True Fellowship
I John 1:3-2:2
SIGNS YOU LIVE IN THE YEAR 2001...
1. You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.
2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
3. You call your son’s beeper to let him know it’s time to eat. He emails you back from his bedroom,
"What’s for dinner?"
4. Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her web site.
5. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven’t spoken with your next
door neighbor this year.
6. Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.
7. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.
8. Every commercial on television has a web-site address at the bottom of the screen.
9. You buy a computer and 6 months later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.
11. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 years of your life,
is cause for panic and turning around to go get it.
12. Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and take planning.
13. Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.
14. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have e-mail addresses.
15. You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.
16. Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.
17. Your idea of being organized is multiple-colored Post-it notes.
18. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.
19. You get an extra phone line (or a ADSL/cable modem) so you can get phone calls.
20. You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved
one.
21. You get up in morning and go online before getting your coffee.
22. You wake up at 2 am to go to the bathroom and check your E-mail on your way back to bed.
23. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)
24. You’re reading this.
25. Even worse; you’re going to forward it to someone else
This is life in 2001? No wonder there is a sense of alienation, it seems we are losing a sense of personal touch. Banks are getting automated, don’t even need to go out to go shopping for Christmas, you can do it on-line. Our fast pace hi tech life has left us all breathless, has it not? It seems “instant noodles” or “microwave relationships” are more than appropriate metaphors for our lifestyle. We want things that zip by fast, fast cars, fast ferries, fast food, faster computers, quick results, don’t we? Who of us have not ever been frustrated by how long one can download something from the internet, line-ups, traffic tie-ups? Those in first year university can’t wait to finish 4 year degree. Those in final year can’t wait to get out of the “real world” to work. I wonder because of this desire in us for this fast pace of life, is true Christian fellowship in trouble? How do we get hooked up to real biblical fellowship?
A. Spiritual Ties
Fellowship is a word that is often misunderstood. While it undoubtedly brings up wonderful memories of teriyaki chicken and coffee and kuchen, that is not the biblical idea of fellowship. In fact, we read in 1 John 1:3 (NLT)
3 We are telling you about what we ourselves have actually seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. The fellowship is based on spiritual ties we have with God and each other through Jesus! Nothing to do with Tim Horton’s donuts or Starbucks!
It is by The shedding of Jesus’ blood
19 And so, dear brothers and sisters, we can boldly enter heaven’s Most Holy Place because of the blood of Jesus. 20 This is the new, life-giving way that Christ has opened up for us through the sacred curtain, by means of his death for us.
(Heb.10:19-20)
--Before Jesus, God’s people had many restrictions placed upon them when they wanted to come into God’s presence. In fact, only the high priest could enter into the “Most Holy Place,” and then only on certain days and under certain conditions.
--Now, however, those who have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus have received the freedom to enter into God’s presence with continually and with confidence.
The sacrifice of Jesus’ body (10:20)
--When Jesus gave His body upon the cross, the curtain in the tabernacle was torn in 2, and, a new way was provided to meet God. We have direct access to God through the shed blood and torn body of Jesus.
Do u see, understand what happened here?
The Grasshopper and The Ant
The mother of a nine-year-old boy named Mark received a phone call in the middle of the afternoon. It was the teacher from her son’s school. "Mrs. Smith, something unusual happened today in your son’s third grade class. Your son did something that surprised me so much that I thought you should know about it immediately." That was not a particularly comforting thing to say to her. The teacher continued, "Nothing like this has happened in all my years of teaching.
This morning I was teaching a lesson on creative writing. And as I always do, I tell the story of the ant and the grasshopper: The ant works hard all summer and stores up plenty of food. But the grasshopper plays all summer and does no work." "Then winter comes. The grasshopper begins to starve because he has no food. So he begs, Please Mr. Ant, you have so much food. Please let me eat, too." Then I say, "Boys and girls, your job is to write the end of the story." Your son, Mark, raised his hand: ’Teacher, may I draw a picture?’ "Well, yes, Mark, if you like, you may draw a picture. But first you must write the ending to the story." "
As in all the years past, most of the students said the ant shared his food through the winter, and both the ant and the grasshopper lived. A few children wrote, ’No, Mr. Grasshopper. You should have worked in the summer. Now, I have just enough food for myself.’ So the ant lived and the grasshopper died." "But your son ended the story in a way different from any other child, ever. He wrote, "So the ant gave all of his food to the grasshopper; and the grasshopper lived through the winter. But the ant died."
And the picture? At the bottom of the page, Mark had drawn three crosses. The cross reminds us that our salvation came at great cost to God. His Son gave up his life that we might keep ours.
I John continues to say:
4 We are writing these things so that our joy will be complete.
5 This is the message he has given us to announce to you: God is light and there is no darkness in him at all. 6 So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness. We are not living in the truth. 7 But if we are living in the light of God’s presence, just as Christ is, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin.
Question: Are you and I living in sp. Darkness? Have we seen God’s light yet?
