Union with Christ: The Most Underrated Doctrine (with Sam Allberry)

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0:00:00 – (Ligon Duncan): I mean, it’s no wonder that Spurgeon said there is no joy in this world like union with Christ. The more we can feel it, the happier we are. It’s just no wonder that Spurgeon could.

0:00:14 – (Matt Smethurst): Say that it’s nice to be chatting with a Presbyterian and an Anglican and hear a Baptist quoted. Welcome to this episode of the Everyday Pastor, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. I’m Matt Smethurst.

0:00:38 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:39 – (Matt Smethurst): And today we’re joined by our friend Sam Albery. Sam is a longtime friend of mine and he is the associate pastor at Emanuel Nashville, author of many helpful books that I’ve benefited from personally. And even just the other day I was thinking about a little more book of his that’s not nearly as well known as it should be called why Bother with Church? And today I want to think in particular about a topic that Sam wrote about in a more recent book titled One With My the Life Changing Reality of Being in Christ. And that’s the topic of union with Christ.

0:01:19 – (Matt Smethurst): For much of my Christian life, I didn’t think much about this particular doctrine. I believed it and so far as I understood it, but I didn’t completely realize or grasp how it fit into the glory of salvation. Sam, thanks for being with us.

0:01:37 – (Sam Allberry): Hey, thanks for having me. I’m so thrilled to be with you both.

0:01:41 – (Matt Smethurst): You mentioned in One With My Lord that the doctrine of union with Christ you thought was similar to an orange in your Christmas stocking. Can you explain what you were talking about?

0:01:55 – (Sam Allberry): Yes. I don’t know if this is an English, peculiarly English thing, but in our Christmas stocking each year, and I still get one, by the way, I’m 50 years old and still get a Christmas stocking from my mother, and it always has a small orange, a nectarine or a tangerine at the bottom of it. And so for much of my Christian life, I viewed union with Christ a bit like that. You kind of have the other things you’re a bit more excited about. Then there’s this other thing that you think, okay, that’s, that’s a good thing, but I’m not as interested in it.

0:02:24 – (Sam Allberry): And what I began to realize as I looked at union with Christ is that it’s not an item in the stocking, it is the stocking. It is the way in which we receive all the other things that we have through Christ. So it’s much, much bigger and more expansive and more all encompassing than I previously thought.

0:02:42 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I love that illustration. Let’s just kind of define our terms. First and foremost, what is the doctrine of union with Christ?

0:02:50 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, it’s a doctrine that you find especially articulated in the Apostle Paul’s writings, in which he explains that by the Holy Spirit we are united to the risen and ascended Christ. When we rest and trust in Christ alone for salvation as he is offered in the Gospel, the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ so that all that is his is is ours. And every spiritual blessing that he has accomplished in his great work of redemption is ours in him. And everything that we have, we have in him.

0:03:31 – (Ligon Duncan): And Paul will, in Ephesians 1, he will meditate on this in that great prayer of Doxology that he starts off with that runs from Ephesians 1:3 all the way down to verse 14. And then he’ll work it out in passages like Romans 6, he’ll touch on it in Galatians. He comes back to it over and again. And I wanna say, maybe not just like Sam with the orange in the stocking, but this is a doctrine I’m certain that my faithful pastors preached on when I was a younger man. But somehow it eluded me.

0:04:10 – (Ligon Duncan): And it was not until I read John Murray’s Little Redemption Accomplish and Applied when I was in seminary that I began to organize my theology in relation to this glorious truth. So it was something I should have known about early. I’m sure that my pastors mentioned it to me in sermons. I know that they were talking about the significance of that phrase in Christ that occurs over and over in the New Testament. But somehow I was missing it.

0:04:43 – (Ligon Duncan): And it was a real blessing to me to have a teacher faithfully explain it from Scripture and relate it to everything else. Because as Sam said, it’s not just something. It’s everything is connected to it and in it. And so it’s a wonderful, wonderful theme for the edification of Christians.

