More than Just Hanging Out
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We are continuing our way through the six main purposes we believe God gave the church to fulfill.
This morning, we introduce the fifth purpose, which is our desire to “Encourage one another through fellowship”
What comes to your mind when you hear the word “fellowship?”
If you grew up around a Baptist church, it probably conjures up images of potluck lunches after Sunday morning services.
Perhaps your church had a meal before Wednesday night activities, and it was called a “fellowship meal”.
We may think of it as the meal time before we start a lesson in our small group.
You know, the more I think of it, the more I realize that we may subconsciously equate fellowship with food.
The picture the Bible paints of fellowship is much richer than that, though.
Biblical fellowship is more than food.
Even if we know it doesn’t have to involve food, we have a sense that fellowship is just getting together with other believers.
We will see this morning that fellowship is more than just hanging out, though.
In fact, there is at least one place in popular culture where we get a better picture of what “fellowship” looks like.
How many of you remember the actual title of the first Lord of the Rings book? The Fellowship of the Ring.
That book reflects a bit of the concept of fellowship we are getting at.
If you recall, the story is about Frodo Baggins, who has been entrusted with destroying a ring that has powerful evil magic in it.
However, he can’t do it alone, so there is a group of different people with different abilities who gather around him to help him carry out his mission.
That’s getting us closer to the biblical idea of fellowship.
At its core,
Fellowship is partnership.
When we talk about encouraging one another through fellowship, it is more than just hanging out—it is partnering together.
To get a more complete idea of what that kind of partnership looks like, we are going to turn over to the book of Hebrews.
If you have a Bible, go ahead and open it to Hebrews 10:24-25.
We are just going to look at a couple of verses this morning, but let’s get a sense of what has been happening in the book so far.
Hebrews is a unique book. For one, it is the only New Testament book that we don’t know who wrote it.
There are lots of interesting theories, but they don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
The writer is writing to a group of Christians who are facing a difficult time. We don’t know exactly who they are, but they seem to be believers who were Jews. At the very least, they are familiar with the Old Testament.
The writer points to Jesus as the fulfillment of many of the Old Testament ceremonies.
He has spent a lot of time talking about Jesus and the signs and symbols he fulfilled, and he is getting ready to start talking more directly about how the church should respond in light of who Jesus is.
Verses 19-25 are a hinge of sorts as he is beginning this new section.
As we get closer to the verses at hand, we see that we are supposed to draw near to God because of Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf—we find that in verse 22.
In verse 23, we are commanded to hold tight to what we believe no matter what happens.
Finally, we get to the command we are looking at this morning.
Read verses 24-25 with me...
Now, if you were paying attention, you may have noticed something: The word “fellowship” never appears in this passage.
However, the instruction God gives us here gives us three main components of true, biblical fellowship.
They give us a picture of what is included in partnering together in fellowship.
It is more than food, and it is more than hanging out; instead, fellowship is when we consider, gather, and encourage others to live like Jesus and lead others to do the same.
Let’s break that down together this morning a phrase at a time.
First, fellowship means we must:
1) Consider each other.
1) Consider each other.
Read verse 24 again...
This may sound crazy at first, but fellowship starts with thinking about each other.
I am not going to ask you to raise your hand, but how many of you may have gone a few days this week without thinking about someone else from church?
Maybe you have some friends or co-workers who also go here, so you thought of them, but how much time have you given to considering the other people God has put you in the body with?
I was talking with someone who was going over some of the lasting effects of all we have gone through over the last few years.
One of the big lingering effects is the isolation that we have experienced.
There were seasons where we all went into survival mode in one way or the other and, for a season, we turned inward to make sure we and our families were taken care of.
The hard part is that for some, you haven’t come out of that yet.
It is hard to reengage and begin to care again, but if our church is going to grow in fellowship, we need to think of others often!
We looked recently at this passage in Prayer Meeting, but Paul commanded the church in Philippi to do something similar:
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves.
Now we are getting somewhere.
You see, we can’t have fellowship if we aren’t even thinking of each other.
However, that thinking is more than just a, “I wonder how Phil is doing today.”
The verb “consider” here has the idea of thinking about carefully or considering closely.
The command to consider one another here and in Philippians is an active consideration that is more than just a passing thought.
In Hebrews, the writer gives us a specific topic for us to think about as we consider others. Go back and read verse 24.
Our goal in considering others is for us to think about how we can challenge them to grow in love and good works.
The word “provoke” is usually negative because of how strong it is. We are called to provoke—other translations say “spur”—to challenge people to grow in love and good works.
Notice the order: love first, then good works.
One commentator put it this way:
“Love is the internal attitude and spiritual disposition that expresses itself in outward tangible good works.” (David Allen)
In other words, you and I are called to spend time thinking about how we can encourage each other to love Jesus and others more deeply and how we can help each other live like him in everything.
This isn’t out of a judgmental heart or a proud ego.
