Priests

I have a Jewish friend that recently told me I was his Rabbi. That totally humbled me, but it was really encouraging to hear. He told me that about the same time a particular theme kept coming up in my reading and in my personal times with the Lord. That theme was the priesthood of common people.

Have you ever thought about how we pay people to "do ministry" today? In general most people don't share their faith with others, or go to visit people in hospitals or prisons (unless they are family members), or teach others about God or the Bible. That's what we pay pastors and missionaries to do. For whatever reason we expect pastors, reverends, priests, missionaries and maybe elders and deacons to do those things, because that is their job after all, and we can choose to help if it fits into our schedules.

I was reading in Exodus 19 a passage of Scripture that blew me away. God told Moses to tell the rest of the freed slaves (the Jews), "'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Awesome! God set these people free in order to make them priests.

Rob Bell comments on it this way in the book Jesus Wants To Save Christians:
"Priests? A priest mediates the divine. To mediate is to come between. A priest comes between people and a god or gods. A priest shows you what his or her god is like. When you go to a temple or shrine and you see the priest there - what they do, what they say about it, the rituals they perform - you get a sense for what their god cares about, who their god cares about. So when God invites the people to be priests, it's an invitation to show the world who this God is and what this God is like."

So the Jews were chosen to be messengers, ambassadors, witnesses, priests of who God is to the rest of the world. And guess what... so are we! Peter wrote a letter to Jesus followers scattered all over the world, and he said, "you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God."

The people of God are people who make up a Kingdom of priests. Each of us has been called out of darkness and into light and each of us shows the rest of the world who God is. Paul put it this way, "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God." We are appealing to others on Christ's behalf to be reconciled. Isn't that what we pay our pastor to do? Even if that were true, are you willing to pay someone to do something that He has chosen you to do? I hope not.

If you are a citizen of the Kingdom of God, then you are a priest. And with that comes the responsibility to show the rest of the world who God is, what He cares about, who He loves. If we call Jesus, "Lord," then we ought to be ready to stand in the gap between Him and those who don't know Him and introduce Him to them.

May every citizen of the Kingdom live this life as a priest of the Living God, presenting Him to the world as Savior and Lord.