"In Christ is Reality" isn't just a name I picked because it sounded good. It's how I'd actually describe my own life, if I had to be honest about it. I want to explain what I mean by that. Then I want to tell you about a season, and later a single afternoon, that made it real to me in a way it hadn't been before.
What I mean by it
Here's what I mean. If you are in Christ, then Christ is the most real thing about you. More real than your circumstances, your feelings, your failures, or what the world says about your life.
Paul writes, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). That isn't devotional language to cheer you up on a bad day. It's a claim about what actually exists. Paul says something similar to the Colossians when he talks about the old festivals and sabbaths: "These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:17). Some translations put it, "the reality is Christ." That's where the name comes from.
Most of us live the other way round. We let our circumstances decide what's real, and Christ becomes the thing we reach for when the "real" stuff gets too heavy. A comfort. A coping mechanism. I understand why. Circumstances are loud. They show up on your bank statement, in your body, in how people treat you. Christ can feel quiet by comparison.
But Scripture keeps putting it the other way round. "You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). Hidden, so not always seen or felt, but no less real. And Paul again: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). He isn't describing a nice feeling about Jesus. He's describing the deepest fact of his life, deeper than his history, his suffering, his reputation or his fears.
So your union with Christ isn't an accessory sitting on top of your real life. It is your real life. Your job, your body, your mistakes, your achievements, the story other people tell about you, all of that is real too. But none of it is final. Christ is the deepest layer.
I could leave it there, as theology, and some of you would nod and move on. But it was never meant to stay a doctrine you agree with on Sunday. For me, it started becoming real in March 2020, and it didn't start well.
March 2020
I caught COVID in the first wave, and I caught it badly. It landed right on the heels of a season at church that had already worn me down through one trial after another. I think the virus just cracked open something that was already close to breaking. For a week, maybe two, I didn't pray. I didn't do anything you'd call godly. I just wanted to be done with church, with ministry, with all of it. Julie was right there next to me the whole time, watching me lie around moodily, half-watching Netflix, completely checked out. I was done.
Then near the end of that two-week wilderness, a pastor I hadn't spoken to in years, Manu Cherian, a prophet, reached out. He told me he'd seen me in a dream, sitting next to him. That, to me, was mercy. That was grace, showing up uninvited. I wanted to pour my whole heart out to him, but before I could, he started prophesying, describing exactly what I'd been going through and then speaking over my future, twenty and thirty years out. It brought me to my knees. I was in tears, undone that God would come looking for me in a backslidden place like that, rather than waiting for me to clean myself up first.
Pastor Manu connected me with another pastor around my own age, Joshua Mathew. I still remember our first real conversation. In the past, whenever I'd talked to a leader my own age, I'd show up guarded, trying to look like I had it all together, subtly flexing whatever spiritual maturity I could manage. Not this time. I let my guard down and let Joshua actually speak into my life, and we ended up sitting with Isaiah 53 together. It was lockdown. Neither of us had anywhere to be. We stayed up the whole night talking about the suffering servant.
Somewhere in that conversation I realised the Christianity I'd been living up to that point had mostly been held together by me. I'd been a Christian since 2009, and I still didn't actually know Jesus the way Scripture reveals him. What I felt that April wasn't new information. It was the weight of the gospel landing for the first time. I came to the Lord like a child, looking for Christ in pages I'd already read a hundred times. And as I started actually seeing him there, my life started changing underneath me.
For hours at a time I'd just sit and cry in God's presence, taking in the love of Jesus like I was hearing about it for the first time. What undid me wasn't a new fact about God. It was realising that this Christ, this beautiful, glorious Person, was already in me, and he wasn't going anywhere. He wasn't there to demand I change from the outside. He was changing me from the inside. Calvin says that as long as Christ remains outside of us, everything he suffered and did for us is of no use to us. It's only as we're united to him that it becomes ours. I was finally living that. I kept getting changed, over and over, just by his love. The fact that he actually liked me. No striving required. That was the first time I knew it, instead of just believing it: in Christ is reality.
Bonnie Brae Street, 2022
Two years later, in 2022, I got to stand inside a small, unassuming house on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles. If that street name means nothing to you, here's why it means everything to me. In April 1906, a handful of praying believers gathered in that house, ordinary people, nobody famous, and the Holy Spirit fell on them. Within days it spilled over into what became the Azusa Street Revival. Before there was a mission on Azusa Street, before the newspapers were writing about it, there was a small house full of people who wanted more of God than the room could hold.
I stood inside that house for thirty minutes. Nothing dramatic happened while I stood there. No vision, no voice, nothing I could point to afterwards and say, that's the moment. What happened was quieter than that, and I think it's stayed with me precisely because it was quiet.
I wasn't there for a tour. I went there hungry, aware that whatever started a movement that has since reached hundreds of millions of people didn't start with strategy or a platform or a five-year plan. It started with people in a small room who had nothing to offer God except their desperation and their availability, the same way I'd had nothing to offer two years earlier except a wrecked fortnight and a phone call I didn't see coming. Standing in that space, something in me recognised the real engine behind everything I believe. The Spirit of God poured out on ordinary, hungry people in an ordinary room, because God has always liked using the small and the overlooked.
I left that house with a conviction I haven't been able to shake: the Holy Spirit will have first place in my life and in whatever ministry God gives me. Not just right doctrine about the Spirit, filed away for later. First place. The actual centre of how I live and lead.
Nothing about that house was special by the world's measure. It wasn't a cathedral. It was just a house, with ordinary people in it, until God's presence became so undeniable that history had to make room for it. That's what happened in a bedroom in 2020 too. Nobody was there to write it down but Julie and God.
So what now?
I'm not asking you to go and find your own Bonnie Brae Street, or your own two-week wilderness. Though if one finds you, don't waste it. I'm asking you to get hungry for the same Spirit who met me in both places.
Christ in you isn't an add-on to your real life. He is your real life. Hidden some days, quiet most days, but never less true than whatever your circumstances are shouting at you right now. And he doesn't just want to be believed in. He wants to be known.
So don't just agree with this and move on. Abide in him. Enjoy him. Let the same Spirit who met me on a bedroom floor in 2020, and in a small house in Los Angeles two years later, keep drawing you deeper into knowing the Christ who already lives in you. Give him first place. Not because he'll leave if you don't, but because that's where the life is.
Grace and peace,
Until Christ is formed in us,
Aben
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