Perfect Fellowship!

"Perfect Fellowship!"

Sermon Series: Walk in Faith (1 of 10)

1 John 1:1-4

Pastor Jerry Ingalls

First Baptist Church-New Castle, Indiana

January 17, 2010

This morning we are starting our first sermon series. I prayed for months about which book of the Bible to start with and after reading through numerous books and praying, I truly feel that God led me to First John.

Why? Because First John is an amazing book that teaches us how to Walk in Faith. This is a letter written by the Beloved of Jesus Christ, the Apostle John, to the Beloved Children of God, His Church. This is a letter written to the early church because the 2nd and 3rd generation Christians were having a hard time understanding who Jesus Christ was and the implications of their faith in Jesus as the Son of God, their Lord and Savior.

We will read a letter written in the late first century AD, most likely 60 years after Jesus Christ's earthly ministry--his miracles, his teachings, his death on the cross and his resurrection; his appearances after death and his ascension into Heaven to be at the right hand of the Father for eternity.

So, this is a letter to deal with people who were saying that Jesus Christ never truly was a human as well as to deal with those who were saying He is not really God. John, an eye witness of all Christ did, said, and was sets the record straight for not only this church, but for the Church throughout history. He is a first hand account!

Beyond his witness, John sets us straight on how we should live our lives because of our right understanding of who Jesus Christ is as fully man and fully God. As the Savior of all humanity!

So, as we walk through this study over these next 10 weeks we are going to dive deeply into who God is as well as how we should live our lives differently because Jesus Christ is God! We are going to close the gap between our heads and our hearts and start to truly live as disciples of Jesus Christ!

It is God's timing that we start this study today, on January 17, 2010. Tomorrow we celebrate the life of one of God's chosen instruments in contemporary history--the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. A man who though not perfect, strived to know God and to live out his faith by bringing God's reconciliation to all people regardless of their skin color. We remember the contributions of this great man of God!

It is in such times as we are in today when the world needs disciples of Jesus Christ to start walking in faith and being the hands and feet of Christ.

With tragedy at the local level with the death of Jessica Wantz; war, a crippling economy and soaring unemployment rates at the national level; and catastrophe at the international level with the devastation of Haiti; the local, national, and international community needs the Church of Jesus Christ to Shine the Glory of God.

First Baptist Church of New Castle, Indiana it is God's charge to us to be His lamp stand and shine the Light of Jesus Christ. As a spirit-filled missional church, how are we going to respond?

Our Scripture reading is the first four verses of First John. Please open your Bibles and turn with me to 1 John 1:1-4; pull out your sermon notes and grab a pen or pencil because we are going to get into God's Word.

God's Word to us today, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete."

The Word of God; let us pray.

This is a rich prologue to the letter...an introduction that sets the stage for why John is writing. I want to highlight three significant points that I gleam from studying this text. If you open up your sermon notes which I have provided for you to follow along with to take notes in you will see that I organized these three points around this phrase, "Perfect Fellowship with God..." Each point will complete that heading. There are some blanks for you to fill in.

The first point of our study comes out of the first 2 verses,

PERFECT FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD...IS ONLY POSSIBLE THROUGH A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS CHRIST!

1 John 1:1-2 states, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us."

This has striking similarities to the first 2 verses of The Gospel of John, written by the same John, the Beloved Apostle of Jesus Christ. Listen to these words:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." - John 1:1-2

In both sets of verses we see John pointing to the fact that in the beginning, the Word was with God. The Greek word for Word is Logos and it has two possible connotations in our Scripture Lesson. It is either pointing to Jesus Christ as the Word of Life or the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the Word of Life. Either way, there is one thing that is very clear: "the life-giving word of the gospel is essentially a proclamation about Jesus Christ who is the living Word of God."

When you take the authorship of John and the purposes of his writing in mind, I believe it is clear that the Logos is clearly intended to be Jesus Christ.

You see, John is saying that He, and the other Apostles, are first-hand eye witnesses to Jesus Christ. They had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, who is the Word of Life.

What makes up a personal encounter? Let's look at our Scripture and you can underline these phrases: "we have heard", "we have seen with our eyes", "which we have looked at", and "our hands have touched".

John is proclaiming that which he is a witness of...that which he knows personally he is sharing. That's what it means to be a witness--to proclaim that which you know is true because of your personal encounter with God through Jesus Christ!

When you have a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and accept Him as the Son of God and ask Him into your life to be your Lord and Savior then you enter into a personal relationship with God, who is the One who welcomes us into His Perfect Fellowship.

