One of the prophets, he said to them, but who did you say that I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, Blessed are you, Simon Marge, only for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter. And on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Then He strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that He was the Christ. May the Lord add in His own blessing to this reading and hearing of His word for His name's sake. Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, What did you imagine the gates of hell would look like? Well, they might well look like the gaping hole at Pan's grotto, located in Caesarea Philippi, where this scene in Matthew 16 took place. This area of Caesarea Philippi is also called Pontius, Pontius, after the Greek god Pan. And it's there with a gaping hole into the earth where a cave is recessed. that a worshipful place, a shrine, has been set up with all kinds of carvings, images of devotion to Pan, the Greek god of desolate places. As you stand there and you look back into this gaping hole, this cave, this dark and foreboding places Teresa and I have done, you can understand why it might well be an illustration of the gates of hell and why Jesus chose this place to give this message to his disciples. This grotto represented the powers of darkness in Jesus' day. Our Lord took his disciples north in Galilee into the Golan Heights, as they are known today. And there, as they were gathered at this spring pious at Caesarea Philippi, he began to ask them, who do people say that I am? What do people say about me and my identity? Well, they think you're John the Baptist, or they think you're Elijah, or one of the prophets. Jesus asked Peter, who do you say that I am? Who do you disciples say that I am? Peter speaks up, you are the Christ, you are the anointed one, you are the Son of God. And what you'll notice is that this confession of Peter, which is recorded in all three of the Snoppy Gospels, not just here in Matthew and Mark and Luke as well, this confession becomes the turning point in the Gospel. This is the pivot point. And after this confession of Peter, Everything starts to move toward Jerusalem. Everything starts to move toward the culmination of Jesus' life and ministry in his crucifixion and resurrection. And it's this confession of Peter's that points the way as to who Jesus really is and what it truly means for him to be the Messiah, the appointed one of God. Now, this confession of Peter becomes pivotal in the Gospel, and this passage becomes pivotal in our doctrine because it is the first mention in the New Testament of the Church. Jesus only mentions the church here, and then twice in chapter 18, verse 17. If you're dealing with a brother, you're trying to reconcile, you go to your brother and see if you can work things out. If you can't, Jesus said, we'll take two or three others with you and see if you can work it out. And if that doesn't happen, then you are to take it to the church. So Jesus mentions the church here in chapter 60, again in chapter 18, in ways that are brief, that only begin to hint at this doctrine. But here in chapter 16 especially, we are provided with certain essential building blocks for the doctrine of the Church that are vital for us to understand if we are going to see and understand and appreciate the way this doctrine is unfolded later in the New Testament, for example, in the book of Acts and the epistles. Now, let me say that tonight we're only going to look at these foundational principles. There is a lot more to say about the doctrine of the Church. I believe in the Church. Not only do I believe in the Church, but I am what is known as a ura divina Presbyterian, a divine-like Presbyterian. I believe that Presbyterian church government is the form of government that God intends for his church and that he has revealed in scripture. But we can't get into all of those details tonight. You have to attend my Sunday school class. A little plug, a little advertisement for that. And we get into more of the details there. But tonight, I want to look at these essential truths, these building blocks for the doctrine of the Church. And we are going to, using this building imagery, begin with the foundation, verse 18. After Jesus pronounced Peter to be blessed for confessing him to be the Christ and acknowledging that this confession did not originate with Peter's own ingenuity, but rather was something revealed to him by God, Jesus goes on to say, I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Now, there have been perhaps fewer debated passages in the New Testament than this one. And this is a highly contested passage with a number of interpretations that have been offered. For example, those who are of a more liberal bent, a higher critical bent, they say actually that verse 18 we should just excise from our text altogether. Pronouncing Peter to be the rock upon which the church is built doesn't really belong here at all because it's not found in Mark and it's not found in Luke. But if we were to use that criteria to judge what belongs in our Bible, something has to appear in all three of the synoptic Gospels to be valid, we would impoverish ourselves of a lot of wonderful passages of Scripture, a lot of wonderful truths, because God did not see fit to put every account and every event from the life of Jesus or every saying that he uttered in all three of these books. So the liberal hierarchical option should be pushed off the table right at the beginning. This is firmly established in the text that Jesus said this to Peter. But what did he mean by saying, lesser are you, son of Peter, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church? Well, there, of course, is the Roman Catholic interpretation of this, that Jesus at this time was establishing the papacy. that Peter was the first pope, and that he was invested with certain powers as the pope, and that