to see.

For various reasons, Paul has been reluctant to ever share about this experience, but circumstances have compelled him to. Opponents in Corinth are running a smear campaign against Paul, trying to turn the Corinthian church away from him. One of their arguments seems to be that they had an inside track with God, that they had experienced special visions and revelations from God. So Paul is trying to do two tricky things at once: (1) show his readers that such visions alone are not signs of spiritual maturity and authority and (2) demonstrate that he’s not just saying this because he’s never had any. This isn’t a case of sour grapes. Paul is in the awkward position of having to explain that he actually has had visions and revelations—in fact, surpassing anything his opponents had experienced—while at the same time trying to show that this is not the sort of thing a Christian should boast in. The fact that this extraordinary revelation occurred fourteen years ago and that Paul has never once mentioned it until now shows that it has not been the focus of his ministry.

So in his awkward reluctance to bring this up, Paul initially talks about this experience using third-person language—“I know a man who had an amazing vision of heaven”—before spilling the beans that it was really him all along.

What is significant for us is the language Paul uses to do this. If it were us writing today, we would probably say something like “I know a Christian man who fourteen years ago . . .” But Paul says, “I know a man in Christ.” That, to him, is the most natural and obvious way to talk about himself. And he’s presuming it’s the most natural and obvious way for his readers to understand it too. He doesn’t have to include a sidebar explaining what “being in Christ” means. He just refers to “a man in Christ,” and everyone knows exactly what he’s talking about. It was the go-to terminology. On a census form, Paul presumably wouldn’t put “Christian” but “a man in Christ.” If it is so instinctive for Paul, and not so for us, it suggests that we are missing something significant about what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

“In Christ” in the New Testament

Another example comes in the book of Acts. Luke is describing the growth of the early church. They have already faced some significant obstacles: opposition from some of the local authorities insisting that Peter and John no longer preach to anyone in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:17), as well as the beginnings of problems within the Christian community, with Ananias and Sapphira judged by God for trying to deceive everyone about how much they had been giving to the Lord (Acts 5:9). Yet through it all, the apostles remained faithful. The whole church was gripped by a fear of God (Acts 5:11).

Luke then gives this summary of the progress of the ministry at that point:

Now many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles. And they were all together in Solomon’s Portico. None of the rest dared join them, but the people held them in high esteem. And more than ever believers were added to the Lord,...