How We Become One With Christ

Ephesians is a great book to study to learn how God’s plan worked to save us to how we can stand and fight the battle with Him. Ephesians 1 talks of God’s plan and how we gain redemption and forgiveness due to His love and grace. He used His Son as the perfect sacrifice to pay the bond price to free us from the slavery of sin.

Eph 1:3-14 NLT

3 All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we united with Christ. 4 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. 6 So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. 7 He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. 8 He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.

9 God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure. 10 And this is his plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ — everything in heaven and on earth. 11 Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.

12 God's purpose was that we Jews who were the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. 13 And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. 14 The Spirit is God's guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so that we would praise and glorify him.

We have the opportunity of knowing God when we are in Christ. He chose us for salvation, adoption, and forgiveness. Through Him we can gain insight, the gifts of the Spirit, power to do God’s will and the hope of living forever with Christ by trusting God and accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior. He chose us first and if we trust Him, we will show this by choosing His way rather than our own. We can never take credit for any of this because it is a gift only gained when we accept Jesus Christ. Our only part is to trust God and then we can learn who He is.

We do not have the means to save ourselves from sin. Jesus paid our bond by dying on the Cross. His blood was worthy of paying the price for everyone, the sacrifices the Jews performed proved temporary and foreshadowed the redemption price paid by Jesus. All slaves are freed with a redemption price and with sin it always required blood, so Jesus let His flow for all of us.

Blood sacrifice turns some people off, but God chose this method. When you think of it, blood is the life force of all living things. All animals have blood and all plants have some sap like flow that moves the required nutrients for life travel throughout the body. Jesus claimed to be the way, the truth and the life. Through Him we can become reconciled once again to God and freed from bondage to sin. He paid the only price that could defeat sin for everyone.

What are you waiting for? We still have time to repent and accept Jesus, but none of us know when the time runs out. Don’t wait to feel better or worthy. Go to Jesus as you are with your confession of true repentance and He will adopt you into His family, cleansed to live a new life because God loves us all and wishes to lose no one.