Jesus responded and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” John 3:5
I’ve been trying to grasp the things Bishop has been teaching about being in union with Christ. I get what he is saying to a degree, but I need to mull it over until I own it to my depths and have my own language for it, which has meaning and impact for me. So here is my latest revelation in my own words about the matter.
When a child is conceived, he/she is in his mother and is in union with her. The baby lives in amniotic fluid, which we commonly refer to as water, and is physically connected to the mother by an umbilical cord. He cannot exist outside his mother and has no sense of being a separate human. When the mother’s “water breaks” and she goes through labor, the baby is born without any effort on his part. He is now physically separated from his mother but still has no awareness that he is an individual. Over time he becomes aware of this fact. They call it individuating. As a child grows, he goes through many stages of separating from his parents and discovering himself as an independent individual.
But the kingdom of God is upside down from the world. We talk about being “born again,” but that looks exactly the opposite of what it means to be born in the natural. Before you are a Christian, you are separated from God and aware of yourself apart from God. When you are born again, you are placed INTO Christ. INTO, not out of, someone. And that happens when you are “born of water and the Spirit“. You start the journey of discovering that you are in Christ and Christ is in you and that you can be utterly dependent on Him forever. Where He goes, you go. What He does, you do. You don’t cease to exist, but you live in union with Christ. You don’t lose yourself; instead, you become the person you were always created to be.
If you take this out to its furthest conclusion, there would then be a time when you no longer thought of or experienced yourself as existing separate from the person of Christ. You wouldn’t struggle with “my way” versus “His way” because your way would be His way. That sounds like heaven to me.