Union with Christ in Scripture

Driving home: Someone has said, and rightly so, that the doctrine of union with Christ is perhaps the most central truth, or the central truth, of the Scriptures with relationship to the salvation of sinners.

Martin uses the metaphor of a blackboard with a bracket labeled 'Union with Christ' spanning eternity to illustrate how this doctrine encompasses all aspects of salvation from past to future.

is indeed one of the fundamental concepts of the Word of God, as it expounds the salvation that is ours in Christ. And what we're going to do in the time allotted, in about half an hour, is to make a sweep through eternity. We're going to start in eternity past, if I may use those terms, without someone nailing me for being so non-technical as to put the limits of time onto eternity, but if you will please picture a huge blackboard here before us, and at the top of the blackboard there is a bracket that is holding everything together, and at the point in the bracket is the phrase, Union with C...

10:20 - 11:48 Read in full sermon

Driving home: Jesus Christ married Himself to His people in eternity. We were chosen in Him.

The analogy of a man marrying a woman and taking on all her legal debts and liabilities, while conferring his assets, is used to explain how Christ, in eternity, took on the liabilities of His people's sin and conferred His glorious assets upon them.

When a man commits himself to marry a woman, he automatically takes upon himself all of her legal debts, all of her liabilities. If she is sickly, if she's not so pretty to look upon, he must dwell with her homely face for the rest of his days. If there are other problems, there are legal involvements, he binds himself to that woman and to all of her liabilities. And furthermore, he binds himself not only to be held responsible for her liabilities, but to confer upon him, her, all of his assets. And as I've been thinking of these thoughts this morning, I've been thinking of the fact that I've ...

18:50 - 20:18 Read in full sermon

The point: Never discuss the extent of the atonement without first considering the biblical doctrine of union with Christ.

A Christian poem is quoted to capture the intimate union of believers with Christ in His death, resurrection, triumph, and ascension, reinforcing the idea that 'with Him their head they stand or fall.'

As surely as our salvation has its tap roots in eternity. When there was this sovereign selection of God and that selection found us married to the Son, bound to Him, so when the Son comes forth into time, and in time as the God-man He walks, He lives, He prays, He weeps, He agonizes in Gethsemane, goes to the awful, terrible blackness of Golgotha, and goes through the open tomb and ascends. We are bound to Him and He to us, so that with but one exception in these verses I've just quoted, Paul uses those compound words, the little preposition soon, with, and then the verb, and it's only in the...

28:41 - 30:09 Read in full sermon

Driving home: You mean to tell me that a body that is disintegrated to dust, that's been eaten by the beast or the rodents, is still indissolubly united to Jesus Christ? I mean to say that's exactly what these words force upon us. The…

Martin vividly describes the gruesome reality of physical death and bodily decay to highlight the profound confidence believers can have in facing death, knowing their bodies remain united to Christ.

My friend, if you want to see one of the practical implications of this doctrine, you look death straight in the eye. Don't look at him as he tries to present himself in modern burial practices. The corpse is made to look like it's in the flush of hell. But you face death in all of its ugly reality and know that after a few short months, when all that the undertaker could do for you to make you look pretty will have long since spent itself. A carcass being eaten by the worms is going to be lying there in the earth. And if you get a sealed vault, it only delays it for a short amount of time. My...

40:52 - 41:38 Read in full sermon