0:05:02 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. So it’s the Bible’s teaching that through faith in Jesus, what’s true of him becomes true of us. His status becomes our status. His spiritual wealth becomes our wealth. His past becomes our past, his future becomes our future. Because in the words of Sam’s book, we are one with him. It’s like the ultimate wedding ceremony exchange where you are bringing into the marriage crushing, unpayable debt, but you just happen to be marrying the wealthiest man in the universe. And so your debt becomes his, his wealth becomes yours. What’s true of him becomes true of you, Sam.

0:05:44 – (Matt Smethurst): You, of course, as we’ve said, wrote a whole book on this what are some of the go to passages where you find this doctrine to be most prominent and precious in the Bible?

0:05:55 – (Sam Allberry): Yeah, thank you. It’s one of those doctrines that’s not always foregrounded but is often lurking just under the surface of lots of passages. But there are some particular texts where it does poke through into the foreground. Ligon just mentioned Ephesians 1 and that opening that sort of as Paul just sort of tumbles over himself, unpacking what we have in Christ, that would be one Jesus teaching on the vine and the branches is again that theme of abiding in Christ and what that means to do. So what’s involved with that?

0:06:28 – (Sam Allberry): First Corinthians 6, it comes up a little bit there, but Paul again makes that parallel to the man and the woman becoming one flesh and how when we come to Christ, we become one spirit with him and some of the ethical implications that flow from that. It’s never far from the surface in Romans, but Romans 6 has been another key passage for me, just really. And Romans 5 for that matter, with Adam. So those are passages, I think, where it’s been most explicitly talked about at some length.

0:07:01 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, you mentioned it’s often more backgrounded in passages. And I think for those of us who are committed to expository preaching, we’re wanting to make sure the main idea of the passage is the main idea of the message. We need to pay careful attention to what can feel like it’s more of a background truth, an assumed truth, and bring it to the fore for our people. Kyle Worley, in his helpful book on this topic, Home with God, says that the doctrine lives in the prepositions of the New Testament. And I think that’s a good way to put it.

0:07:36 – (Matt Smethurst): Sam, this. I think one of the reasons this is so counterintuitive for us is because the way that we typically refer to following Jesus is by calling ourselves a Christian. But you point out that that’s actually not the way that the biblical authors usually refer to their own discipleship to Jesus. So first of all, just explain how this is the default way of self perception, self understanding for New Testament Christians and why that’s significant for us.

0:08:10 – (Sam Allberry): Yeah, it surprised me. I hadn’t really stopped to think about this before, but the word Christian only comes, I think, two or three times in the New Testament, whereas the language of being in him, in Christ comes in the hundreds of times. So that is by far the most common way. The New Testament refers to people who are followers of Jesus. And it made me think, well, if Our default language is different to the Bible’s default language, then there’s probably something we’re missing at the conceptual level.

0:08:43 – (Sam Allberry): And I think for me, I’d always thought of being a follower of Jesus, but again, that conceptually implies he’s somewhere a small dot on the horizon. I’m trying to keep up with him. There’s distance there. Whereas the language of being in Christ reminds me of the closeness, the nearness, the intimacy, the I will be with you always to the very end of the age ness of our, of our life with Jesus. So I’m not going to stop, you know, I’m not launching a campaign to stop using the word Christian. But I think we just need to make sure, as particularly in our teaching ministries, that we are teaching up the concept of being in Christ.

0:09:26 – (Matt Smethurst): Absolutely. We focus so much on whether Christ is in us, which is a good question. But we don’t as often think about are we in him, which seems to be the dominant focus of the New Testament. Lig how did you try to bring this doctrine to bear as a pastor, not only in your preaching but also in your counseling? And how did you see it help people practically?

0:09:51 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, I mean, I think you two have already brought up one way and that’s just in the issue of Christian identity. How do we think about ourselves? We all know and have probably read a Christian author named Dale Ralph Davis. He’s a wonderful Old Testament author. He taught at RTS for many years. And Ralph used to sign letters to people in Christ in Jackson and it was his way of saying, hey, who am I?

0:10:21 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m in Christ. And the Lord right now has put me in Jackson, Mississippi to be a professor to people that are preparing for the ministry. And I think it was his way of saying, here I am in the world, but where I really am, I’m in Christ. I’m in this particular place in the world ministering. But who I am, identity wise is I am a man in Christ. And of course that’s a way that Paul describ himself as a man in Christ.

