This sermon explores the profound spiritual union believers share with Jesus Christ, a ‘mystic harmony’ that transcends typical understanding. It emphasizes that this union is foundational to every aspect of Christian life and salvation, empowering believers to live a new life dead to sin and alive to God.
Transcript
Introduction to Mystic Harmony
This wonderful gift this week. For this pulpit Bible, I am not a prophet, but I would say that this may sit as part of our pulpit for many years to come. I am very grateful for that. It is a wonderful gift.
We were singing a couple of hymns, and we sang “For the Beauty of the Earth.” There was a little line in there that goes, “For the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and sight.” We read words like that. I wonder if we think about the meaning of words when we sing them. We should.
I want to be talking about that mystic harmony this morning. I am going to be talking about some things that are beyond our comprehension. There are things that you are familiar with, you have thought about, I am sure. You cannot avoid thinking about it to some degree. As we explore this this morning, we are going to find that what we are looking at are things that go beyond our experience, our normal actual experience from day to day.
What I am going to do this morning, I am going to begin by reading from Romans chapter 6. I am not going to do exactly an exposition of this this morning. We will look at the focus of what we are going to look at this morning, which is Romans chapter 6 and verse 11. But I am going to read a portion of this this morning, beginning in verse 1 of Romans 6.
I should probably tell you that what we are going to be talking about is the foundation that is assumed and taught in this passage, which is the amazing unity that the believer has with Jesus Christ. That is the mystic harmony that I want us to think about today. There is a union that a Christian has with Jesus Christ that goes beyond normal relationships. It goes beyond our typical understanding of things. I wanted to explore that so that we can appreciate better what that is, which is foundational to so much of Christian life. In fact, it is foundational to every part of Christian life. It is foundational to every part of the doctrine of salvation as well. It is crucial. Growing in our understanding of this teaching should be helpful to us. We will understand it at different levels. All of us can understand this at some level. A few might be able to understand it a little more. None of us will understand this completely. It is one of those really deep, profound teachings that come to us directly from the Word of God.
Let me begin by reading this beautiful and wonderful and instructive passage from Paul’s letter to us, the letter to the Romans. Romans chapter 6, beginning in verse 1:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death is no longer master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all. But the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies so that you obey its lust, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.
That is the passage this morning I want us to be thinking about, and I want us to apply this by understanding the relationship we have with Christ.
Let me pray for us and ask God to help with this. Father, we recognize that the passage that we have read, which is so crucially important to us because we want to live a godly life before You. We want that exhortation of Paul, that instruction for us to consider ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ. We want that to be true. We want to do this. Lord, the foundation for this is in our relationship with You, in our relationship with Christ. And so we ask, Father, for help this morning as we consider this passage and many others, as we think about the truth of Your New Testament teaching. Help us to understand this relationship that we have with Christ a little better, to wonder about it, to appreciate it from a new perspective, to be able to worship You because of the glory of it. We ask, Father, for all of this help, and it can only come to us by the power of Your Holy Spirit applying these truths to our hearts and minds. Please do this for us, we pray, in Christ’s name. Amen.
The Foundation of Union with Christ
How do we keep from sin? How do we live a godly life? How do we keep ourselves from sin? We do that, Paul says, by reckoning ourselves dead to sin. What does he mean by that, and how do we do it? Paul, in this entire passage, is talking about a spiritual reality, and that reality is our union with Christ.
Everything in the Christian life is based on that. Everything. I was just looking at the beginning of last week’s sermon. I pulled a quote from last week’s sermon. Near the beginning of the sermon, I was talking about the previous week’s sermon, and I said, “We explored the deep foundational truth of the fear of God, recognizing His terrifying infinite holiness. We saw that the core of all human sin, according to 3:18, is having no fear of God before their eyes. But we concluded with the magnificent transforming truth that because we are in Christ, that terror is utterly changed into awe. God, the Almighty Judge, whose power is terrifying to His enemies, has become our loving Father.”
That is an extraordinary thing. God, who is terrifying, He is incredibly awesome, He is infinitely powerful. When we are in Christ, He is our Father. Did you get the little phrase, “in Christ”? In Christ. If we are in Christ, then He is our Father. Everything in the Christian life is based on our unity with Jesus Christ, the fact that we are one. There is a powerful unity. We are one with Jesus Christ.
