Union with God is Our Source

I’ve come to appreciate that the Christian life is not a mere admiration or even imitation of the life of Christ. Rather, following Christ is a participation in Him.

The New Testament is not a set of “tips” and “strategies” for making your life work by following Jesus’ principles.

The word I’ve used most to describe falling Christ is a “personal relationship.” I like the term, but I’m seeing now that had a relationship with God mostly on my terms. Robert Mulholland uses the phrase “loving union with God” as the goal of spiritual formation, implying living in harmony, yielding, and cooperating. I’ve often felt like I was working on a self-improvement project on my own.

Here’s an excerpt from The Deeper Journey showing the wonder of union:

Paul describes Jesus in this way: “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19 NRSV).

So, when Paul tells us that all the fullness of God was in Jesus, he is simply summarizing what these and other New Testament passages convey—God and Jesus are in a profound and mysterious union with each other.

Now here is something remarkable. Alongside Paul’s claim that all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ, he pray “that you may be filled with all the fullness of God”! (Eph. 3:19)
We are to have something of the same profound and mysterious union with God that Jesus has as the revelation of our true humanness in the image of God.

Mulholland is not talking just outwardly, imitating Christ’s behaviors, but a vital, passionate relationship!

The oneness Jesus prays for in John 17, is illustrated by his own relationship with God: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” Jesus is praying that you and I would live in a similar kind of relationship with God that he has as the revelation of true humanness in the image of God.

Jesus is indicating that the purpose of the Christian life is a life of loving union with God at the depths of our being.

Union with God results in our being a person through whom God’s presence touches the world with forgiving, cleansing, healing, liberating, and transforming grace.

I hope you are beginning to see that the Christian life in its fullness is far more than being active in a Christian community, affirming a certain set of beliefs, or adopting a particular behavior pattern. These are a secondary result of the primary reality of a life engaged in an ever-deepening union with God in love.

A loving union with God is the essence of the Christian life in the world. I should warn you, however, that the deeper journey into this loving union with God passes through some pretty rough territory—the jungle of the false self and the world of the idol and its box, the religious false self—before we come to the borders of the country of the Christ self.

Robert Mulholland, The Deeper Journey, 11-20

In my next series of posts, I will share the characteristics of the false self and how it veers off course and out of union.