Last Saturday I announced our theme for 2009, which is Life in Christ. We will begin the year by picking up our studies from Luke, which began in anticipation of Christmas, and continue with those studies through Easter. The teaching team is engaged in some in-depth Bible study, with accompanying use of the Life Application Commentary on the Gospel of Luke. You too might like to commit to read Luke through in the coming weeks. In fact, I once read of a woman who took time every Sunday afternoon to read through one of the four Gospels, which she did in rotation, essentially reading all four Gospels each month! That ought to encourage us to take up our Bibles!
I will begin this weekend by exploring the amazing opening to Paul's letter to the Ephesians, which lays out the many things we have been given "in Christ." In verse four we read this stunning line:
Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes.
I want to be very clear, so in addition to reading it here, you will hear me say on Saturday night (Lord willing), that "life in Christ" is no Christian catchphrase. It's not like the "Christian living" section you find in the Bible bookstore. It is not a set of words and actions that make us "good little lights for Jesus."
Rather, life in Christ...
...began long before we did, long before the creation of the world even
...began with God, not with us
...began with God's love for us, not our sudden realization that we need to love Him
...began with God's election of us, not with our sudden smart decision to choose Him
...makes us holy and without fault not in an actual sense but in God's eyes (because when we are in Christ, God sees us through the filter of His Son—and most certainly not the other way around!)
You see, life in Christ (as opposed to the Christian life) is the only way we can function rightly before God. In fact, I might daresay that the Christian life has much to do with collecting little "Christian" traits and trinkets that supposedly make us look more pious, whereas life in Christ has much to do with God tearing from us the unholy work of the flesh that would have blinded us from our Savior forever had He not rushed in and staked the claim He has always had in our lives. Yes, there is a way we are to live when we are in Christ (to make our calling and election sure), but without His life in us first, the living is only a charade.
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