The Mystical Nature of Our Union
This teaching, the importance of this teaching, cannot be minimized. The union of a believer with Christ is difficult for us to comprehend because it is spiritual. People call it mystical, that mystic harmony I was talking about. It is mystical. By mystical, I mean that it is something that transcends our normal understanding of things. It is something that is absolutely true. It is just as real as the wood of this pulpit. But it transcends our normal experience. It goes beyond, really, beyond this physical world. It reaches out into something that is more than all of that. It is a transcendent truth. It is a central truth, I said a few moments ago, of salvation. Union with Christ is central to the whole doctrine of salvation. It is not something that some theologian invented. It was taught first of all by Jesus Christ, and it is taught throughout the New Testament, repeated over and over again. The teaching is that we are in Christ, that Christ is in us, we are like Christ, and we are with Christ. All those truths are found in this talking about the relationship of a believer with Jesus Christ. It is something that is hard for us to grasp, to comprehend, to think about.
There are lots of things that are difficult for us to think about. Some things in the physical world are difficult to think about. I thought maybe this might be an illustration. I was reading, I hope it is a good illustration. This week I was reading about quantum computing. It is an interesting thing, quantum computing. When you start reading about that, it leads you to quantum physics. Quantum physics is something that I do not have the math skills to comprehend. My mind, I do not think, I do not know if I have the capacity to. Most people probably do not have the capacity to think at those levels. Some will, but not completely. But it is an amazing thing, some amazing thing that happens.
For example, the thing that I found most interesting was a principle that is called quantum entanglement. I am going to talk about quantum entanglement for just a minute. Maybe it will serve as an illustration. On the atomic level, or in quantum physics, there is a principle where a particle can be entangled, linked with another particle in a profound way. They can be separated by great distance. If you affect one, immediately the other one is affected as well. I am going to give you an absurd illustration. Let’s say we have two packages, two little packages, and the packages have one sock each in them. They are identical except one is red and the other is blue. Today is my son Justin’s birthday, and he is an appropriate distance. He is about 5,000 miles away from us in Romania. So let’s give him one of those packages. We have the other one here. If one sock is red and the other is blue, and I open up this package and I have the red sock, guess which sock he has? He has the blue sock. It is not too profound, is it? Let’s make them quantum socks. If there is a quantum entanglement between these two things, then in each package, both socks would have the capacity or would be both red and blue at the same time. So, when I open up this package and I look at it and it is red, immediately, 5,000 miles away, the sock that is in the package that Justin would open would turn blue. It would be blue at exactly the same time this one turned red. You read something like that, and you think about that, and you think, well, that is amazing science fiction. That is what you think. I cannot quite believe that. Quantum computers work based on that principle. Quantum computers that actually work, work based on the principle of that entanglement. It is something that is real, that is physical, that is beyond our comprehension right now. In fact, Einstein called that “spooky things that happen at a distance.” So it is something that is beyond us.
Our union with Christ is called a mystical union, not because it is not real, but because it is something that is beyond our normal experience. It is difficult for us to understand. But God has revealed it to us in His Word. He has revealed it to us in His Word, and we deal with it all the time, so often that I do not think we think about it very much. How many times in the Bible would God have to tell us that for us to really believe it and grasp it? It should be one time, shouldn’t it? How many times does He tell us that? I did not count them all. But every time the Apostle Paul uses that phrase “in Christ,” that is what he is talking about. Every time he says “in Him,” this is what he is talking about. How many times does he do that? 164 times. Just that one phrase. That is many. That is just one of the ways that the New Testament describes it. That is just one of the many ways that it is described.
This is a reality, our union with Christ, that is profound and hard, really impossible for us to completely assimilate. It is like some other mystical unions that we read about. For example, the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is that within the nature of the one God, there are three eternal persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are one. There is a unity there. There is only one God. But within the nature of the one God, there are three eternal persons. Do you grasp that? Not really. It is a mystical union. It is true, though. It is absolutely vitally true. Or the relationship with Jesus within Himself. When the Son of God, the Holy Son of God, who is spirit, becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus, there is a unity that takes place that is beyond in His nature, that is beyond anything we can comprehend. Jesus is 100% human with a human soul. He has a human spirit. He has a human body that is subject to the things that humans are subject to. At the same time, He is completely, completely God. Can you wrap your mind around that? That is a spiritual relationship that is similar. When we are in Christ, there is a union between the believer and Christ that goes beyond what we can normally think about.
