Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11).

The most important thing in life, hands down, is to figure out how to be made right with God. If your life on earth comes to an end before that is taken care of, you will be separated from Him for all eternity.

That, my friend, is bad news.

What are we to do then? Well, step one is to recognize and acknowledge this separation between you and your Creator exists. But after that, then what?

Many people reach this point and conclude they must try harder, do better, buck-up and follow the rules as best they can. Ideally, at the end of their life they will have done more good than bad (or at least more good than most other people), and therefore God will welcome them into Heaven.

This is, in essence, what all religion teaches: Be a good person and you might get to go to a better place when you die. The problem with this though, is we can’t do it. We can’t become good people, at least not on our own.

Sure, you may consider yourself to be a good person, but are you perfect? Are you holy? Because the gap that exists between man and God can only be overcome if man is somehow made holy. And man, left to his own devices, can never become holy.

God knew man couldn’t clean himself up. He knew man couldn’t overcome the separation that existed between them. Yet God loves every single one of us so much He was willing to do whatever it took to remove the separation from us—even if it cost Him the life of His son.

And it did.

When you called on the name of Christ and reached out to Him to save you, Jesus made you clean. It had nothing to do with your ability to clean yourself up, follow the rules, or become a good person.

Jesus made you Holy.

Jesus made you right with God.

It was all because of Jesus.

That, my friend, is good news.

Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

Did you know there is a difference between the laws of the Old Testament and the commissions of the New Testament epistles?

The laws of the Old Testament are telling us, “You must do this or else there will be punishment.” The commissions of the New Testament are telling us, “Because of the power of Christ within you, this is how you get to act now.”

See the difference?

The New Testament isn’t a bunch of additional rules and commands telling us how to live a good life for Jesus. It’s telling us who we are now that we are in Christ. The New Testament is telling us what it will look like when we let Jesus live His life through us.

Any time you find what appears to be a command in the New Testament epistles, look for an “in Christ” statement nearby. I’ve found it’s always close by. For example, look at the following verse from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth:

Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body (1 Corinthians 6:18).

How many times have you read that as a command telling you to resist sexual temptation by your own power…or else? But look at the two verses immediately following:

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).

Paul knew the church in Corinth hadn’t fallen back into sexual immorality because they were too weak to resist temptation. It was because they had forgotten who they were in Christ. They forgot they had the power of the Holy Spirit living within them.

Instead of telling them to shape up and knock off their bad behavior, Paul simply reminds them to remember who they are now that they are in Christ.

Likewise, if you are struggling with sexual immorality, it’s not because you are still a slave to sin, it’s because you have forgotten who you are in Christ. If you can remember that the Holy Spirit now lives within you, you can rely on Him to give you the power to honor God with your body.

But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him (1 Corinthians 6:17).

When I read about being one with the Lord in Spirit, I immediately think back to the earthly example of this that God gives us all the way back in the Garden of Eden:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).

Yes, part of what this verse is talking about is the sexual union between a husband and wife, but it actually goes much, much deeper than that. As we see later when Jesus quotes this verse in his response to the Pharisees, this union is the literal joining together of two individuals by God.

Two separate persons becoming one in spirit.

As I write this, it’s been just over a week since my wedding. Needless to say, this idea of “two becoming one” has been on my mind a lot lately.

For the past year or so, I’ve been falling more and more in love with the woman who has now become my wife. During that time, I desired to learn everything I could about her, discover what makes her happy, and learn to avoid doing anything that might make her question why she keeps hanging out with me. I wanted to be with her as much as I could. Even if we were doing nothing together, at least we were together.

As great as this was, at the end of each day she would go back to her house or I would go back to mine, we deposited our paychecks into separate accounts, and we didn’t even have the same last name.

We were together, but we had not yet become one.

Today, however, thanks to the covenant of marriage, we are one. We now share the same house, the same bank account, and the same last name. Deeper than that though, our souls have been joined together by God. We have become one in spirit.

Yes, we are still two distinct individuals, but from here out, we will always be one entity: “The Kuhn’s.”

The same is true with you and Jesus.

There may have been a period before you trusted Christ when you we’re intersted in finding out more about Him—a time when you wished to discover if He truly was who He said He was.

Or perhaps you spent many years trying to impress Him with behavior and sacrifices in order to feel closer to Him (That was my story).

If you’ve never made the commitment of trusting Him as your savior though, you’ve only been courting Him. You’re still going home to separate houses each night.

If, however, you have trusted Jesus with your life, then you’ve already become one with Him in Spirit.

Your eternity has been fully aligned with His eternity.

Your debts were completely satisfied when He added His signature to your spiritual bank account.

Even your heavenly name has been changed to reflect who you are now that you’re in permanent union with Christ.

Everything changed for me the moment I pledged myself to my wife on our wedding day and the two of us became one in God’s eyes. As wonderful as this has been for us though, it is nothing compared to the eternal union we’ve received with our Lord and Savior.

And being able to know that we’ve been made one in spirit with the Lord, well, that is truly something worth celebrating

God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin (1 Corinthians 1:30).

For the most part, school came fairly easily for me. I don’t recall ever getting a poor grade on a test or paper unless I purposefully chose to blow it off (which is a whole nother story). As long as I paid attention and read my assignments, I could get a decent grade without having to put in too much effort.

For an overly imaginative and creative kid like me, this was both a blessing and a curse. Sure, I could breeze through my homework quicker than most kids, which was a good thing. But then what was I supposed to do with all my free time?

In my younger years, I would typically play with Legos, read Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, or draw epic Ninja Turtles vs. Star Wars battles. As I got older though, my decision-making skills seemed to regress.

Instead of building robots, I decided to stink-bomb the school cafeteria.

Instead of reading books, I chose to look at porn.

Instead of battling with action figures, I broke into cars for drug money.

The irony is, no matter how much trouble I got myself into, my grades never dropped. I remained on the honor roll at school despite all my poor decision-making.

I may have had a ton of knowledge, but I clearly didn’t have enough wisdom.

Wisdom is “the knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action”(1). You can know true facts about a million different things, but if you don’t know how to apply that information to your life, it’s just knowledge. Knowing facts and information may get you into the final round of Jeopardy, but it won’t help you navigate life unless you pair it with wisdom.

True wisdom, however, isn’t something you generate on your own. As Paul shows us in this verse, the source of true wisdom is Jesus: “God made [Christ] to be wisdom itself.”

Once again, Paul is speaking in the past tense. God made… It’s been done.

Furthermore, God did this for our benefit. He knew that many of the decisions we would be faced with in life would far exceed our pay-grades. Which is why He made Christ to be the embodiment of wisdom, placed Him within us, and granted us full access to everything we will ever need to know.

As Charles Ellicott says in his Commentary for English Readers:

“Christ became to us God’s revelation of Himself, thus giving us a wisdom from the source of all wisdom, which surpasses utterly any wisdom we could have derived from nature or from man” (2).

You can rest assured that God will never bring you to a tough decision only to leave you hanging. If you find yourself in a situation where you need wisdom, remember that Wisdom itself already lives inside of you. All you need to do is ask for it. He will make your path clear or give you the words to say.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that God’s widom far exceeds my own. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I have a feeling my decision to stink-bomb the school cafeteria wouldn’t have seemed like such a great idea if I’d sought the Lord’s wisdom first.

But then again, if I had asked Him, I probably would have missed out on all those fun hours I spent staring at the wall of the detention room.