‘But what about you?’ he asked. ‘Who do you say I am?’
Matthew 16:15-19
Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’
Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’
Jesus said “I will build my Church.” He promised to continually build, it’s a present and future thing.
This is our starting point. Any church needs to know that Jesus himself is creating the Church. It’s nothing we can set a pattern to, it’s alive, chaotic and unpredictable and we need this to become more evident among us.
Sometimes we try to take the reins off Jesus. There are four ways we can approach this, and three of them are wrong:
| Our church | Jesus’ Church | |
| We build | Our design, attempted in our own strength | Jesus’ design, attempted in our own strength |
| Jesus builds | We expect Jesus to do what we want | Jesus’ design done His way, with His strength |
Ultimately the job of building the Church belongs to Jesus. That doesn’t let us just put our feet up though, because he’s given us the job of making disciples!
When we focus on big church-building projects alone we’ll so easily miss the brick-and-mortar work of making disciples. As we make disciples of Jesus we’ll find Jesus builds them into his Church.
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