Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 409
Delivered on Sunday Morning, September the 15th, 1861, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”—1 John 1:3.
FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD was one of the richest privileges of unfallen man. The Lord God walked in the garden and talked with Adam as a man talketh with his friend. So long as he was willing and obedient, Adam ate the fat of the land, and among the rich dainties and “wines on the lees well refined,” of which his soul was a partaker, we must number first and foremost, unbroken communion with God, his Father and his Friend. Sin, as it banished man from Eden, banished man from God, and from that time our face has been turned from the Most High, and his face has been turned from us;—we have hated God, and God has been angry with us every day. Christ came into the world to restore to us our lost patrimony. It was the great object of his wondrous sacrifice to put us into a position which should be equal and even superior to that which we occupied in Adam before the fall, and as he has already restored to us many things that we lost, so among the rest—fellowship with God. They who have by his grace believed, and have by the precious blood been washed, have peace with God through Jesus Christ our Lord, they are “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God,” and they have access with boldness into this grace wherein we stand. So they who are in the kingdom, and under the dispensation of the second Adam, have restored to them in all its fullness that fellowship which was lost to them by the sin and disobedience of their first federal head. John was among the number of those who had enjoyed this privilege with Christ in his flesh. He had been Christ’s chosen companion, elect out of the elect to a choice and peculiar privilege. During the incarnation, he was one of the favored three who had enjoyed the closest intimacy with the Redeemer; he had seen Christ in his transfiguration, had witnessed the raising of the dead maid, had been with the Lord in the garden, and he had lingered with him even when the thrust was given after death, and the blood and water flowed from his pierced heart. John had the nearest, the dearest, the closest fellowship with Christ in the flesh. As he had laid his head upon Christ’s bosom, so had he laid all his thoughts and all the emotions of his mind upon the heart’s love and divine affection of his Lord and Master but Christ was gone; it was no more possible to hear his voice, to see him with eyes, or to handle him with hands, yet John had not lost his fellowship, though he knew him no more after the flesh, yet he knew him after a nobler sort. Nor was his fellowship less real, less close, less sweet, or less divine, than it had been when he had walked and talked with him, and had been privileged to eat and drink with him at that last sacred feast. John says, “Truly our fellowship is”—not was—“is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”
And now, my brethren and sisters in the common faith of our Lord Jesus, this morning I trust that many of us can say, “Our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” Did the apostle John need to say, “Truly”—as much as though some doubted or denied it? We, too, have sometimes an occasion to make as solemn an affirmation as he has done. There are certain sectaries who exalt the form of their church government into a sine qua non of piety, and they say of us that it is impossible that we should have a fellowship with Christ, because we follow not after them. Because we reject not the ministry which God has appointed, to take up with some newly-devised scheme, by which everyone is to instruct his brother, forsooth therefore we have not the fellowship which is reserved for their sect and party. We have been led, when they have spoken very bitterly, to question ourselves; but after deep searchings of heart, in reply to them we can say, “Brethren, whether you be right, or we be right in the matter of church discipline or organization, yet we can assure you that ‘truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.’” And ofttimes the doctrinalist—the man who thinks more of the doctrine of Christ than of the person of Christ, and who couples therewith the conceit that he himself must be right, and all others wrong,—because we may not be able to endorse all the heights of his doctrine, or, on the other hand, may not be able to join with him in his legal statements—says, “O these people! there are many of them, but they can have no fellowship with God, because they do not sound our Shibboleth, they do not join with us in every separate dogma which we teach, and therefore the Lord is not with them.” Ah, but we can say to them, “Brethren, we are content to leave these doctrinal disputes to the Great Arbiter of right and wrong; we have formed our opinion of Scripture; we hope, as in the sight of God, and as before the Most High, we can say, we have not shunned to declare the whole counsel of God.” But whether this be so or not, we protest to you, “Truly,” yes, “truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.” And perhaps the experimentalist—the man who attaches undue importance to his own particular form of experience—may cry out that the minister has not had the same experience of human depravity as himself; he may condemn us utterly because we do not give prominence to a certain favourite but unhealthy standard of spiritual conviction. Well, we can say to him, “We have preached what we do know, we have testified what we have seen, and if we cannot go to all the heights, and depths, and lengths, and breadths, as yet, we hope to grow; but we can say, even should you doubt our declaration, ‘Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.’”