Union with Christ and Resurrection Life

As we’ve mentioned in several other posts, the most significant lesson we’ve received from the Lord during our time on the field has been union with Christ. It has made such a radical difference in our practical experience of walking in the Spirit that it is the message that we most want to share with other leaders, goers, and believers.

The critical explanation of oneness with Jesus comes best from Hudson Taylor:

The Spirit of God revealed to me the truth of our oneness with Jesus as I had never known it before.

How great seemed my mistake in wishing to get the sap, the fullness out of Him! I saw not only that Jesus will never leave me, but that I am a member of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. The vine is not the root merely, but all – root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit.

Think what it involves. Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? Or your head be well fed while your body starves?

The sweetest part… is the rest which full identification with Christ brings. I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest position He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient. No fear that His resources will prove unequal to the emergency! And His resources are mine, for He is mine, and is with me and dwells in me.

Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

To us, learning about union with Christ unlocked the practical application of the promises of God in our lives. Those biblical promises for provision, joy, wisdom, power went from a distant and vague hope that they would happen to a daily, rich, and real experience in our lives and ministry. Without the secret of oneness with Jesus, we most likely would not have made it past our first term in Thailand.

And although we had been surrendering our control and receiving His promises throughout team leadership and growing ministry in Thailand, the shock and trial of cancer and burnout brought us deeper into the lessons of union. There was more surrender, more death to self that the Lord was bringing in order to receive the true goal of union with Christ: resurrection life and power.

We are continually learning and desiring to experience more intimacy, more of Jesus’ presence, more of our very lives, will, thoughts, words aligning with his. He continues to respond by giving more. 10 years into our time on the field, anxiety has gone from a near constant reality with no reprieve before learning about union, to something we had to actively surrender to receive peace from Jesus, and now to a rare occurrence that is honestly surprising when it pops up.

The circumstances of life and ministry on the field have not gotten much easier. But for thoughts of anxiety and the corresponding tension headaches, panic, desperation, escapism, and inevitable conflicts to go from 10 times a day to 10 times a year is a testimony of God’s power to transform our lives. 

This is not to even speak of —

• supernatural empowerment of strength and energy when my gas tank is completely empty,
• wisdom for decisions that I would never be able to make from my own knowledge, 
• joy in the midst of the lowest points in my life,
• favor and blessing in ministry with people that we did not earn,

and so many other miraculous and practical ways that Jesus has shown himself to be faithful.

His promises in Scripture are true. And they are available to us right now.

And there is so much more that he desires to give us than we can even imagine.

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.

Galatians 2:20

More posts on Union with Christ and Resurrection Life:

1. Union with Christ Part 1
2. Union with Christ Part 2
3. Resurrection Life Part 1
4. Resurrection Life Part 2
5. Resurrection Life Part 3

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God’s Faithfulness, Provision, Protection, and Presence

It feels a bit cliche to say that God’s faithfulness has been a theme of the past 10 years, but there’s a reason why Scripture so often speaks to this aspect of His character. Samuel Saldivar examines 1 New Testament and 4 Old Testament terms that highlight God’s faithfulness and counts up to 733 times these terms are used in the Bible.

In spite of whether I realized it or looked to Him for it, God has been faithful. He has been provider, protector, and Friend.

When our marriage struggled and we fought nearly every day for our first year on the field, He brought healing and unity between me and Jenn to turn a weakness into a joyful point of strength.

When we didn’t know what to do as leaders or how to make decisions for our team, His Spirit gave wisdom and discernment generously and protected our team from catastrophe.

When our team had conflict and disagreement and unhealth, He created unity and camaraderie for us as one body in Christ.

When we were physically exhausted, sick, and out of gas, He provided supernatural strength, energy, and healing.

When trying to pursue a vision for multiplication among 70 million people without the gospel and being told from numerous experienced workers that it couldn’t be done, He blessed us with cherished Thai partners that are bearing fruit beyond what we could dream.

When my wife was in the ICU after a seizure and I didn’t know if she would live or die, in the waiting room of the hospital at 2AM, I experienced His faithfulness and presence beyond any other moment I had before that.

