What Does It Mean to Be “In Christ”?

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Eph. 1:3–14)

When people ask you about your faith, how do you describe yourself? Are you likely to say, “I am a Presbyterian” or “a Baptist”? Or perhaps, “I am an Episcopalian”? Or perhaps you say simply, “I am a Christian”?

It probably never crosses most of our minds that if we could ask believers from New Testament days to describe themselves, they would probably never answer, “We are Christians.” In fact, the word Christian appears only three times in the New Testament. The disciples were first called “Christians” at Antioch (Acts 11:26). Later on, King Agrippa seems almost to spit out the word when he asks the Apostle Paul, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?” (Acts 26:28). And later, in his first letter, Simon Peter speaks about someone’s suffering as “a Christian” (1 Peter 4:16).

In these three contexts, Christian is probably a pejorative term, even “hate speech” devised by opponents of the gospel, just as the term Puritan was in the seventeenth century. It may well be that it was virtually spat out like the word* fundamentalist *today. These are “hate terms.” If this is how the word Christian first came into common currency, it is not surprising that in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke chooses to use the word “disciple” (e.g., in Acts 6:1; there are more than two dozen examples) or occasionally describes believers as followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 22:4; 24:14), since they followed the One who said, “I am the way” ( John 14:6).

But if you were to ask Paul, “How do you think about yourself?” his answer would probably not have been any of the above, but rather, “I am a man in Christ.”

I remember, as a young teenager, reading 2 Corinthians 12:1–10—the passage in which Paul speaks about the extraordinary revelations he received and the thorn in the flesh that kept him from pride. Introducing the passage, he says that he once knew “a man in Christ” who had extraordinary revelations of God’s wonder and grace, so remarkable that he felt it would be illegitimate to describe them to others. I recall wondering, “Who is this anonymous ‘man in Christ’ that Paul is talking about?” Perhaps I was dull in thought, but the answer only slowly dawned on me: Paul is speaking about himself! This is the basic way that he describes himself because it is the fundamental way in which he thinks about himself. He is “a man in Christ.”

Capture these two words “in Christ” and their equivalents (e.g., “in him”) in your mind. Then take a quick browse through the sixty or so pages in your Bible that contain Paul’s thirteen letters. You will find the expression “in Christ” or a variant of it over eighty times. Equivalent expressions “in the Lord” (or sometimes “in the Lord Jesus”) virtually double that number.

If you have never noticed this before, you will probably be astonished at how often Paul uses these expressions and wonder how you can have never really paid much attention to them. And yet it is possible to have been reading Paul’s letters for years, even decades, without noticing the significance of this little prepositional expression that is clearly his basic way of describing what it means to be a Christian.

These two words, the preposition “in” followed by the title “Christ,” form the central theme of these pages. By the end of the book, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is the longest exposition of two words that you have ever read! And yet these pages will still only scratch the surface of this rich and wonderful doctrine. But I hope they will encourage you to see, from a series of biblical angles, what it means to be “in Christ.” If you belong to Him, this is who you really and truly are, every day of your life—a man or a woman who is “in Christ.”

One New Testament scholar has pointed out that in the movie The Godfather, the word Mafia is never used, and yet it is the underlying presupposition of the whole movie.¹ In a similar way, even when this specific “in Christ” phraseology is not used, what is meant by it is fundamental to everything the Apostle Paul has to say about living the Christian life. And more than that, it is also the solvent of many of the issues that disturb the individual believer or a whole congregation.

The New Testament never defines what “in Christ” means. The best way to grasp its significance is to reflect on various passages that describe what is involved in it. Here, our primary task is to introduce ourselves to the importance of being “in Christ.” One of the best ways to do that is by reflecting on its presence in the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.