The Finality! We are Royal Priests

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Then there is the third level, the father level, found in 1 John 2:12-14. It is the way of the Spirit joined to our spirit, where we have moved from merely knowing God’s acts to participating in His ways (Psalm 103:7). It is He carrying out His love activities in the world by us, which of course are the outgoings of God in His eternal nature of self-giving “that the world through Him might be saved.” This is the new and final quality of living in which laying down our lives that others may have their predestined completion is not seen as sacrifice but glory, just as John always spoke of Jesus’ coming Calvary as “the Son of man being glorified” (John 7:39; 12:23).

In the fulfillment of this there is the discipleship process in which we are being trained to be apostles–God’s sent, commissioned ones, whatever our walk of life. All of us who are “young men” are of necessity moved in the direction of the royal priesthood life, since that is the nature of Him who now expresses Himself as us. It is the “taking up of your cross” stage, beyond the point of going to His cross for salvation. It is now on His cross and thus He in us/as us, we now moving on to become participators in His cross.

But there is a warning Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 4:14 about the call there now is to us to “take up your cross and follow Me’ and thus be who He is. Some deeper recognition is involved in this, and not all believers follow through into the total meaning of our New Being. See in 1 Corinthians 4:8-14 where Paul so differentiates between the Corinthian church with its blessed and gifted members, and himself and others who were “apostles.” He warns these saints (1 Cor. 4:14) about their danger in coming short of their completion of taking their intercessory share in the Spirit’s saving actions by the Savior’s body.

As disciples, or learners, as in Luke 14:23-33, the Spirit takes us through detaching-attaching processes. By these we are loosed from our over-attachment to even what are the “good” things of life: family bonds, earthly possessions or over-concern for our own security or physical well-being. “If any man hate not father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sister, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” And, Jesus says, there is a sitting down and counting the cost of this by which we become, not just saved, but co-saviors with Him (1 Cor. 9:22). The Spirit will make apostles of just those who take the full position of faith that He is doing it, which will be in various forms the fulfillment of Paul’s description of an apostle in 1 Corinthians 4:9-13 and Corinthians 6:8-10. This is the top level, completed spirit-self.

For Paul, in Philippians 3:7-11, that meant that after the joy of his salvation (“… what things were gain to me those things I counted loss for Christ”), he then gladly counted all things as loss compared to finding his own completion as Christ in human form in the young man state–“…the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.” He said this meant that: he “suffered the loss of all things,” and that plainly hurt him in the young man stage. But now as the apostle in the royal priest stage, it was actually repulsive to him to think of retaining what it had then cost him to give up. “I… do count them but dung, that. I may win Christ.”

Total reversal, not of attachment to the bad things of life, but the good things to be absorbed in the best, the only true things. These were to “win” the privilege of co-saviorhood with Christ, way beyond the stages of relying on Christ for his personal needs. Now it was to be absorbed with Him in paying the necessary price for the fulfillment of a world’s need, and that meant being one with Him on that co-saviorhood, fatherhood level, sharing in manifestations of His power by faith action (“the power of the resurrection”). It also meant sharing in the suffering and death experiences of a priest-intercessor (“the fellowship of His suffering and conformity to His death”), from which would then come the co-resurrection of many from the dead–the intercessor’s gain.