Foundations of Fellowship
Notes
Transcript
Intro
Intro
Welcome stuff...
Here’s what we are doing this summer and tonight...
Let’s get into tonight. We are going to be spending this week and next week focusing on our relationships with one another. Tonight, being our relationship with one another as the church and brothers and sisters in Christ, and next week focused on dating/romantic relationships and the purpose of them. So, tonight’s message is called..
Foundations of Fellowship
I want to park on that idea of the word fellowship for a moment, because I want us to acknowledge how overused it is. The church nowadays…as a whole…tends to use that word for any gathering of people. If you’ve grown up in the church you know what I mean...
Football and fellowship
Food and fellowship
Join us for a time of fellowship
Join us for and evening of worship, prayer, and fellowship.
Go ahead and head into the Fellowship Hall.
It’s a word that’s becoming overused. And like many words that are overused, the meaning of it has become diluted…watered down. And I want to take a minute to redeem that word for us…because the word itself is a beautiful word.
You see, we take fellowship to mean gathering of believers, or community events. But in scripture it means much more than that. In scripture…the word fellowship comes with an idea of intimacy and partnership. Let me say that again...
In scripture…the word fellowship comes with an idea of intimacy and partnership.
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
14 Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?
9 and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.
Do you see what I mean?.....
So tonight, not only do I want to redeem the word Fellowship, but I want to help you understand it’s crucial importance to your life as a Christian....and I want you to understand the importance of you keeping up with it, especially this summer…but also throughout your life. I also want you to understand the importance of fellowship as a tool to evaluate the health of your relationship with Christ.
So with all that said, turn in your bibles to 1 John 1:5-7
5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
Now, I had us read a couple verses together, but the crux of this message really revolves around one particular verse…and that is verse 7. Think of verse 7 as the hinge that all parts sort of swing on. And out of verse 7, we see our first point…and it’s this.
Fellowship with Each Other Flows From Fellowship with God (v.7a)
Look at the first part of verse 7 again…this first part of the verse is a qualifier. You see it there? IF WE WALK…THEN WE HAVE.
If this is true…then this is true.
The first implication of this is that our fellowship with each other, is truly caused by…it truly flows from our fellowship with God.
Meaning, it’s the basis of why we gather…it’s the reason.
The power of the gospel...
Get it out of your heads that you must find people who are just like you in order to be in fellowship with them…get it INTO your heads that you must find people to walk with God.
So now we must ask…what does fellowship with God look like? What does it mean to have fellowship with him. Thankfully, that’s answered for us in the first two verses we were in. Look back at them..
Fellowship with God means:
Walking in Holiness/Purity
It calls him light…it calls him the opposite of darkness, in fact it says he doesn’t contain any darkness whatsoever. If we look throughout scripture, and especially the OT, we see that light signifies Purity and Knowledge.
That’s means there’s no malintent, no wrong decisions, no bad things at all in him…and this passage says that walking with him means we won’t walk in darkness..
Now…that’s a bit difficult for us…but not the call to it is not unheard of....
Walking in Truth
Not living in deceit…not hiding sins, lies, or deception.
Walking with Each Other
You see this in the second part of verse 7, and in just a minute we are going to be talking about how walking with another proves our walking with God…but before we get there…let’s talk about what it looks like to walk with one another, to be in fellowship with each other as we are in the light as God is in the light.
The first thing I would say…it’s hard. And it’s hard no matter what stage you’re at. And if you think it’s easy…that’s because you may be ignoring the next step you need to take in order to deepen your fellowship with one another.
Let me give you some examples of the next step you may need to take to deepen your walk with each other. Or the steps you need to take as you start walking with one another.
Show up
Open up
Grow up
Blow up
Fellowship with Each Other Proves Our Fellowship with God (v.7b)