Union with Christ and Why It Matters (with Rory Shiner and Kyle Worley)

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

0:00:00 – (Courtney Doctor): When I was in seminary, I had a professor who every single class, and he always did his arms kind of like this and he was like, it’s all about union with Christ. It’s all about union with Christ. And you know, it was kind of one of those things. I was like, yeah, that sounds right. But I just didn’t really get what he meant. And then all of a sudden, you know, you’re reading and of course we’ll probably end up going to Ephesians 1, but you’re reading and all of a sudden all those little phrases that you just mentioned, Rory, you know, in him, with him, it just starts jumping off the page and you’re like, oh, it really is all about union.

0:00:32 – (Kyle Worley): Foreign.

0:00:39 – (Courtney Doctor): Welcome to the Deep Dish, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition where we love having deep conversations about deep truths. I am Courtney Docter and my normal co host, Melissa Krueger is on a much needed vacation. So she is not with us today. But today I do get to talk with two actual real life friends. Both of them happen to be pastors, both of them happen to be authors. Kyle Worley is the lead pastor of Mosaic Church in Richardson, Texas. And Rory Shiner is the senior pastor of Providence Church in Perth, Australia, which I’ve been to. I’ve been able to worship there before and then got to go to lunch at Rory’s house afterwards. So what a treat that was. Perth is actually the farthest place in the world from where I am right now in the U.S. so it’s just, it’s so far away, but it is so beautiful. So Kyle and Rory, thank you for joining me on the Deep Dish. Today we are going to talk about something that I just told you all before we start hit record that I’m so excited to talk about, which at first blush people might not get that excited about. But I hope that by the time we’re finished with this conversation, they’ll understand why the three of us love this so much. But it is the doctrine of you union with Christ.

0:01:55 – (Courtney Doctor): And so you’ve each written a book on union with Christ. So what I want to do to start, I want each of you to give because you both give great working definitions in your books of like your definition of what union with Christ means.

0:02:09 – (Kyle Worley): I’ll let Rory lead the way. He’s ahead in the time zone, so we’ll let him go in the definitions here.

0:02:14 – (Courtney Doctor): True. He’s already at tomorrow morning. He’s so far ahead of us.

0:02:16 – (Rory Shiner): That’s right. I can just let you all know that you’re Going to love tomorrow. It’s a great day. And it’s going well so far. The Lord’s here too, so it’s all good.

0:02:24 – (Courtney Doctor): Good.

0:02:27 – (Rory Shiner): Look, I. I think that union with Christ, one way to say it would be it’s the relationship we have with Christ by faith. We might unpack this, but it’s the relationship that we have with Christ by faith. It’s the. The overwhelmingly dominant way of. The way that the Bible describes our relationship with Jesus is that we are in him, with him, connected to him, married to him, you know, grafted into him, all these things.

0:02:56 – (Rory Shiner): That’s the big. The kind of word cloud for what we call union with Christ, which is to say that by faith we enter into a relationship with Jesus where we’re in him, so that all that he has becomes ours.

0:03:11 – (Kyle Worley): I love that. I love that. Yeah. In the book, I talk about you with Christ as the Christians. Identification, incorporation, and participation into all of Christ’s life. So identification, that’s an identity component in Christ, I become a new me. Then incorporation in Christ, I become a part of a new we. And then participation in Christ, we’re given a new way to live in Jesus. So identification, incorporation, and participation into all of Christ’s life. And kind of the shorthand is in union with Christ, I receive a new me, I become a part of a new we, and I’m welcomed into a new way to live in God’s world. And so, riffing off of something from John Frame, I heard many years ago, he said, in Christ is the most. The most general thing that you can say about a Christian. I would just say, in Christ is the most general and the most wonderful thing you can say about a Christian is that they’re united with Christ. It’s the most fundamental thing, and it’s the most significant thing.

0:04:05 – (Courtney Doctor): There’s no salvation apart from union with Christ. I mean, it’s how we’re. It’s how we’re saved. And it’s so. Okay. So I’m going to ask you guys when you first started realizing, like, the centrality and the. And the beauty and the necessity of this doctrine. But I want to tell you. So for me, when I was in seminary, I had a professor who every single class. And he always did his arms kind of like this, and he was like, it’s all about union with Christ. It’s all about union with Christ.

0:04:31 – (Courtney Doctor): And, you know, it was kind of one of those things. I was like, yeah, that sounds right. You know, it does sound right, but I just didn’t really get what he meant. And then all of a sudden, you know, you’re reading and of course we’ll probably end up going to Ephesians 1, but you’re reading and all of a sudden all those little phrases that you just mentioned, Rory, you know, in him, with him, for him, like it’s all. It just starts jumping off the page and you’re like, oh, it really is all about union with Christ.

0:04:59 – (Courtney Doctor): So what about you guys? When did it like become like this light bulb moment?

