Why is fellowship with God essential to our lives?
God desires to speak to all people despite their circumstances to express His love. Many times He speaks through those who received His callings for their lives, as the prophets in the Old Testament, as well as men and women whose lives were transformed by Jesus Christ, whom He eventually sent for the propitiation for our sins. He also speaks through the Holy Bible, which is His inerrant Word of Truth, the Holy Spirit, and the people who know us.
As said in the book Apocalypse Here and Now! Are you Ready? about God’s gestures of love by Betsy Fritcha, the purpose of God, who is Love and Truth, is “to draw to Himself anyone who will stop and take notice that He is speaking to them” because He “desires fellowships with human beings, who are made in His Image and after His Likeness. God truly desires to have fellowship with you.”
Every Christian should keep these two spiritual facts in their minds and strive to live by them:
- First, God is Love. He desires to have every human being know His love and to share in His love. It pains Him greatly that most people continue to spurn His gestures of Love. He grieves greatly for those who reject His perfect Love for them. His Heart of Love suffers pain when those He is wooing to love Him spurn Him over and over again. (Fritcha, Apocalypse Here and Now! Are you Ready?)
- Second, because we are made for love (and God is Love), we are created for fellowship with God. Despite the sinfulness of human beings, plus what they did to Jesus, He continues to seek them out and wants to be in relationship with them. After all, He created humankind for fellowship with Him.
God’s desire to have a fellowship with us proves that He is never a distant god but approachable and, above all, personal. He wants to be near us and walk with us. How important is it that we develop a fellowship with God? What are the results we can get from entering a fellowship with Him?
- You get help from God
To have a fellowship with God is to walk with Him as we journey through this world. Leviticus 26:12 affirms, “I will walk among you; I will be your God, and you will be my people.” Through His Word and the Holy Spirit, He will sustain us while we go through some rough times.
- Being in fellowship with God helps us avoid sin
Because we are born in sin and shaped in iniquity, we need the utmost help from God to avoid sin so we do not get lost in the time of temptation. Being in a fellowship with God steers us away from sinful situations and, above all, redeems us from the consequences of sin. Our fellowship with God gives us the assurance that we receive atonement through Jesus. What can wash away our sins and make us whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
- We learn to trust in God
When we walk with God, we cannot do things our way, which is why He sends the Holy Spirit to walk alongside us to guide us and to show us what to do and not to do. As we walk in fellowship with God, we trust and lean on Him who knows what to do. By realizing that His ways are not your ways and His thoughts are not your thoughts, you learn to trust God. While He has blessed you with the gifts and talents to make a difference in your life and the lives of others, He has also created you with the need to depend and trust in God consistently.
- We put our hope in God
By our fellowship with God, we know that there is hope after a struggle, failure, or brokenness. There is nothing you could do that God’s saving hand cannot reach you. You cannot run away from God that He cannot pull you back. Hebrews 10:23 says, “Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.” He will keep every promise that He has made to His people, therefore we should hold fast to hope and become confident in the future that He alone can control.
Since God loves us so dearly, we should strive to live in love toward Him and toward one another. Let His Word dwell in each of us, for His Word bears the character of God Himself, which is Love, and speaks His message of love to us.
The good news is you do not have to wait for death to experience a fellowship with God because it begins now and continues for all eternity.
The Damsel’s Files 