Prayer: Lord, we worship You for this moment. Thank You for gathering us all into Your dear name. Lord, we have no trust in ourselves. We trust in You, and we trust in Your cleansing blood. How we thank You for the cleansing blood that cleanses us all the time. Lord, we thank You for Your presence, and we thank You for Your speaking. We thank You for Your heavenly oracle, and we thank You that You can be and would be one with us in the spirit. Lord, display the fact that we are one spirit with You in our speaking. Lord, defeat the enemy. We ask You by touching Your throne of authority to deal with the evil one. We accuse him before You in Your mighty name. Lord, in Your mighty name we even bind the strong man, the evil one. Lord, put him aside. Be with us, glorify Your name, and fill this hall with Your presence. Amen.
In the past few years, I have spent much time to reconsider the teaching of the Bible. After much reconsideration I have the burden to share with the saints the advance of the Lord’s recovery today. The Lord’s recovery has been going on progressively throughout the centuries of the history of the church, and it is still going on because it has not reached its peak yet. Throughout the centuries of church history, the recovery has always been advancing and will continue to advance until it will reach its consummation. Even among us in the past sixty years there have been a number of advances. In these years, the Lord has shown us something more in His going on. This is why we have entitled this book The Advance of the Lord’s Recovery Today. In this book I have the burden to present what the Lord has shown us in the past few years. The four major items that the Lord has shown us are the priesthood of the gospel in the New Testament, the organic building up of the Body of Christ, the perfecting of the saints by the gifts, and the prophesying for the building up of the church as the organic Body of Christ. These four major items are the advance of the Lord’s recovery today.
These four items are big “missings” in today’s Christianity. They all have been missed. I am burdened to the uttermost with these items. In these days, I am consumed with these four items. I am here on this earth to labor with the Lord and in the Lord so that He can recover the gospelizing by the New Testament priests of the gospel of God, the organic building up of His organic Body, the perfecting of all the common saints by the gifted persons, and all prophesying, speaking Christ into others for the building up of the church. These four items are on my shoulders. I am burdened. The Lord desires to recover these four big, crucial, major things missed among His people.
The first item that the Lord desires to recover is the priesthood of the gospel in the New Testament. The New Testament reveals that we are priests of the gospel of God. The terms priests and priesthood may be familiar to us, but I do not believe that many of us are familiar with the term a priest of the gospel of God. This term is only mentioned in Romans 15:16. Let us look first at the present translation of this verse in our Recovery Version: “That I should be a minister of Christ Jesus to the nations, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, that the offering of the nations might be acceptable, having been sanctified in the Holy Spirit.” We have reconsidered the Greek text of this verse, especially the portion translated “ministering as a priest the gospel of God.” We feel that a better translation of this phrase is “a ministering priest of the gospel of God” or “a working priest of the gospel of God.” Here is a priest who is ministering and working. We may even say that such a priest is “an energizing priest of the gospel of God.” From our study of the Greek text, we feel that this phrase can be in apposition to the previous phrase, “a minister of Christ Jesus to the nations.” Thus, a minister of Christ Jesus to the nations is a ministering priest of the gospel of God, a working priest of the gospel of God, an energizing priest of the gospel of God. A minister of Christ Jesus must be a priest of the gospel of God. I have studied and expounded the book of Romans in the past, but I did not see until recently that we are priests of the gospel of God. In the Old Testament, the priests were working and ministering to offer animal sacrifices to God, but Paul as a New Testament priest was busy in the gospel of God.
The truth concerning the priesthood began to be recovered from 1828 when the Brethren were raised up by the Lord in England. They saw the universality of the priesthood. Before that time, Bible teachers thought that the priests were a particular body of special people. This was the reason that the clergy-laity system was built up. The so-called common believers became the laity. According to this concept, someone who is not of the clergy is a layman, and if someone preaches the gospel who is not of the clergy, he is a lay preacher. Thus, two classes of believers came into being, and this brought the Lord’s children back to the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, the majority of the children of Israel could be considered as the “laity.” God’s original intention was for the entire nation of Israel to be a “kingdom of priests” (Exo. 19:6). However, because of their worship of the golden calf (Exo. 32:1-6), most of the Israelites lost the priesthood. Later, only Aaron and his sons were the priests, and the Levites served the priesthood in practical matters (Num. 3:6-10). The British Brethren, however, saw that in the New Testament, according to Revelation 1:5b-6 and 1 Peter 2:5 and 9, every believer is a priest.
The New Testament teaches us clearly that all the believers are priests. We are not individualistic priests, but we are priests in a corporation to become a priesthood. This is the teaching of the New Testament that the Brethren saw. From the very beginning of the Lord’s recovery among us, we also saw this truth concerning the priesthood, but neither we nor the Brethren pointed out that the priesthood in the New Testament is the priesthood of the gospel. Yes, we all are priests, but what kind of priests are we? Today we see that according to Romans 15:16 we are priests of the gospel of God. We all need to declare, “I am a priest of the gospel of God!”