The New Testament revelation concerning the priesthood of the gospel is entirely different from the practice in Christianity. Because the priesthood of the gospel is according to the divine, biblical revelation and not according to human thought, we have to receive it. This divine revelation will revolutionize our entire concept and change our entire practice. We are believers chosen by God, redeemed by Christ, and regenerated by the Spirit. Now we are priests. A priest is one who is so close to God, who is one with God, and who can have God’s oracle to speak to people. Such a one can also bring God to man and bring man back to God.
The Old Testament priests only handled the types of Christ that pointed to the coming Christ, but we New Testament priests have received Christ, and Christ has entered into us. Now we are in Christ, and Christ is in us. We are even one with Christ, so whatever He is and has is ours. We can go out in the condition of the Triune God being wholly one with us. We go out with the Triune God. We go to command the sinners to repent with the authority of Christ. The Lord Jesus said that all authority had been given to Him in heaven and on earth, and then He charged us to go and disciple the nations (Matt. 28:19). We go to disciple the nations with His authority, baptizing them into the Triune God. We do not just impart the Triune God into them. After they receive the Triune God, we have to baptize them into the Triune God to make them one with God. To preach the gospel is to go out with Christ and with His divine authority to visit our relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues, and neighbors. We have to preach the gospel as priests, making this a part of our daily walk, our daily life.
To go to visit sinners and get them saved that they may be made the sons of God and the members of Christ is the first step of the priestly service, the priesthood. The New Testament priests are linked with the gospel. In the past when we talked about the priests, we never thought about the gospel. We considered that the priests and the gospel were two absolutely separate items. This shows that we were short of spiritual sight, spiritual vision. We did not see that the preaching of the gospel is the priesthood. We need to see that the priesthood is linked with the preaching of the gospel. The preaching of the gospel is our daily life, our daily work, because the preaching of the gospel is the work and the duty of the New Testament priests.
If the offering of the sacrifices were taken away from the Old Testament priests, they would have nothing to do; they would have no daily living. Everything would be meaningless to them. The daily work and the daily living of the New Testament priests is also to offer the sacrifices in reality. While we are preaching the gospel, we are the energizing priests, fulfilling our daily duty to offer the saved sinners to God as acceptable sacrifices. From now on, whenever we preach the gospel to sinners, we must have the deep sensation that we are the energizing priests, struggling and endeavoring to do our daily duty to fulfill our priesthood. This realization will make a great difference in our daily life. If we do not understand that our preaching of the gospel is the fulfilling of our priestly duty, we will only preach the gospel when we feel like it. When we are happy, we will preach the gospel. When we are not happy, we will forget about preaching the gospel. If something is our duty, however, we do not do it according to how we feel.
To illustrate this let us consider a sister who is a housewife. A good housewife is always on duty. She may have three children—one in kindergarten, one in elementary school, and another one in junior high school. Every morning she is busy preparing breakfast for each one. All three children are different with their particular characteristics, and they may want different things for breakfast. One may want a soft-boiled egg, and another may want scrambled eggs. The third child may want his eggs cooked the way that he saw them cooked in the school cafeteria. Thus, every morning the mother makes eggs for her children in three different, particular ways. After they eat breakfast, she has to drive them to different schools at different times. This is her duty as a mother and as a housewife. She cannot tell her children that she is tired and that they need to take care of themselves. She fulfills her daily duty regardless of how she feels. Because she realizes that this is her duty as a housewife, she carries out her daily duty regardless of her feeling. Do we realize that we have to preach the gospel because it is our duty? Have we preached the gospel with the deep sensation that we are fulfilling our duty? Our preaching of the gospel is to carry out God’s New Testament economy, and this is the New Testament priesthood assigned to God’s children as priests.
To fulfill such a duty, we must be the energizing priests. To be a mother raising up children, in a certain respect, is a joyful thing, but in order for a mother, a housewife, to fulfill her daily duty, she must be energizing. Paul practiced the priesthood in the same way. In Romans 15:16 he said that he was a minister of Christ Jesus, an energizing priest of the gospel of God. He was an energizing priest to offer the nations to God as acceptable sacrifices. Because Paul saw and realized this, he took this as his daily duty. One day our feelings may be very high, and we may want to preach the gospel everywhere. Two days later we may feel down, and we will not want to preach the gospel. This is why I do not like to see the saints so excited in a natural way. We may be excited one day and down the next day. What we need is a daily revival. We need to live a priest’s life. We have been chosen, saved, regenerated, and ordained to be the New Testament priests of the gospel. Now we are not so free because we have a priestly duty to fulfill.
