Four things our church needs to do - #3 - Fellowship
Romans 12: 9-21
by Jim Galbraith, based on a sermon by Darrin Hunt
First Baptist Church, Port Alberni.
May 20, 2007
Credit
I want to start this sermon by thanking Darrin Hunt, a Baptist pastor in Pennsylvania, for the inspiration and title for this sermon. He has done a masterful job of using this passage to explain fellowship, and I was blessed as I worked his thoughts in with mine to produce this sermon.
Review
We have been working through a series on what I believe are the essentials of a healthy church.
We have talked about the primary need for worship, which I defined as the direct praise and affirmation of God himself.
Through spoken and sung word, through prayer and craftsmanship, through dance and so many other methods,
we can tell God we love him because he first loved us.
With worship, we live out our primary purpose – to glorify God.
Without worship, we’re just a social network or service club.
We have also talked about nurture; which I define as the deliberate teaching and training of Christians for service in the church.
We nurture when we preach, teach and train.
We nurture when we help each other discover our spiritual gifts and then use them.
We nurture when we help leaders learn to lead.
With nurture, we produce Christians ready to serve and bear fruit for God.
Without nurture, we produce nothing.
The third and fourth vital functions are fellowship and outreach,
and it is to fellowship that we turn our hearts today,
Introduction
FELLOWSHIP includes activity which promotes and edifies RELATIONSHIPS within the church body, both local and abroad.
It includes friendships, social gatherings, small groups and any activity where Christians seek to enjoy each other, give to each other and help each other.
Fellowship can be chatting over a sandwich after a morning service, or it can be kneeling together in prayer for a sick friend or family member.
It is love acted out with each other as the subject.
Now, that makes me think of a new way of explaining these functions:
If worship is our love shown to God,
and nurture is our love for learning and growing in his word,
then fellowship is our love for each other, modeled on God’s love for us.
(I’ll save how outreach fits into this next week )
The passage we read today is one of the best passages to explain how exactly we can be loving each other,
and when we love each other well we are enjoying good fellowship.
There are actually 24 different instructions about love and fellowship in these verse, but in the interests of time and attention spans every where,
we are going to group them into a top ten list of fellowship,
or, if you like, “The 10 commandments of Fellowship”.
1. Love one another. v. 9-10
- Love – agape, unconditional, sacrificial – God and Jesus love!
- Brotherly love – “philidelphia” - family love, friendship love - Devoted and – devoted – actively caring and committed to each other (love)
A church that understands fellowship is a church that loves each other.
2. Honour one another. v. 10
Honour – something weighty, valuable, high esteem, dignity, respect.
When we honour a commitment, we are giving that commitment respect and dignity by taking it seriously.
When we honour a person, we give that person respect and dignity by taking them seriously.
Fellowship means that we honour others.
3. Worship with one another. v. 11-12
Here is another example of the functions overlapping
– we need to worship God, and we need to do that together!
We can worship on our own, of course, but the coming together of God’s people to worship is also one of our strongest expressions of fellowship.
Worship draws us closer to God and closer to each other.
Worship promotes fellowship!
How can we best worship and serve the Lord?
By being zealous for Him, burning and boiling with desire for Him,
being joyful in hope, patient in affliction and faithful in prayer.
Fellowship means that we worship together.
4. Be gracious to one another. v. 13
Fellowship means that take care of each other within the church,
and also that we care for those who come to visit or check us out!
We’re pretty good at looking out for each other, but how well do we do at making sure the visitor(s) amongst us are truly cared for, and not just counted for the attendance record?
Here’s a great story about a man who tested how well churches showed hospitality to visitors in their midst.
A church newsletter mentioned a man who visited eighteen different churches on successive Sundays, trying to find out what the churches were really like. In every church, he was neatly dressed and followed the same routine of giving ample opportunity for fellowship. Then he used a scale to rate the reception he received. These are the points he awarded:
10 for a smile from a worshiper
10 for a greeting from someone sitting nearby
100 for an exchange of names
200 for an invitation to have coffee
200 for an invitation to return
1000 for an introduction to another worshiper
2000 for an invitation to meet the pastor
On this scale, eleven of the eighteen churches earned fewer than 100 points. Five actually received less than 20. The conclusion: The doctrine may be biblical, the singing inspirational, the sermon uplifting, but when a visitor finds nobody who cares whether he’s here, he is not likely to come back." James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988) pp. 94-95.
We need to be gracious to everyone who comes here, not just those we know. We need to practice and pursue hospitality.
We need to be deliberate about our greeting, making everyone else feel welcome here.
It’s not someone else’s job; it an opportunity for all of us to enjoy.
Fellowship means being gracious to one another.
