Below is our second message in the Devotion to Fellowship series titled “The Purpose of Fellowship”.
Last week we began our discussion about fellowship by trying to establish that a devotion to fellowship with each other is a necessary requirement in our obedience to God. God created man in His own image for fellowship with Himself and with a need for fellowship with each other. God created us in His own unity to live in unity with Him and each other. Psalm 133:1 says “Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!” During the course of the next few weeks we will look several times at Jesus’ last recorded prayer in the book of John before going to the cross when He asks His Father, on our behalf, three separate times “that they may be one as We are one”. Unity is the outcome, fellowship is the pathway. We don’t have fellowship because we are united we come to unity by living in fellowship. We have talked many times about the reality that all suffering is caused by sin. Specific suffering may not be attached to a specific sin but all suffering is caused by sin. Without sin there would be no sickness and disease, no hatred and prejudice, no poverty and greed, no selfishness and manipulation, no guilt and shame, no lust and self-pity, no divorce and loneliness, there would be no death. Today what I want us to see is that fellowship is actually an act of redemption; fellowship begins to restore something that has been lost, it rights a wrong, it shines light into darkness and it announces that the way things are is not how they were meant to be. Sin created divisions and divides, separations and cliques, accusations and distrust, classes and castes; fellowship begins healing, repairing and delivering us from them even while we live in the midst of them. Fellowship points men to their Creator and draws them to their Redeemer, it makes us aware that we are broken and that Jesus came to heal us and that part of that healing is not only to mend our hearts but to mend our relationships with each other. In our study of the function and value of God’s Word we learned that God’s purpose in giving us the Scriptures was to reveal His character; that the Bible is the revelation of God that it is not a book that shows us who God wants us to be but rather it is God showing us who He is so that we can know His love, His heart, His goodness, His faithfulness and His perfection. The scriptures are, in their purest sense the Father sharing Himself with His children. My question today, along those same lines, is what is the purpose of fellowship? Why was fellowship such an important part of the first church’s devotion? Why must fellowship become a part of ours? Today we are going to try to answer those questions by seeing that there are two specific things that fellowship does, again, before we even work to define what fellowship is we are going to try to see why fellowship matters. Fellowship with each other builds our character and it shows Jesus’ identity. When we devote ourselves to fellowship we are given even more power over sin and we reveal even more of Jesus’ glory.