Read the series.
Biblical fellowship is a two-sided coin, or a two-edged sword, or a two-way street, or something. (The title of this post strongly implies that I don’t know anything at all about baseball.)
I’d like to close this series, and the larger metaseries about the means of grace, by noting that fellowship, our reciprocal care for one another in the body of Christ, is a comprehensive task that involves complex people. It’s not enough to just try to be positive and encouraging.
Read the series.
Last time we considered a passage from Ephesians 5 that provided some basic principles to underlie our exercise of fellowship. This time I’d like to consider a different Pauline passage, one that helps us recognize when we’re succeeding.
In the opening paragraph of Philippians 2, Paul exhorts the church to live out their unity in Christ in several specific ways—
Read the series.
It’s time to look a little more closely at what we’re actually doing as we minister our gifts to one another in the church.
A passage I find helpful in this regard is the opening paragraph of Ephesians 5, which is just one sentence with two main verbs that point us to how we conduct our relationships in the church.
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; 2 and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
Last time we noted that from the beginning we’ve been designed for fellowship, for interpersonal relationships—and that for our time in history, the church is a significant part of God’s plan for that. He even commands us to keep at it.
OK, if God says I’m supposed to fellowship, then I will.
But what’s the point? What am I supposed to be trying to accomplish? I don’t suppose there’s any bigger waste of time than a bunch of people standing around without any understanding of what they’re there for.
As this year began I started a series on spiritual growth, which I called “On Building Spiritual Muscle.” The series focused on the key spiritual exercises that the Bible prescribes for spiritual health, exercises that Christians have generally called “the means of grace”: Scripture, prayer, and fellowship. The next series, “On Devotions,” focused on the first two of those means of grace, and particularly on our private practice of them.
