Fellowship and a Productive Prayer Life
Prayer • Sermon • Submitted • 1:13:06
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Prayer is one of the means that God gives the believer in order that they might enjoy and experience fellowship with Him and achieve intimacy with Him.
Today, in the twenty-first century many Christians do not have a biblical understanding of the concept of “fellowship.”
The Scriptures teach that Christian fellowship which is biblical has two directions: (1) Vertical: God (2) Horizontal: Body of Christ.
Christian fellowship is a relationship and partnership with God and Christ’s body and involves sharing His objective of advancing His kingdom on earth by caring for and working together with the body of Christ in this endeavor.
The church age believer can experience fellowship with God because of the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection and session at the right hand of the Father.
Fellowship with God and their fellow believer is based upon their union and identification with Jesus Christ in His crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection and session at the right hand of the Father.
There are many synonyms in Scripture which describe the church age believer experiencing fellowship with God.
As we will note, it is first of all synonymous with experiencing eternal life.
When a Christian is experiencing fellowship with God they are experiencing eternal life.
They are also experiencing their salvation or in other words, their deliverance from eternal condemnation, condemnation from the Law, spiritual and physical death, personal sin, enslavement from the sin nature and Satan and his cosmic system.
To experience fellowship with God is also to experience sanctification or in other words, fellowship is experiencing being set apart to serve God exclusively in doing His will.
The believer must be filled with the Spirit or more accurately influenced by the Spirit in order to experience fellowship with God which is accomplished by obeying the Spirit’s voice as He speaks to the believer through the communication of the Word of God regarding the will of the Father.
They must also be operating in the love of God in order to experience fellowship with God.
When a believer is experiencing fellowship with God, they will experience undeserved suffering which advances them to spiritual maturity.
The believer will pray when they are in fellowship with God.
Lastly, the believer who experiences fellowship with God and grows to spiritual maturity will experience intimacy with God.
Christian Fellowship denotes the following concepts:
(1) Relationship with Christ: We are all permanently united together by the common (eternal) life that we share as a result of regeneration and the baptism of the Spirit (Acts 2:42; 1 C. 1:9; 1 Jn. 1:3).
(2) Partnership: We are to work together for a common purpose to obtain common objectives for the glory of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ (cf. Phil 1:27; Phlp. 1:5; Gal. 2:9; Heb. 1:9).
(3) Companionship: We are to communicate with one another and have fellowship with one another sharing with one another the things (viewpoint and thinking) of Christ (Acts. 2:42; Heb. 10:25; 2 Tim. 2:2; 1 Thess. 5:11; Rom. 1:11-12; 2 Tim. 2:2; 1 Thess. 5:11; Philem. 6).
(4) Stewardship: We must recognize that all we have belongs to the Lord and has been given to us as trusts from God to invest for His purposes.
Believers need to be willing to share their material possessions for the promotion of the gospel and to help those in need.
Good stewardship stems from recognizing our relationship to Jesus Christ, but it also means recognizing our partnership in Christ’s enterprise on earth. (Rom. 12:13; 15:27; Gal. 6:6; Phil. 4:15; Rom. 15:26; 2 Cor. 8:4; 9:13; Heb. 13:16; 1 Tim. 6:18).
An English dictionary can shed a lot of light on the Bible if we would use it in our Bible study.
The translators chose English words according to their real and exact meanings.
When we study our Bibles, we assume we understand the full significance of a word, but often our ideas are very incomplete and this is particularly true of the word “fellowship.”
Webster’s English dictionary can add to our understanding of the concept of fellowship.
They provide the following definitions for the word “fellowship: (1) companionship, company, associate (vb.) (2) the community of interest, activity, feeling or experience, i.e., a unified body of people of equal rank sharing in common interests, goals, and characteristics, etc.; (3) partnership, membership (an obsolete usage but an important one. It shows what has happened to our ideas of fellowship).
There are three key ideas that come out of this: (1) Fellowship means being a part of a group, a body of people. It is opposed to isolation, solitude, loneliness, and our present-day independent kind of individualism. (2) Fellowship means having or sharing with others certain things in common such as interest, goals, feelings, beliefs, activities, labor, privileges and responsibilities, experiences, and concerns. (3) Fellowship can mean a partnership that involves working together and caring for one another as a company of people, like a company of soldiers or members of a family.
When a believer is experiencing fellowship with God, they are experiencing eternal life and thus they are one in the same.
If you are experiencing eternal life as a believer, then, you are experiencing fellowship with God and vice versa.
John 17:1 Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, 2 even as You gave Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. 3 This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” (NASB95)
Romans 6:4 Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (NASB95)
In order for the believer to experience fellowship with God, they must be filled with the Spirit or more accurately, they must be influenced by the Holy Spirit who permanently indwells them.
Therefore, being filled with the Spirit and experiencing fellowship with God are one in the same.
The believer who is filled with the Spirit or influenced by the Spirit is experiencing fellowship with God and vice versa.
The filling of the Spirit takes place when the believer is obeying the voice of the Spirit, which is heard through prayerful study of the Word of God.
It is not an emotion (though it will result in emotions such as joy) but rather is the mental state of the believer who does not have any unacknowledged sins in their stream of consciousness and is applying the Word to their thought process.
The filling of the Spirit takes place in the soul of the believer when they allow God the Holy Spirit to influence his soul, which He does through the Word of God.
Ephesians 5:18“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. (NASB95)
“Filled” is the verb pleroo which means, “to be fully influenced.”
Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary defines the word influence: (1) Capacity or power of persons or things to produce effects on others by intangible or indirect means. (2) Action or process of producing effects on others by intangible or indirect means. (3) A person or thing that exerts influence.
If we were to paraphrase Webster’s definition of the word, we would say that Paul wants the Ephesian believers to permit the omnipotence (intangible means) of the Holy Spirit (Person) to produce Christ-like character (effects) in them.
Ephesians 5:18 And do not permit yourselves to get into the habit of being drunk with wine because that is non-sensical behavior, but rather permit yourselves on a habitual basis to be influenced by means of the Spirit. (My translation)
To experience fellowship with God is to experience salvation and they are one in the same.
Experiencing salvation is describing fellowship from the perspective that it is a deliverance from eternal condemnation, condemnation from the Law, spiritual and physical death, personal sin, and enslavement from the sin nature and Satan and his cosmic system.
1 Corinthians 1:18 For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (NASB95)
A believer who is experiencing fellowship with God is experiencing their sanctification and they are one in the same.
The believer who is experiencing sanctification is experiencing fellowship with God and vice versa.
Experiencing sanctification is describing experiencing fellowship with God from the perspective that it is experiencing being set apart to serve God exclusively.
2 Thessalonians 2:13 But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. (NASB95)