For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
MATTHEW 18:20
Following Jesus is both a private and a group activity. Yes, God loves each of us, and we hear His call as individuals. So we need to make time to be alone with Him. At the same time, though, we should remember that “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18 A), applies to more than marriage. We must follow Jesus with others who have been similarly called.
We see this call to communal life repeated throughout the New Testament. “Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul writes to the Galatians, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). The writer of Hebrews urges gathering for mutual encouragement, especially in trying times (Hebrews 10:25). And in today's verse, Jesus reminds us He will be present even when only “two or three have gathered in [His] name.” All these instances reference koinonia, in the Bible. It was Luke’s term for the healthy Christian community at the church’s founding (Acts 2:42). We are made for this kind of richly layered discipleship—with God and with fellow believers.
In a world filled with distractions, solitude is an essential Christian discipline. But so is the spiritual discipline of fellowship—that’s where we find the joy and presence God promises when we gather with our brothers and sisters in the Lord.
-IBC
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