Union with Christ - An Application

 

(This was my weekly letter to my congregation on Wednesday, 21 February 2024)

This morning in my devotional reading, I was working through 1 Corinthians 8. Though I’ve read these words a huge number of times over the years, today one verse caused me to stop and take stock.  Paul wrote, “Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ” (1 Corinthians 8:12). What struck me is a couple of things. First, in God’s saving work, we are – by grace alone – united (hitched, bonded, ingrafted) to Christ so much so, that what happens to us happens to him, and what is his becomes ours (think of Galatians 2:20, for example). As Sinclair Ferguson put it, “through union with Christ all that is his by incarnation becomes ours through faith” (“The Christian Life,” 110). Let that percolate in your heart for a while. Your fear, anxiety, tears, and so forth, he feels. And his “Peace, be still” is yours. Second, the way we treat one another, is how we’re treating Christ. Let that sit in your head a moment or two.

As an example of this last point, Samuel T. Logan, Jr. (an OPC minister and President Emeritus at Westminster Theological Seminar-PA) makes a specific application of our union with Christ regarding how we talk about fellow Christians; “Beyond what we owe our neighbors simply out of charity, when we talk about other professing Christians we are communicating something about the Savior whose name we and they together bear…when we say anything about other professed Christians, the total content of our remarks – both denotation and connotation – gets applied, whether we intend it or not, to him whose name we share” (Samuel T. Logan, Jr., “The Good Name: The Power of Words to Hurt or Heal,” 42, 44). Because of our union with Christ, the way we talk about or to one another – fellow believers – is what we are saying about or to Christ. Yikes! That’s simply one example.

So, here is where my mind went while thinking through that verse. One the one hand, Paul’s point should set up a caution sign in our hearts when we are about to do something selfish or sinful against a fellow Christian. “She’s united to Jesus. If I do this to her, I’m doing this to him!” That’s a negative, but important, recognition. On the other hand, you are so united to Christ that when you are grieved, or wronged, or slandered, or worried – Jesus feels it himself, and so identifies with you that he takes that on himself. But he also gives you himself, his warmth, his peace, his consolation. It’s a heartwarming thought to recall regularly.

As I end, all of the above helps us to see why Sinclair Ferguson says, “The great temptation most of us face is to believe that very little has happened to us through grace” (Ibid., 104).

Pastor Mike