Union and Identity

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:1)

Two words carry the whole of the Christian life: union, and identity. Union is where sanctification begins. You come to know Jesus Christ as Lord, the Holy Spirit becomes an intimate part of your life, and you are bound to him. Paul reaches for one phrase again and again across all his letters, well over a hundred times, and the phrase is in Christ. In him. Inside him. Joined. That is the union, and for the believer it is already a settled fact.

Out of the union comes the identity, and this is where most of us stall, because a union can be entirely real while the identity is still old. The wild branch has been grafted in. That happened. It is finished, it is true. But the branch still has to stop trying to fruit like a wild tree. It has to draw from the trunk it is now attached to rather than the roots it used to have. And that shift is not automatic.

This is the quiet struggle underneath most of our frustration with ourselves. We were bound to Christ the day we came to him, and we have been arguing with our own old sap ever since, trying in our strength to be what we already are by grace. So do not labor to earn a union you already possess. Labor instead to believe it, and to let the new trunk, and not the old root, decide what grows.

When, Not If

"And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers." (Luke 22:32)

Notice what Jesus assumes. He does not say, if you turn again. He says, when. He is speaking to a man who has not yet failed, about a failure he can already see coming, and he is calmly making plans for what that man will do on the far side of it. Not if you come back, but when you come back, go and hold somebody else up.

There is no shaming in that sentence, and there is no lowering of the standard either. There is only a Savior who knows exactly what Peter is, and exactly what Peter will do, and exactly what Peter will become afterward, and who is already assigning him work. No matter how low or how far you have fallen, you can stand again in the keeping power of Jesus. You can turn back. You can lift your eyes to the cross.

But you cannot lift your eyes to the cross while you refuse to take them off yourself. That is the whole obstacle, and it is worth naming precisely. It is not the sin. The sin is handled, paid, finished. It is the pride that insists on staying down in the dirt inspecting the sin, because to get up and walk back would mean admitting that Someone else already covered it. So get up. Someone further along the road is waiting for you to strengthen them, and you cannot do it from down there.

Sift and Lift

"But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail." (Luke 22:32)

Satan's aim is to sift your faith. Jesus' aim is to lift it. Hold those two sentences side by side, because they are nearly the whole spiritual war, and between them they explain most of what happens to you in a given week.

Sifting is violent. It is a farmer throwing grain into the air and letting the wind carry off whatever is light, a thing done to wheat by someone who does not care what the wheat feels about it. Jesus says Satan demanded to have them for exactly this, to thrash them, to shake them until something came loose. And when he says Satan has asked to sift you, the word is plural. It was never only Peter. It has always been all of them, and all of us. He is not after your faith because you are special. He is after your faith because it is faith, and faith is the one thing in you he cannot devour.

Which brings us to how Jesus lifts it. Not with a lecture. Not with a strategy handed down. He says, I have prayed for you. The Son of God, on the worst night of his life, hours from a cross, spent some of his last free breath praying that a man who was about to deny him three times would not lose his grip.

And the man did not. So when you feel the wind take everything light in you, do not conclude you are being abandoned. You are being sifted, and Someone stronger than the wind has already prayed that the one thing that matters will hold. Let the chaff go, and trust the prayer that is holding the wheat.

Just a Little More

"One's life is not in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke 12:15)

Ask anyone what it means to be rich, and however they dress it up, you will get the same answer. Rich is more than I have now. No one has ever said rich is having less. No one has ever said rich is exactly what I hold at this moment. Rich is always a little further out than where you are standing, which means rich is not an amount at all. It is a moving target, and it moves at precisely your speed.

A younger man is certain that if he could just cross one particular line of income, that would be enough. Then the raise comes, and he crosses it, and it is not enough, because the line has already moved. And it moves again. Every time he gets more, the line slides further out, and he needs more, and he would tell you with a straight face that this time is different. So how much do you need to be happy? Just a little more. It is always just a little more.

That is exactly what the man in Luke 12 was asking for. Tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. He wanted his share, what he was owed. And Jesus refuses to settle the estate, because Jesus is not interested in the estate. He looks past the request and names the thing sitting in the man's blind spot. Greed.

The man did not need more. He needed a friend who loved him enough to tell him what was in the mirror. And so do you, because the target will never stop moving, and no sum you reach will ever be the sum. Ask instead where your life actually is, since Jesus says it was never in the abundance at all.

The Exchange Rate We Learn Young

"Am I trying to please people?" (Galatians 1:10)

Many people who cannot stop pleasing others learned very early that love and acceptance were handed out on condition, earned by meeting the expectation. A child notices the arrangement the way he notices where the good fishing is, and once he has noticed it he uses it, and it works, and it quietly becomes the shape of a whole life. Be useful, and the good word comes. Perform, and you are accepted. Fail, and the warmth withdraws.

Underneath it is a hunger, a desperation for a good word carried home to someone you love, and a person can grow so addicted to finding that word, from anyone who will give it, that he never stops looking. Harriet Braiker calls people-pleasing an addiction, and the comparison is exact. Just as a drug addict seeks drugs, she writes, people-pleasers seek approval. A man may get sober from a great many things in his life and never once get sober from this.

And it will not be broken by trying harder to be humble, because the trying is itself one more bid for approval. The addiction only loosens when a deeper acceptance arrives, one you did not earn and therefore cannot lose. This is the whole scandal of grace. The Father's good word over you was spoken before you performed a single useful thing, spoken over a Son he loved and in whom he was well pleased, and given to you in him.

So stop trying to buy what you already own. You will know the exchange rate is finally breaking in you on the day you can do a hidden good thing that no one will ever carry home and praise, and be content that God saw it.