0:05:04 – (Kyle Worley): Yeah, I was. I was a seminary student and I was already. I’d been in vocational ministry for a few years at that point and was teaching God’s Word to students. And I was sitting in a seminary classroom and the professor got up and he read through Ephesians Chapter one, and he had a Scottish accent. I’m not going to try to do a Scottish accent. Every accent I’ve ever tried ends up sounding vaguely Jamaican, which does not do it.

0:05:28 – (Courtney Doctor): We would think it was Scottish because we don’t. We can’t tell the difference. You know, we’re not very.

0:05:32 – (Kyle Worley): We’re not very discerning. But this professor had a very booming Scottish accent. But the way he read Ephesians 1, he emphasized all those prepositional phrases. And as he did so, there really was no commentary he gave to the text. And at the end he just said a faithful summary of what I’ve just read is that everything good that God has for you is in Christ. That’s all he said. And then we broke for lunch.

0:05:58 – (Kyle Worley): And honestly, the Word of God just shattered me in that moment. It was really just the reading of Ephesians Chapter one with that very small one sentence commentary. I did not even go back into the classroom that afternoon. We had a lunch break. It was one of those one week mini masters. I walked around downtown Dallas, where I was at, and honestly just wept. It felt as close to a second conversion as I could really describe. It was really a reawakening of the gospel in my heart.

0:06:25 – (Kyle Worley): I’m truly grateful for it, truly grateful just for the reading of God’s Word in that moment.

0:06:29 – (Rory Shiner): I think for me, a little less, a little less dramatic. But it was in again at theological college or seminary. And in the early years of Christian ministry, there were, I guess, two streams. There were a bunch of debates at the time about the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and the alien righteousness of Christ. A bunch of like semi technical debates and. But you’d often find in a footnote someone would say, oh, it’s all resolved. In union or it’s all.

0:07:00 – (Rory Shiner): This is. All kind of all comes together in union with Christ. And I would get frustrated with these books that wouldn’t go on to explain that. And so I had this sense at a. In the scholarship that there was this thing called union with Christ, that, that a bunch of stuff was getting shipped toward, but no one was unpacking it for me. And, and then pastorally, I guess there were a whole bunch of situations, I guess personally and pastorally, where you became increasingly aware that I guess there was a sense of maybe fragility in people’s own sense of their place with God, their confidence, of salvation, their ability to live the Christian life joyfully and with, with, yeah, with joyful sort of conviction.

0:07:57 – (Rory Shiner): And, you know, I guess there was this, this slow release experience of, I guess what Courtney was saying that this, this phrase, these phrases keep jumping up in Christ, with Christ. These, these pastoral plays happen in the New Testament where situations where we might say, oh, I wonder if that person’s really a Christian. The, the New Testament works on this kind of. Because you’re a Christian, you, of course, you should put this off, put this on.

0:08:27 – (Rory Shiner): And it’s not constantly throwing shade on whether, oh, my goodness, maybe they’re not believing hard enough or trying hard enough, but because you’re in Christ X, Y and Z. So here’s this doctrine that was simultaneously, you know, the solution to a bunch of scholarly problems. But then I couldn’t find anyone who was unpacking it for me. And, and biblically, this solution to a whole bunch of pastoral problems.

0:08:54 – (Rory Shiner): And so then someone asked me at a conference to speak on that topic. And, and I thought, oh, absolutely. And so took that deep dive in and never looked back. Had that, you know, terrific experience of, yeah, almost that kind of those things that happen, I think, occasionally in the Christian life where you’re like, how was I not told this before? And who do I hold personally responsible for letting me get this far without understanding this?

0:09:25 – (Rory Shiner): So that, that, that’s how it, how it happened for me.

0:09:27 – (Courtney Doctor): It’s like when people first understand the whole story of Scripture and they’re like, how was I not told this before? This is how I feel about union with Christ. And so, you know, it’s, it’s just as kind of paradigm shifting as, as if you’ve, you know, if the biblical story has come alive for you, union with Christ, you need to dive into that next. Well, I think each of you in your books, you did such a good job with, just so understandable.

0:09:51 – (Courtney Doctor): And you each Use an analogy. So, Rory, yours is about an airplane that I have used a thousand and three times. And Kyle, yours is about a road trip. And I love. There’s. There’s. Anyway, I would love for you guys to take even 30 seconds and tell 60 seconds and tell the. The story of. So that. So that we have that word picture in our minds, because it really is where, like, the Marvel dropped for me. And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense.

0:10:20 – (Courtney Doctor): So, Kyle, you want to go first on this one?

0:10:22 – (Kyle Worley): Yeah, sure. I talk about maybe two things. I talk about the road trip, certainly, that if we were going on a road trip and I had packed up the car with all of your favorite stuff, and we were headed from my house out to the Oregon coast. We love the Oregon coast, but it’s far away. We were going to make this road trip. Just asking, where do you need to be in relationship to the car to get to the Oregon coast from Dallas? And you could try to. To get out in front of the car and pull us along with a rope. You could back to the future style and grab the back bumper on a hoverboard or skateboard and try to ride along behind us. You could strap yourself to the roof or the bottom of the car.