Let me unpack this phrase for you: Perfect Fellowship.

I want to proclaim to you that which I know is true and have experienced personally: God is a dynamic love affair (a perfect fellowship) who is seeking to restore each of us (you and me!), His lost children back into a perfect relationship.

God exists as three persons in One perfect fellowship. God is One, yet is a dynamic love affair of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is perfect and complete--He is community! And out of His great outflow of His love, He chose to create this universe and hand selected our world to breathe life into His creation. He created His children in His image so that they could populate the world and rule over it. Yet, being in the image of God He gave us free will and in that freedom we broke God's heart and went against His divine intent for our existence which forever stained us with a rebellious and deceitful heart of sin. This sin nature causes us to be selfish and insecure at our core level; and in our selfishness and insecurity we hurt others. The Bible calls these actions sin.

The Bible is the recording of God's story to create out of His perfect fellowship, and then His persevering enduring efforts to restore all of His creation to His perfect fellowship. That is what John is writing about in the Gospel of John and now is writing First John to further emphasize and clarify God's love and message to home churches fractured by wrong views of Jesus leading to wrong life choices.

Turn to Verse 2 of 1 John 1: "The life appeared (a reference to the Logos from verse 1); we have seen it and testify to it (yet more emphasis on the personal witness!), we proclaim to you the eternal life (eternal life is perfect fellowship with God that is only possible in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ), which was with the Father and has appeared to us."

The last phrase "which was with the Father and has appeared to us" is now an emphasis on the Incarnation of God...the Christmas miracle which we just celebrated! Immanuel, God is with us!

In God's dynamic love affair with His children, He sent out of His Perfect Fellowship, His Son Jesus Christ so that we might become One with God in His Perfect Fellowship. God made a way for us to be in relationship with Him not because we are perfect (remember, we are corrupted by our sin nature), but because Jesus Christ, who is perfect, took all of our sin onto Himself on the Cross of Calvary. God took away the sin that corrupts us and that makes it impossible for us to be in His presence, so that for all time, when we ask God to live in us through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Jesus' blood covers our transgressions and makes us whole--acceptable in God's sight. Acceptable for eternal life! By faith and not by works so that no man should boast!

The Incarnation of God is the miracle of God's love manifesting itself to us in a way that we can personally experience and know God.

From Paul's letter to the Galatians 4:4-6, "But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, 'Abba, Father.'"

This is God sending His Son Jesus Christ so that we may see the God who is Spirit and experience the indescribable gift of eternal life.

Our hearts cry out to the God who made us, Abba, which means Daddy (an intimate term of personal relationship) because we have now become fellow heirs of God--as sons of God we have the right of inheritance (you see in the cultural setting of the New Testament literature daughters did not have right to inheritance which is why he emphasized all believers (men and women) to receive the right of sonship). All that is the Father's is ours because of our personal relationship!

How do we know we have been welcomed into this perfect fellowship?

God gives us His Holy Spirit to live in our hearts! The God who is a dynamic love affair, who is perfect in all ways, enters our hearts and lives in and through us so that the world may know that He exists and desires for all of humanity to know Him.

The Apostle John further emphasizes this in 1 John 4:13-15, "We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God."

John is an eye witness to Jesus Christ as one who walked with Him. We are eyes witnesses to Jesus Christ as people who have been given the Holy Spirit. As Spirit-filled disciples of Jesus Christ, we know that God lives in our hearts because of our faith confession in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the Savior of the world!

We have fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. He has given us the fullness of His perfect relationship!

AND THIS PERFECT FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD...LEADS TO FELLOWSHIP WITH FELLOW BELIEVERS!

Let's get it straight up front that our side of fellowship with God and each side of our fellowship with other believers is imperfect because though we are justified in Christ; saved for eternal life in the moment we ask Jesus Christ in our hearts, it is a long journey that takes daily vigilance over our entire lives to live out the perfection of our justification (our salvation!).

This is the process of sanctification: Essentially, as Paul teaches in Philippians 2:12, we have to "continue to work out our salvation with fear and trembling"...and yes, that leads us into the Apostle John's teaching about fellowship with one another, as co-heirs of Christ.

Turn back to 1 John 1 and let's read verse 3 of our Scripture lesson. It states, "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ."

John continues to emphasize his personal experience with Jesus Christ and he teaches that it is our personal relationship with Jesus Christ--our faith, not our goodness or works, or nationality, or sports teams affiliation, or socio-economic status, or race (thank you Martin Luther King Jr. for getting it!)--it is our personal relationship with Jesus Christ that allows us to have fellowship with one another!

