Fellowship

Our series that we are in is called "Small Steps for Long Gains," and what we're doing here is we're taking just a verse that explains a word, and that word is crucial for going forward with God. I hope you see that as an important thing to go forward with God. I hope that's your desire. I hope that's your experience of going forward.

Today's word is fellowship. We go through the alphabet—A, B, C, D, E, F—and I've chosen F for fellowship. And the verse comes from Hebrews chapter 10, the end section there that Graeme read to us. And it goes like this in verse 24 and 25: "Let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing."

Now, this is a verse that comes out from desperate preachers who are worried that people aren't turning up at church, but that's not my intention tonight. That's not why I've chosen that. And I want to just start from the very beginning and say I don't have anybody in mind. You know, sometimes when you think the preacher is speaking specifically to you, but if you sense that, it's not coming from me, okay? I don't have anyone in mind at all.

A pastor I know read to me a letter that he wrote to himself. He read it out to me, and the letter was lamenting the irregularity of the people in his church. And it was a pretty funny letter, actually, and pretty heartfelt. And in the letter, he resolved to speak about this to his congregation, but he would need to do it over a number of Sundays to make sure that everybody heard it. Made me laugh.

The word of God does exhort us in places, but mostly it's on the foundation of who you are. So the Bible never says, "Just do this, just do this, just do this for the sake of it." It always, if it says that, it always grounds it in who you are, your relationship to God, your status, you being part of the family, etc. Can you imagine, for example, a teenager, and you know, they're in their late teens and, say they've got a driver's license, they're going out to a party on Saturday night. Now, the father could say to the teenager, "Don't do that, don't do this, do this, do this," or the father might say, "Just remember who you are. Remember who you are, who you're in relationship with," and let that determine what you do.

Now, the context of this verse—and I'm conscious that we're sort of plucking a verse from the Bible in this little series—but the context of this verse is a call for endurance. Now, endurance is not a popular thought, but it's a very important thought, and it's more widespread than you think. For example, this morning I woke up at around 5:00. That's not unusual for me, but I'm not saying that for any reason except to say that I heard helicopters buzzing around my house, and of course, that's because the Sydney Marathon was on this morning on the start line somewhere up in Miller Street. Sydney Marathon, 42 kilometers. The winner, I can't remember who the winner is, but the winner did it in over about two hours, a little bit over two hours. Some people didn't finish until about 3:00 p.m. today. I always think the people who take the longest should get the prize because they've run for longer. I mean, it's easier for the people who do it in two hours; they don't have to run for very long at all. You should because it's an endurance race; the person who endures the longest, they're the ones who should win in my view.

Two weeks ago, I was in Belgium. I was in a little town called Ypres. That's how I pronounce it. It's spelled Y-P-R-E-S. All sorts of people have got different ways of pronouncing it. I'm going to pronounce it Ypres. And in this little town of Ypres, each night at 8:00 p.m., there's a remembrance service at a place called the Menin Gate. It's an old medieval walled city with a kind of a moat around the outside and big high walls, and there's a gate that comes through it. It's called the Menin Gate. And each day during the 1914-18 war, the Great War, each day soldiers would march out of the Menin Gate. Sometimes they'd march out at the Lille Gate, which is just sort of around the back, which would attract less shellfire, and they would march out to battle in the trenches of World War I in the fields of Flanders.

And you may know that Australians were very prominent in that particular part of the First World War. You may have heard of the Passchendaele offensive of 1917, where it's said that they discovered new ways for people to die. And one of the new ways was when men or horses drowned in the shell holes of mud. If you were injured and you got blown into a shell hole, you probably drowned. And if you didn't drown, by the time they got you out, the wounds were so putrefied that you would die from your wounds. What kept them going? What kept them going? Was it the thought that they might have had a victory? Well, maybe. What kept them going? What allowed them to endure? It's a good question to ask.

Now, the concern here for the Hebrews is that people are at risk of giving up. That seems to me to be one of the reasons, at least, the letter's been written. And therefore, when you get to chapter 10, you get these couple of verses that all begin with the word "let us." If you want something to remember with, I reckon you can call it the Hebrews garden salad because it's got three lettuces in it, right? Verse 22: "let us draw near to God." Verse 23: "let us hold unswervingly to the hope." And then verses 24 and 25: "let's not give up meeting together." Three lettuces.

Let me read to you the whole thing, this whole couple of verses: "Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart with full assurance that brings faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another."

Now, for those of you who have an eye for grammar, you will notice that these three "let us" are what we might call hortatory, that is, they are exhortations. That's why he says, "Let us do this, let us do this, let us do that." They are exhorting us to do something. Let's look at them very quickly.

Firstly, let us draw near to God. Why does he say, "Let us draw near to God"? Well, perhaps it's because sometimes we think we're not worthy to draw near to God. Perhaps it's because we think God is unapproachable. Could God even want me? We are talking about fellowship, and sometimes the thing that causes people to drop out of fellowship is because they feel like they're too bad. They feel like they might have done something which disqualifies them.