0:11:00 – (Kyle Worley): You could run alongside or try to run out ahead. But you know that where you really need to be to get to where we’re going is you need to be in the car. And if you’re in the car, no matter the roadblocks, no matter the detours, if you’re in the car, you’ll get to the destination. And that kind of connects to a really deep reality of our union with Christ, is that once we, by grace, through faith in Christ, are knit to Jesus, we’re united with Christ.

0:11:25 – (Kyle Worley): This is now an unbreakable, unshakable, unchangeable union. Nothing can deepen it, nothing can disrupt it. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. And I think it’s a great comfort. But it’s also, as Rory was signaling, it’s a great foundation for Christian faithfulness, because now we can kind of risk everything in this grand adventure, knowing that at the very. At the very worst, we cannot lose the forever love of God in Christ. And that’s an incredible freedom. Once you begin to.

0:11:53 – (Kyle Worley): Once you begin to really walk in the power of that, there’s real freedom there.

0:11:58 – (Courtney Doctor): Yeah. Not going to get kicked out of that car.

0:12:00 – (Kyle Worley): No, you’re not. You’re not going to get booted out.

0:12:03 – (Courtney Doctor): Rory, tell us about the plane going To Melbourne. Melbourne. Now I say it right.

0:12:07 – (Rory Shiner): Melbourne. That’s exactly right. So, yeah, very similar to Kyle, because I think one of the challenges with union with Christ, one of the ways I think we don’t grasp it is that we kind of know what a sacrifice is. We know what. What first fruits are in an orchard. That’s the resurrection. We know what. And union is a. The technical word is. It’s a locative idea. It’s about a location and, you know, what does it mean to be in someone? And so my illustration, very similar to Kyle, was a plane that you see. If you imagine two people get to the airport, you’re looking at the plane and you’ve got your ticket and you think, what do I do? Do I chase it? Do I get inspired by it? Do I.

0:12:48 – (Rory Shiner): Do I learn from it? And the thing is, you need to be in it, because once you’re in it, where it goes is where you’ll go. And in the illustration, I like to introduce two different people. So here’s someone who goes to Melbourne, you know, once a month for, you know, the board conference. They’ve got frequent flyer points for days. They are completely confident. They don’t listen when the. When the, you know, cabin staff are explaining how to keep safe and where the exit rows are, because they’re just so confident that this plane’s going to get them, where it’s going to take them.

0:13:25 – (Rory Shiner): And then here’s a second person, first time on a plane, never been to Melbourne before, never been in a plane before. And they’re nervous and they’re fretful and they’re constantly asking questions. And when the cabin crew are explaining the safety procedures, they’re taking notes and then they’re revising it across the plan, across the journey. And my two questions are, you know, which of those two people has more faith?

0:13:52 – (Rory Shiner): And I think that’s an answerable question, that the person with higher degrees of confidence has more faith in the plane and its crew. But the second question is, of those two, which of them gets to Melbourne? And then I think the story completely changes then, because the moment you say which of them gets to Melbourne, the confident person doesn’t get to Melbourne quicker or better, and the fearful person doesn’t get there.

0:14:25 – (Courtney Doctor): More to Melbourne.

0:14:26 – (Rory Shiner): Yeah, that’s right. No one’s getting more to Melbourne. At that point, the question’s almost absurd because it’s entirely dependent not on how much faith you had, but on what your faith was in. And I think that’s a key part of union with Christ is that it flips that narrative, which, ironically, is a way. Or not ironically, paradoxically, a way to build confidence is to get it off you and onto the thing that you’ve placed yourself in, or the person, in the case of Jesus.

0:15:02 – (Courtney Doctor): What a sweet truth for anybody listening who’s just like, you know, I doubt. I don’t think my faith is very strong. I mean, what a union with Christ. That’s where our confidence is. I just. I just love that. And what a sweet encouragement it is. Well, I want to talk about where we really see this in the Bible. And, you know, I already mentioned Ephesians 1, and that’s a pretty. That’s a pretty easy place to go because it’s everywhere. So if you haven’t read it, go read Ephesians 1 and look for the prepositions.

0:15:30 – (Courtney Doctor): But as I was reading your books and rereading them, I love, you know, Rory, you really anchor union with Christ in Genesis 1 and 2 in Eden, the garden. And Kyle, you do too. But then you go to the covenants, and I love that. And so I’d love for you to each take a minute and talk about, like, where in the Old Testament are. Are we seeing this? And why do you. Why do you pull those threads for us instead of just saying, oh, well, it shows up for the first time and, you know, in Ephesians 1 or.

0:15:59 – (Courtney Doctor): Yeah. Or even John 17, you know, those are easy places to see it.

0:16:03 – (Rory Shiner): Yeah. Look, I do think that that’s right, that the. I think it is. It is a. A bit of a mistake to think that the doctrine of union of Christ just springs, you know, from a clear blue sky into the New Testament, that it has its background in the Old Testament. So, for example, in. In Eden, I think one of the things you see there is that God, you know, first of all, there’s God. There’s only one thing. Then there’s two things, which is God. And everything that God has made.

