Fellowship, Walking, and Abiding

(from Lesson 19 – 1 John 2:6)

1 John 2:6 ^NASB “the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.” John adds a principle to what he has already said. He talks about knowing God, about loving God, but now he is going to pull in another key word to describe this active, ongoing experience of relationship of the believer. It begins, “the one who says.” In the Greek it is an articular present active participle of lego [legw] meaning “the one who says.” “Abides” is translated into an English finite verb, but it is not a finite verb in the Greek, it is an infinitive. It is a present active infinitive of meno [menw]. It means to stay, to remain, to abide. So in the infinitive it should be translated to remain or to abide, not as a finite verb as “he abides” because there is no subject here. So it is just simply to claim: “the one who claims to abide in Him.” To claim to know Him and to claim to abide are synonymous ideas. The one who claims to abide “ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.”

Let’s go back and look at the steps that have been developed. As John is expanding his ideas he starts off with fellowship in 1:4, 5, goes to walking in 1:6, goes to knowing in 2:3, 4, goes to personal love for God in 2:5, goes to “in Him in 2:5, then he goes to abide in 2:6. Then he goes right back to walking. The point is that these are all related ideas. He is using every word in his vocabulary in order to encompass the idea of our personal walk and relationship with Jesus Christ on a day to day basis.

In 1:5-10 there are three things that John emphasises. First, claiming to know God is parallel to walking in the light, verse 4. In 1:6 John says, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and {yet} walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” So there is a connection. The person who lies and doesn’t practice the truth in 1:6 is claiming to have fellowship, and the person who claims to know Him in 1:4 is a liar and doctrine is not in him—same thing. So that means that knowing God and fellowship are correlated items in this passage. Second, not keeping commandments, the emphasis of 2:3-6, is parallel then to walking in darkness back in 1:6. That would mean that keeping commandments is parallel to walking in the light. That gives us a conclusion, therefore, that enjoying fellowship and walking in the light develop our knowledge of God and the barometer, the self-test, is our obedience to divine mandates.

1 John 2:6 ^NASB “the one who says he abides in Him…” Abide is a magnificent word and has become a major battlefield in the whole area of understanding salvation and the spiritual life. Why is that? It is because there are those who want to take 1^st John, as well as a well-known passage in John 15, as relating to believer versus unbeliever. For example, how do you know if you are a believer? If you abide and keep His commandments. If you don’t abide and you don’t keep His commandments you are not a believer. So for those folk abiding becomes a functional equivalent or semantic equivalent to the word “believe.” So we have to find out if the word “abide” is a synonym for believe or does it mean something else?

In English the word “abide” means a) to put up with or tolerate. That doesn’t fit the context here at all; b) to wait patiently for something; c) to be in store for or to await something; d) to withstand; e) in an intransitive sense it means to remain in a place, and that is close to our Greek meaning in meno. But what we should note is looking at these meanings that none of them listed here are what any of us would think of as synonyms for believe. If we look abide up in a thesaurus we will not find believe listed as a synonym.

Furthermore we have to look at some passages to see how Jesus uses the word. It is interesting that the word meno is used 118 times in the New Testament. Fifty of those usages are by the apostle John—42%. If John is going to use the word meno or to abide 50 times in the Gospel of John, do we think it is an important doctrine in John? He is going to be beating us over the head with this throughout most of his epistle. This is a major theme, and that tells us that the main idea is fellowship and that abiding is a critical aspect to the whole concept of fellowship. Furthermore, if “abide” means “believe” then we ought be able to somehow substitute those two words, and that doesn’t work.

John 6:56 ^NASB “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” What is the meaning of that? Some people simply take that as accepting Christ. Well if that is accepting Christ then abiding equals believing.

1. Eating and drinking are non-meritorious acts that anyone can perform. Believing is something that anyone can perform, and if it is not believing then that means that abiding of fellowship is going to be something anyone can perform, and once again we are driven to the fact that the spiritual life in the church age is based on grace and not works. Anyone can do this.
2. Eating and drinking mean to accept something, to appropriate something, to make it part of one’s system. What you eat is assimilated through the blood stream to all the cells so that it becomes usable. So it emphasises grace. We don’t think about it, it is something that automatically happens. In the initial act of salvation it would refer to the initial act of accepting Christ as saviour, at which time we are instantly in fellowship. But in post-salvation spiritual life it describes spiritual nourishment, the feeding on the Word of God. Eating and drinking refers to ongoing spiritual nourishment.
3. Eating and drinking in John 6:56 are present active participles, describing ongoing action. It is not talking about a one-shot thing. If it was talking about salvation it would not be expressed as a present participle. But the verb meno is a present active indicative—continual action. That indicates the characteristic of that believer, the believer who is continually feeding on the doctrines of the Word.
4. In John 6:53 eating and drinking are aorist active subjunctives, focusing on an event: accepting Christ as saviour. A present active participle is going to focus on a continuing process—ongoing eating, post-salvation experience where we have fellowship with Christ.
5. Therefore John 6:56 uses present active participles to indicate continuous action. Paraphrase: “Whoever continues to be nourished by Me stays in close relationship to Me.” So if we stop being nourished by the Word, Jesus is saying, it is not going to be long before we sin, be out of fellowship, and are not going to be abiding with Him.
6. Conclusion: If eating and drinking are the metaphor describing belief, then what we have to say in these verses is that meno must mean something beyond initial saving faith. So faith cannot be equated to abide or remain. The bottom line is that it does not make sense on syntactical grounds for abide to be understood to be something that is related to initial saving faith.
7. Even though someone believed in Christ and currently maintains a close relationship with Him the potential remains to discontinue fellowship. If true believe prevented breaking fellowship there would be no need to command them to abide. The point is that if someone believes in Christ then they would be saved, they would not have to be commanded to abide after initial saving faith. So the fact that believers are commanded to abide in Christ indicates that it is a post-salvation experience and not something that happens at salvation. Furthermore, a believer remains or abides in Christ’s love by obeying the mandates, John 15:9, 10. If abide means to believe then Jesus’ statement in John 15:5—“…he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit…”—would mean that that would have to be translated, “If you believe in me and I believe in you, you will bear much fruit.” That is an absurd statement, for why would Jesus need to believe in us? Yet this is one of the major planks for Lordship salvation. The bottom line in Lordship salvation is that if there is no fruit there is no faith. But that is not what Scripture says. Scriptures says that fruit comes after long-term abiding.

What are the conditions, then, for fellowship with Christ?