Union or Partnership?

A year or so ago, I was talking with Pastor Mike, and he made a remarkable statement. He said, “The Christian life is a union, not a partnership.” Since then, Mike and I have had many rich discussions about that concept. We’ve both concluded that our attempts to live the Christian life have gone much more successfully when we stop looking at our relationship with the Savior as a partnership and start looking at it as a union.

What do we mean by “union, not partnership?” Well, most Christians live their lives as if part of the responsibility for producing a godly life is theirs, and the other part is God’s. I know that was true for me. For most of my Christian life, I looked at the New Covenant in much the same way the Jews looked at the Old Covenant. I had a part to play, and God had a part to play. If I did my part, God would do his part.

It’s understandable how we come to this view. We look at the history of the Israelites in the Old Testament, and we see Moses, their representative, going up on Mount Sinai to bring God’s covenant down to them. At the end of the Torah, in Deuteronomy, we read God saying, “See, I have set before you life and blessing, and death and cursing. If you keep all these rules, I will bless you and give you life. If you fail to keep these rules, I will curse you and give you death” (paraphrase, Deuteronomy 30:15-20).

We read passages like this and we think, “God expects us to obey Him and follow orders. If we do that, He’ll bless us. If we don’t, we’re in trouble.” We see the children of Israel reply back to God, “Yes, we can do this, and we will do this.” That’s the nature of covenants, right? Each party has a set of obligations to fulfill. It’s like a contract. I have my obligations, and God has His. If I fail in any of my obligations, that releases God from fulfilling His.

Ever since we ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we’ve been trying to make the same deal with God. Haven’t we? “God, I’ll obey you, please bless me.” We believe that if we pray more, we’ll get more blessings. If we praise more, or tithe more, or serve more, we’ll get more blessings. If we kill off more of our sin, we’ll get more blessings. If we sacrifice more, or deny ourselves more, we’ll get more rewards. If we do more good deeds, we’ll get more heavenly rewards.

Just like the Israelites, we as Christians are gluttons for punishment. We have a queer desire to keep wanting to enter into covenants with God that we cannot keep!

This is the partnership mindset. God and I are like business partners. We’ve struck a deal. If I keep my end of the deal, God will keep His.

But this is actually not how anything in the Christian life works. What God actually does is … everything. He keeps His end of the deal and my end. Why? Because I’ve proven, time and time again, that I cannot keep my end of the deal. The Apostle Paul makes this point in his letter to the Galatians:

“…if a law had been given that was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law” (Galatians 3:21).

Paul states that the law cannot impart life. As a result, the law cannot bring righteousness. Righteousness comes from one and only one source: the life of Christ. Since the law could not give us Christ’s life, it follows that the law could not make us righteous.

Paul says the same thing to the Romans:

“Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law” (Romans 3:20).

What God has been trying to show us since the Garden is that He’s really not all about good and evil, right and wrong. He is less concerned with creating people with a certain morality than He is with creating a people of a certain kind. God wants children who have His eternal life in them, for it is His life only that is the very source of righteousness or moral perfection.

Works of the Law or Obedience?

“Works of the law” is just another way of saying “obedience to God.” I know some theologians and teachers will disagree with me. But in my view, these are the same thing. Saying, “We cannot keep the law” is tantamount to saying, “We cannot obey God,” for what is it we are obeying or disobeying, if not the God’s moral laws and rules? Whatever rule or commandment God gives, we will eventually disobey it. That’s one aspect of the “original sin” what we inherited from Adam. Adam and Eve only had one commandment to follow—and they couldn’t even keep that! Not to mention, they weren’t born with a sinful nature, like we were, and they still couldn’t keep just one commandment.

So, I don’t quibble about whether “works of the law” is different than “obedience to God;” they are one and the same statement to me. Jesus said, “No one is good—except God alone” (Luke 18:19b). That settles it for me. There is only one Person who can obey God—Jesus Christ. That is true now. It was true 2,000 years ago. And it will be true 2,000 years from now. Just as only the Spirit of God knows God (1 Corinthians 2:11), only God (Jesus Christ) can obey God.

The true gospel—the really good news—is that Jesus Christ is already, always obeying the Father—and God has credited or imputed His righteousness (and, by extension, His obedience) to us as Christians. That means the Father looks at us, too, as always obeying Him. Not by any works or obedience or merit on our part, but by His own grace and mercy.

