We gather on the Lord’s Day not simply to congregate together but to worship together and to fellowship together. We are sojourners and exiles throughout the week, but on the Lord’s Day, we receive a foretaste of home. We can come hungry, and by God’s grace we will leave blessed and filled.
The Christian church has the great gospel reminder that the morning, the dawning of light, brings forth fresh praise and fruitful fellowship of the saints (Lam. 3:22–23). Why is this important? It was in the morning that the Lord Jesus Christ was raised, defeating death and the grave, setting forth the priority of the Lord’s Day (Luke 24:1–7). The worship of almighty God is not an individual practice but a communal one. The Lord’s Day is a day for this community, when we engage in our calling as a covenant people to fellowship with God and with one another.
The fellowship of the saints is vital to our life in Christ and our understanding of being a part of the church. The marks of a true church are the preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. When we survey the early church, especially as Luke outlines in the book of Acts, we see the necessity of fellowship as it pertains to the marks of a true church. Consider the well-known passage in Acts 2:42–47. Luke puts fellowship in the context of worship. Notice that fellowship isn’t simply a gathering of people who want to be social or those who share similar life experiences. What makes Christian fellowship unique is supernatural unity over common truth and teaching: the gospel of Jesus.
The writer of Hebrews exhorts us:
Consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Heb. 10:24–25)
Here is a call to all Christians that we must not isolate but instead come together. To be sure, there are painful seasons of isolation for some members of the church, and there are also contexts outside corporate worship that can also fit into this exhortation. In our day, however, it is entirely possible to come to church and leave without any real meaningful conversation or investment in relationship. How subtle yet dangerous the temptation to think that church then becomes more about me and what I can get than what I can give. A Christian cannot be an individualist; the church body needs what each unique member has to offer.
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