In 1 John 1:3, John writes that “our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” And that was something John really understood, because in the years he’d spent as a disciple, watching and learning from Jesus, he’d come to love Jesus very much, and he knew Jesus loved him too (John 13:23).
John also understood that fellowship is with both the Father and Jesus, because in “knowing Jesus,” he wrote, we “know the Father as well” (John 14:7). It was also John who quoted Jesus saying that “the Father himself loves you because you loved me” (16:27). Again, fellowship was with both Father and Son. So it’s not surprising that John was the one gifted to write about “fellowship with the Father and Jesus,” as to what it means, the joy it creates, and how we get to experience it too.
Having experienced that fellowship himself for possibly up to eighty years already, John writes like a wise old grandfather when starting out in 1 John 2:12, “I write to you, dear children.” These are the people at the very start of their journey into fellowship with God, the “newly hatched” Christians beginning their new life as newborn members of God’s family.
What brings them into fellowship with God – at this point in their lives – is “knowing your sins have been forgiven on account of Jesus’ name.” What kickstarts anyone at any age into an awareness of God is “the blood of Jesus purifying us from all our sin” (1:7).
John is talking about how “fellowship” with God is created and the crucial starting point, which is realizing and acknowledging that because of Jesus’ death our past life is no more. Whatever stupid and awful things we’ve thought, said and done, are no longer held against us in God’s eyes. And as literal children in a human family that’s where fellowship begins too, when as kids we said or did something we knew was wrong, but we heard our parent say, “You’re forgiven.”
That’s the point when a real awareness of love begins, in being undeservedly forgiven, followed by the joy of a conscience relieved, a relationship restored, and learning what being a family is all about.
Because it’s into God’s family that we’re being brought and learning what it’s all about now too. Which, as John adds next, comes from “Knowing the Father”….(next blog)
