“If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” – 1 John 1:6-7
In his book “A Fellowship of Differents, Showing the World God’s Design for Life,” Scot McKnight writes: “So if we want to get the church right, we have to learn to see it as a salad in a bowl, made the Right Way of course. For a good salad is a fellowship of different tastes, all mixed together with the olive oil accentuating the taste of each. The earliest Christian churches were made up of folks from all over the social map, but they formed a fellowship of “different tastes,” a mixed salad of the best kind.
A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate makeup:
· a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative
· some tenants, with families and slaves and dependents, also living in the same home in rented rooms
· some family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church , a couple of slaves whose owners do not attend
· Some freed slaves who do not participate in the church
· A couple of homeless people
· A few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home
Add to this mix some Jewish folks and perhaps an enslaved prostitute, and we see how many “different tastes” were in a typical house church in Rome: men and women, citizens and freed slaves and slaves (who had no legal rights), Jews and Gentiles, people from all moral walks of life, and perhaps, most notably, people from elite classes all the way down the social scale perhaps to homeless people.”
We need to put our relationship with Jesus Christ first in our lives, and when we walk in His light, all our relationships will be correct. Today, in prayer, thank the Lord for His fellowship and seek to follow Him in all that you do.
“A habit of devout fellowship with God is the spring of all our life, and the strength of it.” – H. E. Manning
God’s Word: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.” – 1 John 1:3
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