In my previous job, one of the things I would do is I would call up the people who ran the chaplaincy at the universities. And I'd look when I realized which students were going to which universities, I would ring them up and I would say, "Keep your eye out for this person and this person, this person. Here's some names to look out for on O-Day so that you get to know these people and hopefully they might join the evangelical union or campus Bible study, whatever you want to call it." And I can remember one occasion, the person who was the chaplain said to me, "I'm really glad you've done this because one of the things we find is that quite often someone will turn up at university and in the first three or four weeks they'll do something really dumb, like really stupid or something really regrettable." And everybody knows, and therefore they'll feel like they can't ever join the evangelical union or its equivalent. And that can often be the case; if you feel like you've done something which disqualifies you, you feel like you can't join in the fellowship.

But we've all got to remember that we are acceptable not because of what we've done; we're acceptable because of Christ. If you fail in one area of life, it's easy to think you're a failure in every area of life, but that's not true. You have a failure. It might be that you have failed in the crucial area of life, that is, how you relate to your maker. So welcome to the human race. But the thing is that Jesus has died so I can draw near. See, even that is not a barrier. So no matter how I feel, the writer is saying, "Draw near." I should draw near. And we need to encourage each other to do that. When we know people feel like they can't draw near or they've been disqualified, we need to encourage them, "No, no, draw near. Don't rely on what you've done, rely on what Christ has done." And sometimes in church, the leader exhorts us with those sorts of words. There's a line in the communion service where the leader says, "Draw near with faith." It's a great line, isn't it? He or she is exhorting us to draw near with faith when we feel like we might not want to. So that's the first one: let us draw near to God. Why? Because Christ has done all that's required.

Second, hold fast the hope. Keep your eye on the future. When he says, "Hold fast the hope," this is pointing forwards to the heavenly gathering. You are the people of God. You have a city. It is the city of God. It is the city up ahead. It is the heavenly city. That is where you live. Jump across to chapter 12, a couple of pages across, there's this really, really crucial verse. Probably two pages across, chapter 12, 22 and onwards. Can you see it there? "But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You've come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You've come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word."

He says here, "You have come." In Greek, the verb there means it has happened. You have come already. He's writing to these believers, "You've come to the city." Now, it's not the little hill just outside of Jerusalem called Mount Zion, which you can visit today. It's not that geographical place here in the 21st century. It's not even geographical at all, but it's the city, it's the spiritual city where God is in the midst. You've come to that city. And he says, "You have come to it. You have come to the city that is to come." That's a strange way of speaking, isn't it? It's like saying, "Today, here tonight, you partake in the future." You are right now gathered around the throne of the Lamb in the city of God. I mean, it doesn't feel like it here, but the reality is you are very—you are right now gathered around the throne in the city of God. You've come there through the death of Jesus. You are now in the presence of God with everyone else. You are there in the perfection of humanity. The present experience doesn't feel like it, but that's the reality. That is who you are. And that is our identity as a church.

Sometimes when it comes to church and sometimes when it comes to fellowship, we can get too pragmatic, can't we? "What's the value of this? Does this give me any value? Do I need it? Does it help me?" It often belies the question, "What utility does this have? What utility does this meeting have?" But Hebrews 12, the passage says you're actually there already. You are there already.

And finally, and perhaps to the major point: "Let us consider how we might spur one another on to love and good works, not neglecting to meet with each other, but encouraging one another." Consider how you might spur one another on and encouraging each other. Notice, straight off, it's a positive statement. It's not "How can you criticize people?" or "How you can find the problems?" My background is in engineering and in health sciences; I'm very much focused on "What's the problem?" because my job is to fix the problem. And there's a sense in which that's quite important, but you can easily just see problems, can't you? "This is a problem and it needs to be fixed, and this is a problem and this needs to be fixed." However, the encouragement here is put positively: how you might encourage one another.

And he says here, "Don't give up meeting." There might have been all sorts of pressures not to meet back in those days when this was written, all sorts of pressures then and all sorts of pressures today. Help others go forward in the life that they've been given, that you've been given. Now, I give thanks for the people who are drawing near to God. I give thanks for the people who are holding out hope. I give thanks for the people who are spurring us on. Some of us are down, some of us are up. Hopefully, the ones who are up are not down, and they can help the ones who are down. And then the ones who are down don't stay down for too long because they're up and they can help those who are down, and vice versa. That's a great thing, but let's work at it. Let's keep working at this. When he says, "Consider how you might spur one another on," I take it to mean we need to give it some thought. We might need to reflect on it. It may not be exactly straightforward as to how to do that. It might require some creative thinking, some original thinking in order to do it. So consider how you might do it.

But in order to be practical, let me make a few practical suggestions that might help us to go forward. The first thing I want to say is the key to all of this, the key to what we do in fellowship, the key to what we do in church whenever we get together for the purpose of growing, the key to it is service. It's a strange word, "service," really, isn't it? Because we say, "Come to the 5:00 p.m. service" or "Come to the 10:00 a.m. service," and by the "service," we mean service. That's, I think, how the name came.