0:10:50 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I do think that you’ve already brought up one of the important areas because Christians bring all kinds of baggage into our Christian experience from the past. That’s very, very real and very, very self defining. And Jesus is very, very serious about having the, the sort of the claim to pride of place in the definition of who we are. And so union with Christ is vital for that, but it’s also vital for assurance. I mean, this is one of those areas where our assurance of Salvation has to be grounded. If our assurance is grounded in our good godly desires, in our performance, in our aspirations to godliness, we’re never going to have assurance.

0:11:45 – (Ligon Duncan): But when we realize that every spiritual blessing is ours in Christ Jesus, as the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1, it has a massive effect on Christian assurance. So it’s one of those doctrines that we want to deploy as we’re trying to foster a good godly biblical assurance in believers. But, I mean, it impacts almost every area of the Christian life. It impacts how we battle sin. You know, I belong to Jesus. That’s how I battle sin. I belong to Him.

0:12:18 – (Ligon Duncan): I’m united to him. Paul will deploy it that way with the Corinthians. You know, how can you be one with the world when you’re one with Christ? So it’s a tool for battling sin. Look, there’s that beautiful chapter in the Westminster Confession, or if you prefer, in the London Baptist Confession of 1869, on Communion with Christ and with other believers. So the doctrine of union with Christ actually informs our experience of communion with Christ and our experience of communion with fellow believers. So it’s all over the place in the Christian life and is just a wonderful, wonderful truth for pastors as we’re seeking to grow people up into Christian maturity.

0:13:08 – (Sam Allberry): I think it’s just piggybacking on that, the whole notion of assurance. I was talking to someone just a couple of days ago who is wrestling with assurance. And when I was kind of asking him a few questions, it was clear that it was because of how he was doing in his own Christian life. And so I was trying to say to him, the question isn’t, are you having a good day? The question is, is Jesus having a good day?

0:13:31 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes.

0:13:31 – (Sam Allberry): If he’s having a good day, I’m okay. Yes, I’m probably not having a good day, but that’s okay. He’s covered that.

0:13:39 – (Ligon Duncan): So, Sam, when did the orange become the whole stocking for you? Could you just explain that process? How did you see it? How did you get it?

0:13:48 – (Sam Allberry): Yeah, it was a process. The first domino to fall over was reading something by Richard B. Gaffin, not by faith, not by sight, or something like that. I can’t remember what the name of the book was, but that was when I first began to. I’d heard of the doctrine, I’d seen it around, but I hadn’t really thought about what it meant. And Gaffin began to kind of help me pull on that thread. Sinclair, Ferguson, you just mentioned.

0:14:11 – (Sam Allberry): I found some lectures of his somewhere Online, and he was teaching on this. And that blew open so many categories in my mind. Found some, again, lectures online by Mike Reeves, which did the same thing. But it’s then one of those things where once you’ve noticed it, you can’t unsee it in Scripture. And particularly working through Romans, actually just working through Romans for myself, I had a real breakthrough in Romans 6, just personally thinking about certain besetting sins and how it can feel like the sin is saying to you, this is who you are. This is how we roll.

0:14:48 – (Sam Allberry): Stop trying to pretend to be some Christian version of yourself. You’re clearly not. And my understanding of union with Christ from Romans 6 helped me to realize that who I am in Jesus is who I really am, and that sin is the imposter, not holiness. And therefore I’m never being more true to myself than when I’m pursuing holiness in Christ. And it’s sin that’s going against the grain of my true identity now, not holiness. And that was such a significant mind shift for me. And that was a real breakthrough because it meant holiness didn’t feel like this thing I’m constantly aiming for and never quite reaching. It felt like, no, holiness is actually who I am.

0:15:35 – (Sam Allberry): And it is an inevitability by God’s grace, slowly as I’m sanctified in this life and then in glorification in the age to come.

0:15:44 – (Matt Smethurst): Sam, elaborate on that. In the sense of the old self and the new self, and how understanding that we are new in Christ gives us fresh confidence and hope and power in the fight against sin.