Before you launch to the field, you hear testimonies from workers and read the words from missionary biographies like Adoniram Judson in the prison, Jim Elliot the night before they go to encounter the Huaorani and are martyred for their witness, and John Paton in the tree running for his life from savages. In those testimonies, they all talk about experiencing His promises for peace, joy, and trust, and about how Jesus had never been more present or nearer than in those moments of crisis.

John Paton writes, 

Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe as in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among those chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?

You read the word, you pray and plead, you hope within hope that when those moments of trial come, that He will give you faith to believe the promises. That your faith won’t fail. That He will be and do everything that He said he would.

Sitting in that waiting room, distressed and scared, I prayed the simplest prayer that I could muster: “God, I trust you. I believe that you are with me and that you are sovereign and that this will be for your glory and my good.”

The moment that I realized that I not only prayed but I believed those words, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and joy that He gave me faith to believe the promises. That He had not abandoned me but had drawn nearer than ever before. It felt like I had passed the test of faith, only because He allowed me to. I didn’t know what tomorrow would hold, but I knew that I was held by Him. My Friend that would not fail me in the very embrace of death itself.

God is faithful, even to give the faith to believe His promises.

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Joy in Fulfilling Calling

At one missions conference we went to, we heard a speaker say, “Many goers do not persevere long enough to see the vision that God has given them be fulfilled.” Obviously there are many uncontrollable reasons that people leave the field, but his exhortation to us was to continue persevering in the work even if it is slow or difficult or plodding.

Timelining out the significant events of the last 10 years was emotionally heavy. It took me 1-2 hours per year to look back, remember, and note the significant moments, and inevitably to feel and experience those things as well. Even with as many good moments as there were, much of what we experienced still feels weary, sad, and melancholic. In some seasons, even if there wasn’t a distinct negative event, it just felt like we were constantly plodding uphill in the mud and rain, two steps forward and three steps back. It’s hard to count how many moments we wanted to give up, to escape, to just pick an easier life. Difficult conversations, hospital visits, sin issues, burnout, and self-dependence tinged the timeline like stains on the page of a book. And this didn’t even count all the smaller burdens like missing home, lingering sicknesses, feeling strange and misunderstood in a foreign culture, and a continual underlying stress, anxiety, and loss of control.

I decided to mark the events with a green color for positive and a red color for negative. After tallying them up, there were 211 positive, joyful events and 56 negative, difficult events. For every difficult thing, there were nearly 4 joyful things.

Life on the field is low lows and high highs. There were 267 significant events in 10 years, about 2-3 per month. I doubt if I would’ve even had 1/10th of that had I stayed in the States. And it’s true, life would’ve probably been easier, safer, more stable. And I would’ve, for the most part, avoided most of these very difficult, heavy moments.

But I would’ve missed out on joy.

He had good works for us to walk in. And even in the difficulties and suffering, he was teaching us lessons of how to receive joy and peace and rest in Jesus.

Jenn shares that when we returned back to Thailand after cancer, it felt like her soul clicked back into place. There is a joy and a contentment in your inner being to be exactly where God wants you to be.

And there’s joy in seeing a vision begin to come to fruition. 

We came in response to a calling and a Commission towards a spiritual need for the gospel in Thailand. At first, though I might not have admitted it, I was seeking validation. I wanted to be validated that I wasn’t crazy for leaving a good job in the States to essentially start over in a foreign country. To be validated that I was a good leader. To be validated that we could see ministry fruit happen where others said it couldn’t happen.

When the first trials and challenges came, most of those inane desires went out the window as we were just trying to survive. Being humbled by the Lord quickly checked our motivations, and learning union with Christ made us realize that Jesus’ words in John 15 were painfully and wonderfully true – “apart from me you can do nothing.” We started to focus on abiding not so we could get what we needed to bear fruit, but simply so we could experience more of Jesus.

When the ministry started seeing fruit, no one was more surprised than we were because we knew how incompetent, stupid, and weak we were. It was clearly because of what God was doing through our Thai partners, not because of us.

But still we experienced joy. Not validation of ourselves, not affirmation of our strength, but that we had a front row seat in seeing God’s goodness in bringing the first new believers, the first new churches. We celebrated when reports of new believers and baptisms came in. We worshipped when the sick were healed or demons were cast out. We wept with gratitude when we saw obedience and transformation in people’s lives and families. We were in awe when we realized that God was doing a work much bigger than we had anticipated.

