#30. True Fellowship is Very Special!

1 John 1:67 If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; 7 but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. We are taking a pause this week to take a look back at the journey of discovery we have been making regarding the nature of true fellowship. We began by asserting that the church has watered down the idea of fellowship to little more than the passage of time when two believers happen to be in the same place. Scripture presents it, instead, as nothing less than the outworking in our lives of the fact that we are intimately and eternally joined to our common Savior, our Head and our Husband, and that He dwells in all of us by the Holy Spirit, through Whom we have been given gifts to be used for the good of the whole body. We went on to deduce that only true believers can experience fellowship, and that we are commanded by God to enjoy this means of grace. We saw that the early church set us an example by devoting themselves to fellowship. Next, we began to look at fellowship as a vital aspect of the life of the body of Christ, dwelling on the fact that we cannot separate ourselves from this body, and as a part of the whole, we must reflect our union with our brothers and sisters in true acts of fellowship. Indeed, fellowship is so essential that without it, Christ's body on earth cannot function effectively. We then spent several weeks considering the various gifts that God has given to the church, all of which are designed to assist in the proper functioning of the body and its growth in grace, but which the possessors must use for that to happen. Thus, fellowship is to be characterized by the outworking of these gifts in the church. Here are the gifts we looked at: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self control, wisdom, strength, service, teaching, exhortation, giving, diligent leadership, mercy, faith, helpfulness, the desire to evangelize, and wholesome instruction and shepherding. We wanted to list those out so that we can see them all together in one place, and imagine what a local fellowship would be like where each member is exercising one or more of these gifts with the intention of serving Christ and building up the church in love. Hopefully the very idea is exciting to you, and will cause you to respond in the following ways: To pray that you may know what your gift(s) are and may not be slow to use them in the church To pray that your fellowship may be characterized by the love that underpins the use of all these gifts To pray that everyone in the church may bind themselves to the body and do what they can to see that it flourishes.

Our next meditations will focus on fellowship from another angle, as we consider all the "one another" texts in the Scriptures which essentially command us to use our gifts for the good of our brothers and sisters. Hopefully, though, such commandments will be a delight

to our souls and a joy to obey, now that we have seen what fellowship is, and what God has supplied to make sure it is a foretaste of heaven to all who enter into it wholeheartedly.

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