0:16:01 – (Sam Allberry): Well, Paul walks us through it in Romans chapter six, and he does something similar in a much more compressed way in Galatians 2. In both passages, he talks how we have gone through a death. I think I used to think the Christian life is Jesus died so that we can live, which is true, but he died so that I could die in him and then live new life in him. And so Paul kind of shows us that in the early part of Romans chapter six, he says, you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So that’s the first piece of it is a mental shift. Consider yourself dead to sin.

0:16:44 – (Matt Smethurst): And isn’t that the first imperative in the Book of Romans?

0:16:48 – (Sam Allberry): I believe so. It’s the first thing we’re told to do. And it’s not be dead to sin, it’s consider yourself dead to sin. And he says a couple of verses later, in verse 14, sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law. But under grace. So something about what we now have in Christ means that sin loses its power and authority over me. It’s still part of my felt reality. The old self is still there and hasn’t left the building yet. I still feel those temptations, those impulses.

0:17:25 – (Sam Allberry): But I’m no longer under the authority of sin in the way that I once was, because I’m now under grace. I’m alive to God in Christ Jesus. Something has so radically shifted in my relationship to sin through his death and resurrection and my being united to his death and resurrection.

0:17:44 – (Matt Smethurst): And in terms of the practical fight against sin, is what you’re saying that every single time we do succumb to sin, we didn’t have to.

0:17:54 – (Sam Allberry): Exactly. So I would love to say I haven’t sinned since I had this breakthrough with Romans 6, but it just means that sin is not inevitable. When Paul asks that question at the beginning of chapter six, are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? You can ask that in a mischievous, disobedient way. You can also ask that in a despairing way and think, is sin my lot now in this life? And the answer is no, because we’re not under sin’s mastery in the way that we once were.

0:18:28 – (Sam Allberry): And I use the analogy of going back to visit my high school a few years after I’d graduated. And it was the same head teacher that had always been there when I was there. And when I heard his voice, my reflex was to do what he said. And it was an effort not to, because for several years that voice had had authority over me. And so I had to sort of do a mental mind shift and say, no, no, I’m not. I’m not under him anymore. He’s not my headmaster.

0:18:56 – (Sam Allberry): He has no authority over me. And we have to do a sort of a similar mindset shift when it comes to the. When sin comes knocking on the door and bossing us around, we have to say, no, no, no. I know it feels like you’re in charge, but you’re really not anymore. I’m no longer under the authority of sin.

0:19:14 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s so good. It reminds me of Augustine’s rubric that in the garden, Adam and Eve were able to sin. Since the Fall, we are not able not to sin, but in Christ. So in Adam we’re not able not to sin, but in Christ we are able not to sin. And of course, our hope is that one day, in the new heavens and new earth, we will not be able to sin. And I think that that what you’re saying, Sam, I think it’s a note that we, we as preacher, we don’t want to be legalistic and we don’t want to.

0:19:53 – (Matt Smethurst): We don’t want to weigh people down with expectations that are unrealistic. And yet I do think it’s part of our job as ministers of the gospel. Because of course, the gospel grace is not just about getting your sins forgiven. It’s also about getting power to fight sin. He breaks the power of canceled sin. We sing. And if you just want your sin canceled, that’s all you care about. But you don’t care about its power in you also being broken.

0:20:24 – (Matt Smethurst): You may not yet be a Christian. You know, grace is not permission to sin. Grace is power not to. And so I think that we shouldn’t assume as. As ministers of the gospel that because we want to be grace driven, that we don’t also look people and say, indwelling within you is an omnipotent person, the third person of the eternal Trinity. And the very power that rose that brought the Lord Jesus up from the grave is the same power that resides in you so you don’t have to sin.

0:21:03 – (Matt Smethurst): And rather than that weighing them down, that can put wind in their sails.

0:21:08 – (Sam Allberry): Yeah, I’ve used the verse many times. He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. And Jesus is not intimidated by your indwelling sin.

0:21:18 – (Matt Smethurst): Sam Ligg mentioned the doctrine of assurance and how that’s related to union with Christ. Talk a little more about that.

0:21:24 – (Sam Allberry): Yeah. There are lots of different ways in which understanding this doctrine helps our assurance. I was talking with a guy at church a couple of weeks ago who’s really been struggling with his assurance was so tied to his spiritual disciplines. And I was trying to explain to him the difference between our union with Jesus and our communion with Jesus. And our union with Jesus is unchanging. That’s been established by Him.

