Fellowship With the Father and With His Son

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 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. We write this to make our joy complete.                                                                                                    –1 John 1:1-4

The Gnostics were a religious sect who were contemporaries of the early Christians and who held particularly destructive views of life. To begin, the Gnostics believed that Jesus was not a real person but rather a phantom person. Also, they believed all physical matter was simply tainted and evil. However, a person's spiritual being was pure and unable to be tainted. Therefore, one's actions (whether good or bad) could not affect one's purity of spirit. Amidst the apostle John's eloquent dismantling of Gnostic thinking, he develops four themes in his letter to 1st century believers: light, truth, life, and love (1:2, 5, 6, 8; 2:4, 9-10).

In these beginning verses of John's letter, he is saying that the Gnostics have it wrong: Jesus was not a phantom spirit, but rather He was a real person whom John himself had seen, heard, and touched. Furthermore, walking in fellowship with Jesus and his followers means we cannot be like the Gnostics who had no regard for physical matter or our physical lives. We simply do not have the luxury of ignoring the manner in which we live, as if it doesn't matter. John says it like this: "Whoever claims to live in Him must walk as Jesus did" (v.6). In other words, our physical lives do matter—not only in our fellowship with others, but in our fellowship with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ—for from this fellowship comes our joy.

May we all combat Gnostic thinking in our lives by reflecting upon how Jesus lived. May we walk as He walked. May we live in light and truth and love. May we have fellowship with the Father and with his Son, the one who was seen and heard and touched, the one who is alive and who makes our joy complete.