164 times Paul says “in Christ.” How many analogies are there? Paul uses the power of the Holy Spirit, with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, all of these “in Christ.” When he gives the illustration of a marriage, which is a powerful illustration of the union of a believer in Christ. Christ, the faithful husband, the church is His bride. It is sealed by vows, which is faith and trust, and it is for eternity, forever. That is one illustration. Christ is the head of the body, and the church is the body. This is talking about the unity believers have with Christ. The building and the temple. The imagery of a great building and all of the with its Christ is the cornerstone, and all of the people of God make up the stones of that building. Unity, together with Christ. Those are symbols and pictures. Jesus talked about the vine and the branches. He is the vine, and we are the branches. The branches are part of the vine, and the life of Christ flows through the vine into us. It is talking about that unity that we have with Him.
When we celebrate baptism, we are celebrating symbolically with water what it means to be immersed into the person of Christ through salvation. When we celebrate the Lord’s Table, we are celebrating Jesus’ provision for us with His life and death. The food, the bread and the wine, is His life imparted to us. All of these things, every one of these things, have to do with this relationship with Jesus Christ.
The Eternal and Experiential Aspects of Union
When does this happen? That is a tricky question, because the Bible gives us two answers, and both are true. Two answers to when it happens. First of all, it happens in the mind of God in eternity past. This is the straight teaching of the Bible. It is very plain. I will read a verse to help demonstrate that. John Murray described it when he said, he writes, “The union with Christ has its source in the counsel of God the Father before the foundation of the world.” In other words, the fact that you are united with Christ was in God’s mind in eternity past, before anything happened, long before you were born, long before this earth was created, before the foundation of the world. It has its fruition, its ultimate result, in the glorification of the sons of God. The person who is in Christ will one day be glorified with Christ, receive a new body, live with Christ in glory, be the glorification of the sons of God. How long does that last? Forever. Forever. So it goes from forever to forever. That is incredible to think about. That is an amazing thing for us to think about. Its orbit has two foci. One is in the love of God, the eternal love of God, and the counsels of eternity. The other is the glorification of Christ and the manifestation of His glory. The former has no beginning, the latter has no end. Then he says, “We cannot think of a past, present, or future apart from union with Christ.” That is pretty profound. Every part of our life is connected in a real way with union with Christ. So it begins in God’s eternal plan. Before God created a star, before He divided the light from darkness and hung a star in the heavens, God saw us in His Son, the Lord Jesus. He saw us in Him before anything else happened. The Apostle Paul tells us that God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, Ephesians 1:4. He tells us in 2 Timothy 1:9 that He gave us grace in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time. You should look at that verse. That is a paraphrase of the verse. Look up 2 Timothy 1:9 sometime and think about that verse. This means that God never thought of you apart from His Son, the Lord Jesus. From the depths of eternity, His plan for you always was and will be wrapped up in the glorious plan for Jesus.
For a believer in our own experience, there is another answer to that. We are immersed in Christ. We become part of Christ in our experience when the Holy Spirit of God baptizes us into Christ. It is when we put our trust in Jesus Christ. The Spirit of God identifies us in Jesus Christ. It is an act and work of the Spirit of God. It is called the baptism of the Spirit of God, and that is different from physical baptism. In fact, it is better if you do not even use that word baptism. If you thought of that as immersion into Christ, that is what this is talking about. In the New Testament, when you get to the word baptism, it is a word that comes to us from the Greek. They did not translate that word. They transliterated the word. Because when most of our English Bibles were being formed, the King James Bible, for instance, the King James Bible was formed in part of the Church of England. They do not baptize by immersion. There are different forms of baptism that different people, different groups do. Some sprinkle, and some dip, and some immerse. The Bible is very clear about baptism. When it came to that word, you could see how that might be problematic if every time you got to that word, you translated it. If every time you got to the word, you translated it and you said immersion, which is what it means. If it was normally translated, it would be immersion. It would be hard to read dip out of that, wouldn’t it? In any event, I am not trying to step on anybody’s toes here. I am just telling you the truth. The reason that I am telling you this is not over the ordinance of baptism, but by what it means when we are talking about it in Romans chapter 6, which is the immersion of the believer into Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are immersed into Christ. We become part of Him. We are immersed. That is our experience in salvation. It is a spiritual act of God that does a work on us, uniting us with Jesus Christ in a profound and meaningful way.
