Union With Christ # 28

4. Vocational Union

Matthew 16:18; Ephesians 2:20-22; 1 Peter 2:5

I trust that you are seeing in these various aspects of union with Christ a particular value and meaning and conception bound up with each one. If you have not quite clearly and definitely grasped that, will you please go back again and start at the beginning, not just accepting that these are forms of union with Christ, that there is eternal union and there is creational union and there is marital union, but fasten upon the particular meaning and idea of each one, and, if you can, put a single word against each, a word of your own choosing.

The word which stands against this fourth aspect is vocation, for the house of God is constituted for a specific purpose for which a house exists. Before we can go any further, we must just stop with that word "house." "Whose house are we." It is a very interesting and a very full word. When we use the word "house," at any rate in English, our minds have a very limited conception. In the original word, all the ideas of a dwelling, a household, an arrangement, the furnishings and the stewardship are found, and it is those various meanings, like the facets of a jewel, that we are now going to consider briefly. But remember that the governing thing is union with Christ in this sense, union with Christ as a house.

A. A Building

The first meaning of the original word is a building. "I will build my church." "Every house is builded by someone; but he that built all things is God" (Hebrews 3:4). The house is a building. This building is that which corresponds to Christ Himself. He said, as He looked at the House, the stone house, the great temporal building, and immediately transferred its spiritual significance to Himself, to His own body - "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). "I will build my church; and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it." All the destructive arts of hell will not be able to prevail against that which He builds, His building: a building, not now of stone, but of living stones. That is Peter's word about this house - "Ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house."

This house, which "house are we," has as its governing object and vocation the making of God Himself present and available to men. That is the first idea. The building is for a habitation of God, "a habitation of God in the Spirit" a habitation of God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, so that God becomes present and available. That is a statement. It could remain just a statement of truth, but things ought not to remain merely as such. It is the setting forth of a test, the test as to whether the house of God exists, and the test as to the existence of the house of God, or of living stones comprising the house of God, is first of all whether God is present or not. Is God known to be there? That is the test of everything so far as the house is concerned, for that is its vocation. It has no meaning apart from that.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 29)