0:21:52 – (Sam Allberry): For that to be undone, Jesus would have to come back down from heaven and climb into his grave. That is fixed. Our communion with Jesus fluctuates. There are times when we are drawing near to him and we’re being faithful to him, when we are attentive to his word and we are praying to him and walking with Him. And there are times when we’re more distant, when our hearts might be cooler towards Him. That doesn’t affect our union, but it does affect our enjoyment of that union.

0:22:23 – (Sam Allberry): And I think he was looking for his assurance in his communion with Christ rather than his union with Christ. And I think we can get those around the wrong way in two ways. We can assume that our union means we don’t need to commune, and John 15 shows us that’s not the case because Jesus tells us to abide in him and to keep on abiding in Him. But similarly, we mustn’t think that our union is dependent on our communion with Jesus.

0:22:49 – (Sam Allberry): So I am the son of my lovely parents. I try and speak to them often. I try and be a good son. If I was to neglect talking to them, it wouldn’t mean I’m not their son. It just might mean I’m a pretty lousy son. But I’m still their son. And so I want to take that sonship that I have with them and honor it and enjoy it and make the most of it. And similarly with my relationship with God. I might be a poor child of God, a poor son of God, but Jesus has made me a son of God.

0:23:28 – (Sam Allberry): So my union with him is not dependent on my communion. My communion should flow out of what I know about my union with him.

0:23:35 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s a really helpful distinction. Sam Lake, have you found other ways of talking about union with Christ that has helped everyday pastors or believers find traction in fighting against sin and moving along toward our heavenly hope?

0:23:53 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, you know, one is to tie this doctrine into biblical theology a little bit. And as Sam has already mentioned and is all really good book books on union with Christ do. There are various metaphors that the Bible uses for this. Marriage is one of the major metaphors. So that in the New Testament, Christ and his people, just as husbands are to love their wives, as Christ loved the church, because there’s this marriage picture of God’s relation to us that expresses some of the blessings and realities of union with Christ. And I like to point out, you go all the way back to the Old Testament when God calls Israel out of Egypt. One of the things that he says in Exodus 19:4, 6 is that he has brought Israel to himself.

0:24:48 – (Ligon Duncan): Now that language actually comes right out of the end of Genesis 2 when he brings Eve to Adam. So the language is the language of a father bringing his daughter to the bridegroom. Well, in Exodus 19 he says, I’ve brought you to myself. I’m the bridegroom. This is a marriage between us. And then he says, and so have no other gods before me. Worship only me. I’m your husband. Be faithful to me. And of course, what happens immediately is they worship other gods.

0:25:22 – (Ligon Duncan): And the golden calf happens 12 chapters later in Exodus 32. And in the wake of that, Moses prays this amazing prayer in Exodus 34. And he says, you know, God, yes, we have failed to obey, and, you know, we don’t deserve your forgiveness, but would you forgive iniquity, transgression, and sin? And would you take us for your treasured possession? And what Moses is asking is, would God treat unfaithful Israel like she was still his faithful wife?

0:26:10 – (Ligon Duncan): And the amazing thing that God says in Exodus 34 is, yes, I can do that. And the way he does that is through Jesus in union with Christ. And so really what Paul is unpacking is something that was set in motion back in the days of Moses, but you had no answer. The law could not give an answer to that. Only Christ could give an answer to that because they had broken the law. And so it’s a wonderful biblical theology that pastors can kind of sneak in along the way as they’re telling the story of the Bible and, and relate it to union with Christ.

0:26:50 – (Ligon Duncan): So you not only have these wonderful passages that Sam has already pointed our attention to in the New Testament, and you not only have that underlying material on it everywhere in the New Testament. And Sam mentioned this is not just a Pauline thing, this is a Jesus thing. It’s John 15, it’s John 17. This is, you know, Paul, I think every great idea from the apostle Paul, he plagiarized from Jesus.

0:27:15 – (Ligon Duncan): And this is yet another one where Paul is just riffing on Jesus when he teaches this doctrine of union with Christ. But it’s rooted in the biblical theology that’s being unfolded from the very earliest days of the Old Testament. So that’s another way that pastors can kind of teach this as we work through the Bible with our people.