those who come after him, his successors, they are the true bishops of the church. They are the head of the church on earth. And so much are they ahead of the church on earth that they are actually invested with infallibility when they speak regarding the doctrines of the church. But the difficulty with that is that that's not found anywhere in the Bible. Neither the infallibility of the pope, nor that Peter was the first pope. If celibacy is a requirement for a bishop in a church of Rome, Peter does not meet that requirement. He was married. I think that's how you get a mother-in-law, right? Remember Peter's mother-in-law, who was healed by Jesus. If you have a mother-in-law, chances are you have a wife. It's kind of like if you have children, chances are your parents did as well, right? So the logic falls down here. Nor are we told that Peter is invested with certain powers or enabled to pass those powers down to his successors. What does this mean, then? You are Peter. I'm Paul on this rock. I live within my church. Some interpreters come and look at this passage, and they say, well, there's a play on the Greek words here. And that's the key to understanding what Jesus is talking about. He says to Peter, you are petros. You are petros, the rock. And upon this petra, I will build my church. Jesus refers to Peter and gives him this name, rock, or stone. And then he refers back to himself as the petra, or the boulder, or the bedrock upon which the church is built. The difficulty with that interpretation is that you have to read gestures into the text. You have to read into the text some indication that Jesus is pointing to or pointing out Peter in the first place and then pointing to or indicating himself in the second place. And we're not able to do that. What is the meaning of the passage then? Well, I think if you look at the grammar, if you look at the syntax, it's quite clear that when Jesus refers to the rock, and the rock upon which he will build his church, he is very naturally referring to Peter himself. Petros Petron referred to the apostle. But Jesus isn't referring to Peter in and of himself. Nor is he referring to Peter in isolation from himself. He's referring to Peter in his union with Christ as the confessor of the truth and the proclaimant of the gospel. And you're saying, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Yes, you do. This is a divine truth that you have uttered. And as a confessor and proclaimer of that truth, through confessing and proclaiming that truth, I will build my church. And the gates of hell will not prevail against it. It's this confession of who Jesus is, the identity of Christ, that becomes the foundation upon which the Church is built. The Apostle Paul will say in 1 Corinthians 3.11, Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, in Ephesians 2.20, the apostle will play with that imagery a little bit, and instead of referring to Christ as the foundation, he calls him the cornerstone of the foundation. that the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. And what I would submit to you is that what Paul is teaching in Ephesians 2.20 is essentially the same thing that Jesus is teaching here in Matthew 16. Christ is that cornerstone by which the whole building is aligned. And the foundation upon which the building is built in is the apostles and the prophets, again, like Peter, as confessors and proclaimers of Jesus Christ. So ultimately, the foundation upon which the church is built is the identity of the Son of God, the person of our Lord Jesus, and the profession of his gospel. Now, it's upon that foundation that the building is erected, it's constructed. Jesus said, I will build my church upon this. This is a sovereign declaration. It reveals to us a divine intention Jesus is not merely saying, this is a way the church can be built. He's not saying, this is the way I hope it will be built. But he is saying, this is the way I would want it. And this sovereign declaration is intended to be a comfort to his people. It's often a comfort to the pastor. It's a comfort because it means God is in control. When I was in Twin Lakes last week, one of our writers, a man named Mark Horn, who's a church planter in Vernon Beach, South Carolina, which I've heard is called Las Vegas by the sea, he was giving his testimony And this is a difficult place to minister. And what was Mark's hope? What was Mark's encouragement? That Jesus said, I will build my church. And so he is there to be a faithful pastor, a faithful church planter. But he's looking to this solemn promise and intention of Christ to do the work. But folks, this should not just be a comfort for the pastor. It must be a comfort for you as well. That what you're involved in, what you've been called into, is the work of Jesus. And you are part of that work. And He will build it. And He will see that His will is done, and that all of His people are gathered in it. Isn't that the emphasis in Catechism 54? What do you believe concerning the Holy Catholic Christian Church? I believe that the Son of God, out of the whole human race from the beginning of the world to its end, gathers, defends, and preserves for himself by his spirit and word in the unity of the true faith a church chosen to everlasting life. I will build my church. And the Catechism goes on to say, I believe that I am and forever shall remain a living member of it. Why? Because God has chosen in his good grace to make me a part of that whole thing. Now, this is a sovereign declaration, but we must remember that God uses means to build His church. When Jesus said, I will build my church, He does not allow us to sit back and do nothing in its construction. Jesus uses means. What are they? When we talk about the means of building a church, I often think of the old commercial from the 1970s, the Smith Barney commercial. I don't know if any of you remember it, with John Housman. And he's advertising this