If we had given up when things felt impossible, or perhaps never even took the first steps of obedience towards this wildly insane calling, we would have missed out on all of the joy that God wanted us to experience.

“Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit… These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

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Conformed to the Image of Christ

Lastly, what stuck out to me in looking back on the timeline was how much I have been changed. In the timeline above, the red events were negative and the green were positive, and I marked the blue events and lessons as significant moments of change, growth, and development for me personally.

This can perhaps be said of any 25 year old, but the word that comes to mind in describing myself at 25 is “naive”. My reality for the first few years in Thailand was something in between “I don’t know” and “What the heck is going on?!” In regards to life overseas, marriage, team leadership, and suffering, I had no idea what I signed up for.

I have failed as a follower of Jesus, as a husband, as a friend, as a ministry worker, and as a leader miserably, spectacularly, and repeatedly over the past 10 years to the detriment of myself, my wife, our team, and our ministry. Those failures were painful and have left scars that we have had to surrender to Jesus for healing. The fact that we are still here 10 years later with several physical and emotional scars is a testimony to the Lord’s kindness in sustaining us.

Reading through Robert Clinton’s The Making of a Leader helped me to understand that every experience, every opportunity, and particularly every failure has been how God has been shaping me. Those scars are literal and figurative marks of the ways that He has developed us more into who He has intended for us to be.

What excites me for the next 10 years is not only how much more impact we will have armed with the valuable lessons He has given us from the past 10, but how much more the Spirit will change me, how much more He will help me to know and love and become more like Jesus.

With 10 years behind us and the next horizon in front of us, we can simply say – If God has been faithful through all of this, how much more faithful will He be going forward?

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”

Hebrews 10:23

In Part 1, we highlighted how the stress and anxiety of our first year on the field as team leaders brought us to a breaking point. And in that trial, God revealed to us our sin and gave us a desire to find Paul’s secret to being content in every situation from Philippians 4.

The first revelation of this secret came from a John Piper talk on Hudson Taylor’s life.

Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

We want you to hear from Hudson Taylor’s words about his discovery of this spiritual secret. We’ll look at three different letters: the first from before he discovers this spiritual secret, the second from 30 years after of someone observing this secret’s effects on Taylor’s life, and the last one where Taylor describes his experience of this discovery.

The first letter is from 1869, the year before he had the discovery of this secret. He is writing to his mother – because your mom is the one who is willing to listen to you complain – about his struggles and trials in China.

“[The need for your prayer] has never been greater than at present. Envied by some, despised by many, hated by others, often blamed for things I never heard of or had nothing to do with, an innovator on what have become established rules of missionary practice, an opponent of mighty systems of heathen error and superstition, working without precedent in many respects and with few experienced helpers, often sick in body as well as perplexed in mind and embarrassed by circumstances—had not the Lord been specially gracious to me, had not my mind been sustained by the conviction that the work is His and that He is with me, . . . I must have fainted or broken down. But the battle is the Lord’s, and He will conquer.

We may fail — do fail continually — but He never fails. . . . I have continually to mourn that I follow at such a distance and learn so slowly to imitate my precious Master. I can not tell you how I am buffeted sometimes by temptation. I never knew how bad a heart I have. Yet I do know that I love God and love His work, and desire to serve Him only and in all things. And I value above all else that precious Saviour in whom alone I can be accepted. Often I am tempted to think that one so full of sin can not be a child of God at all. . . . May God help me to love Him more and serve Him better.”

You can hear the desperation and anguish in his voice. We resonated with the trials that Taylor described in this letter, even though our experiences were much less difficult than his. Every kind of struggle involved with a new and pioneering work, failing continually, following Jesus so slowly. We love God and want to serve Him but need so much help. 

If you are overseas or aspire to be and have not experienced these things, we can tell you that you will.

Soon after this letter, Taylor discovers this spiritual secret later in 1869. And just in time, because he has arguably his most difficult year of his life in 1870 – one of his young sons dies in January, and then in July both his wife and newborn child die of cholera. And he has this spiritual secret to sustain him through all this.

