In the first post of this series, we looked at the priority of worship as Redeemer’s primary pillar. Worship encompasses everything we do, and that includes our fellowship.
Worship is our giving of glory to God in response to seeing the glory of God.
Fellowship is our commitment to partner with one another in Gospel love.
How, then, can we glorify God in response to His glory through Gospel love for one another?
Seeing the Glory of the God of Perfect Fellowship
God reveals in His Word that He is the one and only God. Yet, He also reveals that the one God exists in three Persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And before anything or anyone was ever created, this Three-in-One God experienced perfect fellowship within Himself.
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 gives us a glimpse into the inner fellowship of God before the foundation of the world. He says that He shared perfect glory with the Father (vs. 5); He says that He and the Father shared perfect oneness, perfect unity (vs. 21); He speaks of the Father’s love for Him that He experienced before creation (vs. 24); and He declares that He knows the Father (vs. 25).
God didn’t create the world because He was lonely. In fact, just the opposite! The Father, the Son, and the Spirit shared such perfect fellowship with each other that the love of the One God overflowed to be expressed in His creation. Mankind was created–you and I were designed by God–to be swept into this perfect fellowship forever!
Yet we cut ourselves off from fellowship with God. We chose hatred toward Him over love. We made war on our Creator in disobedience. And what was God’s response? To bring us back into fellowship with Himself!
Again, Jesus makes this clear in John 17. He says that He came to give eternal life, “and this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God” (vs. 3); He came “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me” (vs. 22-23); He came “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them” (vs. 25). And then Jesus gave Himself up to death on a cross to make it happen. The God of perfect fellowship reveals His glory to us in forsaking His Son instead of us, that we could have fellowship with Him again!
Responding to the Glory of the God of Perfect Fellowship
Our response of worship to this glorious God of fellowship is to reflect His fellowship to one another. To “partner with one another in Gospel love” is to constantly drink of the love of God in Christ until we are overflowing in love for one another. We have been caught up together in fellowship with the Trinity! May this reality unite us together in loving, sacrificial, life-on-life fellowship.