0:16:32 – (Rory Shiner): And everything that God has made is, you know, over those six days, is bought, bought into, you know, order and focus. Separating sky from, you know, heaven from earth, sea from land, and so on. Forming and filling is what God does. And then in Genesis chapter two, in the middle of the creation, you had this unity, which is the Adam, the. The man who is torn apart. So the. The one becomes two. And then in the.

0:17:02 – (Rory Shiner): That kind of marriage scene in Genesis chapter two, as they come back together, that’s not just a union but a reunion, because a thing that was once one becomes two and then comes back together in the complex union of. Of. Of marriage. And that’s what, for example, Paul in Ephesians 5, he’s. He’s using that like. He’s not saying, oh, here’s this new thing I thought of, you know, last Tuesday called union with Christ.

0:17:30 – (Rory Shiner): But here, here are the antecedents to God’s, you know, overwhelming purpose of bringing and what I would call a complex unity. So it’s not a unity of sameness where we, we all become a big, you know, there’s a big stew and we all. So the, the unity of Adam and Eve in that first marriage is a complex unity where man and woman come together as one flesh. And the union we have with Christ is a complex unity where we don’t collapse into him.

0:18:05 – (Rory Shiner): So we’re unified while still being us. So it’s, It’s. There’s still a me that’s unified to Christ. And that, as Kyle says, there’s still a way that’s unified with Christ.

0:18:14 – (Courtney Doctor): I love that.

0:18:15 – (Kyle Worley): Just to keep riffing off of that. I mean, the organizing kind of motif of, of how I approach union with Christ in the title of the book is Home with God. And, and I really see that as an organizing principle of the whole story of the Bible, of which union with Christ is the perfect fulfillment. So you have home with God in the garden in Genesis 1 and 2, and then new heavens and new earth in Revelation 21 and 22.

0:18:36 – (Kyle Worley): But the perfect fulfillment of our home with God, of dwelling with God, is not just being around him, but it’s being in him. And so it’s not the garden, nor is it the new heavens or the new earth. It’s being in union with Christ. And the covenants are a foreshadowing of that. Before Christ, you see, with Abraham and then with Moses, with Israel’s whole worshiping life, they are brought into relationship with God by virtue of covenant love, not on the basis of any works they could do or any righteousness that they’ve performed.

0:19:08 – (Kyle Worley): And that covenant love has a representative or a mediator that there’s somebody that they are in for Israel, at least over the course of the Old Testament. It is being in Abraham, the covenant that God has made with Abraham. I think this is really important to see, not only because it helps to provide the context for the New Testament’s explicit emphasis, because we want to be clear. Union with Christ, as you both have said, isn’t something that the New Testament authors discover or invent.

0:19:36 – (Kyle Worley): It’s a unfolding, an explicit articulation of something that had always been there in a tectonic or foundational capacity. And the covenants are a demonstration of that. And I think it’s important to point that out for one other reason, which is I find across the story of the Bible a distinction between our union with Christ and our communion with God. I think we see this in the New Testament that our union with Christ is unbreakable, unshakable and unchangeable. It’s sealed by God in Christ for good forever.

0:20:08 – (Kyle Worley): It can’t be deepened or disrupted. Our communion with God is our enjoyment and experience of all that God has said is forever ours in Jesus. And this union and communion distinction that I think becomes really clear in the New Testament, I think is there in the covenant architecture between the covenant with Abraham and the covenant with Moses at Sinai, which the covenant with Abraham is this unconditional, no strings attached covenant. The covenant with Moses at Sinai has some conditionality to it, but it’s not as if God has told Israel that they will only belong to him now on the basis of their behavior or their good works. But he is telling them in a further articulation of his love, because you are my people for good forever now, behave as my people, live as my people. You are free from the bondage of Egypt. You are free on the foundation of my covenant love, so live in light of it. And I think that that complementarity between the covenant covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Moses, it mirrors in a foreshadowing way the distinction between union with Christ and communion with God that we find in a greater unfolding in the New Testament. So, yeah, the covenants are really union with Christ infrastructure. You might say.

0:21:22 – (Kyle Worley): They’re the precursor to the perfect fulfillment of covenant love, which is found in Christ alone.

0:21:29 – (Courtney Doctor): Oh, I love that. I’d never thought of it in that way before, and I love that connection. Okay, so this is just a personal question then. So John 15 Abide in me and I will abide in you. And you know, when you abide in me and abide in my word, my word abides in you. So is that union with Christ? Is that. Is John 15 union with Christ, language or not?

0:21:50 – (Kyle Worley): That’s a really good question. And I don’t, you know, Rory and I have just met and we probably have taught this passage before. And admittedly, some of the language in John 15 is fairly technical. There are portions of John 15 that I think you can come, you can land in different places. Even among Christian scholarship, in terms of what the emphasis is, I talk about abiding in home with God as an adventure, that there is a dynamic.

