87. Fellowship of His Son
1 Corinthians 1:9 God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian Church and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith. He creates the fellowship of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and our Lord. Jesus is the fellow we follow, and all who follow Jesus are a “band of brothers” mutually looking out for and caring for one another. All believers are related to each other with Christ as the center with whom each one is directly in a loving relationship. Believers are united to Christ by faith and as a consequence each is related to every other believer in Christ. Thus there is a fellowship. A fellowship is a group of disparate individuals related to the others in a group because of a commitment to a common interest. The interest, or shared experience, binds the members together. In this case the common interest is Jesus Christ. We all believe in Him, know Him, love Him and are committed to Him.
The individuals in the group may be very diverse in all the other interests of their lives with no commonality, but in the most important aspect of life there is a common bond. This bond of peace is a strong bond of love for one another because of Christ.There is an unseen unity in this fellowship that is in the Spirit. Since that unity is believed, but not seen, the spiritual unity is disturbed with factions, divisions, parties, denominations, and acrimony (divorce and even war) because of selfish human sinfulness, which is much more visible. It is easier to focus on the differences that we see than on the unity that we don’t see. When believers focus on the differences between them rather than on the Christ that binds them they miss out on the joys of fellowship, and what is designed for peace becomes war.
Fellowship and family relationships need to bind together in the Christ they love instead of the self they love. For this reason we need to believe the promise of the fellowship of Jesus because it is still true and real, whether we see and feel it or not. The fellowship is still there: it can be disturbed but not removed; it can be ignored but it won’t go away forever. We are called into the fellowship.
The fellowship metaphor is similar to the family metaphor in Scripture in that there a unifying bond within each group. The unifying bond is Jesus Christ, and He is the commonality that unites us with one another and with God. The fellowship is meant to be enjoyable and mutually edifying, not disruptive or divisive or divorceable. God joined us together in Christ; we cannot separate the union any more than we can be separated from Christ.