Christian fellowship, then, is an expression of both love and humility. It springs from a desire to bring benefit to others coupled with a sense of personal weakness and need. It has a double motive: the wish to help and the wish to be helped, the wish to edify and the wish to be edified. It is that corporate seeking by Christian people to know God better through sharing with each other what individually they have learned already. We seek to do others good, and we seek that others will do us good.
We can therefore say three things about fellowship. First, it is a means of grace period through fellowship and in fellowship one’s own soul is refreshed and fed by the effort to communicate one’s knowledge of divine things, to come and pray for others, and to receive from God through them.
Second, fellowship is a test of life. Fellowship means opening one’s heart to one’s fellow Christians. The person who is free to eschew pretense and concealment about himself when talking to his fellow believers is the one who is being open and honest in his daily dealings with God. He is the one who is walking in the light, as John puts it in the first chapter of his first letter (if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, one John one verse seven. If we are not walking in the light we do not have fellowship with one another. If we are not letting the light of God shine full on our whole life, we shall never have free fellowship with others because we shall be unwilling to open up to them. After all, why would we willing to tell them the shameful secrets of our hearts when we are not prepared to open up to God and let him deal with these things? Those who will not walk in the light with God will never walk in light with their brethren.
Third. Fellowship is a gift of God. The new English Bible translates Paul’s blessing in second Corinthians 13:14 like this: “May the grace of God the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The kind of fellowship of which I am speaking, which has as its motive love to our brothers in Christ as an expression of our love to the Lord, and which involves real openness with each other and real reliance on each other – that kind of fellowship comes only as God’s gift in and through the Holy Spirit. It is only where the Holy Spirit has been given, where we are spiritually alive to God and anxious to grow in grace ourselves and help others to do the same, that such fellowship will be a possibility. It is only as the spirit enables us that we shall actually be able to practice it.
JI Packer