0:22:15 – (Kyle Worley): And I think John 15 is. My view of John 15 is that the language is oscillating or moving back and forth between a fixed reality that is kept, that is given by God and sealed by God, and a present work among God’s people that is empowered. So basically God is sealing us in Christ. He has pulled us into Christ. And now because of that, there is an activity at work in the believer’s life. But God’s faithfulness to us is not contingent on our faithfulness to Him.

0:22:49 – (Kyle Worley): But there are both blessings and consequences to not actively abiding in Christ. So again, that would be. I don’t want to. I, I, Rory certainly would not be held to the same opinion. So having spoken first, I wouldn’t want to. To bias. He might think the same thing. But there are also really charitable other perspectives on how the language works in John 15. But for me, the emphasis is God has pulled us into life in Christ.

0:23:14 – (Kyle Worley): There is an activity the believer now undertakes now, and there are both blessings and consequences in proportion to that activity. But what’s not up for discussion is whether or not they belong to God in Christ, having been brought into Him. That is a fixed forever reality.

0:23:29 – (Courtney Doctor): Okay, Rory, what do you think? I want to hear it.

0:23:32 – (Rory Shiner): Yeah, I think that that sounds, that sounds like where I land that. I think somewhere, like, if, I mean, I mean, certainly I think union with Christ in terms of the. Where it’s coming from, the New Testament, I think it’s something like 164 times you get the phrase in Christ, but then you get a whole bunch of other, you know, prepositions of being with Christ or co. Crucified with Christ, buried with Christ in baptism, the marriage metaphor, one flesh and so on. And so I think I would want to think that the, you know, the upper room discourse in John 15 and so on is, Is part of that broad category of union with Christ.

0:24:08 – (Rory Shiner): And I think with Kyle probably would share that view, which I think occurs elsewhere in Union Christ, that there is both a objective and subjective basis to it. So there is a. Which is true of a ton of stuff in the Christian life. Like, you know, Paul is able to say that I want to. I want to know Christ and share in the fellowship of his sufferings. And in, in Philippians and so on, where I think, I think in that abiding, there’s both an active thing that you could abide more, you could lean into that more and be more cognizant of those blessings.

0:24:47 – (Rory Shiner): And so on. And there is an objective sense in which he is the vine, you are the branches. And I think what I think the burden of teaching union with Christ and the past implications, I think, is not to say there’s no subjective element, but I think to flip who’s in the driving seat there, to say out of the objective truth that we are one flesh with Christ, that we are members of his body, or that we are the branches of which he is the.

0:25:20 – (Rory Shiner): We are the, he’s the vine, we’re the branches. It’s on the basis of those objective truths that we can proceed with that subjective experience of experiencing the thing that’s true in reality.

0:25:34 – (Courtney Doctor): Well, okay, if you’ve been listening and you’re kind of like, hey, wait a minute, what are they even talking about? We’re going to land the plane, we’re going to take a little break, we’re going to hear a word from our sponsor, and then we will be back and we’re going to really dive into how this beautiful doctrine that it’s is so true and should permeate every aspect of our lives, how it actually does that. So we’ll be right back. Well, welcome back. We are talking with Rory Scheiner and Kyle Worley about union with Christ. And so I want to start by asking you guys, what difference does union with Christ make in your daily life? And I mean, even, even today.

0:26:10 – (Courtney Doctor): Rory, you’re at the start of a day. Kyle, you and I are at the end of a day. What difference will it make or has it made made today?

0:26:18 – (Rory Shiner): Well, again, as someone who can speak from the future, being in the next day, the. I think for me it has been, it’s been, it’s been a huge comfort on a. On a daily level because I know that I am working out of a thing that’s true of me. So I wake up and the, you know, the quality or non quality of my quiet time or whether I skip the quiet time altogether is the truth is that I am in Christ, that I’m united to him, and that my identity, the resources for the day’s obedience come out of this thing that is true of me when I’m awake or when I’m asleep, when I feel close to God or far from God.

0:27:11 – (Kyle Worley): Yeah, you know what? I spent a large portion of my Christian life thinking that God’s best for me ended with forgiveness. And I think union with Christ reminds us, preaches to our heart, that in Christ I am not only forgiven by God, but I’m welcomed by God. I’m a child of God. That doesn’t just mean that God is the divine Etch A Sketch. And he took the record of all my wrongs and he erased wisdom. It’s that I’ve been welcomed into his presence.

0:27:44 – (Kyle Worley): I think about Zephaniah3 and I remember the first time I heard this. And I just wonder, do we think about God’s love for us like this? The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty One who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by his love. He will exult over you with loud singing. This idea of the love of God being a delighting love. It’s not just a love of mercy that forgives sinners, but it’s a delighting love in his children.

0:28:13 – (Kyle Worley): Think about the voice of the Father over Christ at baptism. This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. When we are in Christ Jesus, we are not just forgiven, we are beloved. And I think that’s the fundamental cry of every human heart is to come to believe that they are beloved. And in Christ, you actually have the foundation to believe that it can be more than just a. A really sweet thing or a really sappy statement.

