By John N. Oswalt, FAS Speaker
We proclaim to you what we ourselves have actually seen and heard so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
1 John 1:3 NLT
So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth.
1 John 1:6 NLT
So you must remain faithful to what you have been taught from the beginning. If you do, you will remain in fellowship with the Son and with the Father. And in this fellowship we enjoy the eternal life he promised us.
1 John 2:24–25 NLT
I know you have had the same experience I have had in reading the Bible: a passage you have read a hundred times suddenly catches your attention in a way it had not before. 1 John 1:3 did that for me recently. The only reason John is telling people about his experience with Jesus is so that they can have fellowship with the disciples, who happen to be in fellowship with God? Is that all?
Well, of course that is not all! But the problem was not in the Bible, it was in my shallow understanding of the word “fellowship.” What is fellowship? Well, it is talking together with Christian friends after church, or perhaps in a little more extended way at a church supper. As a matter of fact, while we need not dismiss those, fellowship as John and the rest of the New Testament uses it, is much more than that. The NLT effectively captures that when it translates the older versions, “abide” (e.g., 1 John 2:24–25) with “remain in fellowship.”
What are we talking about? Salvation is not finally about having our sins forgiven and going to heaven. It is about coming to be “in” God: to live in him, to experience him through the real presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and as a result to be bound in the same way to Christian brothers and sisters. We will go to heaven together or not at all. To “abide” in God is to have a living relationship with him that changes everything. John wants us to have the eternal life that Jesus’s Cross and Resurrection makes possible. But that eternal life is found in no longer living in lonely selfish isolation, but in coming to be “joined at the hip” with God. That is fellowship. Do you have that?
Read more devotionals from Dr. Oswalt on his blog site: calledtobetransformed.net.