One in Sonship With Christ

A. B. Simpson was an author, hymn writer, conference speaker, evangelist to the urban masses of New York City, and a missionary statesman.  He founded The Christian and Missionary Alliance and Nyack College.

The following is from his book The Christ Life:

"Not only does He [Christ] come down into our humanity, but He also takes us up into His Divinity; for we are, indeed, through Him, 'partakers of the Divine nature.' His own very being is imparted to us, and we share His actual relation to the Father.

"'Go tell my brethren,' He says to Mary, 'that I go to my Father and your Father, to my God and to your God.'

"It is not that we are adopted into sonship, as a poor child of obscure birth may be received into a noble family, to become the legalized son and heir, but it is as if that child could be re-born into the very blood of that high-born house.

"We have been actually made partakers of the same nature as God. Hence the Apostle John has finely expressed the deep reality of our sonship in his wonderful words,  'Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God'; and then he adds, 'and we are the sons of God,' not merely called and even legally declared the sons of God, but actually the sons of God by receiving the life and nature of God, and so we are the very brethren of our Lord; not only in His human nature, but still more in His Divine relationship.

"'Therefore He is not ashamed to call us brethren.' He gives us that which entitles us to that right and makes us worthy of it. He does not introduce us into a position for which we are uneducated and unfitted, but He gives us a nature worthy of our glorious standing; and as He shall look upon us in our complete and glorious exaltation, reflecting His own likeness and shining in His Father’s glory, He shall have no cause to be ashamed of us."