Grace Baptist Church, Nokomis, IL.

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It’s so nice to be able to see you all every week and to worship with you. I don’t think I express that enough. I’m glad that we gather as often as we do to encourage each other in our walk with Christ. We need that. And I hope that you all genuinely enjoy coming together. The early church loved it so much that they gathered together every day for awhile. They just couldn’t get enough of the fellowship and teaching and worship they could have when they were together.

There are some things in life that give us such pleasure that we can’t get enough of them. We love holding newborn babies. We love to watch babies sleep. We love to hear the laughter of babies. Basically, we just love babies. But there are other things that we can’t get enough of as well. For me, I can’t get enough pizza rolls and ice cream.

I asked you last week how important your church family was to you on a scale of 1 to 10. Every response I received back was 10 or higher! It seems we all know our church family is extremely important. But what if I told you that gathering together as a church can be one of those things that we can’t get enough of? That it should fill us with such joy that we want to do it as often as possible? This can be the reality for each one of us, if we find our joy not in the world, but in Christ.

Read 2 John 1:12-13

It’s important that we see each other face to face. We certainly can encourage each other with paper and ink. But I don’t remember the last time that I wrote someone a letter. Today, instead of paper and ink, we use things like email, texts, and facebook. And actually facebook is starting to lose some its usage as well. But there will always be some new way to communicate. But none of those things can take the place of gathering together.

Teaching often happens better in person. Now, in writing this, John was in no way devaluing the importance of written instruction. The apostles wrote many letters, and all of them are for our encouragement and instruction. All Scripture is God breathed and useful (2 Timothy 3:16). So it’s okay for us also to encourage people through writing, and facebook, and texting. But writing is often a difficult means to communicate and encourage life change. The apostles wrote many letters, but they were also constantly traveling to churches. Some things are better communicated in person.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. You’re writing a letter or an email and you realize that it could easily be taken the wrong way, so you think, “I should really call them instead.” And sometimes written communication can just get confusing. And there are other times when even a phone call seems too impersonal. Gathering together in person means we can talk together about what God is telling us in the Scriptures in a direct, immediate, and personal way.

The text of verse 12 literally says, “I hope to come to you and talk mouth to mouth.” I love how our Sunday evening service allows us to go deeper into the passage I preach on, and we all talk about it together. And I love how our Wednesday evening service is a time where we can spend more time praying for each other’s needs, and I’m thankful that it’s not just an organ recital.

Being able to do all of these things in person, being part of a local church family, increases your joy. It makes our joy “complete,” or “full!” It’s not just the fact that we get to see the people we like. When we’re together, God is present among us in a very special way (Matthew 18:20). Of course, God is always with us, but we experience His presence in a unique way when we gather together that it brings us joy. Being with our church family is not the only thing in Scripture that is said to make our joy complete. Paul wrote that our unity made his joy complete (Philippians 2:2). It should make our joy complete as well. We should take great delight in maintaining church unity.

John the Baptist proclaimed that his joy was complete when Christ came (John 3:26-30). And the Apostle John wrote another thing that would make our joy full as well (1 John 1:4). What things was he talking about? (v. 3) Our fellowship completes our joy because we all have fellowship with God through Jesus Christ. Simply coming to church doesn’t make you have this joy with us. We have this complete, full joy when we know Christ as Savior, having experienced His grace, and when we come together to celebrate God’s grace.