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.