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 speaks has indicative and imperatives has passed and present and

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

maybe it's 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 two 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 are 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. The New Testament way of answering

the question, who are you, believer? Is by this prepositional phrase, I am someone in Christ.

I've said before on the podcast that I started reading the Bible when I was about nine.

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