To fulfill our priestly duty we have to learn to be energizing. The first thing we have to do is to get sinners saved. God has chosen thousands of people on this earth and has ordained them to be the sons of peace, but we have to go out to visit people to find these sons of peace (Luke 10:1-6). Whether or not someone is a son of peace cannot be determined by only one visit. We may have knocked on a man’s door when he was fighting with his wife. When we tell him that we have come to preach the gospel to him, he will not have a heart for it. We should not think that he is not a son of peace. We visited him at the wrong time. We better try to go back to him again after three weeks. Three weeks later, he may be happy when we visit him. Then he will receive us and also receive the Lord. In Luke 10 the Lord told the seventy that He sent them out as lambs in the midst of wolves (v. 3). It is hard to say just by one visit whether a person is a son of peace or a wolf. We must go back to visit people again and again.
The Lord Jesus gained His disciples by His traveling. When He was traveling by the seashore of Galilee, He called Peter, Andrew, James, and John (Matt. 4:18-22). Later as He traveled, He saw Matthew the publican sitting in the customs office, and He said to him, “Follow Me” (Matt. 9:9). Luke 8:1 tells us that the Lord Jesus traveled from city to city and from village to village to visit and gain the sinners. In the Lord’s earthly ministry, He did not formally arrange to have big meetings. Instead, He traveled to bring the gospel to sinners. Therefore, as the New Testament priests fulfilling our New Testament priesthood, the first thing we have to do is to go to visit the sinners where they are. If they are not at home but working in the factory, we may need to go visit them in the factory during the time that they have a break. Our preaching of the gospel is not just the outward form of knocking on doors. We must visit people and gain them where they are.
When we go to visit people, we go as priests of God with God’s authority. When we go in this way, our speaking will be with authority. Only the Spirit knows what we will speak. If we live a life of the priesthood, we will go out to preach the gospel with much prayer. Then our going will be our being sent out by the Lord. When we visit people, we will always say something instantly to meet the instant need. When someone answers the door we may say, “We were sent by Jesus Christ to come here to pass on grace and peace to you.” When we speak in this way, the person to whom we speak will respond in a positive way. He may say that he wants grace and peace and that he would like to know who Jesus Christ is.
If we go out to visit people in a loose way without much prayer and only tell them that the church sent us here to preach the gospel, they will turn us away. We must go out to visit people with much prayer and with much realization that we are not ordinary persons but God’s priests. When we visit someone with the gospel, we may tell him, “God sent me to see you to make you rich.” When we tell someone that we are coming to make him rich, he will be happy. We are telling him the truth. We came to make him rich in salvation, rich in Christ, rich in grace, rich in peace, and rich in many other things. He is a poor person, but we have come to make him rich. The point I am making is that the Spirit knows how to lead us to speak a particular word. Quite often, we do not need to say too much to someone. After a little conversation, he may be ready to pray to receive the Lord.
We need to take the preaching of the gospel as our duty and do it regularly, constantly, and continuously. It is best if we would make a budget of our time. Now that we have seen that the preaching of the gospel is our daily duty, we need to realize that this does not mean that we have to deliver a child every day. Even in the natural realm, it normally takes a woman nine months to deliver a child. We should not go out and get too many people baptized in one day. That would be foolish because we could not take care of all of them. We need to exercise “birth control” in our preaching of the gospel. We should just go out one or two nights a week until we can get two or three people baptized. Sometimes in one night we may get three baptized in one home—a husband, his wife, and their son. After baptizing them, we should stay with them for a long time and then go back to them the next day. We should not go to knock on more doors because these three babies are enough for us to care for. We should go back to them frequently to feed them and to care for them. Mothers know that their feeding of their little ones must be regular, constant, and continuous. We should go back to visit these new ones again and again until we realize that they are settled in the Christian faith.
We can bring them to the group meetings so that they can become acquainted with other Christians and have fellowship with them. They need the mutual care and mutual shepherding in the group meetings. We can also bring them to the larger church meetings where they can participate with the saints to prophesy for the building up of the church as the organic Body of Christ. It is best if we can spend an entire year to take care of these new ones so that they will be kept as remaining fruit and be perfected to do the same thing that we are doing in our priestly service.
After we feel that these new ones have been raised up, we can go out to get some others saved, and we can do this kind of work year-round. If we can arrange our time properly, this will not be too difficult for us to carry out. To raise up children is not an easy task, but if we do it properly, regularly, constantly, and continuously, it will not be too difficult. Our labor to raise up the new ones is like the raising up of our children. If we labor in this way, we can gain one or two remaining fruit year-round. If many saints labor as priests of the gospel, there will be a good percentage of increase in all of the local churches.