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‘Our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.’
1Jn_1:3
We cannot escape from God in our daily life. If God be really infinite, He not only may, He must be infinitely concerned with everything in our daily life. Therefore our relationship with this indwelling God is not a thing of any special times and feelings and temperaments, but a thing of most intense and immediate reality. It cannot be evaded or dispensed with; it is the primary fact of life; there is no other reality that can be compared with it. No man can dispense with religion, because no man can dispense with God, Who day by day is within him.
I. How are we to conceive of this indwelling God?—All nature is a revelation of God, and nature must be interpreted by what is highest in man. God in His nature cannot be less, He can only be infinitely more, than what is really revealed in man. That is, if there be in man the power of a rational ordering of things, there must be in God also mind and purpose. If there be in man the power to will, so there must be sovereignty of will in God. But in man there are higher things than mere will and intelligence; there is the power of conscience. You may remember how a great philosopher said that the two things which most loudly spoke of God were the stars of heaven without and the voice of conscience within. God, therefore, cannot be less, He can only be infinitely more than all the highest goodness disclosed in the best of men. Yet one step more. When we think of man we think not only of his will, his mind, and his goodness, but of something higher still of which he is capable—the quality of love. God therefore cannot be less, He can only be infinitely more than all we can conceive of love in its utmost intensity and self-sacrifice. In Him wisdom, will, goodness, love, reach to the highest imaginable point of intensity and reality, and this God is every moment within you—closer than your breathing, nearer than your very selves, ‘so close that He is not even so far off as to be near.’
II. Let us think quietly what such words as these involve.—Here at the roots of my being, in the very innermost shrine of myself, there dwells this God: He is supreme, and my relationship with Him must stand before my relationship with any other being or business or concern in the whole world. I cannot dispense with it, it is vital to me; there is nothing else so vital and so real. The one primary question for every human being is this: How is it between your soul and God! It is not an obtrusive question; it is a most natural, an inevitable question. A man has not faced the meaning of his life until he has faced that simple and elementary question—on what terms are you standing with this Infinite Being? To be wrong there must mean the certainty of being wrong everywhere; to be right there means the possibility of being everywhere right.
III. What is the right relationship with this indwelling God?—What is the relationship that we may conceive Him to desire for us? We know love to be the highest revelation of God in man, and we know that what love yearns for is fellowship in the lower orders of life. He is satisfied with the creature which fulfils the law of its life; we can think of God rejoicing in the beauty of the flower or the song of the bird, but when we come to man we come to gifts which he shares with God; a man has a heart that can feel and a will that can choose. So what God is yearning for is that we may enter into fellowship with Himself. When man first came on the strange scene of this life there began in him a new cycle of progress of thought concerning the Unseen. You find the desire to be in communion with the Unseen in the simplest forms of religion. In the most primitive religions, which are the child language of our race, you will find everywhere this idea, that by prayer, by acts or worship and sacrificial feast the worshipper must bring himself into fellowship with the Unseen Being Whom he worships. Let us not despise these rudimentary religions. They are the first signs of that great human development which reaches its highest point in the intercourse with God of a John or a Thomas à Kempis, or—let us say it with reverence—a Jesus Christ. We are made for this fellowship with God; it is the law of our being. If we realise this truth we must recognise that our life means fellowship with the Father. To stand apart, therefore, from God, from religion, to keep these things at a distance from our daily life, is to be nothing less than a human failure—a failure quite as real though far more pitiful than the failure of the seed to become a flower or the worm to become a butterfly. Ease, pleasure, success, may disguise this failure, but the true verdict is, Here is a man who has failed because he has not found his way inward to God. On the other hand, to be in touch with this indwelling God through thought, through obedience, through prayer, holding to Him in the inmost life—this is to be set free from failure, this is to be on the way of attaining the highest in our human life; this is to become what God destined we should be.
IV. Are you not conscious as you think of this necessary fellowship between you and the indwelling God of at least two obstacles to our attaining to it?
