What It Means to Be in Christ
One prepositional phrase lies at the heart of our identity as Christians: we are “in Christ.” Today, Sinclair Ferguson concludes our gospel grammar lessons by considering the theological riches contained in these two words.
On Things Unseen this week, we’ve been paying a visit to what I’ve called the “grammar school of the gospel.” And we’ve been having a kind of short refresher course on how the gospel works, how it has a grammar all of its own. Like the English language, the grammar in which the gospel speaks has indicatives and imperatives, has past and present and future tenses, and it also has positive and negative verbs. But since today’s Friday, maybe it’s appropriate that we talk about smaller words, by which I mean prepositions.
A preposition is a word that enables us to understand the relationships between things. And most, but not all are short words like to or from or with. Actually, all these prepositions I’ve just mentioned play an important part in the grammar of the gospel. But today I want to focus on the preposition in.
So far, we’ve focused on verbs which are “doing” words—God’s doing and our doing. But as I say, when we talk about prepositions, we’re thinking about relationships. And in that context, no preposition is more important to gospel grammar than the preposition in, especially when it appears in the phrase in Christ, or one of its several variations in the New Testament, in Him or in the Lord. These various ways of saying the same thing appear scores and scores of times in the New Testament.
I like to highlight the importance of the expression in Christ in this somewhat provocative way: there is no evidence that the Apostle Paul ever thought of or spoke about himself as a Christian. If you think about it, the word Christian is used only three times in the entire Bible. New Testament believers do not seem to have described themselves that way. In fact, the word may well have been a term of abuse, like fundamentalist. The New Testament way of answering the question, “Who are you, believer?” is by this prepositional phrase, “I am someone in Christ.”
I’ve said before on the podcast that I started reading the Bible when I was about nine, but it was ages before this truth dawned on me. I remember puzzling over Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:2, that he had known a man in Christ who, fourteen years before, had a remarkable experience of being caught up into the third heaven. And I wondered who this anonymous man was, and then eventually it dawned on me: “Of course, Paul was speaking about himself.” This was how he characteristically thought of himself: he was now a man in Christ.
You maybe remember how he explains this in Romans 5:12–21: we were by nature, he says, in Adam. He was the head of the original humanity, of which we are part. He acted for us as our representative when he sinned, and then his sinful nature was passed on to us through natural generation. But now by faith, we are no longer in Adam. We have been translated and are now in Christ. All Christ did, He did as our representative and substitute. He lived our life, He died our death. He did this for our salvation. And now, by the ministry of the Spirit, He unites us to Himself by faith, and we come to share in all the benefits and blessings of His work. All that He has done for us is now ours, and we receive it all because we are in Christ. This then, is who we are now. This is our new identity. We’re men and women and young people who are in Christ.
Think of it this way. This is what Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:3–4; it’s what it means to be in Christ. We receive every spiritual blessing in Him because we’ve been chosen in Him. We’ve been predestined in Him. We’ve been reconciled in Him. We’ve been pardoned in Him. We experience illumination in Him. We are given adoption in Him. We are brought to sanctification in Him—and all to the praise of His glorious grace. This is who I am if I’m a Christian. The gospel grammar gives me a way of identifying myself, thinking about myself and who I am. And that’s important, as I think we all understand today, because our lifestyle—how we live—is the result of who we are, who we believe ourselves to be.
What’s the importance, then, of this phrase in Christ in the grammar of the gospel? Well, it’s this: it’s possible for a Christian to suffer from identity theft and then identity loss, and it can be very difficult to regain. And the result is, to use an expression of our forefathers, that we end up living below the level of our privileges. We don’t realize who we are—that is, who we are in Christ. We don’t realize that in Christ, everything that’s in Him is now ours. And if we are in Christ, then He wants everything that is His to become ours too. That’s how the grammar of the gospel structures our thinking so that we can live the Christian life with our heads held high because we know who we are. Nobody in all the world is more privileged or has a more glorious identity than the man or the woman or the young person who can say, “I am in Christ—that’s who I am.”
It’s very clear in Ephesians 1:3–14 that Paul regarded this element in the grammar of the gospel as one of the most thrilling aspects of being a Christian. In fact, these verses are so marvelous that the American theologian B.B. Warfield is said to have believed they should never actually be read, they should only be sung. To know that you are in Christ puts melody into your soul and music into your life.
So, I hope you can rejoice in that today, and I hope you’ll continue to reflect on these various aspects of the grammar of the gospel that we’ve been thinking about this week. It is truly a glorious thing to be in Christ, to be a Christian. So, enjoy being one this weekend, and I hope you’ll join us again on Things Unseen next Monday.