0:28:46 – (Kyle Worley): It can be true, actually, spiritually true. So it makes a great deal of difference to me. I’m somebody who struggles a tremendous amount with shame and anxiety and coming to realize that because I am in Christ Jesus, there is not a future version of me that God is going to love more is a place of grace, freedom from having to constantly try to prove myself to others or to him, as silly as that sounds. So, yeah, there’s real freedom there.

0:29:17 – (Rory Shiner): So helpful. Sorry, jump in. That’s, you know, really well articulated and it does. It’s so true that the. There’s this. I think there’s a sense in the Christian life that maybe depending a little bit on how you’re wired internally, but where you kind of think, look, this is why we can’t have nice things until I’ve sorted myself out, until I’ve got it going on, I’m not going to even think about union with Christ or the delight of the Father in me until X, Y or Z is sorted out.

0:29:46 – (Rory Shiner): And I think the union with Christ completely flips that. That the experience of being united to God, loved by God, that His delight in me is as much as his delight in Jesus because I’m in him, is not the carrot at the end of sorting myself out, but the basis on which I proceed. And that. That. That’s. That I. I You know, I cannot underestimate how much that does actually change the experience of being Christian.

0:30:22 – (Courtney Doctor): It does, doesn’t it? I mean, I even think, you know, every. So I, I just think all, all of the benefits of Christ, because I’m in him, they’re mine. And so, you know, even. Even daily just going to the Father, you know, there’s times that, That I would hesitate to run and it’s like, no, no, no, I’m. I have access because I’m in Christ, because I have Christ access. Like everything that’s his. Like you were saying, you know, the beloved son, he’s well pleased. He’s delighted in.

0:30:50 – (Courtney Doctor): When we’re in him, that’s. That’s ours. And, and even Kyle, as you were talking about, like, you know, we tend to think like, forgiveness is the end game of. And it is part of it, and it’s beautiful and it’s glorious. I mean, praise God for forgiveness. But you’re right, it’s not the totality or even the end game. I think we have a whole talk we could do on sharing the gospel, that it’s not just Christ died to forgive you of your sins and take you to heaven. There’s a whole lot more to the gospel. And I think union with Christ really starts getting at it.

0:31:24 – (Courtney Doctor): But Kyle, I think it’s you in your book that you talk about this idea how so often we talk about salvation as asking Jesus into our heart. Heart. And, and I think that what both of you would say is that. That actually we’re being invited in instead of inviting Jesus into our heart. It’s not individualistic and it’s not just for, you know, the. The sole purpose is not just forgiveness, but there’s something bigger and more beautiful going on. And so what would you all. How would you talk about this idea of salvation being tied into union with Christ? What’s a better way to think about it?

0:32:03 – (Courtney Doctor): Our own salvation.

0:32:05 – (Kyle Worley): Yeah. Well, listen, I am so grateful that I heard a pastor stand before me and say, if you have heard the gospel and want to receive Christ, pray and ask God into your heart. Because I prayed that prayer in a small East Texas church, and I am truly grateful for it. The Lord saved me. And like I say in the book, I was convinced the most wonderful thing that had happened is that Christ had come to live in my heart. And listen, there are times in which the New Testament talks about Christ in us, Christ in me, the hope of glory. It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.

0:32:37 – (Kyle Worley): The overwhelming emphasis in the New Testament is us in Christ, not Christ in us. But it is a mutual indwelling. I would say that I have found it to be more helpful, although sometimes less actionable, so to speak, when you’re proclaiming the gospel, to invite people to receive what God has for them in Christ. Imagine that God is inviting you to live with him, that he’s inviting you into his home, which is in Christ Jesus, and that when you place your faith in him, faith is the gift that God gives us so we can give ourselves back to God.

0:33:09 – (Rory Shiner): I think the only place that you get the language of Christ coming into your heart or dwelling in your heart is in Ephesians 3. Someone might be able to correct me on that. So I just think, and let’s just give it a moratorium. Let’s have 10 years of not saying that. And in our evangelism, let’s invite people into Christ that Jesus is Lord, that He God’s inviting you to be in him. And then after 10 years, we can revive, you know, that language again for a bit.

0:33:38 – (Courtney Doctor): Well, I would love to just toss out a couple scenarios. You know, that the women listening me, us, we all walk through life dealing with all these different things. And I want to talk about just very specifically ways that union with Christ actually comforts us, actually ministers to us, actually strangers, strengthens us, actually reminds us of true truths. And so you guys might have some examples of your own. Feel free to toss them out there and talk about that. But just think about the young woman who is maybe early 20s, and she’s trying to figure life out, and she doesn’t really know who she is.

0:34:16 – (Courtney Doctor): It’s an identity crisis of sorts, of trying to know where she’s going to fit in, what she’s going to do with life. So how does union with Christ, Christ, how does this matter to her at all? What difference does it make to her?

