Grace : Love : Fellowship : With Us

“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
2 Corinthians 13:14

What does this prayer for grace and love and fellowship mean?

I don’t think it is an arbitrary blessing – a “let’s come up with three ‘god’ things and attach them to a Trinitarian depiction of God” prayer. I reckon this grace and love and fellowship is supposed to be our daily experience – all of us – the means by which God leads his people, the measures against which we can learn to recognise God’s voice - and also the voice of the accuser, the deceiver.

But what does it look like, when the Lord Jesus Christ responds by giving us his grace, God (the Father) responds by giving us his love, and the Holy Spirit responds by giving us his fellowship?

It starts with grace. (Why? Because it is only by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ that we can know the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in the first place.) Grace is the means given us which enables us to do what Jesus asks us to do. We can’t go and make disciples in our own strength. He walks with us, and lifts the burden. Churches can be communities that place heavy burdens on people, especially people who are clearly able people (in fact, the same people who are asked to take on additional burdens in their workplaces, so that the church puts additional burdens on already over-burdened people).

I think of some close friends who felt that Jesus was asking them to have a large crowd of people back for Sunday lunch every week. For someone else, that would have been a burden. But because Jesus supplied the grace they needed in order to do it, it was no burden at all. It really wasn’t. And after a time, it started to feel like a burden on them, and they were able to recognise that what was going on was that Jesus was taking back the grace for that particular thing, and that this was a sign that this season was coming to an end. Jesus would give them grace to do something else, in his good time.

To have kept on going would have resulted in diminishing returns of fruitfulness. And to have kept on keeping on going would have eventually have resulted in bad fruit – resentment, irritability, tiredness that leaves us vulnerable.

The leading of grace is part of the rhythm of abiding and growing and bearing fruit and being pruned back – grace flowing to lead us out into growth and fruitfulness, and drawing back to lead us back through close pruning into a time of abiding in Jesus the vine (see John 15).

Sometimes there are things that just need to be done. In fact, there are always things that just need to be done. But to do them without the necessary grace is burdensome – and it is a burden that Jesus does not intend or want for us (“Come to me all who are weary and heavy-burdened, for my yolk is easy and my burden is light.”). The problem with doing things out of duty is that it is – or at least, it becomes - joyless. The greater problem is that – like the older son in the parable of the prodigal son – in acting out of duty we place ourselves as servants not one of the family.

The love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit – experiencing a friendship that is growing increasingly close – work in a similar way. Not that God removes his love from us, but that as we move out of his will for us we experience distance between us that is intended to draw us back.

So here are some good questions to ask, on a regular basis, of the things we do and the things we might take on:

Does this activity/responsibility (or, the prospect of it) feel burdensome, or is it a channel of grace?

Do I experience joy, even in the midst of hard situations; or the absence of joy, even in easy situations?

Is the fruit of this activity a deepening sense of God’s love, or a growing sense that I am a servant and not a son?

Is the fruit of this activity a deepening sense of fellowship with the Holy Spirit, or a growing sense of disappointment with God, and/or his people and his bride, the church?

“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”