History, holiness, humility, and fellowship

A first-century believer who suddenly dropped into a modern church wouldn’t know what was happening. That’s my conclusion after fifteen years in ministry and reading a lot of church history.

One of the most obvious points of confusion for that first-century Christ-follower would be the contrast between the modern church’s approach to fellowship and what she was used to.

We don’t; they did.

This side-lining of a vital mark of the New Testament church only makes sense. Our cultural milieu places excessive emphasis on expressing oneself, being oneself, and promoting oneself. It only makes sense, then, that fellowship (dependent as it is on denying oneself) has fallen out of favor.

Is there any hope of regaining fellowship as a celebrated and integral part of church life? If so, we must figure out how to overcome the overwhelming cultural influences of the day. Here are three suggestions for rediscovering fellowship.

Gaining the proper historical perspective

My mom gave my wife and me a cutting from my grandmother’s plant. She might have gotten hers from a plant that her grandmother had. Now, I can go to the local garden center and buy a new plant anytime. They’re cheap, usually healthy, and I can buy another one when I inevitably kill it. But it doesn’t mean anything. A plant with a family heritage behind it is much better, even if it’s visually the same. The history makes it so much better. I look at the plant differently.

We need more history to have true fellowship. We tend to settle for garden center fellowship. Cheap, fast, and disposable. We are glad to have fellowship with someone until they make us mad. Then, instead of pursuing conversation and reconciliation, we dump them and move on. It’s a perspective problem. The kind of perspective that fellowship grows best in isn’t what that so and so said last week, what he did last year, what she posted last month. You’ll never have fellowship if past offenses, anger, and accusations define your relationships. That’s too short-sighted.

Fellowship requires more than a superficial connection to those around us. It requires a relationship deepened by both joys and sorrows, brokenness and healing, apology and forgiveness. It takes leaning in, speaking up, and listening well. The cultural obsession with immediately canceling those we disagree with is killing our fellowship.

We also need to recognize that true fellowship is based on the history of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, coming to earth, being a man, walking, talking, and eating with us. Dying, bleeding, buried. Raised, exalted, and glorious. Fellowship with other people is grounded in the fact that God sought fellowship with you at the expense of His Son. With the proper perspective, fellowship stops being about you and what you want and how you were wronged and becomes a desire for God’s glory and unity between brothers and sisters in Christ. Joy is impossible for Christians if they are out of fellowship with God or a fellow believer. Jesus came to earth to restore that path to joy.

Emphasizing holiness

Holiness isn’t popular right now. Many people see any pursuit of an increasingly sanctified life as spiritual oneupmanship. The worst thing you can do in today’s society is strive to be more like Jesus because that means you think you’re better than everyone else.

“Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for you will be satisfied?”

“No,” our culture says, “Cursed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for you surely hate everyone.”

The demonization of desiring Christ to be formed in one’s life and the normalization of self-indulgent apathy are celebrated in certain circles as opening doors to fellowship. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to most people’s expectations, deemphasizing holiness is not the path to fellowship. Instead, fellowship is only possible by strongly emphasizing it! There has to be a standard; there must be expectations for fellowship to work. Everyone in church life talks about fellowship, but we have to understand that our words don’t mean a thing if our experience contradicts them.

Words aren’t the basis; lived truth is. Salvation is not dependent on your works, and scripture’s clear that that’s not the case. But works reveal salvation, and fellowship depends on them. If you are continually and unrepentantly walking in darkness yet still profess faith, you’re a liar and aren’t in fellowship with God or anyone else. If you occasionally fall into sin, repent, and seek restoration with God and others, you’re practicing the truth.

Holiness matters because a life that is in fellowship with God will be in fellowship with others. It is natural. If we are in good relational standing with the Creator, we will line up with His creatures, particularly His image-bearers. There is a one-to-one correlation between your relationship with God and your relationship with others. If you are walking in the light of God’s holiness, you have fellowship with others.

Ultimately, though, all of our efforts at holiness will fall short. And that’s good news! Because self-sufficiency does not lead to fellowship with God or our brothers and sisters. Scripture calls us to a godly struggle for holiness while revealing that we will never be good enough. At that point, we must recognize that Jesus’ blood is the only avenue to fellowship with God and others. Left to our own devices, we won’t make it. But God makes a way through his grace. That’s hard for us to accept. We all want the boast of self-sufficiency. We all want to be masters of our own fate, captains of our ships. But we can’t. We need Jesus. We need Him for salvation, and we need Him for fellowship. That’s why this last point is so important.

Recovering humility

Pride makes us want to pretend we are sinless. Pride kills fellowship. To pretend that we don’t have sin needing repentance effectively declares that Jesus died for nothing. That’s a lie. Humility is the antidote for our pride, the potion for restored fellowship.

Recognizing that the world is not waiting breathlessly for my next social media update is a good step toward humility. Putting my desires aside for a brother or sister’s needs is another. Confessing sin to one another is progress. Gathering with the saints, even when I don’t want to, greeting someone even when I’m uncomfortable, loving people who don’t look like me…these are all steps to humility.

Fellowship is ultimately just mutually acted out humility. We must be humble if the modern church will demonstrate appealing fellowship to the world. This demonstration requires individual humility, where no one believer thinks more highly of himself than he ought, but it also means corporate humility. Whites and blacks, old immigrants and new immigrants, Calvinists and Arminians: none are better than others. But fellowship will remain ignored and disposable until we all recognize it and live it.

We need to change if we truly want to see New Testament fellowship restored. It will take humility; it will take pursuing holiness; it will take committing to building history.

And it will be worth it.