The Spirit’s Drive in Us

So it is now with us as with Him. Freed from our own self-problems, a permanent drive "eats us up," that all the world, and that means for us all within our guided reach, must share this life’s secret which belongs to them if they but knew it: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God and it doth not yet appear what we shall be." And so a priest is a commissioned person. He can’t help it. He doesn’t seek out the commission, it seeks him out. It’s a divine "must." What "must"? Whatever confronts us as the area within our reach where we can bring Christ to others. I had to be a witness to Christ to my fellow soldiers in World War I. I had to knock on doors of the men’s rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, when I went from the army to the university, and invite them to come to our Christian Fellowship and find Christ, out of which came the birth of the now worldwide InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And, always seeing that the front line is the place for a soldier in a war, when I heard C.T. Studd, who had sold all (being England’s great cricketer and a wealthy man) to take the gospel to tribes in Africa who had never heard of him, I had to go and join him. And now after years of taking Christ to the unreached peoples of the world, in my "old age" at 94, I have to take this final total reality of Christ reliving His life in our forms and going into saving action by us, to all who will give me a hearing. This life is a glorious "have-to." Therefore, in actuality every born-again son of God has at once begun to be a priest-intercessor from the moment the Spirit has made his body His temple. We are a commissioned people!

The way of the intercessor-priest is by whatever form of involvement the Spirit indicates to us that we can be in action in bringing our light to others. Obviously there can be no limits to what special way that is. But it will be in the form of self-giving, in no way engineered by us, but by which we take the place of those we are intercessor for, that they might take their places as redeemed sons of God. It is thus vicarious. It just will cost and will be a death for us–not sought for by us, but in some forms our heart and mind and body involvement for these others will bring a death: to our reputation in being called "fanatics," to our material and physical expenditure, to who knows what in what way. For death, as Jesus said in John 12:24, presses out His life for others (1 Peter 2:20-25). Paul again said, "We which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you" (2 Cor. 4:12). 

That’s the cost of intercession following on to the commission. Often we may not realize we are in an intercessory "death" until we find we are! But then knowing that this is the intercessor’s way, we anticipate the glory in the suffering. He "poured out His soul unto death and…made intercession for the transgressors" (Is. 53:11-12). "For the joy set before Him, [He] endured the cross" (Heb. 12:2).