Taylor has 30 more years of extremely difficult ministry in China, living through shortage of funds, shortage of workers, personal sickness (at one point he is paralyzed and confined to his bed in England), and separation from his wife and children for long periods of time. He lives through conflicts in China including the Boxer Rebellion that was against foreigners where 58 adults and 21 children under his leadership are killed.

Nearly 30 years later, close to the end of Taylor’s life, there’s a testimony from a minister that Taylor is visiting in Australia who describes Hudson Taylor and how he practically lived out this union with Christ.

It impressed me profoundly. Here was a man almost sixty years of age, bearing tremendous burdens, yet absolutely calm and untroubled. Oh, the pile of letters! Any one of which might contain news of death, of lack of funds, of riots or serious trouble. Yet all were opened, read, and answered with the same tranquility – Christ his reason for peace, his power for calm. Dwelling in Christ, he drew upon His very being and resources, in the midst of and concerning the matters in question.

And this he did by an attitude of faith as simple as it was continuous. Yet he was delightfully free and natural. I can find no words to describe it save the Scriptural expression “in God.” He was in God all the time and God in him. It was that true “abiding” of John fifteen.

So, in his first letter, Taylor is struggling, striving, falling short. He discovers the secret, and for 30 years of more responsibility and burden than any of us will likely ever face, he is still a man marked by complete tranquility, peace, and true abiding. So what was his spiritual secret?

Hudson Taylor writes to his sister in 1869 about his experience where God opened his eyes to this spiritual secret.

“[My work] was never so plentiful, so responsible or so difficult, but the weight and strain are all gone. The last month or more has been, perhaps the happiest of my life, and I long to tell you a little of what the Lord has done for my soul. There is nothing new or strange or wonderful – and yet, all is new! Sometimes there were seasons not only of peace but of joy in the Lord; but they were transitory, and at best there was a sad lack of power. All the time I felt assured that there was in Christ all I needed, but the practical question was – how to get it out.”

Don’t we feel this? At times we feel so close to Jesus and we’re filled with faith, but it fades. But how do we get from Christ all the things we need from him, the power and the promises, when we need it?!

“The Spirit of God revealed to me the truth of our oneness with Jesus as I had never known it before.”

“How great seemed my mistake in wishing to get the sap, the fullness out of Him! I saw not only that Jesus will never leave me, but that I am a member of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. The vine is not the root merely, but all – root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit.” 

Jesus is not only the vine and we are the branches, the vine includes the branches. We are a part of him, one with him – in the same plant, members of Christ’s body!

“Think what it involves. Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? Or your head be well fed while your body starves?”

“The sweetest part… is the rest which full identification with Christ brings. I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest position He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient. No fear that His resources will prove unequal to the emergency! And His resources are mine, for He is mine, and is with me and dwells in me.”

The Secret – Union with Christ

This is the secret, as best as we can describe – you are ONE WITH CHRIST. You have UNION with Christ. We all know that Jesus is perfect and has everything we need; most people don’t struggle with that. What we struggle with is – will Jesus give me what I need? Or another way to say it is: how do I access all the resources that I need that are promised in Scripture? Because most times, it feels like I have anxiety and powerlessness more than I have every spiritual blessing!

Everything that you need is found in him, we know that, but this is the key: you already have everything in him because you are united with him! Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? You’re part of the same body. Can Christ be rich and we be poor? No, because we’re one together with him.

It doesn’t matter if you are conscious of it or feel it, union with Christ is true for every believer. Wayne Grudem defines it this way: “Union with Christ is used to summarize the relationship between believers and Christ, through which Christians receive every benefit of salvation.”

Any place in the New Testament where you see, we are in Christ, Christ is in us, and we are like Christ, and with Christ, these are all referring to union with Christ. Paul himself uses some form of ‘in Christ’ 88 times in the New Testament.

How to Abide – Surrender and Receive

Realizing our oneness with Jesus changed everything. It firmly and completely answered the question – ‘can we receive from Jesus what the promises of the Word say in our times of need and in our daily lives?’ – with a resounding YES. If we are one with Jesus, then he withholds no good thing from those that are connected to him in the vine by faith.

