The Union That Has to Be Maintained
Forming a connection with Christ is not the same as preserving it
There is a mistaken assumption that runs through a great deal of contemporary Christianity, and it goes something like this: the hard part is getting saved.
Once that transaction is complete, the spiritual life settles into something more like maintenance than struggle.
The text does not support this assumption, and the actual experience of every serious believer across the centuries has confirmed that it does not hold up. The union with Christ, once formed, requires something ongoing to remain real. Not because grace is insufficient, but because the connection is a living relationship rather than a completed transaction, and living relationships require continued engagement to remain alive.
“Continue earnestly in prayer, being vigilant in it with thanksgiving” (Colossians 4:2, NKJV). Continue. Earnestly. Vigilantly. This is not the language of a relationship that has been secured and can now be left to run on its own momentum. It is the language of an ongoing, active practice that the believer is responsible to maintain, not as a condition of earning salvation, but as the actual mechanism by which a living connection stays alive.
What does this maintenance actually involve? The text names several specific things, and each of them is uncomfortable enough that most contemporary teaching tends to soften or remove them. We must resist. We must deny. We must conquer self. These are not passive postures. They describe an ongoing engagement with forces, internal and external, that are continuously working against the connection the believer has formed with Christ.
“Submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7, NKJV). Resisting is active. It requires the believer to actually identify what is being resisted and to actively oppose it, repeatedly, because the opposition does not relent simply because a single victory has been won. Paul describes his own ongoing engagement with this reality with surprising honesty: “I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27, NKJV). The discipline is continuous. The possibility of disqualification, for Paul himself, late in a ministry of extraordinary fruitfulness, was treated as genuinely real rather than theoretically impossible, and the treating of it as real is itself part of what kept him faithful through the duration of a long and demanding ministry.
This is why the text describes the preservation of the union as requiring earnest prayer and untiring effort. Untiring is the operative word. The effort does not have a natural stopping point this side of glory. It continues because the forces it is resisting continue, because the self that must be denied does not simply disappear after the initial commitment but reasserts itself continuously, requiring continuous denial.
But here is what keeps this from being merely exhausting self-effort: the text is clear that the victory comes through the grace of Christ. “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41, NKJV). Watching and praying are the believer’s responsibility. But the actual victory over temptation is not produced by the believer’s own willpower. It is produced by the grace that flows to the believer who has maintained the posture of dependence that watching and praying represent.
Courage, faith, watchfulness: these are the postures through which grace becomes effective in the believer’s ongoing struggle. Not substitutes for grace, but the conditions under which grace operates most fully. The believer who has stopped watching, stopped praying, stopped actively resisting, has not lost access to grace because God has withdrawn it. They have stepped out of the posture in which the grace that is always available becomes practically effective in their specific situation, on their specific day, against their specific temptation.
What would it look like for you to treat the maintenance of your union with Christ with the same earnestness the text describes, rather than assuming the initial formation of the connection was the entire task? The believers who finish well are rarely the ones who started most dramatically. They are the ones who kept watching, kept praying, kept resisting, long after the initial intensity of conversion had settled into the daily texture of ordinary obedience.
This distinction matters because it reframes what spiritual maturity actually looks like. Maturity is not the graduation from active dependence into self-sufficient stability. It is the deepening of active dependence into a more consistent and more practiced posture of watchfulness, resistance, and prayer. The mature believer prays more, not less. Watches more carefully, not more casually. Resists with greater skill, not with diminished necessity. The maintenance never becomes optional, but it does become, with practice, more natural to the believer who has genuinely committed to it as an ongoing way of life rather than a temporary phase to be outgrown.
Focus Verse: “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” — Matthew 26:41 (NKJV)
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