Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God

If you're in a dry season or ever wonder if there is more to life than this, I strongly encourage you to pick up this book. Rankin is the perfect travel guide to help you navigate the topography of your heart as you search for "living water". Through this book, you realize the "sweet waters of the far country" are not so distant after all – but it's readily accessible through union with Christ.

The term "union with Christ" can sometimes feel so abstract and elusive. How are we united to Christ…really? What does that look like day-to-day? Rankin does a brilliant job of helping us understand and live out this reality of being grafted in the vine (John 15). He shows us how we can experience heaven here and now by baptizing our imagination and seeing what is already true of us: we are hidden and safe in Christ.

As an excellent teacher, pastor, and doctor of souls – Rankin doesn't deny or undermine the problem. He acknowledges the sanctification gap; that disconnect where our experience and theology don't always seem to align. He calls it out courageously and allows us to wrestle with that gap. As Henri Nouwen says: "You say what I suspected, you express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes – you say who we are, you recognize our condition…"

Through this book, I realized that I am not alone in struggling with this gap. There is an entire history of people (past and present) who acknowledge this gap and have discovered that the antidote is union with Christ.

Rankin brilliantly shows how union with Christ is the thread that holds it all together and it helps us rediscover who we really are. Because we are covered in Him and made in His image, we also share in the hope of glory. "Worldly thoughts began to lose their hold, while heavenly ones grow clearer and clearer" (Ignatius of Loyola).

Just like we need reminders in our lives, there are certain phrases from the book that have now become part of my daily vernacular that anchor me in Christ. Not as empty platitudes, but as rich truths that have become interwoven into the fabric of my identity:

• I am in Christ and Christ is in me

• I am home; completely safe and hidden in Him

• The image of God is being restored in me

• God sees, God knows, God is with us

• Suffering brings us back to God's own heart

If you are a fan of Tim Keller, John Ortberg, Dallas Willard, and J.I. Packer, you will enjoy this book, as it is comparable in its ability to communicate practical theology of what it means to be in Christ.

This will be a book that you will want to read over and over again; that you will want to chew and digest over time. It is easy to read, but it does not forsake depth or richness. It brings together high theology and deep spirituality; the head and heart.

As you read and engage with this book, my prayer for you is "that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith – that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:17-19).