0:34:30 – (Kyle Worley): Oh, goodness gracious, Courtney, this is a good question. I’m looking at some of the ones that you’ve outlined for us here. And I just think about. I know that, you know, every time that we pose a hypothetical about where somebody’s at, there is somebody who is really there. When I think about the. The isolation that comes with loneliness, I think that our culture often outlines for people that with our differences in particular, you e either have to deify your differences or you have to deny your differences.

0:35:01 – (Kyle Worley): That seems to be the two roadmaps that the culture is. You gotta deny differences, act like there’s nothing there. I can’t fit in anywhere because I’M not like these people. So you deify your differences or you deny them. I have to basically become something other than I am in order to fit in. And I think that the good news of union with Christ is that in Christ our differences are not made everything, and they’re not made, made nothing.

0:35:25 – (Kyle Worley): They’re dignified. They’re neither deified nor denied. And so I think that the doctrine of you with Christ says, hey, listen, you don’t have to give up all of the things that make you you. It’s just important to realize that none of them are determinative for your worth or your value. But what God has said is true of you in Christ becomes the new determiner of your value. And he has said that you’re beloved and holy and perfect and worthy, not because. Because that’s what every day of your life looks like, but because you’ve placed your faith in Jesus, and He is all of those things.

0:35:59 – (Kyle Worley): And so I think that being welcomed as we are into fellowship with God, that we might be transformed, is good news for lonely and isolated people.

0:36:08 – (Courtney Doctor): Yeah. Yeah, that’s good, Rory. Let me ask you this one then. What about a young woman who is just longing, maybe longing for children, maybe longing for. For a spouse, maybe longing for resolution or, you know, just the suffering to end. What would you say to her? How does union with Christ matter in our. In our unmet longings?

0:36:32 – (Rory Shiner): Yeah, that’s great. You know, a few things that I think Kyle’s already picked up on, so. Firstly, the being in. When we are in Christ, we don’t cease to be creatures. So it’s not a transition from being a creature to being divine or. Or whatever. So we still bring all our creatureliness to us, to that which involves, you know, whole processes of. Of grief and longing. And I don’t think there’s any pastoral future in pretending things that don’t hurt, that hurt, don’t hurt, or things that unmet longings don’t involve a whole bunch of grief and processing and sorrow. And the.

0:37:14 – (Rory Shiner): I think what. What union with Christ brings to the table in that is not. He’s a. Here’s a pill you can take that will make you not feel what you’re feeling or not acknowledge these things. And as a. In our creatureliness, that. That’s part of the. The human experience, and it’s part of the experience that God invites us to bring into. Into Him. So we don’t. We don’t become generic, you know, human 1.6.0, section 9, unit 2. We come in our Particularities of unmet longings and griefs and, and sorrows.

0:37:53 – (Rory Shiner): They are, they are what comes into our union with, with, with Christ. And I think in the, in the church, I think that the church is often caught up with that union language. So body of Christ is a union, a union idea. And as we bring ourselves into the body of Christ, that’s both in terms of gifting so the, to the, the first scenario, the, the, the, the young woman that feels like where do I fit and who am I?

0:38:26 – (Rory Shiner): Because the confidence they can have is that they are. However it is their why that’s not by accident. That’s the sovereign work of God the Spirit in making you the hand, foot, eyes or whatever of the, of the body. And I think that that is also true in our grief unmet longings that we, we bring that into the body of Christ for that actual tactical expressions. I think, I think one of the ways that we experience the body, the doctrine of union with Christ is in the actual life to life analog showing up at the same time in the same building experience of oh, you’re my sister and I am connected to you forever in Christ and at the moment my sister is sad or whatever. I think that’s part of the implication of our pastoral care is that we bring that one to another.

0:39:35 – (Rory Shiner): I think the trick with the thing with pastoral care is to kind of under promise and over deliver to say yeah, there’s mourning with those who mourn, weep with those who weep. And in that process of doing that, I think we receive the kind of tangible comforts that come from being members together of, of his body.

0:39:53 – (Courtney Doctor): I’m so glad you talked because we, you know, we’re coming to the end of this conversation and we really didn’t even touch on the corporate aspect of our union with Christ because we’re not the only ones that are united to Christ. It’s not just me and Jesus. Right. We’re united into God’s people. And so again I’m going to commend both Rory’s book and Kyle’s book that’ll both be linked in the show notes for that they both give a wonderful explanation of the corporate, corporate benefits and blessings and responsibilities of union with Christ. Well, can you all tell us, can you a time that personally union with Christ really comforted you or strengthened you or sustained you in some way?

0:40:38 – (Kyle Worley): Yeah, yeah. I mean I can think of many times when I was writing the book, it was the most challenging years of pastoral leadership and family leadership I experienced. It felt like the French novelist and Philosopher Franz Kafka said that a book should be an ax for the frozen sea that is within you. Basically, like when you’re writing a book or reading a book, you should be trying to bust up the frozen sea that is within you. And writing this book on you with Christ was like that every time I sat down to write, to try to remind myself who I actually am in Christ Jesus. And yeah, we were fostering at the time as a foster family, and we’ve since adopted a little girl through that process. But we had, you know, a series of foster kids come through and you love them, and it was so difficult and so challenging to see them go.

