In an earlier post, I wrote that God’s eternal destiny for you is communion with Him and fellowship with the church.  Communion and fellowship starts from when you are born from above (John 3:8) and continues for eternity.  Evangelism, by contrast, just lasts for this life.  After God ushers in the new heaven and earth (Rev. 21) there is no more opportunity for people to transition from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of life.  This makes evangelism critically important and, as I said, if you did nothing else but tell people the gospel, you will not have wasted your time on this earth.

However, the bible includes a lot about communion with God and fellowship with His people.  As examples, Jesus tells people about the narrow way in Matthew 7, Paul quotes a number of old testament scriptures on the subject of being God’s sons and daughters at the end of 2 Corinthians chapter 6 and John records Jesus’ words on abiding in John 15.  But there are many more examples, in fact, depending on how you read it, you could say the whole New Testament is mainly about these two things:  communion with God and fellowship with His church.

In fact I believe that when God inspired the Scriptures (particularly the New Testament) he inspired them with mainly one class of people in mind.  Jesus called these people “disciples”, Paul went on to describe them as “saints” and John wraps up the New Testament by calling them “overcomers”.   The three words are not synonyms but they are closely related and they also have a sense of progression in them.  Being a disciple/ saint/ overcomer is God’s ordained way of having communion with him and fellowship with the church.

According to the New Testament, if you want communion with God and fellowship with the church then you must be born again, be a follower of Jesus (a disciple), be made holy (a saint) and persevere to the end (an overcomer).