Message by Chris Berglund

What happens when something God has revealed becomes more than a truth we understand and begins to take shape within us?

This week, Chris Berglund talked about something he has described for years as “imagination unto conception.” It can sound unusual if you hear the phrase without context, so he took some time to explain what he means by it and, just as importantly, what he does not mean.

This is not about imagining the life you want into existence. It is not about our minds creating reality. Christian imagination begins somewhere completely different: with revelation.

God initiates.

He speaks. He reveals Christ. He opens something to us in Scripture or by His Spirit, and then we are invited to stay with what He has shown us.

Chris described imagination as the inward place where we behold what God has revealed. It does not produce truth. It gives the eyes of our heart somewhere to look.

And Scripture is filled with this kind of language.

Jesus rarely gave His disciples abstract theological statements. He gave them pictures.

“I am the vine; you are the branches.”

A shepherd and his sheep.

A city sitting on a hill.

Bread.

Light.

A house built on rock.

Jesus gives us something to see because truth was never meant to remain only an idea in our heads. We behold Him until what is true of Christ begins to become formed in us.

Think about the vine and the branches. We can read those words quickly and move on, or we can stay there.

Jesus, You are the vine.

I am joined to You.

Your life is my source.

There is no fruitfulness apart from You.

I am not producing Your life independently. Your life is flowing through union with You.

Suddenly, we are no longer glancing at a verse. We are beholding Christ.

That distinction matters.

A glance can give us information. Beholding gives the Spirit room to form something within us.

Paul uses this language when he tells the Galatians that he labors until Christ is formed in them. He uses it again in 2 Corinthians 3 as he describes beholding the glory of the Lord and being transformed into the same image.

This is where conception comes in.

We receive something God has revealed. We hold it before Him. Faith begins to agree with what grace has already said, and the Spirit brings formation.

Chris summarized it this way:

Grace gives revelation.

Revelation gives us Christ to behold.

Beholding fills the imagination with His beauty.

Faith receives what grace has revealed.

Faith rests in what Christ has finished.

And from that rest, the Spirit forms Christ within us.

From beginning to end, the source is Christ.

Even Abraham was given something to behold. God took him outside and told him to look at the stars. “So shall your descendants be.”

He gave Abraham a promise, but He also gave him a picture.

Then came years in which everything Abraham could see naturally seemed to contradict what God had said. Yet there remained something greater to behold: the word of the God who cannot lie.

That is the invitation for us too.

What has God revealed about His Son that we have read a hundred times but never really stayed with?

What would happen if we stopped rushing past the Scriptures and allowed ourselves to gaze?

What if we lingered over John 15 until union with Christ became more real to us than independence?

What if we stayed in John 17 long enough to begin seeing the love between the Father and the Son, and then realized that we have been brought into that love?

What if we beheld Christ until the truth we confess began to shape the way we actually see ourselves, God, one another, and the world around us?

This is not trying harder to become like Jesus.

It is staying with Jesus.

It is fixing the eyes of our hearts on Him, agreeing with what He has revealed, and trusting the Spirit to form in us the life we could never manufacture ourselves.

No more glancing.

Let’s behold Him.

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