Once I really saw this truth—once the Holy Spirit gave me revelation—I could stop seeing the Christian life as a partnership. It’s not about me doing my part, because if God relies on me to do my part, He’s going to always be disappointed (and so will I). That was the lesson that God was trying to show the children of Israel. And that is the same lesson God is trying to show us as Christians.

Right after Moses gave his people the law, the people said, “Yes, we will do it.” Moses and Aaron then went back up on the mount to get more instruction from God. Before Moses and Aaron could even get back down the mountain, the Israelites had already made a golden calf as an idol and were worshipping it (Exodus 32). The ink on the tablets hadn’t even dried before the children of Israel had broken their end of the covenant!

We cannot keep any law God gives. It is pride to think that we can. In fact, the law was given so that disobedience would increase:

“The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase…” (Romans 5:20).

The New Covenant Is Essentially Different

As I look back over my Christian life, the seasons in which I suffered the greatest defeat were seasons when I was busy “trying to keep my end of the covenant.” I truly did not understand the New Covenant. This Covenant is radically and fundamentally different from any previous covenant God made with His people. Jeremiah prophesied about this new covenant hundreds of years before Christ came:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 32:31-34).

I want to pause to underscore a few salient characteristics of this New Covenant. As we stated at the outset, the New Covenant is not like the Old (Mosaic) Covenant. How is it different? Well, for one, it’s unbreakable. Once you’re in it, you can’t break it (John 10:28-30). I know this is a controversial subject in some Protestant Christian circles, especially among charismatic and Pentecostal Christians, and I’m not going to go into that debate here. But that is my belief.

Second, in this New Covenant, God writes His law within us, on our hearts, as opposed to tablets (or papyrus). The word translated as “law” is actually torah in Hebrew. Torah doesn’t literally mean “law.” It actually means something closer to teaching or instruction, but came to be used as the proper name of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. (Why are Jews and Christians so obsessed with law?) This “teaching written on our heart” is a prophecy of the coming Holy Spirit who comes to live within us (John 14:26; John 16:13). The teaching that we need will no longer be external to us, written down somewhere. Rather, the teaching of the New Covenant will reside inside of us, written down on our hearts.

Third, in the New Covenant, we will all know God. That word “know” in Hebrew is the same word used in Genesis where it reads, “Adam knew his wife” (Genesis 4:1). In Genesis, it meant sexual intercourse. (Remember the Law of First Mention we discussed in a previous chapter?) Genesis is the first time the word “know” is used in Hebrew. What happens during sexual intercourse? Union. God was about union from Day One, and here He is telling Jeremiah that everyone who enters into this New Covenant will know God—that is, be in union with God.

Fourth, this New Covenant brings with it complete and never-ending forgiveness of sins. God says He will not even remember our sins anymore. We no longer have to keep making animal sacrifices or burnt offerings to be forgiven, as the Jews teach. We no longer have to keep doing penance or go to confession every week, as the Roman Catholics teach. Rather,

“… by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

The Righteousness of God in Christ

One way in which the New Covenant differs from the Old is this: God does both parts; He keeps His side and our side. He keeps our side by giving us His very life—the life of Christ that lives in us by the Holy Spirit. In doing so, God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us. As we saw previously, God crucified us with Christ, and then raised us with Him. By this regenerative act, God birthed in us a new, holy, and righteous spirit, and joined our spirit to Christ’s Spirit in oneness. It’s mysterious. It’s not fully comprehensible. It’s incredible. But it happened. And as a result of this, we are now His righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21).

I can be God’s righteousness in Christ because I’ve died. I’m no longer in the picture. It is simply Christ living His live inside my dead vessel, unto God. I just happen to get the benefits of this inclusion. That is God’s grace, not anything having to do with me or my merits. This was all done by the kind intention of God’s will, for the praise of His glory.

You see? You see how the gospel begins to change and come alive, once you get self out of the way? Once self stops being a point of reference, it’s as if the Spirit unlocks new mysteries every day. New power begins to flow into the weak places. We begin to get new nourishment for the Christian journey. We start seeing everything with new eyes, from the standpoint of Christ and His cross. As Dan Stone said, '“Everything we need for living the Christian life is found in the cross of Jesus Christ, rightly understood.”

What’s My Part?

I used to look at the Christian life essentially as a covenant where I had to keep my end so that God would bless me. I never worried whether God would keep His end. He’s God, right? He always tells the truth. But I always worried whether I could keep my end! I didn’t realize that this paradigm inevitably plunged me into condemnation.