(a) The first is our ignorance. Might not God in order to make fellowship with Himself real and possible disclose Himself as man—His will, His goodness, His love in some human life which we can know and touch, and realise in the closest intimacy? So the human spirit would have been certain to ask. And we know there is an answer in the world. There has been a man here, seen, spoken to, followed as a friend, one Jesus of Nazareth, and this Man claimed that He was this disclosure of God within the terms of a human life. Here is God’s answer to man’s need. Here God has revealed Himself so that we human beings may understand what it is to love Him and be in fellowship with Him.
(b) The second obstacle—what is it? Your conscience gives the answer—it is sin! Who am I, knowing my inward life, to think of holding this daily communion with an indwelling God? There are those who say that the time has come that we must cease to speak of sins against God. Once again an historical answer comes: this Man Christ Jesus came claiming to be a Saviour of His brethren from their sins; the Man Jesus has come to us not only as a revelation of God in human flesh, but also as a power by which our sin can be overcome. In that Manhood of Jesus Christ God is ever coming forth to rescue us from the power of sin. Through that Manhood of Jesus we on our part, by trusting It, pleading It, uniting ourselves with It, are restored into fellowship with the Father.
V. God dwells within us, life of our life, closer than our very selves.—Our relationship with this God must be the primary fact of our life. It is to be a relationship of communion of heart and will made possible for us through the Manhood of Jesus. In Him the character of God is disclosed; by Him we are redeemed, restored to God. Therefore, to take Christ as God and Saviour is to be ‘put right with God’—that is, ‘to be saved.’ So whatever circuit our thought makes it comes back to that first and deepest declaration of Christianity. It is the first lesson of the Christian faith that we learn, it is the last discovery of Christian thinking that we reach—that to take Jesus Christ as God and Saviour is to be saved. This is the ever-living theology—a theology which, though old, is always new because it answers and satisfies the deepest and most abiding needs of the spirit of man.
Archbishop Lang.
FELLOWSHIP WITH CHRIST
True fellowship is the union of a common service of love for Christ’s sake. What really is the triumph of Christianity in each life, in the Church, and in the world? It is getting each one to serve the others with his best.
I. Our fellowship in Christ is based on relationships.—It is ‘with the Father.’ We are, as Christians, not a separated, scattered family; we are all with the Father; we are all at home; we are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, in the actual relations of family life, and our Father is with us. They who have present fellowship with the Father make up the ‘whole family in heaven and in earth.’ St. John wanted those disciples to whom he wrote to have full fellowship with him; but he knew that they could only gain it as they had what he had, ‘fellowship with the Father.’
II. Our fellowship in Christ is based on character.—‘With His Son, Jesus Christ.’ God smiled out of heaven upon His Son, and said, ‘This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.’ It was Christ’s character with which He was so pleased. Christ bade His disciples ‘follow Him’; but He did not merely mean, ‘Attend upon Me; or step into My footprints.’ He meant, ‘Be like Me, do like Me; have My mind; breathe My Spirit; work My works; be changed into My image; be such sons of the Father as I am.’ St. John so carefully says, ‘Fellowship with the Son,’ to remind us that the spirit of sonship is essential both to fellowship with the Father and with each other. Be a son with Christ, and it will be easy to keep in brotherhood. Keep in full fellowship with the Son, by being good and sonlike as He was, and there need be no fear about our fellowship with one another.
Illustration
‘Perhaps an illustration will help you to understand how fellowship with God is not only possible, but a Christian necessity. Think of the public speaker. In order to impress his audience with his subject, many processes are carried on within his mind while he is speaking: memory in recalling, abstraction in arranging, judgment in delivering; yet not for a moment does he let go his argument, not for a moment does he forget his audience, and if he is a skilful orator, he adapts his words to the effect he is producing. Now, what the presence of an audience is to the speaker, is there any extravagance in supposing the presence of God may be to a believer? With our whole heart in our business, we may yet be conscious of the presence of Him Who knows our every thought and sees our every action, so that all we do may be influenced by Him. The working man, toiling for his family, often has them in his thoughts, and, instead of being a hindrance to his work, his thoughts help him to ply his task the busier. The servant may always have the remembrance of his master in his mind, even though that master is not present. So thoughts of God may run like golden threads through the web of our life.’