What we find through the history of God dealing with men and then through his chosen race, the Hebrews, that they found that God was too awe-inspiring, too majestic to have any relationship with individuals and so they decided that because he was so awesome and just and powerful and holy and couldn’t be approached because of all of this, and they were so evil and sinful and bad and couldn’t go near to God because he was holy and they were so bad, that they instituted a priesthood, someone who could be touched like they could be, yet was holy enough to approach God.
So the priesthood came and was the means of preventing the people of God from understanding the father heart of God because they said, “I am not holy enough because I have sinned. Therefore I will go to the priest and give him an offering so that he can pray for me to God because I can’t.”
You understand that concept of the Old Testament. Now think about these. That concept is still alive and well in a lot of Christendom. We think that we are not worthy of coming into the presence of God. Therefore we must have someone else to do that for us. One of the things that happens to me very often and still happens to me even when I’m not in a foreign country, they will come and they will say, “Please pray for me for ...” Please pray for my family. Please pray for my children. Please pray for their school. Please pray for my daughter to have a baby. Please pray for this. Please pray for that. Please pray for something else, as though I had somehow got more connection with God than they had.
No, I don't have any more connection to God than the next Christian, I have just realised the connection that I have with my father and they perhaps haven’t realised. You see the connection is that God made us his sons. He made us his sons, therefore he must be our father. If he’s our Father, then we can go to our Father. Now, it’s great that you can pray for somebody because they asked you to pray for them; but we don’t need someone to pray for us. We need to know that we have access ourselves. Amen?
Excerpt from coming book by Howard Sands
Your Kingdom Come
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