We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Change That Is Real
With the coming of Christ, which we celebrate during the Advent season, the Father, Son, and Spirit made a way for us to be incorporated into the triune fellowship. We are placed in Christ through the power of the Spirit. This doesn’t just change how God views us and relates to us. It changes who we really are.
We really are “in Christ,” and through the Spirit, Christ really is in us! A great deal of harm has been done by teachers who stress how our union with Christ changes how God sees us without emphasizing how this union really changes us. The Father doesn’t just view us “with Jesus spectacles,” as some have said. Rather, the Father re-creates us in Christ through the Spirit.
We are “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph 2:10, emphasis added). “If anyone is in Christ,” Paul says, “there is a new creation: … everything has become new!” (2 Cor 5:17).
When God says we are righteous, holy, and blameless in Christ, we are in fact righteous, holy, and blameless. Take some time to read Romans 6:1-12. This is the point that Paul makes there. Paul makes it clear that our union with Christ isn’t a fictitious thing—it is real. We really do participate in Christ’s crucifixion and burial. And we really do participate in Christ’s death and resurrection life.
Moreover, since “the life [Christ] lives, he lives to God,” freed from sin, we “must consider [ourselves] dead to sin and alive to God in Christ” (Rom 6:10-11). Our thinking about ourselves should line up with the truth of who we really are. Our new identity must give rise to new ways of thinking, which in turn gives rise to our new way of behaving.
Paul does not command us to behave a certain way in order to become something we’re not. Rather, he commands us to remember who we already are in Christ, and to think and live accordingly. Paul is not giving people a new set of ethical rules; he is calling people to live out a new identity.
The life believers now live is no longer a life of their own efforts; in Christ, this old life is dead and buried. Being incorporated into Christ, the life we now live is the life that Christ himself lives, and this life is eternally toward God.
In sum, just as we participate in the love and life Christ receives from the Father, so we participate in the love and life Christ lives to the Father.
Christ is God for us, and us toward God. In Christ, we receive unsurpassable worth, and because this reception is not a fictitious thing—we really do have this worth from God!—we also participate in Christ’s overflowing of life and love to God and to others. The perfect love that God is is directed to us, abides in us, and therefore flows through us—and all of this takes place only as we are in Christ.
—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 41-43
Image by Dan Darell via Unsplash
Category: General
Tags: Jesus, Kingdom Living, Transformation
Related Reading

The Perfect Love of God
The Father, Son and Spirit exist as the infinite intensity and unsurpassable perfection of eternal love. We know this about the triune God not by speculation but because Jesus demonstrated that love (Rom 5:8) in his willingness to go to the furthest extreme possible to save us. When the all-holy God stooped to become our…

Christians and Creation Care
Image by Ali Inay While the mustard seed of the Kingdom has been planted, it obviously hasn’t yet taken over the entire garden (Matt 13:31-42). We continue to live in an oppressed, corrupted world. We live in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” Not only this, but we who are the appointed landlords…

One Word
While I’ve lately been pretty distracted finishing up Benefit of the Doubt (Baker, 2013), my goal is to sprinkle in posts that comment on the distinctive commitments of ReKnew a couple of times a week. I’m presently sharing some thoughts on the second conviction of ReKnew, which is that Jesus Christ is the full and…

Life to the Full
What does it mean to live life to the full? Greg addresses this question in this short video by The Work of the People.

God’s Kind of Holy War
This is part three of a series on Revelation. You can find part one here and part two here. While there will come a day when the sacrificial victory of the Lamb and of his people will be apparent to all (5:13; 15:4; 21: 23-4), only to those who embrace the perspective of the heavenly…

5 Distinctions of God’s Kingdom
Jesus said that his kingdom was “not from this world,” for it contrasts with the kingdom of the world in every possible way. This is not a simple contrast between good and evil. The contrast is rather between two fundamentally different ways of doing life, two fundamentally different mindsets and belief systems, two fundamentally different…