That comes to us through faith. This union with Christ is received through saving faith. Justification happens because we are united with Jesus Christ. Romans 8:1, we quoted Romans 8:1 for the last three weeks. “There is therefore now no condemnation.” You do not have to worry about God’s judgment. Why? For all those who are in Christ Jesus. If you are in Christ, if you are united with Him. Here in Romans chapter 6, we begin to see just one of the many, many applications of what it means to be united with Christ and how it works. In the first part of the chapter that we read, how can it be that we who died to sin shall still live in it? Do you not know that all who have been baptized, immersed into Christ Jesus, have been immersed into His death?
Here is one of those amazing things that has to do with the mind of God and our connection. It is a real connection. Let me remind you that when we think about thinking in ourselves, we think, well, we imagine all sorts of things. What we are talking about in the mind of God is something that is real, because God is the one who creates. All reality comes from Him, and He is ultimate reality Himself. God sees us in Christ. When Jesus Christ came into this world, when He was born and laid in that manger in Bethlehem, God saw you with Him. God saw us connected with Jesus Christ from the very beginning. When they took Him to pay that sin offering, the little offering for purification, that they did a week after He was born. Why did they do that for the sinless Son of God? They did that because God sees you in Him, and we needed that purification offering. We need every point of the Old Testament law kept. God sees us in Jesus keeping all the perfect law of God through His entire life. All the things that are true of Christ, God sees as true of you by vicarious through the work of Christ. We did not do it. We could not do it. But Jesus Christ did that for us. Jesus, who is sinlessly perfect, goes to the cross, and He pays the price of your sins, all of them, and my sins. God sees us there with Him. He sees you there. It is not possible for you to hang on the cross for three hours, endure the infinite wrath of God, an eternal hell’s worth of wrath in three hours. But God sees you as if you have done it because Christ did that for you. He identifies you with Christ. He sees you die on the cross, be buried with Him. This is what this text is saying. Be immersed into the ground, placed into the ground with Jesus Christ. He sees you rise from the dead with Jesus Christ, given new life. That whole debt completely paid. If it were not paid, He would still be in the ground. The fact that God raised Him from the dead, when He raised Him from the dead, He raised you from the dead spiritually. The fact that you will rise physically one day is based on that truth as well. More than that, we are given eternal life right now for this life. Right now we have eternal life, and that comes from the resurrected life of Jesus Christ. The same power, the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, is the power that empowers us. That is what it tells us in Ephesians 1:18 following through there. It is an extraordinary thing. Do you not think that this is beyond our comprehension when you start thinking about it? It is beyond anything that we normally think about. But it is absolutely gloriously, wonderfully true. Based on that, Paul has something to say to us in verse 11. In verse 11, he says, “Even so,” I should read 10 too just to connect it. “For the death He died, He died to sin once for all. But the life He lives, He lives to God.” If you are thinking about that in connection to this relationship we have with Christ, then you can get this. “Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” This is an exhortation to us. Paul is saying in verse 11, “Do this thing.” Here is something for you to do. It is to reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. You are to do this.