In New Testament times, it was probably centered around a meal in somebody's house. The New Testament writers write to the church in Ephesus or the church in Philippi or the church in Lavender Bay or on the lower north shore. It's that that's being written to, and presumably it was in a house and around a meal. And sometime, I think probably in the 1960s, they decided that tea and coffee was important. And tea and coffee is a great way just to chat to people and encourage each other as it says here. So the time after church is important, as the time during church, and indeed before church is important as well.

I once went to a church where the minister thought that the church service was just an interruption in one long conversation. People arrived, they chatted to each other, they're chatting away, you have to get their attention to start the service. And then when it finished, they chat on again. And sometimes at night, they'd flick the lights off to give people the message that it was time to go home. That's great, isn't it? That's a great place to be. I used to be part of a church where there was a young guy who was a bit older than me, and he would always come in just before the sermon. And one time I asked him, I said, "Why do you just come in before the sermon?" And he said, "Because everything before that is just irrelevant." We can run that risk, can't we?

Romans 15:3 says, "Jesus did not just please himself." Church is not a place where I just get what I want, where it's just about my preferences. The purpose is ministry. The purpose is service. And here it's to encourage one another. We need each other's encouragement. How do I do that? How do I encourage one another? Well, there's probably about a year's sermons in that, isn't there? Practically, how do we do that? The list is as long, the ways we can do it is as long as you can imagine.

I've known you for a bit over two years, that's all. Some of you know each other better than I do, and possibly I ever will. There may be people here who think that the encouragement of the minister is the crucial thing, but you see, there's only one minister and there's a lot of people. And if I get around to everybody, I might see everybody twice a year, which is just not enough. So you need each other. You need each other, not just me. Furthermore, it's extremely unlikely that the pastor will be on the same wavelength as everyone. He might be on the same wavelength as some people, but it's unlikely that he'll be like that with everyone. There are some people that I come across and they just don't click with me, and I just don't click with them. I know you find that hard to believe, but it's actually true. The person I am—my characteristics, my abilities, my faults, my blind spots, my introversion, my extraversion, whatever makes up my personality and my character—it may not match with you like a match made in heaven. And so you might need to be in the situation where you say to yourself when you hear me each Sunday, "Look, I don't actually agree with you particularly 100%, I don't fully understand you, I don't really understand what makes you tick, but teach me anyway. I understand I need to hear from the scriptures."

So ministry, it's not just from me to you, but ministry is all of us. It's not for just some people who come here, but all of us. You might notice that someone's missing, and so you reach out to them. You might say to them, "Hi, how you going? Just wondered how you are. Haven't seen you for a bit. Are you okay?" You might be aware of someone who you're worried about. Sometimes we go backwards in our relationship with God, or we feel like we're going backwards. Sometimes our mood goes up and down. Sometimes our affect goes up and down. Other times you might know of someone who feels just a long, long way away from God and from fellowship, and so you pray. And you say to them, "Hey, would you like to have a coffee sometime or go out for a cool drink somewhere?" You might ask for wisdom. And you might say to them, "Hey, we miss you." And they might say, "Well, look, I really am not up to coming back at the moment. I need a bit of distance." And you say, "Well, look, that's great, but do you have a way of coming back?" Because it's very easy when you're away to stay away.

I was part of a church some years ago that was kicked off to be a church for the unchurched. That was the idea, a church for people who don't usually go to church. It actually turned out to be a church for the over-churched—people who had been burnt out where they were and they just went, "I need to come here to get my head together, and I need to come somewhere where I'll get cared for and looked after." And that happens. And so we need to look out for each other. If you see people missing, pray, reach out for them. There are special jobs that happen on a Sunday, jobs that need to be done, but that's not all because ministry happens during the week too. Encouragement happens, fellowship happens during the week.

Part of our service is to those who are not yet part of the flock. When I prepare each week and when I think back to what I've done on a Sunday, the question I ask myself is, "How well did I serve the visitor?" because they're very important. The person who comes, doesn't know anyone—how well do we look after them? We need to serve them too. Did they feel welcome? Did they feel comfortable?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a classic on Christian community, a little book called Life Together. It's a great book to read, but whenever you read Bonhoeffer, you feel very uncomfortable. In it, here's one of his quotes: "Not self-justification, which means the use of domination and force, but justification by grace, and therefore service, should govern the Christian community." It's the rule of love. It's the rule of love that underpins service. It's the rule of love that underpins fellowship. That's our word: "Let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another."

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for these words, but most of all, we thank you for each other. We thank you for the fellowship we share around this group here at 5:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m. in the morning. We thank you for that. We pray you might help us to be that encouragement, that we might spur one another on. Help us to consider how we might do that. Give us wisdom, give us grace to do this. We pray all...

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