Second mark of a healthy church (Acts 2:42)

The members of the church in Jerusalem engaged in fellowship with one another. Fellowship is more than meeting together; it is meeting together to share Christian realities. Christians talking together about their hobbies is not really Christian fellowship.

I suspect what Luke has in mind here is less formal, mutual edification. It would have involved practical expressions of brotherly love (after all, many of these converts were not from Jerusalem, but must have stayed on to learn more about their new faith before they returned home), and no doubt there were many expressions of thankfulness as those in need received from those who had plenty to give. 

Yet their fellowship was also verbal. We can imagine these disciples standing together after the address by an apostle and saying to one another, ‘That teaching did me good. It spoke to a situation I was facing this week. Let me tell you about it.’ And his friends, after hearing about it, would promise to pray for him. Or another might say, ‘I did not fully grasp what Peter said today.’ His friends would then try and explain it, or if they could not, they would say, ’Let’s go and ask Peter what he meant.’ Such interaction is a very effective means of writing biblical truth in our hearts. 

So fellowship requires participation. Participation involves sharing our discoveries of the grace of God in our experiences. There are numerous ways in which his grace touches our hearts, and we are meant to share them with other believers. 

Jesus is active in the fellowship of the church. Sometimes he prompts some of his people to share temporal provisions with other believers. At other times he leads disciples to ask particular questions to a fellow Christian in order to identify something that is wrong. Or he may lead them to quote encouraging promises to another believer without them being aware of the individual’s needs. 

In fact, divine providence may arrange for you to meet within the next five minutes or five hours the person with whom you are to share some of your blessings from Christ and your burdens for his cause. Now, who is that walking towards me?