Living Out Our Union with Christ
It is interesting. Here is a little quiz for 10 seconds. Here is a 10-second quiz on the book of Romans so far. In chapter 1, how many exhortations? How many times did Paul tell you to do something? Do you have any idea? 10 times. How many times? Nobody knows. It is okay. How about chapter 2? You do not know. Chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, halfway into chapter 6. No time. He has not asked you to do a thing. Not in any of these chapters up to now. This is the first time he asked you to do something. He is asking you to do something based on everything that he has given you before in this book. Especially in light of this unity that we have with Jesus Christ. He is saying that since this is true for you, reckon it to be true. Reckon this to be true. Since this is true for you, credit that as true. Several weeks ago, when we were doing Philippians part 2, I did a two-week survey of the book of Philippians. When we were looking at that, I spent a long time on the meaning of that word that is translated in this version, “consider” or “to reckon” or “to credit.” It is an accounting word, and it means you could declare it like a judge would say something is true. My dad used to use the word “reckon” a lot. “I am going to go to the grocery store on Friday night,” he would say, “I reckon.” It has lost its meaning over time. What the word means is like a judge declaring a sentence, or an accountant taking it is a word that deals with reality. It is a word that lines up and says what is actually really true. If you have $10,000 in your checking account, and you record that in your book, you put down in your checkbook account $10,000. The number in the checkbook, if it does not align with what you actually have, it is not reconciled. It is wrong. When you actually record the reality, then it is something that reflects something that is significant and meaningful. Paul is telling us, instructing us in this passage, that because it is true that you have already died with Jesus Christ, identified with Him in His death, in His burial, in His resurrection, then consider yourself dead in your old nature to sin. It is not saying that you do not have sin in your life as a Christian. It is not saying that you are not tempted with sin. What this is saying is that your old person has been crucified with Christ. You have new life in Christ. Go on and live in that new life and ability that you have with Jesus Christ. Live with the resources that God has given you in Jesus Christ. You have died to sin. You have been immersed into His death, buried with Him, and united with Him not only in His death but also with His resurrection and the life that we have been given. John Stott gave an illustration. He said, “Imagine an elderly Christian believer, John Jones, and he looks back on his life, and he divides his life before conversion and after conversion. Volume 1 is the story of the old man before conversion, and it ends with his death in Christ. Volume 2 is the story of the new man after conversion, and it opens with spiritual resurrection, with the life with resurrection, and establishes a new life dedicated to God.” That is what we are talking about here. God saw you in Jesus. Saw this happen to you. It is real. This identification has already happened. Reckon that reality to be true, and go on in the new life that you have in Jesus Christ. Go on in the strength of that. You can lend your members, he says, to sin and be subject to sin, but you do not have to. You have strength and ability in Jesus Christ. You have a new resource. It tells us in Ephesians 1:3 that every spiritual blessing is stored for us in Him, in Jesus Christ. We have access to all the spiritual power because of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Our union with Christ changes every part of our life, even the most mundane parts of our life. The everyday things that you do can be done in Jesus Christ, and that gives it an eternal meaning. When Paul says, “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me,” we tend to think of extraordinary things. But he says all things. That means that when you do the ordinary chores around the house, you can do those in Christ, or you can do those with your mind caught up in the mindset of the flesh. If you do those things in Christ, there is going to be joy in that forever, because it is something done as a work of faith in Christ. The mundane things, everyday things, can be done that way. “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me.” When our labor is done in the Lord, it is not in vain, it says in 1 Corinthians 15:58. It is worthwhile. We live in a new relationship, and that relationship is the relationship that we have in Jesus Christ. We are united with Him. We receive every spiritual blessing in Him. We live according to that relationship. That is just that one phrase. It is also true that Christ is in us. It is part of the same union. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” 1 John 4:4 says that “He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” There is a relationship where we are in Christ and Christ is in us. That powers the Christian life. That is the power of the Christian life. It is real. This is an incredible reality that the Lord of glory would unite Himself to us in such an amazing way. It is probably, I guess, the richest relationship imaginable. It is our position in Jesus Christ. The indwelling power from Christ in us, which transforms us, makes us like Christ. There is no glory in this for us. Not really. The glory is that we reflect and give praise to God. It is humbling when we recognize our complete dependence on Him.
Application and Conclusion
How does it change us? How would we be different if every day we did what this said, if we lived in this reality, that this is the normal way we think of life, that we are dead to sin, our old past is dead, recognize the reality of that, and pursue life in the connection that we have, the resurrected life that we have in Christ. How would that change us? How would it change us if whatever we do in the day, when we are changing diapers, whatever we do in the day, if we are doing those things in Christ, recognizing that we are in Christ, doing all the things that He has asked us to do, it gives us a different perspective on all of reality. It makes it more precious and more valuable.
Let me just think about Galatians 2:20 one more time, and we will close just with the reading of this verse. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
Let me pray. Father, we thank You for the amazing work that You have done for us in Jesus Christ to unite us with Him in such a profound way, and that these things that happened to Christ happened to us in a real way, so that we are free from sin and free from judgment, that our sins have all been forgiven in Christ, and that You have given us new life and an empowerment to live a life by the indwelling of Your Holy Spirit, the indwelling of Christ in us in that way. Father, these things we cannot comprehend them, not completely, but we can live them out by the power of Your Spirit. Our prayer this morning, Lord, is that You make these truths real to us, and Father, real in our daily experience as we through faith live out what we are called to do in this relationship we have with Christ. Please enable us to live godly lives pleasing to You out of the love that You have given to us because we are in Christ Jesus. Help us in these ways, we pray, in Christ’s name. Amen.