In 1 John we first see the eternal life, whom John had heard, seen, beheld, and handled as the Word of life. Then John testified and reported to us the eternal life that we may have fellowship (1:1-3). John’s first Epistle mainly is to keep us living in the divine fellowship of the divine life. As believers we have the divine life, and this life brings us into the divine fellowship. We all need to remain in the fellowship. If we remain in the fellowship, we touch God as light (1 John 1:5), and as love (1 John 4:8-16). This is our enjoyment of God as light and love in our fellowship with Him. We have seen that love and light are the constituents of God’s divine nature. When we remain in the divine fellowship with God, we enjoy God directly as light and love, which is the enjoyment of the divine nature. To partake of the divine nature is to fellowship with God, to enjoy God as love and as light, because love and light are two constituents of God’s nature.
In John’s Gospel we see that Christ came with grace and truth (1:17). When we believed in Christ, we received Him as grace and truth. Grace is God in the Son as our enjoyment; truth, reality, is God realized by us in the Son. In John’s first Epistle we see that the divine love is the source of grace and the divine light is the source of truth. When this divine love appears to us, it becomes grace, and when this divine light shines upon us, it becomes truth. John’s Gospel reveals that the Lord Jesus has brought grace and truth to us that we may have the divine life (3:14-16); whereas his Epistle unveils that the fellowship of the divine life brings us to the very sources of grace and truth, which are the divine love and the divine light. In his Gospel it was God in the Son coming to us as grace and truth that we might become His children (1:12-13); in his Epistle it is we the children, in the fellowship of the Father’s life, coming to the Father to participate in His love and light. John’s Gospel is Christ coming to us bringing grace and truth to us, and John’s Epistle is that we go back in Christ to the source in our fellowship and we touch God as love and as light. Love and light are deeper than grace and truth because they are the sources. This is a divine two-way traffic between God and us. To partake of the divine nature is to touch the source of grace and truth since the divine nature is the source of grace and of truth.
The way to touch this source is to remain in the fellowship with the source. We are in the fellowship already, but we need to remain, to abide, in the fellowship. Once electricity is installed into a building, there is an electrical current flowing, and that current is a good illustration of the divine fellowship. The divine fellowship is a heavenly electrical current. If the electric appliances remain in the current, they function. If they do not remain in the current, they actually are cut off from the enjoyment of the electricity. As believers we do have a heavenly current of the heavenly electricity and we need to remain in this current, to remain in the fellowship. When we remain in the fellowship, we touch God as the source; we touch Him as Spirit, as love, and as light. To touch God as Spirit, love, and light is to partake of the divine nature. This is not a vain theory or a mere teaching but something in our experience.
All of us have experienced partaking of the divine nature in different degrees. If you spend ten or fifteen minutes to contact the Lord and stay with Him and pray honestly and sincerely, confessing your failures, mistakes, shortcomings, defects, wrongdoings, and sinfulness, you touch God as the Spirit in His Person. Deep within your being you sense the Spirit. At this juncture everything in your home, in your yard, on the street, in the heavens, and on the earth is so pleasant and lovely. This is the issue of partaking of love as the nature of God’s essence.
Before I received the Lord, I was easily disgusted with people. After I was saved, no one taught me but I knew that I had to go to God in prayer and fellowship. After praying for a few minutes and repenting of and confessing my sins, I was joyful, and everyone and everything were pleasant and lovely to me. The reason for this is because I was partaking of the divine nature. Even though I did not have the knowledge concerning this, this was still my experience.
Once when I was at my son’s home, I saw my three grandchildren working on their homework at the table. The two girls were seven and nine years old respectively and the boy was eleven years old. When I saw them I asked, “Have you children all prayed today?” The two girls told me that they had not prayed yet because their way was to pray before bedtime. Then the oldest girl told me that she saw her older brother praying and that while he was praying he was weeping. These two young girls are always watching their older brother to find some fault with him, but instead they found their older brother praying and weeping. If this young boy continues to contact the Lord in such a way, everyone and everything will be lovely to him. There will be no need to teach him to love his sisters because love will be within him. In his prayer and fellowship with the Lord he is partaking of the divine nature.
All of us can testify, at least to some degree, that we have enjoyed the Lord in such a way. This is our partaking of the divine nature, which is constituted with the divine love in essence and with the divine light in expression. I believe that after my young grandson prayed in such a way, he was transparent and he was in light. Just by contacting God for ten to fifteen minutes, after we rise up from our knees, we become a person who is transparent and no longer in darkness or opaqueness. What we should say or do also becomes transparent to us. You may not even have the utterance or know how to explain a matter, yet within you there is the light. You know where you should be, and you know where you are. This is the issue of the partaking of the divine nature.
After having a time with the Lord, you sense that One is within you, living, acting, leading, and guiding you. This One is the divine Person, who is the Spirit and this Spirit is also one of the constituents of the divine nature. Everyone who has been genuinely regenerated has had this kind of experience at least once or twice. You touch the source of grace, which is the divine love, and the source of reality, which is the divine light, in your fellowship with the Lord, and both of these sources are the constituents of the divine nature for your enjoyment.