Remember, these Christians were going through a difficult time, so they were considering how they could help each other stay strong in loving Jesus and others in the face of persecution or disillusionment or whatever was going on.
Part of fellowship, of partnership, is taking time to consider one another.
The passage goes on, though.
This can’t stop with just thoughts.
For us to grow in fellowship, we must also...
2) Gather with each other.
2) Gather with each other.
Read the first part of verse 25.
We cannot provoke one another from a distance; we need to get together in person when possible.
We don’t know exactly what was going on with the believers the writer was addressing. As we have said, there seems to be some kind of trial going on.
Scholars speculate that some may have been hiding out of fear of persecution. Others think it may have been people falling away because they thought Jesus was supposed to have come back by that point, so they were disillusioned.
Whatever was going on, some had gotten out of the habit of getting together with other believers.
Do you remember how the early church met at first?
Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts,
They got together every day.
Some of that was formal times of teaching and evangelism at the temple. Other was time spent eating together at people’s houses.
Either way, they were together.
While fellowship is more than hanging out, it does involve getting together.
That is part of what added to the pain of the pandemic for us, wasn’t it?
I think back to the weeks we didn’t have service in-person.
As grateful as I was for technology that at least allowed us to spend time thinking about passages and singing songs together weekly, it was so painful to preach to an empty room with just me and Jamie or Daniel.
The band would play, and I would sing along with them, but it wasn’t the same. We would pause the recording, and they would leave.
Tim and Holly were faithful to record lessons for us, but as excellent as the lessons were, they couldn’t replicate the warmth of being in the room asking questions of each other and laughing and praying together.
We are a people who gather, and when we miss that, we are missing a critical component of fellowship.
That’s why it was so lovely to be back in the building, even if we were masked and spread out—we were together, and we were spurring each other on to hold tightly to Christ in an uncertain world.
Remember, though, that gathering isn’t confined to Sunday mornings.
When was the last time you got together with someone from church for lunch or coffee?
When was the last time you had someone to your home?
I know there is flu and stuff going around this time of year, but let’s look for opportunities to gather.
Again, though, let’s remember: fellowship is more than just hanging out.
It starts with a mindset of considering how to help each other love and live like Jesus, and it continues as we get together.
However, what are we supposed to be doing when we gather?
Look at the last part of verse 25...
3) Encourage each other.
3) Encourage each other.
What begins with considering and leads us to gather shows itself in actually acting out what we have been thinking about.
We need to encourage each other.
The word “encourage” comes from the same word that is used of the Holy Spirit when he comes alongside to help us.
In encouraging, we are coming alongside others to advocate for them, to challenge them, and to encourage them.
This isn’t the first time the writer of Hebrews has encouraged us to do this. Back in chapter 3, he said
But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception.
Here we get back to the idea that we need to have contact with other Christians more than just an hour on Sunday.
You need other believers in your life daily.
This is more than just listening to a preacher on TV or on a podcast—you don’t have any real fellowship with them because they don’t know you and you don’t know them.
Those are helpful ways to keep you thinking about what God is doing in your life and growing in your walk with Christ, but they don’t fill the need for ongoing encouragement that you both give and receive from other believers.
Certainly, those are going to be people who build you up when you are doubting what God may be doing or how you matter to him.
However, encouragement may look different than you and I think at times.
Think back to what we just saw in 3:13. Part of encouragement is helping each other see when we are letting sin harden our hearts.
That means sometimes, someone who is encouraging you to love and good works may be helping you see that there is an area in your life where you are sinning and you need to repent.
Think about it this way: How many of you like a good salad?
I know I do.
How many of you have been in a conversation with someone who enjoyed a good salad earlier and still has something in their teeth?
How did you respond? It depends on the person, right?
If you barely know them, you might just ignore it.
However, if its your spouse, you love them enough to tell them, right?
People who love you and want what’s best for you tell you when you have salad stuck in your teeth.
In a similar way, when we enjoy fellowship with each other, we are going to encourage each other even when that means we have to tell someone they have something in their life that isn’t God honoring.
True fellowship doesn’t sugar coat; instead, we lovingly come alongside to encourage each other.
We give careful consideration to how we can help each other love Jesus better and live like him.
We get together often to encourage each other.
We partner together to exalt Jesus and encourage one another.
After all, isn’t this what Jesus has done for us?
He loved us enough to be concerned for us and consider what it would take for us to be right with God.
Even though it was our sin that separated us from God, he took on flesh and gathered with us, coming as a baby, living among us, and dying on a cross for us.
All so he could come alongside us to offer us eternal life.
Now, he says this of those of us who have come to Christ:
God is faithful; you were called by him into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
We have fellowship with Jesus because he rescued us.
He calls us, then, to cultivate fellowship with others.
How are you doing with this, by the way? What do you need to do differently this week?
Endnote:
[1] David L. Allen. Hebrews : An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture. Holman Reference, 2010.