"In Christ": The Two Words That Change Everything
Recovering union with Christ, the doctrine hiding in plain sight
There is a phrase that appears more than any single doctrine we tend to name. It hides in two small words that the apostle Paul uses again and again: “in Christ”. He is so fond of the phrase that he uses it, and similar expression of it, well over a hundred times. When a writer repeats a term that often, he is not filling space. He is telling you where his focus is. Beneath the surface of the Christian life, holding up everything else, is the reality that a believer is united to Jesus Christ.
We usually describe salvation in transactional terms, and rightly so. Christ paid a debt we could not pay. But if we stop there, we picture God at a distance, processing our case like a clerk approving a claim. Paul goes further and stranger. He says we are not merely credited by Christ from afar; we are joined to him. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The freedom from condemnation is not a document mailed to our address. It is a status that belongs to a place, and the place is Christ himself. To be in him is to stand where he stands before the Father.
This is why Paul can describe the Christian life as a kind of death and a kind of new life happening to someone else, and to us at the same time. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Read that slowly. He does not say Christ helps him live. He says his old self was executed with Christ and that the life now animating him is Christ’s own life. Union is not a metaphor for feeling close to Jesus. It is the claim that his history has become your history.
The image Scripture reaches for most often is not legal but organic. It is a vine and its branches. “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). A branch does not produce grapes by trying harder. It produces grapes by staying joined to the vine and letting the life of the vine flow through it. This quietly dismantles the exhausting version of Christianity in which we generate holiness by willpower. The fruit is real, but it is the vine’s fruit borne through us, not our achievement offered up to the vine.
See what this does to your assurance. If your standing depended on the strength of your grip on Christ, you would have reason to lie awake at night, because your grip is weak and your moods are fickle. But union runs the other direction. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Your life is not stored in your own trembling hands. It is hidden with Christ, in God, in the safest location in the universe. To reach your life, someone would have to reach through the Son and past the Father. Your security is as secure as Christ is.
It also reframes what happens to you in Christ over time. Every blessing the New Testament describes flows through this union rather than around it. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:3). Election, adoption, redemption, sealing by the Spirit: Paul stacks them up in that opening chapter and ties each one to the same location. In Christ. The blessings are not scattered gifts God hands out from a warehouse. They are what comes with the person to whom you have been joined.
So the next time you read your Bible and pass over those two small words, slow down. They are not filler. They are the hinge. To be a Christian is not only to just follow the teachings of Jesus or to admire his example, though it includes those. It is to be so joined to him that his death is counted as yours, his life becomes your life, and his standing before the Father is now the ground you stand on. That is the doctrine hiding in plain sight, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Everything else in the Christian life is downstream of it.
~ Sunny
All Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV).