The Remnant Versus the Crowd

Sit down in a room with someone you have absolutely nothing in common with, and after you have fully exhausted all conversation about the weather, it soon becomes a very uncomfortable situation. As someone who has struggled with making chit-chat all her life, I have faced many such challenging encounters. I have always had a problem with making conversation with those I don’t know well. Backward, shy, introverted – all are terms I would have labeled myself with in the past. However, because I understand what the Bible says about this, I have had to face the fact that the root of all these symptoms is the fear of man, the fear of rejection, which is a nice way of saying, “Pride!” How I hate the sin of pride! Especially when I see it in myself! And, yet it is one that we all struggle with day in and day out whether we admit it or not. THEN, if we want to go a step further, we will come to the realization that all sin resulting from pride is nothing but shear unbelief. Oh, how that light bulb-moment wounded me deeply! It hurt…you guessed it…MY PRIDE!

We’re talking about fellowship. What is meant by ‘fellowship’ in the biblical sense? First, we start with the premise we began with in the earlier blog posts, that light can have no fellowship with darkness. It’s a biblical principle that should be readily acknowledge if one accepts the truth of Scripture. There is nothing ambiguous about the concept.

The last time I talked about fellowship I said it was going to involve sharing or partaking of things. Biblically, those who are able to have biblical fellowship are those who share the life of God in Christ. Christianity is NOT about living a better life – basically being the same person you once were but just adding or subtracting certain things. Christians are those who have received the divine life.

The second thing that biblical fellowship involves is partnering with God – being intimately involved in the things that interest Him – in other words, those who have this new life in them will have a sense of being partners with God in His great plan of salvation. His purposes become the Christian’s greatest passions in life. We have the same attitudes as He does toward this world, sin, evil – EVERYTHING! We see things through different lenses. We come to know that “there are evil forces that are in the world which are manipulating the life of the world in their enmity against God and we are concerned about that.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Part of this partnership we have with God necessitates that we be a people who pray, meditate, read His Word, and do everything we are enabled to do to further His kingdom of light while in this dark world. “We are sharers in God’s thoughts and in God’s enterprise and in God’s whole interest in this life and world.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Someone very close to me once said, “When are you going to stop trying to save the whole world?” I said, “Silly. I know I can’t save anyone, but it’s my job to partner with Him in the work of salvation.” Needless to say, she didn’t get it. She thinks I’m hopelessly disillusioned about life. Come to think about it, we’ve never talked about much since that day.

When I sit in a room with a believer, I will always have something to talk about. That is a truly amazing aspect of our fellowship in Christ. I have been in conversations with Christians the first time we met in which I didn’t want the conversation to end. We, literally, could talk for a lifetime and not exhaust all that we have in common. I have gone to conferences where I have been with like-minded believers who I have felt I have known my whole lifetime. It’s an incredible thing to be part of God’s universal family. There is a oneness there that the world cannot know apart from knowing Christ.

Fellowship means communion. Conversation, sharing, intercourse – all things that represent fellowship whether it is the fellowship the world or the Christian knows. Everyone gets the idea of what fellowship looks like.

Back to our illustration. As hard as it is for me to engage in superficial chit-chat with unbelievers, what would make it somewhat easier? If I knew them, right? It will be much easier for me to hold a conversation for any length of time with an unbeliever I know than one I do not know. The key to fellowship in any sense of the word is relationship; it’s knowing the other person. The longer I know someone the more I find we have in common that we can talk about. This basis of knowledge for the believer with an unbeliever is a great foundation in which to start laying the bricks of the gospel.

That is looking at fellowship from man’s side. But what about this fellowship with God that John talks about in 1 John? How am I to have this fellowship with God? I must know Him. I don’t just know facts about Him. The Christian who can have fellowship with God has come to know Him as Father. It is a sweet, intimate communion between a child and his Father.

Most of us know what it is to have come from churches where there were long, formal ‘prayers’ to a ‘Higher Being’. The ‘priest’ ‘Reverend’ or pastor may even started by addressing God as “Thou, Holy Father” or something to that affect. But looking back we realize that there was no intimacy or familiarity – no sense of a family relationship. It was just a list of petitions given by rote. No heart – no passion. There was no sense of shame, guilt and remorse over sin as when a child who adores his father realizes that he has offended him or disobediently sinned against him. There was no delight and awe and holy reverence. There was a real difference! One could say it was the difference between light and dark, night and day, white and black.

To have communion with God means that I desire to speak with Him and I know that I CAN do that. I don’t need to go through a priest or a saint or anyone else. I go running straight into the open arms of a loving Father who is waiting eagerly for me to come. The door is always open. He is never too busy for this one He delights in…ME! Do you know that love of God? As His beloved children, He wants you to know it. What is stopping you?

Now, I’m not saying that prayer is easy. Prayer is one of the hardest aspects of living the Christian life. We all know the difficulties we have at times of connecting with God. But we must always know that it is on our part, never on His. We will camp on this subject at length later on. Understand for now that prayer is the conversation part of our fellowship with God. It is something that grows in its intensity over time as one gets to know God more intimately.

I have a Bible study in my home on Friday mornings. We’ve been meeting for about eight or nine years. From the 40-50 some women who have walked through my doors, there are only three or four left. Does the word ‘remnant’ ring a bell? Occasionally we have one or two continue to come and leave shortly thereafter. Let me tell you there are not too many people who want to sit and listen to hard teaching for an hour or an hour and a half each week. Any teaching that cuts us open and exposes us for what we are before a holy God is hard, in case you didn’t know!!!

Yet, these few continue to come. Why? Because we are all growing in our love for God. We are getting to know Him in a way that we didn’t know Him before. The more we seek to know Him, the more we come to know about each other. And, can I tell you about our fellowship? The fellowship we have is ‘other worldly.’ Our friendship is based on our same love for Christ. We talk about a lot of things when we go to lunch afterwards, but we always come back to what is most important in our lives, and that is Christ. And we never run out of things to talk about. I’m not saying that we’re all at the same place in our walk with Christ, but there’s that essence of family life. It’s family talk around the table – we are comfortable with each other, able to share the deepest longings of our heart, our weaknesses and the areas we seem to struggle with the most. And there is accountability there. We come alongside and support one another encouraging each other in godliness and holiness. I know we’re not perfect, and sometimes we may even agitate each other as we continue to sharpen each other, but I walk away every week with a small glimpse of heaven knowing that this is love, and the anticipation of spending eternity with my whole family causes me to yearn eagerly all the more to go home. I guess I already have some fellowship with the hymn writer, Fanny Crosby, who said, “Oh, what a foretaste of heaven divine!” I know what that means. I’m certain we have much in common.

That’s what the remnant is like. However, when we were a much larger group, we had people from all different mindsets, many different denominations who were curious, I guess. And even though there seemed to be a connection for a short while, it soon became evident that there were huge differences between us. One by one they each left, most often because my teaching was too hard. I’ve got accused of ‘bashing’ more times than I care to count. In all honesty, I can say that some left because of jobs or other commitments on Friday morning, but for the most part I can only say like John, “They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.”

Then, too, they probably wouldn’t recognize my teaching today because I’m growing, and the boldness that God has given me to proclaim the truth in teaching His Word has gotten stronger and stronger over time. What’s the difference? I have come to know Him better. A lot of the junk out there that is promoted as Christian teaching, which I had exposed myself to in the past, has been replaced with the truth. I guess you could say that even though my eyes may be getting worse (rapidly going downhill after 40), I can see much more clearly than ever before. The truth must stand alone, uncompromised and uncluttered. Clear water, not muddied. True fellowship rests on the Rock of solid truth.

Would I want to go back to so many people in the Bible study if it meant giving up what we now share? Absolutely no way! I know that numbers are not what count, but like-minded people sharing their hearts in true biblical fellowship!