Is Following Jesus Something You Do Alone?

By Pastor John Erickson

When I was in Bible college studying Greek, I spent a lot of time in 1 John. There was a practical reason for that: when you are learning a language nobody speaks around the dinner table, simple vocabulary is a gift.

Paul can write sentences that seem to go on forever. John uses surprisingly straightforward words. I appreciated that more than a little.

And then there's 1 John.

The words are simple. But don't mistake simplicity for shallowness. You can read a sentence in 1 John in ten seconds and spend an hour thinking about it.

One reason I love the letter is that it keeps coming back to the same themes: knowing Jesus, living in truth, and loving one another.

Why all the repetition? Because these things matter more than we seem willing to admit.

A Church That Was Coming Apart

John writes to believers whose community has been shaken. People have left, relationships have fractured, and serious disagreements about Jesus have divided the church.

It's tempting to read something like that and imagine how much easier church must have been two thousand years ago.

It wasn't.

They had the same kinds of problems we have: conflict, pride, people spreading ideas that damage trust, and the pain of broken relationships.

John doesn't respond by telling everybody to stop meeting together and concentrate on having a personal spiritual experience. Instead, he draws them back to who Jesus is and to the kind of life they share because of him.

And he uses a wonderful word: koinonia.

Koinonia Is More Than Coffee After Church

We often translate koinonia as fellowship. But in American church culture, fellowship can sound like doughnuts in the lobby.

Coffee and doughnuts can be a fine beginning. But if that is all we mean by fellowship, we are missing something. I sometimes hesitate over the word fellowship because it can sound so familiar in church that we stop asking what it actually means.

Koinonia carries the sense of sharing, participation, partnership, and relationship. It's a bond that changes the way we belong to one another.

In 1 John 1:3, John says he proclaims what he has seen and heard so that others may have fellowship with him and his fellow believers. Then he says their fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

Did you catch both directions?

Our relationship with God and our relationships with one another are linked.

We don't have to choose between being close to Jesus and being close to other Christians. John assumes those things belong together.

John Isn't Selling Us an Idea

The opening of 1 John is striking. John says the apostles heard Jesus, saw him, looked at him, and touched him.

In other words, he's not describing a philosophy that somebody invented over coffee. He's testifying about a person they knew.

The eternal life John speaks about became visible in Jesus. And because that life has been made known, people who never walked those dusty roads with Jesus are invited into fellowship with him.

That's extraordinary.

Sometimes we treat Christianity as a system of beliefs we're supposed to master. And beliefs matter. John is clear about that too. But the goal isn't to become really good at religious trivia.

It's to know the living God.

And that relationship changes the way we treat the people around us.

Relationships Are Where Faith Gets Real

It's relatively easy to feel patient when you're sitting alone, reading your Bible, and nobody is bothering you.

The challenge comes when somebody disagrees with you. Or disappoints you. Or talks too much. Or doesn't respond to your text. Or makes a decision you can't understand.

Community has a way of revealing what's actually happening inside us.

That's part of why it's important.

You can't practice forgiveness without a relationship. You can't learn to bear with another person if you're never close enough to be inconvenienced. And you don't discover how much you need grace by surrounding yourself only with people who think exactly like you do.

John is writing to a wounded community. He knows what it's like when fellowship is hard. Yet he still calls them toward connection rather than isolation.

Truth and Love Belong Together

John also insists that fellowship isn't built by pretending every belief is equally true. Some of the divisions in those churches came from claims about Jesus himself.

So love doesn't mean we stop caring about truth. And truth doesn't give us permission to stop loving people.

We can be honest about our differences. We can hold convictions. We can acknowledge harm. And we can do those things while remembering that another person is not an obstacle to our spiritual maturity.

Often, that person is part of how God forms us.

Who Is Sharing Life With You?

Here's a question worth asking: Who actually knows what's going on in your life?

Not who follows you online. Not who says hello every week. Who knows when you're struggling? Who has permission to challenge you? Who would notice if you disappeared?

And there's a second question: Whose life are you paying that kind of attention to?

Koinonia isn't something a church can manufacture by adding another event to the calendar. It develops when people show up, share honestly, pray for one another, work through conflict, and refuse to treat relationships as disposable.

Gina once made an observation while talking about our small groups that stayed with me. People can say they are lonely and have no friends while a community is available to them. Sometimes the next step is to show up and begin reaching toward it.

That does not mean loneliness is easy to solve or that every group instantly feels like home. It means a relationship usually needs some participation from us. Someone has to take the first small step. Then the rest of us have a responsibility to make room.

Jesus didn't invite us merely to attend something. He invited us into life with God and one another.

And I don't think we get very far in that life by ourselves.