The Quality of Fellowship 10/4/42
Scripture: Ephesians: 2: 13-22
Text: Ephesians 2: 22 “In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”
“Ye are builded together,” says Paul while writing to the Ephesians. That church at Ephesus was a fellowship. “Through the spirit,” he says. It was a spiritual quality that made the fellowship most significant. “For an habitation of God,” Paul continues. This suggests the extraordinary purpose of the fellowship which is the church of Jesus Christ.
Psychologists have talked of the “gregarious instinct.” People have an urge to get together. This desire for fellowship is powerful. Membership in a tribe was at one time necessary for protection. But even with that necessity not always present, people naturally seek the fellowship of other people. How closely we mingle with our fellows, seems to be controlled by a balance of necessities. (sometimes strange; Fido and the pigs)
It was Schopenhauer who gave the amusing parable of the porcupines as follows: “A number of porcupines huddled together on a cold day for warmth, but as they began to prick one another with their quills, they began to disperse. However, the cold drove them together again, when the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their natures. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse is the code of politeness and fine manners. And those who transgress it are roughly told to keep their distance. By this arrangement, the need of warmth is only moderately satisfied, but then people do not get pricked.”
Isn’t this an interesting description of the breaking down and building up of human associations? Of course, people find it difficult to live closely together in harmony. But they find it even more difficult to live apart. For out of the experience, the fellowship, the warmth of human contact come the ability to speak and write, to appreciate what is good and beautiful, to delve into science and philosophy, art and religion. And so fellowship, begun as a necessity, may rise to a plane of human grandeur.
People find fellowship in many bonds of interest and on many planes. One kind of interest or necessity draws men together into the San Francisco Waterfront Employers Association. Another interest leads to the formation of an Audubon Society or an Outdoor Circle. Scots will rally together in a Robert Burns dinner, and come-backers to Honolulu club together.
You can have fellowship among willful sons of Satan and also among right-intentioned sons of God. And the higher the basis for our fellowship, the more permanent is its quality.
Was it not the pirates in the story of Treasure Island who rollicked and sang together until it was time to divide the booty? Then it became the parable of the porcupines again with each member of the pirate crew armed with quills of avarice, bad temper, selfishness, crudeness.
The lower the basis for fellowship, the more noticeable the quills in number and in sharpness, and the greater the danger of disintegration of the fellowship. The higher the basis for fellowship, the fewer the quills there are and the better they are kept sheathed or under control.
Our church - any church - the church universal - is a fellowship. The church is “the company of those who, in the friendship of Jesus Christ, are seeking to live lives like his.” It is a wonderful institution. It has lived longer than any other institution except the family. For nearly two thousand years the church of Jesus Christ has been the home of great people - Paul, Luther, Wesley. Saintly people have been in the fellowship - Francis of Assisi. People have died a martyr’s death for it - Stephen, Polycarp, Latimer. Others have poured out long lives of strenuous, exacting service to humanity through it. Poets like Dante and Charles Wesley have sung about it. Pioneers like David Livingstone and the Pilgrims have offered their indomitable spirit through it.
To be so lasting and remarkable an association the church must have a fine basis for fellowship. “Ye are builded together through the spirit.” That is it. It is a spiritual fellowship.
The most distinctive observance of the Christian Church is the Lord’s Supper. After the manner of our Lord, we take bread, we eat bread - we take and drink the fruit of the vine. Thus far the ceremonial deals with perfectly commonplace facts - food and drink - taking and eating. But the significance is deepened when we remember - as we are admonished to do in Jesus’ words “This do in remembrance of me.” It is not just a routine act. It is a remembering of His love, his unselfish devotion, his serene strength and courage.
It is a remembrance of other things as well. For bread is not just bread. It contains the hopes and fears, the struggles and triumphs, the work and worry of innumerable people. The farmer, his family and his hired help have poured their lives into the sowing, tending, harvesting and selling of the grain. They have watched in anxiety for signs of rain, or hail, sun or storm, weeds and insects until the wheat is finally gathered in. The truck drivers, all the people of the railroad, the elevator operators, the millers, bakers, the merchants and delivery men have all had their part in every piece of bread that touches our lips. None my be despised. In remembering them we may go far to remove the quills of selfishness and self-sufficiency.
A fellowship of the Spirit recognizes, furthermore, the invisible power behind every visible thing - behind a visible person, his soul; behind a visible world, God. The fellowship of the church is based on the recognition of the invisible God.
But there is more than recognition of God. We need to know Him. When the mind assents and says, “Yes, I believe in God,” the heart must go forward and act as in the presence of God. There is no argument for prayer like praying again and again, simply, earnestly, habitually. God becomes a reality to those who approach him constantly.
The fellowship of the church is an aspiring fellowship. An artist made a drawing of a very small boy standing at the foot of a ladder reaching toward the moon. With his hands uplifted he cries, “I want, I want.” That is a symbol of the church. A Christian congregation is a group of worshipping people. Their basis for fellowship is their aspiration for the high and holy presence of God - reaching upward toward the good.
But not even blind or groping aspiration is enough. Worshipping souls, seeking more light on what God is like, find their attention caught by Jesus Christ. They find in him one who suffered long and was kind; who was not envious, proud or conceited; who was thoroughly unselfish and patient; one who bore all things, believed all things, hoped all things and endured all things. They find in Christ one who never fails, one who is an answer to the deepest longings of mankind’s soul.
The attainment of this fine, harmonious fellowship is one of the pointed purposes of the Church. This fellowship is not the end in itself. It is noble in itself - but our text says that the ultimate aim is a “habitation for God.” What a high privilege and what an awesome responsibility - to become a “habitation, a dwelling-place, for God.” We are God’s building, God’s fellowship, God’s abode! We can make the dwelling habitable, or uninhabitable. We can even shut God out. For it seems that there is much that God has chosen to do only by the hand of us his creatures. God wants to dwell in us. He needs the church as a body of people in whom He may dwell and through whom He may work.
end
(Story of the little child lost in the big church, comforted in
the man’s arms - God’s arms)
Christian people are that for God. A Christian church is like that for God!
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dates and places delivered:
Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, August 5, 1939 AM
Wisconsin Rapids, October 4, 1942
C.W.M.A., October 12, 1942