Pastor's Power Points

United With Christ: In His Death

We have been united together in the likeness of His death
Rom. 6:5

 It is a rare phenomenon that twins are born conjoined. Two persons are connected that share the same blood stream. This is the force of the word used to describe our union with Christ – sumphutoi is a compound word meaning to “grow together” with the sense of being fused into one which is why some early translations like Tyndale used the word “grafted” in this occasion.

At the point of faith the believing sinner is baptized by the Holy Spirit into Christ’s death. This is a mystical union, but it is God’s doing. Clearly it is not something arrived at through a process of sanctification. Rather it is a union established at one point by God as the basis of our becoming like Christ, i.e. walk in newness of life.

The reality of it in God’s perspective is that by faith-union with Christ, His death has become yours. You now share those experiences which are His historically – your “old self” has been “crucified” on His cross which Paul states indicatively in Romans 6:6 and as personal testimony in Galatians 2:20 – I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. It is not just in death that we are untied with Christ, it is also in his burial, resurrection and exaltation!

All this happens according to God’s eternal purpose and it is delineated to us from God’s perspective – with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. This is why the cross of Christ is the focal point of all human history.  It is the basis of justification for those who believed thousands of years before Christ and those of us who believe thousands of years after Christ.

Francis Schaeffer sums it well:  “…our salvation rests upon two historical points: the moment in space and time at which Jesus died on the cross; and the moment at which we by faith accepted Him as our Savior. At the moment that you accepted Christ as your Savior, you were baptized by the Holy Spirit into His death.” By faith, Jesus Christ’s history becomes your history.  So in your next conversation you can confidently say: “I have been crucified and am now alive to tell about it.”

Our mystical union with Christ in His death is not without practical implications.  Romans 6:10 states: “the death that He died, He died to sin once for all.” If we by faith are united with Christ in Hid death then we are also dead to sin… “he who has died has been freed from sin.” Death is to understood as separation, not annihilation or absolute inability. The death of a person means his soul is separated from his body; the death of man in Genesis 3 meant his alienation from God. Consider death to be detachment. The fact that the believer, by faith union is dead to sin means he is detached from the powerful grip of sin that enslaves. On this premise Paul asks: “How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?” It is the same as asking: “You’ve invited to a permanent place at the kings banquet table, how could you still be eating out of the dumpster?” Peter says the same: “that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness” (I Peter 2:24).

At the root of sin is a self-centered nature. For this reason Jesus states “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” Paul reflects this death to self – detachment from enslaving appetites – in liberating fashion when he asserts “He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf” (II Cor. 5:15).  Death to sin necessarily means death to self-preeminence (self holding the most important position is one’s existence), because such self-preeminence was the origin of sin and is therefore at the root of all sin. This death to sin/self is the only possible means of attaining the mind of Christ which is to esteem others more important than yourself (Phil. 2:3-11).

The virtue of taking up your cross and following Christ is to follow Him with abandon. As Jesus Himself exemplified, one’s own welfare and physical survival takes a back seat to the spiritual welfare of others. Pleasing God and glorifying Him are paramount – not to be impeded by ambitions of comfort and security.

You died with Christ from the basic principles of the world.
Col. 2:20

 Here is a classic example of a statement of Scripture that must be understood in its context. The “basic principles of the world” is related to being subjected to regulations. Robertson points out that the word stoicheia (basic principles) is a word for anything in a row or series like letters of the alphabet or elements of Jewish ceremonial training. Elemental teaching is the sense of strict regulations for young children who have not matured in reason and relationship. Paul states to the Galatians that “when we were children we were in bondage under the elements of the world.” But Christ came to “redeem those who were under the Law.”

The basic tenet in all this is that regulations transform no one. This is the contrast between the only two religions of the world: human merit and grace. Even the Law of Moses was powerless to transform a human heart – But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter (Rom. 7:6).

The practical point here is that which Paul states to the Colossians: regulations, moral codes or self-imposed religion “are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.”  The lust and indulgences of the flesh are those appetites which become contrary to the character and purpose of God. Mere regulations and codes have no power to safeguard a person from their lure and power because they proceed from the heart. Any person can be good, moral and clean on the outside for a time while harboring all forms of idolatry in his inner man.

So what is the remedy? God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" (Gal. 4:6). Because of this we can serve in the newness of the Spirit (Rom 7:6). Lets get right to the point – Walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh (Gal. 5:16). Regulations do not – cannot – produce spirituality in the human heart and mind; only God’s Spirit can. United with Christ we have died to those regulations which only remind us of our guilt. Those requirements have been nailed to the cross (Col. 2:14). In their stead God has made us partakers of His divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust (II Pet. 1:4).