Summary
Fellowship With One Another
Scripture paints rich pictures of what the church is meant to be. Alongside the marks of discipleship—praying daily, worshiping weekly, studying the Bible, witnessing, encouraging spiritual growth in relationship, and faithful stewardship—God gives His people the "one another" passages of the New Testament. These passages describe the visible community of faith: how Christians serve, instruct, pray for, submit to, encourage, stir up, and forgive one another. As Francis Schaeffer observed, the early church held two things together at once: the orthodoxy of doctrine and the orthodoxy of visible community. Right teaching and right life together belong to the same picture.
The foundation of that life together is laid in the opening verses of 1 John 1:1-3. John writes of the Word who was "from the beginning"—the Lord Jesus Christ, the same eternal Word of John 1:1. John insists that the apostles heard Him, saw Him, looked upon Him with an extended gaze, and touched Him with their hands. The incarnation is not idea but flesh and blood. And John declares this to his readers for a specific purpose: "so that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ."
That declaration speaks into a culture marked by isolation. Three out of five Americans report being lonely. Innovations that are not bad in themselves—central heat, television, phones, tablets—have nevertheless scattered households that once gathered around a single hearth or screen. With more ways to communicate than ever, communication has somehow grown harder. Online connection can be confused with relationship, and we can quietly stop prioritizing one another at all.
Beneath that social isolation lies a deeper danger: spiritual isolation. Proverbs 18:1 warns that "whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment." When we cut ourselves off from the body of Christ, we cut ourselves off from the biblical counsel, correction, and encouragement we need. We can curate a world of pure preference and live inside an echo chamber where the only voice we hear is our own. That habit easily extends to God Himself: we begin to assume that what we say about God, sin, and ourselves must be true simply because we have said it. We become the source of our own truth—and eventually comfortable enough in that isolation to conclude that we do not need Him at all.
But God will have none of this. In Luke 15:4-7, the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one that has wandered, and when he finds it he calls his friends and neighbors together to rejoice. The searching God gathers the lost into the fold—and into community. This is the fellowship John describes: not merely the health of social interaction, but fellowship of faith in the One who shed His blood for sinners, rose from the tomb, claims us in the waters of baptism, and opens to us life abundant and life eternal. Fellowship with the Triune God produces the fellowship of His people with one another.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison in Life Together, called Christians "a physical sign of the gracious presence of the Triune God," and marveled at "how inexhaustible are the riches that open up for those who by God's will are privileged to live in the daily fellowship of life with other Christians." That is the vision held out to a world that keeps pulling toward isolation, and the picture into which God draws His church through the “Fellowship With One Another” 1-8-23 study and the "one another" passages that follow. John's purpose for writing remains the purpose for our life together: "that our joy may be complete."
Video citations
- “Fellowship With One Another” 1-8-23 — Put your open your Bibles, please, with me, to the book of 1 John in the New Testament. That is on page 211, if you're using a Pew edition this morning of Holy Scripture. 1 John, the very first…