Words to Live by is a weekly devotional email of Scriptures and quotes that highlight and expound upon our Union with Christ. If you’d like to receive devotionals like the one below, please subscribe using this link.

Wednesday Sep 25, 2024

Life in the new dimension

“Priest is the Bible title for this ultimate category of life, and intercession the work of the priest. We understand, of course, that, in Bible terms, priesthood is not some specialized ‘sanctified’ office, but the inescapable ordained condition of every redeemed person. Redemption is at the same moment ordination into the priesthood. All members of the body of Christ, without distinction or discrimination, are, according to Peter the spokesman of the apostolate, not only a ‘chosen generation,’ but a ‘royal priesthood.’ Since the old Israel failed to rise to its privileged commission of being a ‘kingdom of priests’ (Ex. 19:6), the new Israel has received the appointment. God’s priests are very ordinary people, and very secular people, for they are you and I.

We need, then, to be clear about what the office of priesthood involved, and the work of intercessors, since we are these. We have already stated it in the general terms of Hebrews 5:1. The priest has been ‘taken from among men’ (redeemed); ‘ordained for men’ (commissioned): ‘in things pertaining to God’ (to bring men to Christ and build them up in Him).

Get that down to specifics in our daily lives, and we see it best if we understand what is meant by our being intercessors–the chief work of a priest.

In the Bible an intercessor is anyone, everyone, who sees a situation with God’s eyes and moves in on it. That is to say, the whole of our life, all our lives, are full of frustrating, yet challenging situations. God, it said, ‘wondered that there was no intercessor’ and ‘looked for a man to stand in the gap and make up the hedge.’

Millions of gaps, millions of hedges, some in every one of our lives. But the point is to have eyes to see them, and we are exactly positioned, everyone of us, appointed from before the foundation of the world, to be just where we are and what we are–to fill some gap, make up some hedge.

So every life is nothing but a mass of opportunities, and we have been put there to seize them and grasp them. Intercessors, therefore, are not some peculiar people, any more than priests are, but are you and I, in the most ordinary business, workshop, domestic situations; put there because there is something, it may be in our own households, in our church, district, city, country, world, which we are meant to have eyes to see as intercessors, and to stand in that gap.”

Taken from: The Spontaneous You

By Norman Grubb

Pages 102-103