This is the beginning of the little series I promised you a few days ago. I trust it will bless you and you can use it in your daily life or you can share it in a Bible Study, Sermon or whatever you wish. God promised many things and when God makes a promise and says, "I Will" you can trust Him at His Word. Enjoy and please give me your feedback, good bad or indifferent, I welcome all. Just keep your words sweet, because if you do not, someday you may need to eat them and they may not taste as good the second trip around. If you do not know Christ as your Savior, I invite you today to accept Him and invite Him into your heart. He will make a difference and you will spend eternity with Him. Let me know, and I will pray for and with you. Now, here is the first installment in the series, "I WILL", enjoy. Pastor Coutts
I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH
Matthew 16:13-28;
The world does not have a high opinion of the Church for the most part. Let me read for you something I read a while ago which really states for me the world’s sentiment concerning us as Christians. This is what I read . . . “The Christian Communications Laboratory relates the story of a small Midwestern weekly paper which ran a story saying, "We are pleased to announce that the hurricane which blew away the Methodist church last Friday did no real damage to the town." Kind of scary isn’t it! That’s the style of reporting we get today. One writer said, “Maybe our failure today is not that we kill the King's Son or practice violence and bloodshed so much as our being irrelevant and without impact.” (James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988), p. 448.)
Unfortunately, today there are a lot of Christians who do not take a different view than those we have just quoted. Christ went to the cross for His church and the marching orders He gave did not change. There is nothing in His final comments about Church programs, and nothing about Worship styles. There is nothing about liturgy; in fact, His final comments to His believers were in one area alone. He said, "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel..."! Mark 16:15; This was His directive and it was meant solely to build His Church! In some parts of the world this directive is not happening much anymore...consider the following:
“France has twice as many Muslims as Protestants. * There are more spiritist healers in Paris than medical doctors, priests and pastors combined. * Europe is the only continent where the church is growing more slowly than the population. (Servant Magazine, May/June 1989).
The Bible teaches us that the Church is to be a triumphant power on Earth, not even the gates of Hell can destroy it, only apathy, unbelief and disobedience can hurt it! When Jesus and His disciples arrived in a less populated and quieter area He decided to ask them what the general views about Him were. He asks the Disciples to respond with what they were hearing on their travels about how Jesus was viewed by the crowds. The reason He asked them was because He was nearing the end of His earthly ministry and the focus was on what people were thinking and saying.
Their responses fell basically into three camps and reflected the prevailing opinions about Jesus of that day. Some thought that Jesus was John the Baptist....presumably resurrected from the dead! Others that Jesus was Elijah the prophet, and some even thought that Jesus was Jeremiah or one of the other prophets of old. It is true that Jesus did have some similarities with these three, but He is not one of them! Many were not willing to concede that He was unique even though they were willing to concede that He was unusual! Strange as it seems they were willing to believe that He may be some person from the past returned but they were not willing to confront the possibility that He is not history as history goes, but that He is the present and the future! Too many people today are willing to give Jesus an unusual place in history. But in the same vein, they are not willing to face the God of the present and the future that is in Christ now!
The people of Jesus' day were trapped by their religious activity because they had lost the focus and power of their faith. That is because the focus of their power and faith only focused on keeping the institution alive, rather than His being alive and this can happen today to! Rick Warren said, Many churches are driven by finances. The question in the forefront of every one's mind in a finance driven church is, "How much will it cost?" Nothing else ever seems quite as important. Finances are foremost. The most heated debate in a finance driven church is always over the budget. While good stewardship and cash flow are essential for a healthy church, finances must never be the controlling issue. The greater issue is: "What does God want us to do?" We do not exist to make a profit. The bottom line in the church is not: "How much did we save?" but "Who was saved?" I've noticed that many churches are driven by faith in their early years and driven by finances in later years. (Rick Warren, Evangelism for a Changing World, (Shaw, 1995), p. 5.)
Ultimately, it is not how someone else answers the question He poses that will get us into heaven, it is how we answer it ourselves! This is where we see an intelligent Peter because Peter shines here. He answers the question correctly. He says that Jesus is the eternal son of God and his correct response nets him a very positive response by Jesus! Here Jesus blesses Peter and says that on the confession he just made, He (Jesus), will build His Church and the very gates of Hell will not prevail against it! I want to make a clear point here. What Jesus does here is to make a play on Peter's name. We need to go to the Greek language to understand. In Greek, Peter’s name is, ‘Petros’. Petros literally means ‘Rock’, and Jesus says, "Upon this Rock (Petra) I will build my Church". Matthew 16;18;. Here is a bit of insight to this language. Jesus' uses the feminine form of the word Rock in this second use of the term. This indicates that he is speaking about the confession Peter made and not Peter himself.
Wow! This is the main confession of the Church: that Jesus is the Son of God! This is what we are to tell the world! This is what we are to believe! This is the foundation of the Church, and this is what the Church will be built on. It will not be built on money, programs or styles. It is going to be built upon the person of Jesus Christ!
The question is, are we professing this? Jesus promises them the "keys" of the kingdom, What would be the purpose? To do what? Simple. To bind what has been bound by God in Heaven and on earth and to loose what has been loosed by God in Heaven and on earth. This is not an indiscriminate power on our part to determine what can be bound and loosed, it is the power to announce what God has said is bound and loosed, the passive tense in the Greek make this clear. We don't walk around just "binding & loosing" whatever we feel like "binding and loosing". No! We educate ourselves and we learn what God has bound and loosed and announce it as so! But this requires knowledge of God's will and God’s Word! It also demonstrates that we the Church have a spiritual power! There is no force, not even Hell that can destroy what God has declared He will build! I was reading an article from a Canadian magazine that was dealing with Hitler’s use of the swastika. They made this statement. In the end, if Hitler’s National Reich Church had ever been established, the swastika would have replaced the cross. Point 30 of the proposed National Reich Church's 30 point program, drawn up during the war, reads like this, ‘On the day of its foundation, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels, It must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika’.