0:27:35 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s glorious. I love when you preach on the Everyday Pastor podcast link, Sam, talk about how this doctrine fits in with the local church, because I think it could be easy to think about it in a kind of individualistic me and Jesus, or more specifically, me in Jesus kind of way. And that’s all there is to think about. But how ought this be experienced, enjoyed, lived out in the context of others? Maybe even talk a little bit about the role of, say, the Lord’s Supper in the way we think about what’s going on.

0:28:14 – (Sam Allberry): Yeah, it’s wonderful. Our union with Christ, properly understood, gives us more reason to be mindful of our membership of a local church rather than less reason. It doesn’t mean I ride off into the sunset with just me and Jesus because my being united to him also unites me to other people who are United to him.

0:28:34 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s a package deal.

0:28:36 – (Sam Allberry): It is a package deal. That’s the way it works. I come to my father realizing there are other brothers and sisters for whom he is also a father. And that puts me inescapably and wonderfully into relationship with them. And obviously that’s most fully expressed in the life of the local church. Paul learned this the hard way because when he was persecuting the church and was confronted by the risen Jesus, Jesus didn’t say, why are you persecuting the church? He said, why are you persecuting me?

0:29:08 – (Sam Allberry): In other words, what you are doing to my people, you are in some sense doing to the Christ who is united to them. So from Paul’s very first encounter with the risen Jesus, he was made conscious of Christ’s identification with his people. And so if we identify with him, we have to identify with his people. And, you know, all of those biblical imperatives are to be worked out collectively, communally.

0:29:38 – (Sam Allberry): We abide in Jesus together. This is a team kind of a team process, a team effort. So there are so many passages in the New Testament that again, show us how we are in him together. And therefore, we need to be mindful of that. I love praying the Lord’s Prayer, but I love how Jesus tells you to go inside, close the door, and pray on your own, but you pray our Father. So even in your private devotional life, you are bringing a corporate sensibility that actually I’m here with figuratively the communion of saints.

0:30:20 – (Sam Allberry): Now, when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, it’s a beautiful expression of our shared union with Christ, because we are. We are coming as one body to receive the bread and the cup. We’re declaring our union with Jesus as we receive these elements, but we’re also declaring our shared union with Christ as we do this as a body, sharing the loaf, sharing the cup. We don’t just do this individually. We do this corporately as a body.

0:30:53 – (Sam Allberry): So one of the things the founding pastor of my church, Ray Orland. Many of our listeners will be familiar with Ray. I’ve heard him say sometimes when he’s setting up communion, he’ll say, bring your biggest sin, and Christ will bring his biggest forgiveness and kind of see who wins kind of thing. But he’s made the point several times that the sin that is most profoundly troubling you on any given Sunday morning, as you come to the Lord’s table, you come bearing in mind Christ bore that sin on his shoulders.

0:31:28 – (Sam Allberry): He made that sin his. And our receiving of the bread and Drinking of the cup is a way of not just remembering in an abstract way, but actually of freshly receiving and appropriating all that Christ died to provide for us. He has united Himself with our sins so that we can be united with him in his righteousness and in his blessings.

0:31:54 – (Ligon Duncan): Sam, how would the doctrine of union with Christ and the various metaphors that God gives us in the Bible help us explain the doctrine of the atonement? We run into lots of people that object to the theology of penal substitutionary atonement. How does union with Christ help us explain that?

0:32:15 – (Sam Allberry): This is one of the things I’ve loved discovering is it’s one of these doctrines that you realize is like a Swiss army knife and does lots of things. And, you know, I remember my favorite of the new atheists was always Christopher Hitchens. And I remember him saying the most immoral doctrine of Christianity was that of vicarious atonement, this idea that someone else can bear my guilt and take the punishment for it. And that’s a legitimate question to raise, and it’s one the Bible itself seems to raise, because in the book of Proverbs it talks about how the Lord detests someone.

0:32:54 – (Sam Allberry): You know, a guilty person being acquitted and an innocent person being punished. So union with Christ helps us with this. Both of you have each mentioned already that the marital nature of our union with Jesus and the very nature of that means that the estate of the one properly becomes the estate of the other. Jesus isn’t some hapless third party who blunders in front of the out of control bus or whatever those kind of illustrations are.

