What does ‘in Jesus’ mean?

In 1 Corinthians 1:30, Paul tells us “it’s because of God that we are in Christ Jesus.” And God’s reason for that is because Jesus “has become for us wisdom from God.” 

“In Jesus,” then, means God has made Jesus the source of his wisdom for us – “wisdom” being defined by Paul in that same verse as “righteousness, holiness and redemption.” Or, as one translation puts it, “right thinking, right living and a fresh start,” because it’s God’s intent to restore us back to what he meant humans to be. 

In Jesus, then, God is taking us back to the Garden of Eden to get it right this time, because the first time we got it terribly wrong, based on the serpent’s lie that the source of wisdom was in ourselves – in our own brain and ability – which got us thinking, “Who needs God telling us how to live, when we can figure things out for ourselves?”    

So God has given us lots of time to see how that works, with a movie-like script for visual impact in the nation of Israel from Moses to Jesus. Because when Israel thought they were wise enough to figure things out themselves, they always ended up in a terrible mess. But they also learnt that when they cried out to God to get them out of their terrible mess, he always responded by helping them get back to right thinking and right living, restoring the nation back to what he’d called them to be.

It got the lesson across that God was their source of wisdom, because brutal experience made it obvious that they weren’t. God then sent Jesus, who never made the mistake of thinking he had all he needed for right thinking and right living within himself. That’s because his rule of life was: “I am in the Father,” John 14:11, because “it’s the Father living in me who is doing his work” (10). 

What Jesus meant by being “in the Father,” then, was totally depending on his Father to be his source of right thinking and right living, especially since it was his Father’s work he’d been sent by the Father to do. 

Which clues us in to what being “in Jesus” means – that we now are totally depending on Jesus to become our source of right thinking and right living to fulfill the work he’s sent us to do. With that in mind, then, “What did Jesus send us to do?”….(next blog)