Well, we all know that History is the commentary on the foolishness of Hitler's dreams and on the futility of anyone who would endeavor to destroy the Church of Christ. All attempts to fight God's will, will fail, and there are many who have found that out. Remember The emperor Diocletian. He set up a stone pillar on which was inscribed these words:“For Having Exterminated The Name Christian From the Earth.” If he could see that monument today, how embarrassed he would be! Another Roman leader made a coffin, symbolizing his intention "to bury the Galilean" by killing His followers. He soon learned that he could not "put the Master in it". He finally surrendered his heart to the Savior, realizing that the corporate body of Christ and its living Head, the Lord Jesus, cannot be destroyed by the onslaught of mortal men!
Since Christ will ultimately conquer, why not join Him rather that reject Him! So now Jesus begins to tell the disciples the cost that would be involved for their spiritual life to become a reality. He tells them He would have to suffer and die for them and that building the Church would not necessarily involve ease or comfort! I think that too often today we have lost the reality of being a Christian. We look for things to excuse ourselves from commitment. If the pews are not comfortable, or the sanctuary temperature is not just right, or if the service is not short enough, and the requests for tithes are not kept to a minimum, then we will hold back from being a part of the Church!
We need to realize that the Church is not just another marketing institution. It is a vital living entity that is the body of Christ! Gene Veith said, The early church was not market driven and It did not make Christianity particularly user friendly. Converts had to go through extensive, lengthy catechesis and examination before they were accepted for baptism. And the biggest hindrance to becoming a member was the fact that in those days, if you became a Christian there was so much persecution that you faced the death penalty for becoming one. Nevertheless, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the church grew like wildfire. (Gene Veith, Modern Reformation, Jul/Aug 1996, p. 6.)
The cost of our salvation was great, so let's make sure we never cheapen the price by getting lost on petty things! Peter demonstrates how easy it is to one minute be right on target and then lose focus the next minute! Where Peter had just been praised by Jesus as a ‘rock’, Jesus now calls him a ‘stumbling stone’. He quickly falls from ‘rock’ to ‘stone’! It only took a minute for him to forget what God wanted and to insert what he wanted! This has always been the problem with the Church through the ages, keeping the focus clear and correct! We must stay awake and not lose sight of what counts!
James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988) p. 93, makes this interesting point. He says, In the Old Testament kings believed that God gave them direction in dreams. If they wanted to know what they were supposed to do in their administration, they would try to receive a direct word from God in their dreams. If they weren't getting any messages in their dreams while lying in their own beds, then they would sleep in the Temple, where they believed it would work better. This time honored tradition of sleeping in church apparently has it’s the origin in what these kings did. For those who follow that tradition, I just wanted to let you know where it came from although those involved probably won’t appreciate my humor.
The reason why Jesus says to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan" was simple. Satan in the wilderness had tempted Jesus to avoid the cross and this is exactly what Peter's statement meant to do also. So in this way, Peter was suggesting the same thing as the Devil himself! How many Christians have fallen into the same temptation that Satan has always tried to use, that we can be Christians without paying any price tag! Churches are full of people that have no desire to follow Jesus' command to preach the Gospel, or to ever share the message of salvation. I pray with all my heart that attitude changes before He returns!
Jesus now asks for a price from His disciples too. There is a cross bearing for each believer as well as for Christ. Christianity that exacts no sacrifice on its followers is no Christianity! We too are to sacrifice ourselves for Christ and others even though we know this is not always easy, but it is the call of the Church!
Did you know that ‘Kamikaze’ is the Japanese word for ‘divine wind.’ And divine the wind was in 1281. Never was a typhoon more God sent, if one were Japanese. The typhoon crushed the invasion fleet mounted by the ambitious Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (Marco Poli Kublai) in the wake of his conquest of China's Sung dynasty. And then again in World War II, to take the wind out of the sails of the United States naval juggernaut, the retreating Japanese organized their own kamikaze, (or divine wind), it was a suicide air force. Navy pilots slammed their bomb-laden planes, and themselves, into American ships in the Pacific. Twelve hundred pilots killed themselves taking out thirty four U.S. ships.
Today, we need ‘Christian Kamikazes’ who will take the faith anywhere the ‘divine wind’ blows regardless of the cost. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." Why are you a Christian? What do you see your calling as? The world is looking for godly men and women, the Church in power! It seems today that the world just coasts along. Friends, the Church must not coast along!
When Arthur Rubinstein, the famous concert pianist, visited New York, someone invited him to attend church. His answer: "Take me to a church that will challenge me to attempt the impossible." Great people are attracted to great challenges, and that's why we as Christians need to dream great dreams. Christ is coming again very soon. So what are we doing as the Church? Not so much the institution we call the Church, but the believers who make up the Church. Are we taking up our cross? Are we sharing the Gospel? This is the Church's call! Christ will build His Church because He promised He would. We are His workers!
God's promise is clear: He is coming again and He will reward those who live for Him! God never asks for something without giving something in return, and eternity will be well worth any sacrifice we might make here and now. Some day all the petty things of this life will be all but forgotten, but what has been done for Christ will live on and on. Get in on the best building program in the universe. Who do you say Jesus is and what are you going to do about it?
The carpenter of Nazareth is still building His Church today! The Church is God's building, and we are the ‘living stones’. Not even the gates of Hell will prevail against the Church! Why not be a part of the only institution that will last for eternity. This is one building program you will want to participate in! {end of part one}. PB
No comments:
Post a Comment