Now that we know about our union with Christ, how do we live this out? Through abiding in Christ. Abiding is not the same thing as your quiet time. It includes that, but it’s much more than that. Abiding is how we practically live out our oneness with Jesus. Hudson Taylor was marked by the “true abiding” of John 15. Understanding our union with Christ is the key to abiding in Christ.

“From the consciousness of union springs the power to abide.”

John Piper

The two primary components to abiding are surrendering and receiving. 

Surrender

Before we can surrender and receive, we must recognize when we aren’t abiding. The most obvious indicator is when sin rises up in response to a difficult circumstance or situation. For most of us, failing to abide is happening more on an hourly or daily basis than a weekly or monthly basis, so it’s important to check if you’re abiding frequently. Every person has their go-to sins or trigger responses to stress and trials – it could be running towards comfort or control, or feelings of anxiety, anger, self-doubt, or judgment. Take note of these responses when these situations happen, and recognize that you aren’t abiding. Galatians 5 gives a clear distinction between responses of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit.

Notice when you’re not abiding, and then come to Jesus in surrender. Taylor says this of abiding: 

“To let my loving Saviour work in me His will, my sanctification, is what I would live for by His grace. Abiding, not striving nor struggling; looking off unto Him; trusting Him for present power; resting in the love of an almighty Saviour.”

Surrender is a critical component to abiding. The Bible is filled with descriptions of what Hudson Taylor calls ‘the Exchanged Life,’ the result of a surrendered person living out of their union with Christ. But in order to receive the promises of this ‘union life,’ we must first surrender, yield, die to ourselves.

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24)

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor. 5:17)

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)

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. (Galatians 2:20)

Everything about the abiding and receiving of John 15 is contrary to striving, is contrary to anxiety. You can do nothing by striving, can do nothing apart from abiding in him.

This is why dying to self is so important to experiencing a John 15 true abiding. We have to surrender everything to him – our way of doing things, our control, our preferences, our will, our thoughts, our plans, our loved ones, our lives, in order to receive from Jesus his blessings – peace, joy, strength, wisdom, but also Jesus’ will – his thoughts, desires, words, and actions.

And Receive

And after you’ve surrendered your control and the outcome of the situation to our trustworthy and faithful King, then receive what he has promised to you and let him live through you by faith!

Jesus says, ‘If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.’ Are we willing to trust him and take this promise literally? These promises are true and available for us right now through Jesus! When we know his will and promises through his words, and we’ve surrendered our will to his, why would he withhold any good thing from us? Just in John 15, the promises abound: ‘abide in my love’ (9), ‘my joy may be in you and your joy may be full’ (11), ‘go and bear fruit and your fruit will abide’ (16), ‘in me you may have peace’ (33).

We receive these promises and blessings by faith. But this faith is undergirded by the secret – the consciousness and confidence that we are one with Christ like the vine and the branches, and we will receive what he has promised. Because of our union with him, for Christ to reject you would be to reject himself, which is not possible!

What does surrender and receive practically look like? Once we realize that we’re in anxiety or whatever other sin or self-reliance response we might have, we come to Jesus with a simple prayer:

“Jesus, I surrender this situation to you. I surrender my control of it and any outcomes I expect. Help me to have your will and your thoughts, and obey your ways. I trust you for everything I need. I now abide in you, and receive your wisdom and peace for this situation.”

Surrender any aspects of the situation or any of the self-will or desires you have in it. Ask for, and receive by faith, anything you need.

Even in the times when we’re not feeling it or don’t even want to come to Jesus, we try to pray this prayer. Sometimes it takes multiple attempts to get to a point of real surrender, and sometimes it takes some listening to find out what we’re still holding onto or ways that we’re being disobedient. But he has met us every single time. Sometimes not immediately, many times not in the ways we would have expected, but he has met us – because he has said he will and we know we are one with him.

We are not saying that this means no difficult thing or no suffering will come to you ever again – far from it. In John 15, Jesus makes it very clear that the Father is the good vinedresser, who prunes, cuts away, even damages the fruitful branches so that they will bear more fruit. Suffering is God’s method of bringing us to surrender. But what the secret of union does bring is the rest, contentedness, and peace in every situation that Jesus will never leave me and will always resource me with what is needed to obey what he has assigned to me.

