Dear Friend,
I want to tell you something that took me a long time to believe, though I had heard it said a thousand times before it ever became true for me: you were made for communion, not consumption.
We live inside a way of being human that trains us, almost from the moment we wake, to consume. We consume news before our eyes are fully open. We consume images of other people’s lives before we have looked honestly at our own. We consume teaching, worship music, sermons, opinions, entertainment, and even our own spiritual growth, as though the soul were a kind of stomach that simply needed to be kept full. And when we are full, we call it a good day. When we are empty, we go looking for something else to take in.
I do not say this to shame you. I say it because I have lived there, and because I do not think consumption is what we were built for, even when the thing being consumed is good. You were not made to be a mouth. You were made to be a dwelling place.
Before there was a command to obey or a law to keep, there was a garden, and in the garden there was a sound: the sound of God walking in the cool of the day, coming to be with the man and the woman He had made. Not to inspect them. Not to extract worship or performance from them. To walk with them. Genesis does not open with religion. It opens with relationship. The first thing lost in the fall was not innocence in the abstract. It was that walk. Adam and Eve hid, and communion became distance, and distance became the story of every human heart since.
Almost everything that has gone wrong in me, when I trace it back far enough, has been an attempt to solve the ache of that distance by consuming something instead of returning to Someone. Comfort instead of presence. Achievement instead of belovedness. Even ministry, even service, even the good and necessary work of building something for God, can become a way of consuming approval rather than resting in communion. The strategies change. The ache underneath them does not.
Here is what I want you to hear today, as plainly as I can say it: God did not send His Son merely to forgive what you consumed wrongly. He sent His Son to restore what you were made for.
Paul says it in a way that should stop us every time we read it, if we let it: Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). Not Christ near you. Not Christ available to you on request. Christ in you. The distance that began in a garden was closed, not by giving us better information about God, and not by giving us a longer list of things to do for Him, but by God Himself taking up residence in the very people who once hid from Him.
This is what I mean when I say the gospel is bigger than forgiveness. Forgiveness deals with what stands between us. Union deals with the distance itself. Forgiveness says your sin has been dealt with. Union says you have been joined to the very life of God: he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17). That is not a metaphor to admire from a distance. That is your actual condition, right now, if you belong to Christ. You are not a forgiven consumer waiting outside the house. You are one spirit with the Host.
I think we are often more comfortable with forgiveness than we are with union, because forgiveness leaves us in charge of ourselves. We can receive forgiveness and still run our own lives, still perform, still consume our way through the ache, only now with less guilt attached. But union will not leave us alone like that. Union says, as Paul says of himself, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20). That is either the most freeing sentence in Scripture or the most frightening one, depending on how tightly you are gripping the wheel of your own life.
I have found it to be freeing. Not easy. Freeing. Because if it is no longer I who live, then my worth is no longer something I have to go and consume from the next achievement, the next relationship, the next season of growth I can point to. It is already given. It is already secured. I am not striving toward union with Christ as a distant reward. I am living, however slowly I am learning to walk in it, from a union that is already mine.
This is where the Spirit becomes so much more than a doctrine to affirm. The Spirit is the One who makes this union real to us, moment by moment, rather than a truth we simply hold in our heads. He is not a force we access. He is the Person who was given so that Christ would not be a memory or a distant historical figure, but a present reality, closer, Scripture dares to say, than our own breath. When you sense the pull to be still, to pray without an agenda, to sit in the quiet without immediately reaching for your phone to fill the silence with something else. That pull is not weakness. That may well be the Spirit, drawing you back toward the garden, back toward the walk, back toward communion.
I want to be honest with you about what this has meant practically for me, because I do not want to leave you with a beautiful idea and no bread to eat.
It has meant learning to distinguish, in my own life, between rest and reward. Reward says: do this, and then you may rest. Rest, as Scripture describes it, says: Christ has already done this. Now walk from that finished work rather than toward it. I still fail at this often. I still catch myself treating prayer like a task to complete rather than a place to abide. But I am learning, slowly, that the invitation is not to try harder to reach God. It is to recognize that in Christ, I already have.
It has meant being suspicious of my own appetite for consumption, even religious consumption. I can listen to five sermons in a week and be no closer to God than when I started, if what I am doing is feeding a habit rather than meeting a Person. So I have had to ask myself, again and again: am I taking this in to fill a silence, or am I coming to Someone I actually want to be with?
And it has meant remembering, on the days when I feel nothing at all, that communion with Christ does not depend on my sense of it. A married couple does not stop being one flesh because one evening feels distant and quiet. You are one spirit with the Lord whether you feel the nearness of it today or not. That is not a call to spiritual numbness. It is an anchor for the days when feeling is not available to you.
Friend, if you have spent years trying to consume your way into feeling close to God: more content, more conferences, more information, more striving. I do not think you are foolish. I think you are simply hungry for something that was never meant to be consumed. It was meant to be entered. You are not outside the house, pressing your face to the window, hoping enough good behavior or enough spiritual effort will finally let you in.
You are already in Christ. And Christ, by His Spirit, is already in you.
The rest of your life is not a project to complete so that this becomes true one day. It is a lifetime of learning to walk, as Adam once walked, in what is already true today.
Grace and peace,
Until Christ is formed in us,
Aben
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