Union With Christ

1. The Meaning of Christ

1. His Greatness in the Scriptures

He is: The meaning of all things.
He is: The Heir of all things.
He is: The Idea or Nature of all things.
He is: The final test of all things.

2. His Place - by the Love of the Father Infinite Divine Love the Motive and Power

This is revealed:

In all the Scriptures.
By the opposite of love to all Divine activities.
By the Father's demand that the Son be honored.

3. The Greatness of Christ is Spiritual and Moral

Heaven knows it.
Man senses it.
Hell attests it by attempted corruption.

It is implicit in:

His satisfaction to God.
His redemptive work.
The Spirit's operations.

"These things spake Jesus; and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, Father .." (John 17:1)

"That they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us" (John 17:21).

"I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one" (John 17:23).

Introductory

Union with Christ is the heart or center of all that has been revealed of God's thought concerning man and of man's relationship to God. Union with Christ is like the hub of a mighty wheel. There are any spokes to that wheel - election, creation, redemption, salvation, sanctification, glorification; and then, like a series of subsidiary spokes - repentance, faith, justification, conversion, regeneration, and so on. These are the spokes of the wheel, but they all center in Christ and radiate from Christ and reach the rim, which is God. They unite us in Christ with God.

To give all this its true and full value, it is necessary to contemplate or have revealed to us the meaning of Christ, to see what  an immense thing has taken place by the Son of God becoming the Son of man, by God becoming incarnate. It is a question of our being taken, not into Godhead or Deity, but into God's Son incarnate.

Now, the first preachers of the Christian evangel preached Christ. Thy did not, in the first place, preach salvation or sanctification or forgiveness or judgment or heaven. That does not mean that they did not preach those things they did; but not in the first place. They preached Christ, and all those things were included in the preaching of Christ, Christ as inclusive of all and as transcending all; for, after all, such things as salvation and sanctification, forgiveness, justification, are subsidiaries, they come afterward. Christ was before them all and Christ will be after them all. They are inside of Christ, but He vastly outstrips them all.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 2 - (The Meaning of Christ)