Tenchi
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1 Corinthians 1:9
9 God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
2 Corinthians 13:14
14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.
1 John 1:3
3 what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
9 God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
2 Corinthians 13:14
14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.
1 John 1:3
3 what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.
At my conversion at the age of eight, my primary concern was that I not end up in hell. When the Gospel was shared with me by my father and he explained the way of salvation to me, the idea of coming into relationship with God - let alone fellowship with Him - was of much less interest to me than avoiding the Lake of Fire. I heard from my father of God's love expressed to me through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, but in my child's mind the Great Need was to escape burning forever. It wasn't until my early twenties that an interest in knowing God intimately, communing with Him, began to coalesce in my heart and mind. By that time, though, I had adopted a very...dim view of God, thinking of Him as dangerous, perhaps even spiteful, and certainly hard; He would give with one hand and take away with the other; He would hurt as readily as He would help; He was a kill-joy, not the Ultimate Joy the Bible said He was. Consequently, I had to undergo a very difficult season in my second decade of life in order to shake off these profound misconceptions of Him I'd taken up.
Nearing sixty, I see more clearly than ever that at the core of the Christian Life is not just a Moral Standard to attain to, or a vast body of Theological Knowledge to possess, or a community of like-minded people to bond to, or the Salvation of the Lost, but fellowship with God, directly, concretely and personally. In fact, I realize now that God intends for the Christian Life to be deeply anchored in this daily communion with Him. This fellowship with God is, actually, the fundamental motivation for all I do as His child. My right living, my participation in the Christian community, my pursuit of biblical knowledge, my evangelism of the Lost are all to be reflections of, or by-products of, my daily, joyful experience of God. He is the Main Thing; my knowing and enjoying Him, is to provoke and/or generate all the rest of what I do in my "walk with God."
We've all been made to follow our strongest desires. Not a one of us is exempt from this basic truth about being human. And so, our Creator, knowing we will always pursue what we desire most, intends He should be our Greatest Desire. He becomes this in our lives by way of our daily fellowship with Him.
Paul the apostle wrote about setting everything aside in order to know (not just know about) Christ better and better:
Philippians 3:7-10
7 But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ,
9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith,
10 that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death;
Philippians 1:21
21 For to me, to live is Christ...
Ephesians 3:14-19
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,
15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Quoting Jesus, John, also wrote on this head:
John 17:3
3 "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
Again, Jesus did not speak here merely of knowing about himself, but of a direct, personal experience of himself.
The "beating heart" of my fellowship with God is, of course, love. Not my own ugly, contingent, selfish, sin-fouled, human love but God's holy, truth-bound, faithful, self-sacrificing agape love. I come to possess that love in the Person of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5; Galatians 5:22), and am filled with it, more and more, as I am careful to live in daily submission to the Spirit's control (Romans 12:1; Romans 6:13-22; 1 Peter 5:6). As this is the case, fellowship with God begins to take shape in my life, and as I persist in "walking in the Spirit" (Galatians 5:16, 25), our fellowship expands and deepens, overtaking every aspect of my life. In fellowship with God, I discover He is truly more excellent than the "delights" of the World, the Flesh, or the devil. His peace, stability, joy, purity, faithfulness, grace, and transforming power are quieter than the stimulating noise and flash of the World but infinitely more profound and heart-nourishing; His holiness and love are richer, far, far more satisfying, than the brief, sharp spikes of gratification that yielding to the always-hungry impulses of my flesh produces; His transformation of me is a wonder and a delight that nothing else can replicate.
As I live in a daily experience of these things, of God, I want nothing to intrude upon it. With increasing jealousy, I guard my fellowship with my Maker, ejecting from my mind, heart and life anything that I realize halts, or even hinders, it. This happens with a powerful, almost unconscious, naturalness, not from a motivation of begrudging, moralistic duty, or fear of divine punishment, or pious pride, but from an ever-enlarging desire to experience the goodness and wonder of God. It's this desire, born of the excellency of communion with God, that is able to overcome all necessary sacrifice. Instead of painful, onerous giving up of my will and way; instead of constant and exhausting self-repression; instead of giving up all now in the hope of a distant, future heavenly experience of God, I can - and should -enjoy Him in a personal, direct experience of Him in this moment, happily and easily discarding anything that gets in the way of doing so.
Is this your experience as a child of God? Is your daily communion with God so wonderful that you'll let nothing interfere with it? This is supposed to be the fundamental motivation for walking with Him and enduring the sacrifices necessary to doing so. Too often, though, born-again believers know nothing of fellowship with God - and many think there's actually no such thing this side of eternity! Well, as the verses at the beginning of this post indicate, this is NOT so. Nothing else can successfully stand in the place of fellowship with God and properly motivate walking with Him. In fact, without fellowship with God, Christian living isn't really happening.
Psalm 16:8-11
8 I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.
9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure.
10 For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.
11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
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