In Christ

Ask a man where he lives and he will give you a town and a street. Ask him who he is and the answer comes slower, and it’s rarely an address. It is a verdict. He tells you what he does for work, or what he did that he can’t undo, or the quiet running total of the ways he’s fallen short of the man he meant to be. Press him hard enough, in an honest hour, and most of us live at one of two addresses. Some live at the house of open failure, where the sins are obvious and the shame is loud. Others live at a more respectable address, the house of trying harder, where the lawn is mowed, the religion is tidy and the exhaustion is hidden in the back rooms. The first man knows he’s far off. The second man is just as far off and has decorated it.

Scripture says both men have the wrong address.

There is a phrase the Apostle Paul reaches for again and again, more than any other description of the Christian. He says you are in Christ. He doesn’t lead with what you must do. He leads with where you now are. He says it, in one form or another, well past one hundred and sixty times. It is the most common thing he says about a believer, and it’s not a feeling, a goal, or a mood. It is a location. It is your real address.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3, ESV

Read that slowly, because it does something strange. It doesn’t say your life is improving. It doesn’t say your life is on the right track if you keep at it. It says your life has been moved. It has been carried up and tucked away in a place you can’t see and can’t reach with your own striving, hidden with Christ, inside God Himself. That is where you live now. Not in your performance. Not in your past. In Him.

The small word doing the heavy lifting in that phrase, and in this whole book, is the Greek word ἐν (en), “in.” We are tempted to read it the way we read a tool. By Christ. Through Christ. As if He were the instrument we use to get somewhere. But the word is doing more than that. It is locative. It marks a place, a sphere, an atmosphere you’ve been put inside, the way a fish is in water or a man is in his own country. To be in Christ isn’t mainly to use Him. It is to live inside Him.

That single shift, from Christ as a tool to Christ as a territory, is the difference between religion and the gospel. Religion stands outside and reaches in. It works to climb, to qualify, to earn its way across the threshold. The gospel says the threshold has already been crossed, and you were carried over it. You don’t work your way in. You wake up to where you already are, and you learn to live there.

The introduction continues in the book.