5. Do not be spiteful toward one another. vv. 14, 17, 19-20
It’s been said that, “A pat on the back is only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, but is miles ahead in results.”
and Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
When we’re hurt by people, we want to hurt them back,
we want to get revenge, we feel as if we have a right to be angry or bitter.
We’re a congregation that has seen it’s share of battles with cancer.
We have seen victories and defeats, and we also pray for many people struggling with it.
Well, bitterness is a cancer. If it’s allowed to go unchecked, it will continue to grow. It causes pain even when we can’t see it, and it can lead to death.
Thankfully, bitterness is treatable! We do away with it when we address it, work through it and work on loving each other afterwards.
True fellowship means not being spiteful toward one another.
6. Empathize with one another. v. 15
Isn’t it funny how a pain in a small area of the body can cause the whole body to hurt?
A sliver in the right place, a stubbed toe, a hammered thumb – they all can give us that whole body hurt.
Think of that on a church level - We need to rejoice and celebrate with those who rejoice and we need to mourn and weep with those who mourn.
When someone is hurting or struggling, they don’t need instruction on how to get better or downplaying the seriousness of the situation.
What they need is someone to come alongside them and be with them and let them know that we hurt with them.
We don’t have to understand their situation. We just have to care.
True fellowship means empathizing with one another.
7. Get along with one another. v. 16, 18
As much as others will allow, pursue peace.
Peace is NOT absence of conflict, it’s acceptance through conflict.
It’s agreeing to disagree.
Churches are splitting at a record pace because there’s no harmony, no peace. Our valley is no stranger to the phenomena of churches splitting because they couldn’t get along.
It’s okay to disagree at times. After all, we’re a family.
The writer Wayne Brouwer, says, “The German philosopher Schopenhauer compared the human race to a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter’s night.
He said, "The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth; but the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills.
And in the lonely night of earth’s winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness."
“Christ has given us an alternative: to forgive each other for the pokes we receive. That allows us to stay together and stay warm.” (Leadership, Vol. 17, no. 2.)
We need to find a way to get along with each other,
recognizing that there will be differences, there will be personality conflicts.
True fellowship means getting along with one another.
8. Be humble toward one another. v. 16b
We’ve worked through the book of Philippians last year, leading up to advent and Christmas.
One of the predominant themes of that letter is to place the needs of others ahead of our own, so that we become a loving, caring church where all people feel loved and important.
Being humble works best when everyone’s trying; you won’t get walked all over by an aggressor if we’re all seeking to look out for each other!
True fellowship means being humble toward one another.
9. Be honest with one another. v. 17b
We need to work extra hard to make sure that everyone receives fair, proper and honest treatment within the church.
It also means that we must live out our relationships with our neighbours outside the church with integrity.
This verse is not telling us to keep everyone happy,
that’s impossible in our society, or any society for that matter.
Rather, we are being called to make sure that we act in fairness and integrity in all of our actions and relationships.
There’s nothing worse for a church then to build a reputation for playing favourites or not honouring commitments or being a bad neighbour in a community.
We may conflict with the direction our society is going,
but we must make sure that we don’t give our neighbours good reason to ignore us or shut us out.
True fellowship means being honest with one another.
10. Be good to one another. v. 21
One of my favourite movies from the eighties is “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, in which two teenage punks travel through time to complete a report for school.
Through a convoluted series of events, they are placed in a position to deliver advice to the entire future world, and one of the two lines they cough up is “Be Excellent to each other”. (the other is “Party on, dudes!”)
Now, that’s a lot of work to get a Bill and Ted’s line into a sermon,
but what I’m getting at is that when we are “excellent” to each other,
or better said “good to each other”, we take away the room evil has to work.
We squeeze evil out when we let God’s goodness into our fellowship; when we play by his rules instead of our own.
That means encouraging each other, listening to each other, forgiving each other, resolving conflicts, building each other up.
True fellowship means being excellent to one another.
Conclusion
If we are to truly experience fellowship as God intends for us,
we need to live out these 10 Commandments of Fellowship:
We need to
Love one another, and
Honour one another, and
Worship with one another, and
Be gracious to one another, and
not be spiteful toward one another, and
Empathize with one another, and
Get along with one another, and
Be humble toward one another, and
Be honest with one another, and
Be good to one another.
Sound’s a lot like how we should love each other, doesn’t it?
That’s because fellowship is essentially love lived out with each other.
Remember that formula we thought out earlier?
If worship is our love shown to God,
and nurture is our love for learning and growing in his word,
then fellowship is our love for each other, modeled on God’s love for us.
And, of course, we’ll fit outreach into this next week.
But for now, let us strive to live out God’s love amongst us,
because when we do that,
we start to see the love of God that we talk about actually make a difference in people’s lives.