The Apostle Peter challenged in 1 Peter 1:22-23, "Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God."

Peter exhorts, "We are to love one another deeply, from the heart!" A question: because we have perfect fellowship with God, who lives in our hearts?

That's right: the Holy Spirit--the third person of the dynamic love affair who is God! We are to love one another deeply because the God who is love lives in our hearts! This is not the kind of love that can fall out of love with one another, or that kind of love that only loves when you feel like it. No, this is God's perfect love living out through us!

Are you a vehicle of God's perfect love? How is it even possible? Because in Jesus Christ you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

In this verse, Peter is talking about the Logos who is Jesus Christ--the Word of Life--eternal life!

Friends, this is the power of God's Word when you dive deeply into it! The Logos who is Christ, the Logos which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ is what allows us to love deeply! To be in fellowship with one another!

Let's look at fellowship as God intended it from the beginning: From the early church history book, Acts 2:42-44: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common."

The fellowship of believers is the koinonia of the church--more than eating together and drinking coffee together--it is intended to be a miracle and a sign to the world that the God of the Universe can be heard, can be seen with our eyes, can be looked at and touched. Church, we are the visible expression of the Body of Christ; God is made visible to the world in our fellowship with one another.

Does New Castle see Christ visible in and through First Baptist Church? Will Haiti see Christ visible through the Church of Jesus Christ?

Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us keep our hearts and minds focused on Christ and devote ourselves to the life of discipleship. That is the life of working out our salvation with fear and trembling by devoting ourselves to the teaching of the Word, the fellowship of the Church, the breaking of bread together, to prayer, let's truly have all things in common by tithing to the church and sacrificially giving above and beyond our tithe to help those in need.

Truly, if you are willing to join me and my family in fellowshipping in this way, we will be filled with awe and see many wonders and miraculous signs amongst us and through us. We will see God's glory in this generation!

Perfect fellowship with God through Jesus Christ leads us to fellowship with fellow believers and that leads us to our final teaching point: PERFECT FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD...COMPLETES OUR JOY!

Turn with me to the last verse in our Scripture Lesson, 1 John 1:4: "We write this to make our joy complete."

Notice that John emphasizes "our joy". This is a communal joy, not just a personal joy. God wants our fellowship together, only possible because of our perfect fellowship with him, to complete our joy! This is the ultimate intent of our loving Father--for His Children to know His joy and to experience it completely!

Do you believe that God loves you so deeply that He would step out of eternity, take on the human form and live amongst us, die on the cross to take on the punishment for your sin so that you may have eternal life and experience the completion of Joy? Do you believe?

Listen to these 2 teachings by Jesus Christ:

Jesus states in the Gospel of John 15:11, "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete."

Jesus later commands in the Gospel of John 16:24, "Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete."

God is a dynamic love affair whose love for us reached out of eternity and comes to you this morning in a very personal way that you can experience. If you have not yet asked Jesus Christ into your life then in a few moments I am going to ask you to come forward and receive the joy of Christ who is the Word of Life, who is eternal life!

We know that those who choose to follow Jesus Christ, will be given the Holy Spirit as the comforter and sustainer in this life. If you choose to ask Jesus Christ into your life then God will fill you with His joy, regardless of your circumstances, and He will fill you with His personal presence--the Holy Spirit.

We see this recorded in the early church and it is true today. From the Book of Acts 13:52, "And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit."

Brothers and sisters, this is not only a call for those amongst us who need this joy for the first time, this is a call for all of us to return to the God who made us and saved us.

The fellowship that Jesus Christ calls us to demonstrates itself in the Church of Jesus Christ in a way that is unmistakable and only possible because of God's perfect fellowship. The Apostle Paul proclaims in his letter to the Philippians 2:1-2, "If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose."

Our fellowship is a witness when it is completed in Joy! This is the joy of Christ in the Church: when we are like-minded in Jesus Christ, when we have the same deep love for one another, and when we are unified through the Holy Spirit and the purpose for our existence--to joyfully worship God together!

We exist to proclaim our personal experience with Jesus Christ and to show ourselves as His followers by the way we love one another with Joy! This is the witness of Jesus Christ being our Lord and the Holy Spirit living in our hearts! May our Heavenly Father be glorified by our life together in His Perfect Fellowship and may our fellowship be such a witness that draws all of humanity to Jesus Christ