Can u see that true biblical fellowship is not something made up of earthly materials? It is not coffee and cake, it is not spending time with people. It is about existing in the Light! It is about our spiritual selves living in God’s presence… that’s the thing that tie us together. If we have sinful habits, or are in spiritual darkness, we have no fellowship at all. Light cannot coexist with darkness. Light comes, darkness disappears. How does one get to the place of the light of God’s presence without being disintegrated by His light, how can we who are of the dark side stand withstand the brilliance of light. Answer: Jesus!
True test of fellowship is then the cornerstone of Christian theology – Jesus died for our sins, His blood cleanses us from every sin! This is how we get to the place of fellowship with each other. It is not a card that says you are a church member. It is not a thing you can buy. According to John, then, if one is not cleansed yet, he or she cannot experience true fellowship with God or with Christian people. Want to exp. True fellowship? Then we need Jesus – we need cleansing and we don’t have it, we need to ask for cleansing! Since there is no one here that’s sinless, we need to be humble confess, admit failure, mistakes, on a daily basis. Let Jesus take care of our sins!
8 If we say we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth. 9 But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong. 10 If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.
True fellowship then is about humbly admitting we are sinners, saved by grace, as we confess all our faults, he will forgive us. No one can say they have no sin, or else we call God a liar, demonstrates we don’t need grace, don’t need God. In other words, real Christians, that have found fellowship, are a group of people who are clearly admitted sinners, who needs lots of mercy and praise God that His grace is enough to cover every sin. It is really stifling to be in a group of folks who have perfect answers, perfect lives. Go to homes of folks everything is perfect, you can’t feel at home, wonder if your feet smells, are dressed well etc? But go to modest home, with things not so perfect, u feel u can relax. That’s how God is, he knows very well how things are not perfect with us, and says relax man, got it covered. Fellowship with me is sweet cos Jesus perfectly tidied up all the ugliness and dirt of sin. Light has come into your life, darkness is gone!
Does this mean we can go on sinning since we are covered up with the penalty for sin paid up in Jesus? Hear 1 John 2
2 My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if you do sin, there is someone to plead for you before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who pleases God completely. 2 He is the sacrifice for our sins. He takes away not only our sins but the sins of all the world.
Point here is to relax, god forgave us all our sins, in fact Jesus who pleads for us, if we trust Him to do so for us. Question do u trust Him like that? Do you have true feloowship?
Conclusion
True fellowship begin with understanding we are all cut from the same cloth.
1. All of us sin, therefore we are all sinners.
2. God knows how hopeless we are, and He provided Jesus to take away all sin.
Next step in true fellowship is - trust Jesus, only when we trust Jesus we know we can be at home with God and each other.
Third step is to come together in Christ have fellowship in Him together: Worship!
perhaps u have not felt good about coming together...
Illus. Wayne Brouwer, in his article in Leadership says, “The German philosopher Schopenhauer compared the human race to a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter’s night. He said, "The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth; but the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. And in the lonely night of earth’s winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness." Our lives tend toward this right? Don’t feel good eh?
“Christ has given us an alternative: to forgive each other for the pokes we receive. That allows us to stay together and stay warm.” (Leadership, Vol. 17, no. 2.)
True feelowship requires us to be like Christ to each other, we need the warmth of each other, to stay on fire for God and have a passion for life.
1 John 1:7
But if we are living in the light of God’s presence, just as Christ is, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin.
In the fall of the year, Linda, a young woman, was traveling alone up the rutted and rugged highway from Alberta to the Yukon. Linda didn’t know you don’t travel to Whitehorse alone in a rundown Honda Civic, so she set off where only four-wheel drives normally venture. The first evening she found a room in the mountains near a summit and asked for a 5 A.M. wakeup call so she could get an early start. She couldn’t understand why the clerk looked surprised at that request, but as she awoke to early-morning fog shrouding the mountain tops, she understood.
Not wanting to look foolish, she got up and went to breakfast. Two truckers invited Linda to join them, and since the place was so small, she felt obliged. “Where are you headed?” one of the truckers asked.
‘Whitehorse’
“In that little Civic? No way! This pass is DANGEROUS in weather like this.”
“Well, I’m determined to try,” was Linda’s gutsy, if not very informed, response.
“Then I guess we’re just going to have to hug you,” the trucker suggested.
Linda drew back. “There’s no way I’m going to let you touch me!”
“Not like THAT!” the truckers chuckled. “We’ll put one truck in front of you and one in the rear. In that way, we’ll get you through the mountains.”
All that foggy morning Linda followed the two red dots in front of her and had the reassurance of a big escort behind as they made their way safely through the mountains.
Caught in the fog in our dangerous passage through life, we need to be “hugged.” With fellow Christians who know the way and can lead safely ahead of us, and with others behind, gently encouraging us along, we, too, can pass safely. - Don Graham
Charles Swindoll, Growing Strong, p. 286.
As we gear up for Christmas, year 2002 I trust we will have true fellowship with God, i.e a hug from God and because of Christ in us, a hug from each other. Have you got true fellowship?
