On Things Unseen this week, we've been paying a visit to what I've called the Grammar School of the Gospel.

And we've been having a kind of short refresher course on how the gospel works, how it has a grammar all of its own.

Like the English language, the grammar in which the gospel works, how it has a grammar all of its own. Like the English

language, the grammar in which the gospel speaks has indicative and imperatives, has past

and present and future tenses, and it also has positive and negative verbs. But since today's

Friday, maybe it is appropriate that we talk about smaller words, by which

I mean prepositions.

A preposition is a word that enables us to understand the relationships between things,

and most but not all are short words, like to or from, or with.

Actually, all these prepositions I've just mentioned play an important part in the grammar of the gospel.

But today I want to focus on the preposition in.

So far we've focused on verbs, which are doing words, God's doing, and our doing.

But as I say, when we talk about prepositions, we're thinking about relationships.

And in that context, no preposition is more important to gospel grammar than the preposition

in, especially when it appears in the phrase

in Christ, or one of its several variations in the New Testament, in Him or in the Lord.

These various ways of saying the same thing appear scores and scores of times in the New Testament.

I like to highlight the importance of the expression in Christ in this somewhat provocative way.

There is no evidence that the Apostle Paul ever thought of or spoke about himself as a Christian.

If you think about it, the word Christian is used only three times in the entire Bible.

New Testament believers do not seem to have described themselves that way.

In fact, the word may well have been a term of abuse, like fundamentalist.

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