Good Morning!
It was such a blessed time to meet together with young and old for food and fellowship after worship this past Lord’s Day!
People think I’m crazy when I say this (well, not just because I say this) but I’d be fine with BYOL (bring your own lunch) meals after every morning service. No need for a lot of organization or planning, just plug in the crockpots before Sabbath School, put the cold cuts in the refrigerator and enjoy a hot meal with good conversation while the kids run around burning off that weekend energy. I mean what better way to spend the Sabbath than eating and drinking and making merry with the people we are going to be with for eternity? Our very brothers and sisters in Christ?
Like I said, I’m a bit looney. 😉
Though I must say in my defense that there’s just something awesome about spending a Sabbath afternoon with the people of God. We have so much going on the other six days of the week. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about rushing around trying to figure something out to eat, or needing to hurry anywhere after we’ve completed spending time in morning praise of Jesus? Remaining with those whom we just spent seventy minutes with proclaiming Christ and His gospel is a wonderful gift of grace which can be so refreshing in ways we may not know.
There is a sweetness to letting others know of the gracious work of the Holy Spirit and hearing how the Lord is working in their lives. Especially on the day that Jehovah has set aside for His people for that purpose. Remember the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. We benefit from just talking and listening. There’s always Monday, it will still be there. Rest for the soul is as needed as rest for the body. We gain so much from attending to the needs of our spirit on the Lord’s Day which gets neglected during the busyness of the week. Drinking deeply at the well of Christian fellowship will do much to help us gain an appreciation to understand where we can get that when we need it. How can we support one another in Christ if we don’t know each other as well as we could?
Of course, part of the wisdom of such a thing is that it would also help us grow closer together as a congregation. In a church such as ours where so many are related by blood we can neglect the more important spiritual connection that we each share in Christ (and we can forget that there are those of our number who are only related to us in the Lord!). As we spend more time speaking not only of the things of life, but of the life to come it helps us increase our spiritual love for one another. Encouraging us to see one another more and more as our Heavenly Father sees us is peace.
Even if we don’t get to do it every week the more we make time for just hanging out with the people we’ve sworn vows to support and pray for couldn’t be a bad thing. In fact, it’s what we see the disciples of Christ do throughout the Book of Acts, in the epistles of Paul, and in Revelation. God’s people always seem to be together breaking bread and fellowshipping. Very little of the world gets in the way not only of worship, but of the community-building of fellow believers in Jesus Christ in the early Church.
Why should it be different today?
We are living in dangerous spiritual times. We are going to need to be growing in hope and trust and we cannot do that unless we are together learning about and from our brothers and sisters of faith. There are so many things we don’t know we need until we find out that someone who is near us on Sunday morning can provide it for us, and we can’t get that unless we are conversating about Jesus and His mercy toward us. There is a mutual satisfaction in Christian fellowship that we can never get from the flesh, or from the TV. We gain so much more from laughs over sweet tea, pecan pie, and ham and okra than we do from drunken revelry as the world does.
The people of God should be like the scales of Leviathan:
“One is so near another that no air can come between them; they are joined one to another,
they stick together and cannot be parted.”
Pastor Morrow was telling me after we finished eating of some Homecomings gone by back in the 1920’s where close to 1,500 people would come and share a meal. That’s a lot of tables and picnic baskets! He noted how Uncle Eb described for him the all-day event under the shade of the giant oaks that populate our churchyard. Some people probably did gather in their surreys with their yoked horses on them. What a sight that would have been! But it pales in comparison to what we are going to experience in the New Heavens and the New Earth when all the elect of God, from Adam to the last human being ever born, are gathered together for praise and worship of the King of Kings. When we look around on Sunday morning its worth considering the glorious day in the future when all that we see will be done away with, yet all those gathered as one in Christ that we can see with our eyes, and which rest our in the graveyard of Bethany will be with us as one forever.
In Paul’s letter to Rome the eighth chapter usually is understood as the cornerstone of the first half of the book, and for good reason. It is the consummation of everything he has been talking about from the introduction, to his description of the Christian’s justification, and work of sanctification to this portion focused on the fulness of the Lord’s blessing. There he says:
“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.”
If we are truly joint heirs to the promises then it makes even more sense for us to build up those bonds in love. Let us take the time necessary to do this work for our benefit, for our kids, our families, our future, and for the wider body of Christ.
Let Bethany, and every Church under Heaven, be known as a place where everyone is welcome for fellowship and mutual encouragement in the great and wonderful peace of our Lord.
Here’s a little bit more on this:
https://www.gracegems.org/22/christian_fellowship2.htm
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church