Biblical Fellowship: Live Together or Die Alone (1)

I’ll be away on vacation for a few days, but in my absence I’ve prepared a few posts that are excerpted from my booklet: Live Together or Die Alone: A Call to Radical Fellowship. I hope you are stimulated to love and good works by them.

Introduction

The Greek words for fellowship appear twenty-seven times in the New Testament, and speak of something shared or held in common or partnered in. Fellowship, a shared life of faith and love, is an essential dynamic of the Christian life. It is essential in that it is part of the essence of life in Christ: we cannot be in Christ without sharing the life of His body (1 Corinthians 12:12, 13).* And it is essential in that none of us can get along without it.** Literally it is true: we live together or we die alone.

Going Beyond “How Are You?”

It’s been observed often that we Christians know well how to dilute the idea of fellowship. We reduce it to little more than chit-chat, being masters of the superficial, engaging in the equivalent of a social dance with a stranger, synchronizing our conversational steps so as to move slightly in each other’s direction without stepping on each other’s toes or getting too close.

We ask each other “How are you?” but then don’t wait around for anything resembling a real answer. If anyone answers with anything but a smiling-faced “I’m fine!” we don’t know how to respond and we’re quite sure we don’t want to. We know that we’re supposed to go beyond how are you, but we seldom seem to get there.

I wish these last two paragraphs exaggerated churches’ fellowship deficiencies, but as I re-read them, I’m startled by how precisely they describe much of my own flawed interaction with others. I’m guilty of the sin of shallow fellowship.

May I encourage you to feel bold enough in God’s forgiving grace in Christ to look hard at yourself to see if you have been guilty of fellowship neglect as well? Let’s realize that grace covers even our failures to love one another in the church as we ought, and with that knowledge let’s stare sin in the face so we can see where we need to grow.


* “All believers share a common life in Christ, whether or not we recognize it. We are in fellowship with literally thousands of believers from every nation of the world. Although we have never met most of them, yet we are in fellowship with them. We disagree with many of them over various issues of faith and practice, yet we are still members of the same Body. Even though we struggle to like some of them, that does not alter the fact that we share together a common life in Christ. Neither our attitudes nor our actions affect this objective sense of koinonia (fellowship). We are in fellowship with all other believers, whether we like it or not--or even recognize the fact. This objective truth of koinonia is meant to provide the foundation for the experiential aspects of fellowship. The realization that we do in fact share a common life with other believers should stimulate within us a desire to share experientially with one another. This is the whole thrust of New Testament teaching on koinonia" (Jerry Bridges).

** "We should not...think of our fellowship with other Christians as a spiritual luxury, an optional addition to the exercises of private devotion. We should recognize rather that such fellowship is a spiritual necessity; for God has made us in such a way that our fellowship with himself is fed by our fellowship with fellow-Christians, and requires to be so fed constantly for its own deepening and enrichment” (J.I. Packer).