Fellowship – Intimacy in Christ
Pastor Tan Thai · Mar 26, 2017
This sermon explores the deep meaning of fellowship in the church through three aspects: God created humanity for relationship, sin destroyed that relationship, and redemption restores unity. Fellowship is not optional but an essential need for every believer, reflecting the relational nature of the Triune God.
The sermon opens with a foundational theological argument: the Triune God has existed in eternal relational unity before creation. When God created humanity, He said 'Let us make man in our image' (Genesis 1:26), using the plural 'us' to indicate the Trinitarian nature. This means humanity was created in the image of a relational God, making relationship not a choice but an essential instinct. Loneliness is the first thing God saw and declared 'not good' (Genesis 2:18).
The second section presents how sin destroyed both dimensions of relationship: the vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationship between people. Adam and Eve hid when they heard God's voice; Cain killed Abel out of jealousy. The pastor draws on quotations from Pearl Buck, Mother Teresa, Vietnamese author Nguyen Ngoc Tu, and King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 4:7-12) to portray loneliness as humanity's most dangerous disease, incurable by medicine or material wealth. The sermon identifies two symptoms of loneliness: having 'no one' and living 'for no one.'
The third section explains that redemption through Jesus Christ restores our relationship with God and brings us into His family (Ephesians 2:19). The early church modeled true fellowship: believers met daily, broke bread together, and shared with joy and sincerity (Acts 2:46-47). It was precisely this loving fellowship that drew outsiders to faith, consistent with Jesus' teaching in John 13:34-35 that the world will know His disciples by their love for one another.
The sermon closes with a practical call to open one's heart for deep fellowship, even at the risk of being hurt. The Apostle Paul experienced both pain and intimate fellowship when writing to the Corinthian church (2 Corinthians 7:2-3). The pastor quotes C.S. Lewis to warn that those who close their hearts to avoid pain end up living in a 'coffin of selfishness,' and the only place completely safe from the storms of love is hell.