Being In Him

In Matthew 5 Jesus makes this statement, "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees, you have no part in the kingdom of God". Take an honest look at this passage and you will see that what Jesus is really saying is that everyone is an adulterer, everyone is a liar and everyone is a murderer. His view of the law is so high that it includes our thoughts and motivations. If these are off, we’ve violated the whole law. Oh, and He tops his sermon off with this little exhortation, “be perfect, therefore, even as your heavenly Father is perfect.” What kind of a teaching is this anyway?

Suppose you tell a 5 year old to start up a 747, get it airborne and then land it safely. The child will do one of two things. Child A will either try to figure it out by pushing some buttons and flipping switches in the cockpit. Even if he somehow turns on the plane and pushes the throttle forward, he will only manage to crash it into something eventually. Child B will look at the enormity of this request and immediately recognize its impossibility. He will come back to the real pilot with shrugged shoulders asking for help and guidance. He knows he can't do it by himself.

Jesus lovingly invites people to fail. His gentle teaching method is to get them to realize for themselves the futility of ever meeting His standards (His law). Rather than asking the question, "Good teacher, what must I do to be saved," he wants them to come to a low place where they must ask a better question: "is there any way I can be saved? After seeing the failure that your perfect standards have made of me, is there any hope for a wretched failure like me?" This is the right question, a question that reveals the ripe condition of a person’s heart to hear the good news that there is a way , there is salvation for the sinner, healing for the broken, grace for the lawless, hope for the murderer, light for the lost. But it is not in us.

Only because of our unity with Christ are we able to say that all His righteousness is our righteousness. Only because of our oneness with Him can we possibly stand before the holy, righteous and just God with confidence. Only the gospel of grace grants us this blessed unification, which means our salvation. Only in Him do we have life. It is only as part of one body with him that we are perfect, even as He is perfect. Though sins remain, when we are in Christ God sees our sins no more, reckons us as perfect, legally justified and worthy to share in Christ’s inheritance. Apart from Him, though, we have no case in court against our failure, no advocate to defend us against our sins, and we can bear no fruit to justify ourselves. So, justly we die.

The grave importance of our unity with Him is precisely why Jesus makes such a radical, borderline offensive exhortation in John 6:53-54, saying, “truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." This very statement caused many of his early disciples to turn away and no longer follow him. But lets follow Jesus’ metaphor for a minute. What happens biologically when you eat, let’s say, a piece of fruit? Molecules and nutrients are transferred from the fruit to your body. The fruit literally becomes part of your body. It’s strange to think that we literally are what we eat. Our eyes, for example, consist of food that we have eaten. Proof of this is that when you cease to eat your body eventually starts to break down and decay. In the same way unless we are constantly eating Christ spiritually, recognizing our unity with him, reminding each other of his life, death and resurrection, having fellowship and worshipping together in His Name…etc., we start to break down and decay spiritually. But I will argue, that there is no delicious food like Christ, and that once one has tasted Him one becomes a hopeless glutton. When He is the Center of our existence, the Anchor of our souls, the Object of our trust, our All in all, then He becomes part of us spiritually, in the same way the fruit becomes part of the body physically. We literally consist of Christ-ness, or Jesus-stuff. His nature becomes our nature, and the more we eat of Him the more our will is conformed to His. Even His glory dwells in us, as He says in John 17:22-23, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one…” Our unity with Christ is our only hope of salvation. No more is it about what I have done, or have to do to be saved. It is about what has already been done by Someone else for me. It is merely a gift to be received.

In Genesis God points to a tree and says to man, “eat of the fruit of this tree, and you will die.” Thousands of years later God points to another tree, and says to man, “eat of the fruit of this tree and you will live. Forever.”