August 05, 2015
Meeting Together
During a church visit I sat
down in the pew in front of four older ladies. Just prior to the start of the
service one woman said to the others, “What happened to our other pastor?”
Apparently the woman failed to get the memo that the church not only interviewed
and hired a new minister, but he’d been filling the pulpit for the last four
weeks. Words from the writer of Hebrews seems appropriate, “Let
us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us
encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb
10:25 NIV).
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Gail;
-----I like to say that if you boil fellowship down to its simplest elements you find three: imagination, attention, and proximity. Do all that you can, but you’ll never be able to actually feel another person’s emotions or think his thoughts. But knowing those is an essential part of fellowship. All we can do is gather evidence of them by paying attention whenever there is enough proximity to observe their affects, and then imagine the rest according to those observations of what the other person is feeling or thinking.
-----You might want to say, “Well, Steve, the other person can just outright tell you what he’s thinking or feeling.” And that is right. But neither is the telling his thinking or feeling. Thoughts and feelings run deeper than speech can put forth. The most verbalizing them can do is to give another person a basic outline for fleshing out in his own mind with…well…imagination.
-----Leave any of those three things unattended and fellowship suffers. We must bring ourselves into the proximity of others enough to gather evidence of what’s going on in their lives. We must give each other enough attention to actually observe those evidences. And we must pay those evidences enough imagination to relate to what we’ve observed.
-----Of course, that isn’t to say what we imagine will be good or not. Fellowship is not good just because it is fellowship. Paul told the Corinthians we can not fellowship with demons and with the Lord as well. Although all fellowship is made of these three elements, processing those elements by the guidelines of truth produces fellowship in the Lord: sharing proximity with His people, paying them attention for what good can arise, and bounding imagination with reality. Processing these three elements according to deceit also produces a fellowship. But it isn’t worth discussing.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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