0:41:30 – (Kyle Worley): And our family was just going through that journey and we were glad to love them for as long as we had them. But then there’d be this tremendous loss that you experienced even though you were happy that they were being reunited with healthy biological family. And so there was this real deep sadness of loss. I’m a church planter and we were. Were three years in, four years in, and we were encountering some real challenging waters and difficult things as a church plant. And I would sit down to just try to remind myself who I am in Christ. And so I would just say, if you are someone for whom this season is incredibly personally, professionally complicated or painful, I would implore you, if you are a believer, spend some time meditating on the doctrine of union with Christ.

0:42:17 – (Kyle Worley): Slowly read through Ephesians 1, read it out loud, find an audio version of the Bible and let it wash over you. Memorize portions of Romans 6, 1:11 or Romans chapter 8. What shall separate us from the love of God? Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. It is really worth giving. This is one of those doctrines that it’s best to discover in the light so that when the darkness comes, you can stand on it. But if you are in the darkness, this is the best way to start lighting a candle, so to speak, with truth.

0:42:52 – (Rory Shiner): Look for me. And now I’m. I should say, culturally, Australians are a bit more like the British, a little more reticent to disclose personal details. So just trust this is between the three of us and absolutely nobody else listening. Absolutely. Well, that’s just the assurance that I needed. I. If I can be a bit personal, I think I. I know not everyone’s like this, and I’m married to someone who’s not like this, so.

0:43:14 – (Rory Shiner): So I know it’s not everyone, but I think I’ve just. By wiring or whatever, I’ve got one of Those quite busy brains, the kind of brains that wake you up at 2 o’ clock in the morning and think oh my goodness, is it all true? Or am I really Christian? Or in that plain analogy, I’m definitely the second person, the more kind of prone to think and overthink and rethink and all those kinds of things. So just a shout out if you’re that person.

0:43:41 – (Rory Shiner): And I married someone who’s not that person. My, my wife’s from a non Christian background. The moment she became a Christian she’s like, this is definitely true. And I’m definitely. And she just is that kind of person. And, and I’m, I’m wired differently. So I, I’ve found it hugely helpful I think with that kind of mind to the, the doctrine of union of Christ has given me this kind of triage, sabotage capacity to think as the. And this is the maybe oversharing. But the way I think about it now is that my, my, my mind is like, it’s like it’s got a door at the front of it and I can have some, I can exercise, I can’t exercise much control over who knocks on the door because that’s a public access thing. Anyone can knock on the door.

0:44:29 – (Rory Shiner): But union with Christ has given me a much better sense of opening the door and saying what are you doing here?

0:44:34 – (Kyle Worley): Here?

0:44:35 – (Rory Shiner): And is this a conversation we really need to have right now? But if it’s this kind of ambiguous, you know, two o’ clock in the morning, oh, you know, God doesn’t really love you, or you’re not really Christian or God’s really disappointed with you right now, I can now to an increasing degree say what are you doing here? Like what, what is the. A, this is a really inconvenient time. 2 o’ clock in the morning is not good for either of us.

0:45:04 – (Rory Shiner): And B, I, what you’re saying is, is literally not true. Like it’s not, it’s just a metaphysical impossibility that God isn’t delighted in me because he. Because of where I am in Jesus. And that’s been a long slow process, but a really fruitful one of being able to, to manage those kinds of doubts and, and fears in a more kind of robust way.

0:45:36 – (Courtney Doctor): I love that because that’s exactly. I think that there is a, and I think we started the conversation talking about the freedom and the joy of this that as you kind of grow in your understanding of the rock solid, it is a non negotiable, it is true and it is eternally true because it all resides in Christ. It all depends on Christ. Christ. It, it doesn’t depend on me, my fickle heart like Kyle said, or my doubting mind or, or, you know, the strength of my faith. It, it all depends on Christ. And so it is the thing that has grounded me and given me this, this freedom to. Freedom to fail. Freedom to.

0:46:23 – (Courtney Doctor): Freedom to whatever. It’s just, it’s like I had prayed for so long for the gift of self forgetfulness. And I feel like union with Christ is what finally came in and allowed me to even grow in that a little bit. And it’s just, yeah, it’s just a beautiful thing. So I would just commend anybody listening. Please pick up Kyle and Rory’s book. So Rory’s is called One Forever the Transforming Power of Being in Christ.

0:46:48 – (Courtney Doctor): And Kyle’s is called Home With God, Our Union with Christ. They are excellent. They are accessible, they are encouraging, they are edifying, they are true, they are well written. So please pick those two books up. But Rory and Kyle, thanks for joining us. And friends, we hope that you have been encouraged and strengthened and edified by this episode of the Deep Dish. If so, please consider sharing it, liking it, leaving a review and we will see you next time on the Deep Dish.