Fellowship With God: Are You Talking About Him or To Him?

Fellowship With God: Are You Talking About Him or To Him?

     There is a moment in the old hymn "The Love of God" where the lyrics stretch toward the impossible — oceans filled with ink, skies made into parchment, every stalk on earth a quill — and still the love of God could not be contained. It is a staggering thought. The God who rolled the seas into their place, who traced rivers with the tips of his fingers, who is beauty walking — this God wants fellowship with you.
     Not your attendance. Not your performance. Not your religious activity. You !
That distinction is at the heart of one of the most important questions any Christian can sit with:  Are you having fellowship about God, or are you actually having fellowship with God?
The Difference Between Proximity and Relationship.
In 1 John 1:1-3, the apostle John opens with something remarkable. He describes the Lord Jesus Christ in terms of direct, physical encounter — heard, seen, touched.  He is not writing about a concept or a theology.  He is writing about a person. And the entire reason he is writing, he says, is so that his readers might have fellowship — not merely with each other, but with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.
     That word fellowship is the hinge everything else swings on.
It is possible to be surrounded by all the right things — Scripture, song, community, service — and still miss the person those things are pointing toward. The Pharisees are the most sobering example of this. In John 5:39-40, Jesus speaks directly to men who had devoted their lives to the study of Scripture. He tells them that the very Scriptures they search testify about him — and yet they will not come to him that they might have life. They were standing next to the Messiah. They knew the material. They missed the man.
     That is not a first-century problem. It is a right-now problem.
Consider how easy it is to talk about God without ever talking to him. To discuss theology, share testimonies, study doctrine, sing songs, and check every box on the spiritual to-do list — all while the living God stands nearby, waiting. Proximity is not a relationship. Being in God's house does not automatically mean you are in God's presence. You can be four feet from someone and never actually speak to them.
     The Martha Problem
     Luke 10 gives us a picture of this tension that is both gentle and convicting. Martha welcomes Jesus into her home. She loves him. She is serving him. Everything she is doing is good, necessary, and faithful. And yet Jesus tells her that she is careful and troubled about many things, while her sister Mary has chosen the one thing that matters — sitting at his feet and hearing his word.
Martha is not a villain in this story. She is us.
She saw the meal. She saw the work. She saw what needed to be done. But Mary saw him. And there is a world of difference between doing something for Jesus and simply being with Jesus.
     The danger is not service. Service is vital. The church needs people who show up, who clean and mow and check on the sick and pray for the wounded. Do not stop doing those things. But if service becomes the substitute for communion with the living God, something has gone deeply wrong. The activity begins to feel like fellowship. It is not. It is a proxy — and God has never been interested in proxies.
He said it plainly through the prophets: he does not want sacrifice. He wants obedience. He wants you to look skyward at him. He wants you to enter the throne room boldly. He wants you to call him Abba.
     The Self-Assessment: 
     Paul instructs believers,  Self-Assessment in 2 Corinthians 13:5 to examine themselves. That is not a comfortable command, but it is a necessary one. Here are a few honest questions worth sitting with:  Is it easier for you to talk about God than to talk to him? Can you pray for ten minutes without your mind wandering somewhere else?  When you read the Bible, are you listening for what God is saying to you, or are you collecting information — bullets for an argument, proof texts for a position you already hold?
James says to be doers of the word and not hearers only, warning that hearing without doing is a form of self-deception. The Bible ought to be touching the actual terrain of your life — your temper, your pride, your money, your forgiveness, your relationships, your habits. If Scripture is always correcting someone else in your mind, you may be the one with the problem.
     And perhaps the most revealing question of all: does it bother you if you have been absent from the living God?  Not absent from church, not absent from Bible reading — absent from him.  If the answer is no, that is worth paying attention to.
What Fellowship Actually Looks Like
     First John 1:7 offers a beautiful clarification. It says that if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. Notice the order. The vertical relationship with God produces the horizontal relationship with each other.  You cannot manufacture genuine Christian community by trying harder to get along.  Get the first relationship right and the second one follows.
Walking in the light is not a religious fog. It is not performance. It is the conscious awareness that you live before the living God — that he is with you, that he hears you, that he is not a concept but a person who said, "Lo, I am with you always."
David understood this hunger.  In Psalm 63:1, he writes that his soul thirsts for God. That is an appetite no sermon can manufacture for you. You have to turn toward him. You have to cry out. You have to say, Lord, I believe — help my unbelief.
A Simple Prayer to Begin
     If any of this has landed, the response does not need to be complicated. It might sound something like this:   Lord, I have talked about you more than I have talked to you, and I am sorry. I have been busy with your things and I have neglected you.  Jesus, I want to walk with you again.
That is enough to start. He is not far. He has been right there all along.