Experiencing Union

The first time I (Steven) began to experience this contentedness out of union was near the end of our first term, about 2 years after moving to Thailand. We had only begun our ministry of training and equipping Thai believers to multiply disciples a few months earlier, after 1.5 years of full time language learning. Through our early season of ministry, almost every ministry situation – training, coaching, sharing my faith, leading Bible studies – covered me in anxiety. Would I look stupid with my bad language? Would I mess this up? Would I lose my credibility as a leader? Will anyone respond or do anything?

Around that time is when we first began learning about union with Christ, and trying to abide through surrendering and receiving. An opportunity came up to train about 100 people at a large church in some of these disciple-making tools, by far the biggest group we had ever trained. We were up until 2am the night before still trying to translate the training into Thai, figure out what would work, and prepare. And it was then that I realized, “I am not feeling anxiety like I normally would. I’m filled with peace that Jesus will do what he intends, gratitude that I get to be used by him, and joy that he is meeting me!”

And increasingly, we saw Jesus respond in faithfulness every time we would come in humility with nothing to offer him but our surrender. And he would respond with exactly what we needed in that situation – energy and strength in the midst of exhaustion, peace in the midst of anxiety, joy in the midst of difficulty, power in the midst of weakness, wisdom in the midst of the unknown. The fruit of the Spirit was increasing in our lives, obviously not with perfection as we needed to consistently come and surrender our sinfulness and anxiety basically every day. And the fruit of our ministry began to grow, as we saw Thai believers lead new people to faith, heal the sick and cast out demons, baptize, and plant churches that planted churches.

We can confidently say that without union with Christ, we would not have persevered on the field or gotten to be a part of seeing God move in such powerful ways. Everything that we’ve gone through on the field has been worth it to learn this lesson, and it’s the most important lesson we have to give others.

“You were grafted in…”

There are so many practical implications once a person starts understanding and living out their union with Christ – the way we pray, the way we see suffering, the power we have for ministry, the boldness we have to take risks for God, and the very identity we have in Christ. We hope to dive further into union with Christ and some of these implications in future posts.

We want to leave you guys with one last illustration to help us understand union with Christ.

“You, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree.” -Romans 11:17

This idea of grafting helps us understand the vine and the branches in John 15 as well. This is a literally a quote from a gardening website:

“Grafting typically involves joining together parts of two plants to function as a single plant. One of the plants provides the lower trunk and root system. It’s called the stock or rootstock. The other plant provides the upper portion (stems, leaves, flowers and fruit) that has the desirable characteristics (beautiful flowers or delicious fruit) called the scion.”

In general, grafting requires that a wound or cut of some type is made on the stock plant (vine). The gardener, vinedresser, has to make a cut into the root stock that will cause it to bleed. It will literally bleed onto the ground for several days. A piece of the scion plant (branches) is then inserted into the wound.

The vinedresser also has to cut the branches out of the old tree. Then he has to graft them by tying them together in the middle and letting them grow into one plant. The vinedresser also has to cut out and prune all the old nature of the branches so that the new, better nature that comes from the root, can come through and grow.

The point at which the stock and scion join together is called the graft union.

Grafting helps fruit to propagate or multiply better, have superior quality, may gain characteristics from the rootstock like disease resistance, grow more vigorously, and receive better resources from the stock.

This is what Christ has done for us. The Father wounded Jesus on the Cross and made him bleed, to make it possible for us, the branches, to be grafted into the true vine and become one with him. We then receive his nature, his resources, and bear more and better fruit that we ever could have with our old natures. 

Jesus literally went to the Cross so that we could abide in him. The Father made us united with Christ, and we are now one with him in order to bear fruit and bring glory to the Father.

“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.”

It’s our prayer that you may receive the fullness of this spiritual secret, living out this Exchanged Life, for His glory and for your joy!

Reflection and Resources

We have a few questions for you to process how to practically apply union with Christ.

1. In light of this truth about union, what do you need to change about your abiding?
2. Where are you striving to do things for Jesus, instead of resting and receiving from Christ?
3. Where do you feel like you have anxiety in response to stress and hard circumstances in your life or ministry?
4. Where do you need to surrender your ways and self-reliance, and yield to God?
5. What does the Holy Spirit want for you to receive today?

We’ve also listed some helpful resources to learn more about union with Christ on our Resources page.