Why? Because every time I felt like I wasn’t receiving the blessings of God, I would beat myself up. After all, I had to be doing something wrong, if God wasn’t blessing me, right? It had to be because I wasn’t praying enough or rightly. Or because I wasn’t resisting sin enough. Or maybe there was some sin of omission that I wasn’t even aware of. Or maybe I wasn’t doing enough mitzvahs or good deeds. Whatever it was, I had to be doing something wrong. That isn’t a recipe for a happy, joyous or free life.

The paradigm shift happened when I started looking at the New Covenant as one where Jesus did my part—and I just get the credit. It was no longer a partnership between me and God. Rather, it was a union between me and Christ. Christ was now my Husband, and I was His Beloved Bride. Christ now lives and expresses His life through me. As I open my womb and receive Christ’s seed—the Holy Spirit—all I have to do is incubate that New Life that is growing in me. That’s it.

A pregnant mother doesn’t have to do any special work to incubate the child within her, does she? As long as she remains healthy, the child in her womb will grow and produce its life on its own. She doesn’t have to say 10 Hail Mary’s or stop eating meat on Fridays or do a random act of kindness each day, in order to get her baby to grow. She basically just has to do one thing: stay alive and not abort it.

The same is true in the spiritual realm. All we have to do to incubate the life of Christ in us is just … not abort it. How do we abort it? Through unbelief. Unbelief blocks the flow of the Spirit of God within us. All we have to do is rest in the promises of God, to hold fast to them by faith. All we have to do is abide in the unseen, eternal truths of God—to agree with what God says is true, by faith. And His life will manifest itself automatically. “You’ll get holy on accident!” as Pastor Mike likes to say.

Interestingly, the Bible says that this life we have inside us—this Holy Spirit—is an incorruptible seed:

“You have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever…” (1 Peter 1:23).

In others words, you can’t abort this seed. This life of Christ that lives in you by virtue of the Holy Spirit is going to mature, whether you like it or not. No abortion. No miscarriage. For it is God’s sovereign will that we mature and become everything He wants us to be:

“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Ephesians 1;4).

Union Life

Do you see how the Christian life is a union, not a partnership? Does this union concept make sense? I am not Christ’s partner. I am, like Eve, Christ’s womb-man. I merely bear His seed, His life. I don’t have to produce the life. I don’t have to work to obey His rules. All I have to do is be a vessel for His life to manifest in me. And that is just what the New Covenant is all about.

But as long as I looked at it as a partnership, I had no choice but to operate out of separation. God is up there, and I’m down here. I have to do more good and do less bad in order to climb up to Him. God is out there, but I’m in here. I’ve got to keep looking for God amid seen and temporal facts in order to find Him and pull Him in here.

But when I see that I am in union with Christ, I see that I am already as close to Christ as I’ll ever be or need to be. I see that God lives in me, manifesting His holy life through me. I don’t need a 2 hour quiet time to “get closer” to God; God and I are one. I no longer need to worry about how to discover God’s will. He’s manifesting His will in me, if we are in union, right?

“…for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13).

This is how Jesus lived. He lived in constant awareness of His union with the Father. He said things like,

“I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

“Jesus gave them this answer: ‘Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does’” (John 5:19).

These statements from Jesus show us the principle of union. Jesus lived out of His union with the Father. It wasn’t about a partnership. God the Father was expressing His very own life through Jesus. All the fullness of God dwelled in Jesus (Colossians 1:19). Christ was the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). This is basic Trinitarian teaching: Jesus was God Incarnate. We learn the Trinity fairly early on, but we aren’t usually taught anything about Christ living in union with the Father.

This is how Jesus lived. Jesus was just a perfect example of a person who always lived out of the union of His Spirit and His Father’s Spirit. His Spirit and the Father’s were one. He was pointing to oneness.

This is how God wants us to live. He doesn’t want us to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Instead, He invites us to eat from the Tree of Life—to be participants in His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). How do we participate in the divine nature? Through recognizing our spiritual union with Christ’s Spirit, and resting in that truth, by faith.

Jesus + anything = a false identity forming somewhere.

I love how Dan says, "Living out of Christ in you, by revelation of the Holy Spirit, is actually the *safest* way to live." (ROTG, p. 200)

You know how you wind up in Hell? Jesus + Religion (where one is trying to derive identity from Religion). THAT’S the road to perdition, right there.