“The dictionary tells us that a priest is a person who serves God professionally. Most Christians would tell us that a priest is one who serves God. This is right, but what does it mean to serve God? Today’s Christians would answer that to serve God is to work for God. This answer is wrong! To say that a priest is a person who serves God is right, but to say that to serve God is merely to do something for God, is wrong.

To realize what a priest is, we must first see God’s eternal plan. God is a God of purpose. He has a purpose which He wants to accomplish. According to the revelation of the Scriptures, God has a plan to work Himself into a group of people in order that He might be their life and they might become His expression. Based upon this plan, God created man.

Man was destined to receive God, to be filled, saturated and permeated with God, and to have God flow out of him that he might be the living expression of God. This is a brief definition of a priest. He must contact God, be filled with God, and be possessed by God completely that he may be built up with others in the flow of the life of God. Then the priesthood will be God’s living, corporate expression.

Christianity’s concept is that if we love the Lord, we must work for Him. This is a natural, religious concept, not the revelation of the Bible. God never intended to call us merely to work for Him. God’s intention is that we must first open ourselves to Him that He may come into us to fill and flood us until He has taken possession of every part of our being. Our whole being must be saturated and permeated with Him. Then we will be one with Him. We will not only be clothed outwardly with Him as power, but permeated inwardly with Him as everything. Then spontaneously, God will flow out of us, and we will be built up with others in this flow of life.

I must repeat that a priest is not one who merely works for God. God has no intention of calling us to do something for Him. His intention is that we answer His call by opening ourselves to Him and saying, “Lord, here I am, not ready to work for You, but ready to be filled and possessed by You and to be one with You.” Not until we are one with the Lord can we ever work for Him and be a real priest. The main function of a priest is not to work but to spend time in the presence of the Lord until he is one with Him in the spirit. The priesthood that God plans to have is a corporate man who is saturated and permeated with Himself.”

(The Priesthood, chapter 1)