We enjoy love, grace, and fellowship all at the same time. We should not think that first we enjoy love, then we enjoy grace, and finally we enjoy fellowship. While we enjoy the fellowship of the Spirit, we also have the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God. Just as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are not three Gods but three aspects or persons of the one God, so love, grace, and fellowship are three aspects of one thing. The Triune God is the Father full of love, the Son full of grace, and the Spirit full of fellowship.
We should not think that we successively enjoy the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Spirit. No, we enjoy the love of God, the grace of Christ, and the fellowship of the Spirit simultaneously.
Although we enjoy love, grace, and fellowship simultaneously, we may nevertheless point out that love is the source, grace is the course, and fellowship is the destination. Do you know what our destination is? It is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Hallelujah, we enjoy the Triune God and His virtue in the three aspects of love, grace, and fellowship!
In the Epistle of 2 Corinthians we see the abounding grace (4:15), the enriching grace (8:9), and the sufficient grace (12:9). In 4:15 Paul declares, “For all things are for your sakes, that the grace, abounding through the many, may cause the thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God.” According to the context, grace is the very Christ who lives in the apostles as their life and life supply for them to live a crucified life for the manifestation of the resurrection life, that they may carry out their ministry for God’s new covenant.
Concerning grace, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “But by the grace of God I am what I am; and His grace unto me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me.” We may say that grace here is actually the resurrected Christ becoming the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45) to bring the processed God in resurrection into us to be our life and life supply that we may live in resurrection. Hence, grace is the Triune God becoming life to us and everything to us. It was by this grace that Saul of Tarsus, the foremost of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15-16), became the foremost apostle, laboring more abundantly than all the other apostles.
In 2 Corinthians 8:9 Paul speaks of the enriching grace: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, being rich, for your sakes He became poor, in order that you by His poverty might become rich.” It is grace to us that the Lord Jesus, being rich, became poor for our sakes. In the same principle, it will be grace to others if we are willing to sacrifice our material wealth for their sakes.
According to 12:9, the Lord spoke to Paul concerning His sufficient grace: “And He has said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” Paul was experiencing suffering and trial. Sufferings and trials are often in the Lord’s ordination for us that we may experience Christ as grace and power. For this reason, the Lord would not remove the “thorn” from the apostle as he had entreated. Rather, the Lord assured him that His grace was sufficient for him.
Concerning the divine love, Paul says in Romans 5:5, “The love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” From the day we believed in the Lord Jesus, the love of God has been poured out in our hearts. This is not merely a matter of feeling. On the contrary, something substantial, something essential, has been poured out into our hearts. This means that, as believers, deep in our hearts we have something of the divine essence, and this is God as love. In other words, God as love is the divine essence that has been poured out into our hearts. Therefore, the pouring out of the love of God into our hearts is not merely a matter of feeling; rather, it is a matter of the essence of God.
Because something of the divine essence has been poured out into our hearts, the heart of every Christian is a heart of love. I can testify that from the time of my regeneration my heart has been very different from what it was before regeneration. Because we have been regenerated, we have the loving essence within us, even if we are temporarily angry about something. This loving essence is God Himself as love. The Father’s nature, His essence, has been poured out into our hearts, and now we have this essence within us.