The very identity of the Church flows from the essential reality that we are in Christ Jesus; joined to him in an actual, perpetual, and spiritual union that fundamentally transforms everything about who and what we are. Through our union with Christ, we receive the extravagant, lavish grace of God which bestows a divine beauty on his people through all that he does on and through them, and an undeserved and unattainable reality of belonging which bestows a divine unity on what otherwise would be a disparate and hostile people.
God enlivens us by joining us to Christ’s own resurrection as an accomplished and perpetual reality, elevates his people to their exalted spiritual status by forever uniting their experiential existence with that of Christ himself, and recreates his people in Christ to be uniquely beautiful expressions of his Son. He draws his people to himself and to each other in a living, and vibrant communion through Christ that invalidates all the old divisions between them and creates an entirely new subdivision of humanity, and builds these diverse outsiders on the cornerstone of Christ himself into a an organic structure that grows by God’s design into the very temple of the Most High on earth.
The church of Jesus Christ is in a precarious state, and when evaluated on external evidence, one must conclude that she is doomed to slaughter. Though our false shepherds cry “peace, peace,” in our hearts we know that there is no peace. But all is not lost. The Good Shepherd still walks among his doomed flock, and still holds high his staves of “beauty and bands.” When we embrace the reality of our union with him and gaze on the divine beauty and unity we possess in him, even our present trials are endowed with glory. But beware: for when we de-value our shepherd and our union with him and look towards our own external forms, he may very well break our beauty and unity before our face, and relegate us to the lifeless, hopeless, meaningless Christianity that we ourselves have built.
