3 Illustrations That Help Us Understand What It Is to Be “in Christ”
“In Christ” Illustrations
Perhaps because it is a somewhat alien concept to us, Scripture often unpacks our union with Christ using illustrations of more familiar things. Sometimes being told what something is like is a good way to begin understanding what that something is.
1. A Tree and Its Branches
Jesus speaks of his people’s union with him as being like the relationship a branch has with a tree: “I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:5). We don’t need to be familiar with vineyards specifically to get the point (though there are important reasons Jesus uses vineyards as an example here, as we’ll see in due course). We know about the relationship a branch needs to have with a tree.
As I write, I’m staying at my friends’ house just outside the city of Durham. Next to the house is the River Weir, which winds its way through County Durham. This particular stretch of the river is lined by tall oak and sycamore trees. On a previous visit a few months ago, I sat working and heard an unusually loud sound of creaking. I looked around to see if a piece of furniture was about to collapse, and just as I realized that the noise didn’t seem to be coming from within the room, I heard a sudden crashing sound from outside. A huge branch had just torn itself off one of the larger oak trees. The branch itself was thicker than many of the sycamore trees around it and took out one of these on its way down. It’s still there, some months later. Other than its size and conspicuous position, what makes this branch immediately identifiable is its lack of color. The woodland around it is alive in all shades of green, but the branch is a dull brown and its foliage withered and gray.
One with My Lord
Sam Allberry
Brief, compelling devotionals by Sam Allberry help believers understand what it means to be “in Christ” and how unity with Jesus shapes their daily lives.
We know why. When a branch is removed from its tree, it dies. It loses connection with its source of life. The same is true of our relationship with Jesus. We can’t expect to flourish spiritually if we’re apart from him. As Michael Reeves puts it, “The Vine holds nothing back from its branches, pouring all its life into them.”3 So if we disconnect from the vine, we— like that giant branch—will quickly wither and die. There is no spiritual life apart from Jesus.
Little wonder, then, that he goes on to talk about the need for us to “remain” or “abide” in him. Our being in Christ needs to be ongoing. Christianity, it turns out, is not about a quick oneoff transaction with Jesus. The heart of the Christian life is Jesus himself. The only true life we can experience is drawn from him. We depend on him and have no spiritual life without him.
2. A Body and Its Head
Trees aren’t the only things that have limbs. Bodies do too, and I’m depending on the relationship between a limb and my head to be able to write this. Paul notes,
Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph. 4:15–16)
We may be familiar with other scriptures in which the people of God are likened to a body, with each playing a different part. In those passages, the point is normally about our relationship with one another, how each of us is needed and each of us needs everyone else. But here the illustration is adjusted—we’re not just like parts of a body relating to one another but like a body itself relating to its head. The focus is not our individual relationships to the rest of the church but our relationship as a church to Christ. We are the body, and he is the head. And while every part of the body has its own contribution to make, the head is utterly indispensable. We have prosthetic limbs for those who lose an arm or a leg, but there is no such thing as a prosthetic head.
Our being in Christ needs to be ongoing. Christianity, it turns out, is not about a quick oneoff transaction with Jesus.
So our relationship to Jesus is not just static (as that of a branch to a tree might seem to be): we are to “grow up in every way into him who is the head.” The head is not just the source of our life; it shapes who we are and what we become. We are not just empowered by it but directed by it. The growth of the church— what “makes the body grow,” in Paul’s language—is ultimately its head. The whole body is involved—“each part is working properly”—but it is Christ alone who is behind the maturing and growth of the church.
3. A Spouse in a Marriage
The Bible repeatedly uses the language of a marriage to describe the relationship of God’s people to the Lord, and in the New Testament this is applied to the church’s relationship to Jesus. Collectively, the church is Christ’s bride:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Eph. 5:31–32)
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Rev. 21:1–2)
While the church is the bride of Christ, Paul also uses marital related language to say something of the individual believer’s relationship to Christ:
Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. (1 Cor. 6:16–17)
In marriage, the man and woman become “one flesh.” The two become one physically. Similarly, Paul shows us that the believer and Christ become one spiritually. We are “joined to the Lord”—that is what it means to become a Christian—and so become “one spirit with him.” The oneness we have with Jesus is in some ways akin to the oneness a husband and wife experience (and which is so distorted by someone sleeping with a prostitute, as some in Corinth evidently needed to hear). The husband and wife in a marriage are made one without being fused together—they are still two individual people. So too with our relationship to Jesus. We are not absorbed or dissolved into Jesus. We do not lose our unique personality and distinctiveness. In fact, we become our truest selves by being in Christ.
Paul shows us that marriage points to Jesus and his people: “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32). We need to be clear which way around this analogy is meant to be understood. In our familiarity with the human institution of marriage, we tend to put it in the conceptual foreground and then think Paul is saying that our relationship to Jesus is a bit like that. But it is the other way around. The true reality is the gospel—our union with Christ and all that comes with it. The church’s marital union with Jesus is the true and ultimate marriage, and our earthly marriages are something like that. So Paul is not merely saying that the pattern for marriage is a bit like what we have going on with Jesus; he’s saying that if we don’t think about our union with Christ in the right way, there is a danger we won’t think about marriage in the right way. Our fullest understanding of marriage needs to be grounded in the doctrine of our union with Jesus. The “one flesh” relationship will be best understood as we honor and appreciate the dynamics of our “one spirit” relationship with the Lord.
Each of these illustrations—branches, bodies, brides—highlights a different aspect of this relationship to Jesus. He is our source of life, our directing and defining head, and one who is closer to us than any other relationship we can enjoy. John Stott sums it up neatly:
The relationship which is thus depicted is something much more than a formal attachment or nodding acquaintance, something more even than a personal friendship; it is nothing less than a vital, organic, intimate union with Jesus Christ, involving a shared life and love.2
Christ is more needed, more close, and more vital than we ever realized.
Without an understanding of what it means to be in Christ, our view of the Christian life becomes blurry. The ideas will still be there, of course—we’ll know that we’re justified through the death of Christ alone, that we will one day join him in resurrection life, that in the meantime we’re to commit ourselves to walking in holiness, and that all this is to be understood and worked through in the context of a local church. The pieces will be in place, but they won’t fully cohere—they’ll seem like separate elements, each of which we admire in its own way but which, like Lego bricks poured out onto the table, are meant to fit together and make a whole. Union with Christ is the lens through which all these parts of the Christian life can be seen most sharply and beautifully.
Notes:
- Michael Reeves, Christ Our Life (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2014), 84.
- John Stott, Life in Christ: A Guide for Daily Living. (1979; repr., London: Monarch Books, 2003), 41.
This article is adapted from One with My Lord: The Life-Changing Reality of Being in Christ by Sam Allberry.
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