Rooted & Grounded

You are not merely forgiven. You are joined.

Most Christians, if pressed, would describe salvation something like this: God declared our sins forgiven, Christ's righteousness was credited to our account, and heaven is now secured. All of that is gloriously true. But it is not the whole of the New Testament's vision, and when we reduce it to that alone, we find ourselves with a thinner, more anxious faith than the apostle Paul ever intended.

Paul's favorite way to describe the Christian life is not "forgiven person" but "person in Christ." The phrase "in Christ" and its near equivalents appear across his letters with astonishing frequency. To be a Christian, for Paul, is to be located inside of someone: to be joined to him as a branch is joined to a vine, as a body is joined to its head. This is the doctrine theologians call "union with Christ," and it is arguably the root from which every other benefit of salvation grows.

Consider Galatians 2:20: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." Paul does not say he has been pardoned through Christ, though he has been. He says he has been crucified with Christ. His identity is bound up in what Christ has done, not merely as an account transaction, but as a shared history. What happened to Christ happened, in some real and mysterious sense, to Paul, because Paul was truly joined to the one who died and rose.

Romans 6 makes this even more explicit: "For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his." The logic runs in both directions at once. We died with him, and so we will rise with him. Our present life is hidden in his life. Our future is secured not by a contract but by a union.

John Calvin saw this with particular clarity. In the Institutes, he insisted that "that joining together of Head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts, in short, that mystical union" must be accorded "the highest degree of importance," precisely because "Christ, having been made ours, makes us sharers with him in the gifts with which he has been endowed." The gifts of salvation, Calvin argued, flow from the giver himself. You do not receive forgiveness from a distant Christ and sanctification from a closer one. You receive Christ, and in receiving him, you receive everything he is.

This changes the texture of the Christian life in ways that are quietly radical. Suffering, for instance, looks different when you are joined to one who suffered and rose. You are not merely enduring hardship while waiting for a divine insurance payout. You are, as Paul puts it in Colossians, hidden with Christ in God, which means that your worst days are still days in which your life is held inside of his. Doubt looks different too. The believer who is genuinely united to Christ does not hold on to salvation by the strength of their faith. Their faith is the hand that grips Christ, and Christ is the one who holds the hand.

Union with Christ is not an advanced topic for seminary students. It is the grammar of the whole Christian life. Learn it, and everything else (justification, sanctification, prayer, suffering, hope) begins to make a different and deeper kind of sense. The question is not only "Are you forgiven?" but "Are you his?" And if you are his, then nothing, not death nor life nor things present nor things to come, can sever that bond.

"We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body: in short, because he deigns to make us one with him. For this reason, we glory that we have fellowship of righteousness with him."

— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, Chapter 11

Rooted & Grounded

Monday, June 29, 2026

ROOTED & GROUNDED

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