How To Become a Priest

Jesus is ready to empower you with a full and unmediated relationship with Him.  In fact, the only limiting factor in your relationship with Him is your willingness to change, your ability to love, your openess to seeing things from His perspective, and your dedication to knowing and accomplishing His will.  His blessings will chase you down and overcome you if you choose to engage your friendship — your closely held personal, unique, irreplaceable, mutual, and direct relationship with the God of the Universe.  This is what it means to be a priest.  A priest is anyone who commits to the rights and the responsibilities of being a person who knows God.

There was a time when only a few could or did know God.  But when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea all that changed.  God Himself became universally visible for the first time, not just to a select few prophets or wise men, not just to the priests and levites serving in the temple, and more importantly, not just to the few who actually met Jesus in those few years He spent building His ministry, developing a following, and initiating His kingdom on earth to coordinate in harmony with His kingdom in heaven.

“Because you have seen me you have believed.  Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed” – John 20

The key to becoming a priest is establishing an unmediated relationship with Jesus Christ as your only God.  Don’t hide.  Don’t try to enlist someone else to take care of it for you.  Its about you and God.  Its between you and God.  And only you and God can sort it out.

So, to become a priest, here are the basic steps that God has provided, for anyone who desires to find Him:

1. Take ownership of your life.  Every decision you have made.  Every experience you have lived.  Every thing that has been done to you.  Everything that you have done.  And all of the results both good and bad.  Accept where you are and who you are with complete openness, honesty, and the willingness to see it for what it is.
2. Evaluate your decision making based on the results you acheive.  God’s answers always work.  So if the decisions you are making aren’t working, they aren’t God’s will for your life.  Identify where God is already blessing your life and areas where you are still in need of blessing.
3. Commit your life, your decisions, your property, and your personal identity to Jesus Christ as your only God.  Jesus is God.  Embracing this reality will take your perspectives, your decision making ability, and the results you achieve to places you have not even thought possible before.  And commiting your life to Him changes the way you interact with other people, what you choose to do with the time and resources He provides for you, and at the heart of it all your commitment changes who you are – because by choosing a relationship with Jesus as your only God, you are born again.
4. Get baptized by full immersion in water in the name of “Jesus Christ”.  Baptism is the physical act of commitment indicating your ordination into the priesthood.  No other names, titles, or aspects of God should be used in the baptism of new believers than “Jesus Christ”.  Although only your own commitment to walk with Christ can make your baptism effective, and so who physically helps you into the water and makes the statement “I baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ”  is of little consequence, the best practice is to be baptized by the believer who introduced you to Jesus as your only God.  This connection through shared experience will provide you with a mentor in the faith, and a fellow disciple to walk with on the path to eternal life.
5. Take your baptism to the next level.  The baptism in water is your ordination, but your calling is to receive full immersion in the holy spirit and fire.  God’s spirit comes on those who pursue, study, pray for, and accomplish His will.  And as you discover His will, come to understand the actual gospel, and persist in your commitment to staying right in your relationship with Him, exercising your rights as a believer and facing your responsibilities as well — the passion for the salvation of souls, for making the world a better place because you have lived in it, your ability to see God’s will in the present, and receive the persistent blessings God showers on you will rise up like a flame and the power of God’s love will come into you, over you and around you — and through you into all those you reach.
6. Make disciples.  It is the first and most important responsibility of every believer to introduce others to God.  As a priest you are a disciple, a follower and servant of Jesus Christ.  It is your job to make more disciples, not for yourself, but for God.  You may not be the first or the last person to introduce them.  They may not be ready to hear, or they may have deep seated rejection of God in their hearts.  But you make sure the witness of your life, and the testimony of your words accurately reflect, embody, and convey your relationship with Jesus Christ as your only God.
7. Live with integrity.  One of the best measures of your own faith, is observing how consistent you are.  God is completely consistent and so has perfect integrity.  Evil, on the other hand is completely inconsistent and lacks all integrity.  God’s vision for your life is to bless every single thing you think, say, and do.  Every word you speak.  Every decision you make.  Every task you take on.  Everything.  Everything you choose to do either empowers the presence of God on earth, or limits His ability to bless you and those around you.
8. Engage reality and so change it.  Don’t get bogged down in your mistakes, overcome them.  The only unforgiveable sin is one that you won’t face or for which you don’t want forgiveness.  God doesn’t hold mistakes against you, but there is nothing He can do if you don’t accept reality and choose to change it.  Our God is bigger than every challenge you face today.  And there is nothing you can do that will turn Him off of His desire to work with you.  God is a very persistent giver.  Accept the goodness of God, not because you believe you deserve it, but because you know that He wants to give it to you.  Every time you fall, get up.  Every time you stumble, take one more step.  Focus your life on discovering and accomplishing God’s will, not on reliving the past.  Every moment is a new opportunity to engage reality and so to change it.  Take that opporunity.

God isn’t holding anything back in His relationship with you.  His will always provides the best possible outcome in every situation.  And so as you embrace the reality of His will for you, you will be perfected not just individually in your relationship with Him, but also collectively with all other believers as we all work together in becoming the living body of Christ.

Are you ready?  Then pray this prayer, “Lord Jesus, I accept who I am, I understand where I have been, and I repent of my sins.  Right here, right now, I commit the rest of my life to you.  Come into my heart.  I make you my one and only God.  Save me.  Amen.”

If you prayed that prayer, I believe you were born again.  Get baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, pursue and accomplish His will, and get ready to accept the blessings and the promises of God that will chase you down and overcome you now that you are a priest and a believer, a disciple of the one true God and eternal life, Jesus Christ.