0:33:22 – (Sam Allberry): He’s the groom who is lovingly uniting Himself to us and taking on, as Matt said earlier, taking on our crushing debt so that we can legitimately, rightly receive his righteousness, his holiness, and be justified by Him. So the union then makes sense of that exchange. This is not like a kind of I’ll leave a package on your doorstep and you turn up an hour later and pick it up kind of thing. We become one with Him.

0:33:52 – (Sam Allberry): So rightfully, what is ours becomes his and what is his becomes ours. So it speaks not only of how God can justly justify the unjust in the language of John Stott, but at the same time it’s showing us how in order to do that, Jesus has entered into this beautiful relationship of oneness with us forever. He’s apparently happy to unite Himself to us in that way for the rest of eternity, which is it shows his love is even more unfathomable than we.

0:34:24 – (Matt Smethurst): Had previously thought, and you mentioned that we are united to a happy God. And I think it’s so easy for us to just feel like a constant disappointment to Him. At best, maybe he tolerates us. But this doctrine can have a revolutionary effect for the people in our churches when they realize that in Christ, God looks at us and can speak words of approval just as he spoke over his beloved Son in the Jordan River. You know, this is my daughter, this is my Son, whom I love.

0:35:01 – (Matt Smethurst): With you, I am well pleased because you are one with Christ.

0:35:06 – (Sam Allberry): It’s so reassuring. And Jesus himself, we’re told in Hebrews, for the joy set before him endured the cross. Apparently, he loves being our Savior. Yes. So this isn’t an arranged marriage that he was reluctantly partaking in. He loves being our Lord. He loves being our Savior. He loves being the groom to his bride.

0:35:27 – (Ligon Duncan): I mean, it’s no wonder that Spurgeon said there is no joy in this world like union with Christ. The more we can feel it, the happier we are. It’s just no wonder that Spurgeon could.

0:35:42 – (Matt Smethurst): Say that it’s nice to be chatting with a Presbyterian and an Anglican and hear a Baptist quoted. As we wrap up this really helpful conversation. I just love thinking about union with Christ. And I use the word revolutionary. I don’t use that word lightly. I realize that oftentimes you see books published and promoted as the revolutionary take. But I really do think union with Christ can have a revolutionary effect on the people in our churches if we can help them better understand it.

0:36:21 – (Matt Smethurst): And as you guys have so eloquently touched on, it relates to all of the gifts, all of the blessings that we receive in our salvation. And of course, we only experience a small part of our salvation in this life. So maybe let’s end by talking about union with Christ as it relates to our bright and glorious future. Sam, how should that revolutionize the way we think about our future?

0:36:48 – (Sam Allberry): Well, you mentioned this, I think, at the top end of the interview, Matt, that we’re united to Christ so that what is true of him becomes true of us. And so Paul says in Colossians that we died with him and we are raised with him. We’re spiritually raised now. We’ve been given new spiritual life, but it makes our bodily resurrection utterly certain. The fact that the one we are united to, that he has been bodily resurrected, means we will be bodily raised. And therefore our future is as secure as his resurrection.

0:37:22 – (Sam Allberry): There’s no way we can’t be raised. The Australian preacher Rory Shiner uses this illustration of being on a plane. And the moment you get in the plane, what is true of the plane becomes true of you. If the plane is delayed, you’re delayed. If the plane has landed, you’ve landed. And so the fact that Christ has been raised and we’re in him means there’s no way we won’t be raised. So again, it just gives us such certainty for our eternal future.

0:37:50 – (Matt Smethurst): Well, speaking of planes, we’ll go ahead and land it for this interview. Sam, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation. And again, I want to really strongly commend to everyone listening this book, One With My the Life Changing Reality of Being in Christ, published by Crossway in 2024. I’d encourage you to get the book and pass it out to your church members and give them the gift of coming to better understand the reality of being one with their Lord.

0:38:23 – (Matt Smethurst): Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Everyday Pastor. We hope it’s been helpful to you and we’re grateful to Sam for his ministry to us even today. Please take a moment to leave a review or a comment, and especially to share this episode with other pastors so we can continue helping them find fresh joy in the work of ministry.