There is something I would like all of us to see: In this end time, God is doing a work of recovery; He is taking the way of recovery. I believe God is leading all of His children up to this position in this last age. Here is one segment of the pathway of the church that is waiting for a fundamental recovery—the universal priesthood of God's children. As long as a person is one of God's people, he should be a priest. There are priests today. In the kingdom to come, there also will be priests. God wants to secure His priests. He wants all of His people to be His priests.
As soon as you become a Christian, you become a priest. If you want to be a Christian, you have to be a priest. Do not expect anyone to be a priest for you. You have to be a priest yourself. There is no intermediary class among us. No one will attend to spiritual affairs for us. No one will work for us. Among us we must not have another class of people called workers.
If God is merciful to us, all the brothers and sisters will spontaneously be working, preaching the gospel, and serving the Lord together. The more universal the priesthood is, the more visible the church will be. Once the priesthood becomes non-universal, we have failed and our pathway has been corrupted.
We are poor, weak, blind, and crippled. For the Lord to accept persons such as ourselves to be priests is an honor to us. In the Old Testament, such people could not be priests. All who were disabled, lame, or blemished could not be priests. However, today the base, the unclean, the blind, and the disabled have all been called by God to be priests! He is the Lord. I have said this before: We should gladly give ourselves to His service even if it means crawling to His feet to beg for service. We should be happy to kneel down to beg for this honor. I am happy to crawl on my knees and plead with the Lord, "Lord, I want to serve You. I gladly offer myself to Your service. You honor me by allowing me to come to You." To be a priest is to draw near to God. To be a priest is to have no distance between us and God; it is to be able to enter in directly and to wait for no one. To be a priest means that we can touch God ourselves.
If one day all the brothers and sisters in all the churches rise up to serve, the kingdom of God will come among us. It will be a kingdom of priests; all the people will be priests. This is glorious. I look forward to the day when all idols are removed from among us. Before the Lord, we should pay whatever price it takes to achieve this. The Levites paid the price; they were faithful in setting aside their personal affection. Only such people can have a share in the priesthood.
In order to fully understand the priesthood, we need to understand the way God dealt with the priests in the Old Testament. It is a great matter for God to allow a person to draw near to Him without being smitten. Only the priests could eat the showbread, serve at the altar, and enter the holy place. Only they could offer the sacrifices. Others died when they entered the holy place. God's acceptance is the basis of the priesthood. Since God has accepted us, should we not enter in today? Formerly, anyone would die if he dared to enter in. But today God says, "You can come!" How strange it is if we still feel reluctant to come.
We need the Lord to open our eyes. It is grace in its highest form for a person to be given the privilege to serve Him. Those who really know God will say, "The grace that allows me to serve God is greater than the grace which brought me to salvation." The dog under the table can eat the crumbs underneath the table, but it cannot serve at the table. To be saved by grace is relatively simple, but not everyone can serve by grace. Today in the church, everyone who is saved by grace can also serve. It is foolish not to consider this to be a great grace.
Today's Christianity acknowledges the presence of an intermediary class. Christianity as we see it today even divides God's priests and God's people into two classes. We look forward to the day when there is no more hierarchy among us. There may be one or two persons in the church who have failed. But the principle does not change. Today it is fashionable in Christianity to compromise principles. In principle, today's Christianity has fallen and has taken the way of the Israelites—the people and the priests have become two. May we not fall into such a system!