investment group, Smith Barney. And in his inimitable way, Housman says, they make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it. And that became an iconic commercial in the 70s. Well, I think of building a church. Will we build the church the old-fashioned way, by the ordinary means of grace? That's a phrase you hear me use a lot around here, because it is essential to our philosophy of ministry. We don't build the church by trying to become like the world. We don't build the church by trying to accommodate the church to the world. We don't build the church by becoming hip and cool. We build the church by using the means that God has appointed for us. Because the means of grace are just that. They are the channels by which the Lord Jesus funnels his grace into the life and witness of the church. They are the means by which God brings down his power into the life of the church so that the lives of men and women are changed. No one's life has ever been changed by cruelness. It has been changed by the Word of God. Those ordinary meetings of preaching, prayer, and sacraments, and if we pledge on any of those, we are merely impoverishing ourselves. Preaching of the Word of God. Expository preaching. All preaching must be expository. I don't mean it must have the same style, but it must all be rooted in the Word of God and an explanation of that Word as God has given to us. There must be prayer. Because how else do we bring down, how else do we receive the power of God but by seeking His face? There must be the right administration of sacraments. We were talking about this in our Sunday School class today. How do we identify the true Church? How do we know? A church is valid and legitimate in the eyes of God. It's a place where the Word of God is faithfully preached and where the sacraments are hewed and ministered. Those are the infallible marks of the body of believers. So much of this is wrapped up in a biblical emphasis on the Lord's sake. A Lord's Day piety. A piety of sanctifying the day that God has given to us for worship. That's why I mentioned this morning. Sunday morning and evening worship. We do this here. I know we're refreshing. I know this is completely out of transit. It's not what you do to grow and build a church. I get that. But it's what we do because it's a way to begin the Lord's Day and end the Lord's Day and sanctify everything in between to Him. J.C. Ryle, the great Anglican bishop, said, as a rule, there is a general flight of steps down from no south to no south. Or Robert Raymond Shane, one of our great Presbyterian heroes. He said, a well-spent Sabbath we feel to be a day of heaven upon earth. We love to rise early on that morning and to sit up late that we may have a long day with God. Brothers and sisters, it is by promoting, by praying for, and by observing a Lord's Day of piety, where there is the preaching of the Word, prayer, and the right administration of the sacraments, that God will bless and build His Church as He chooses to do. I long for you to have a deep, and a rich four-day experience under the Word of God. That's how you will be built in your faith, and how God will gather in His elect. The third point that Jesus makes here is about the preservation of the church. He said, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. What are these gates of hell? Well, I said that Pam's grotto at Caesarea Philippi might provide a very good illustration. It is a very desolate looking place. But I think Jesus had more in mind than that one location. In the ancient world, the gates of the city provided the seats of power. Today, if you have some legal transactions, you will go where? You'll go to the county courthouse, likely. But in the ancient world, if you had a real estate deal to take care of, or you had a legal question that had to be decided, if you had to go to court, you would go to the city gate. And it would be there that the leaders of the city, the elders of the city, would sit and make the administrative and legal decisions for the city. The gates of the city were the seat of power. And that's what Jesus is getting at. The powers of hell will not prevail The powers of hell will not defeat, and they will not totally throw the church. Satan will assault the church. He will see that the church is persecuted as an institution, and the individuals who make up that institution. But what happens when the church is persecuted? Rather than being vanquished, it's strengthened. This is the irony. This is what the world doesn't get. This is the blindness of the fallen mind. Think, for example, of the persecution that goes on against the Church in China. The Church has been driven underground. Christians are being assaulted for following Jesus Christ. It's happening in Middle Eastern countries. It's happening in other places. It happened in Soviet Russia during the time we call the Cold War. And believers, under persecution and threat, were not able to meet in the open. They were driven into underground churches, meeting covertly. And what happened? The government thought that they could get rid of the church, that they could obliterate the name of Jesus Christ. The gates of hell did not prevail. And now, for example, in China, where the church has been persecuted so severely, there are how many Christians in China? Millions upon millions of Christians in the underground churches. Why? Because God is blessing the gospel. He is building his church. And the powers of hell and poverty are all around him. Phelan leads then to Jesus' comment on the power of the church itself in verse 19. Our Lord said, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you buy on earth shall be found in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loose in heaven. Here's the power of the church. We've looked at the foundation of the church, the building of the church, the preservation of the church. Now, here's its authority. To the church, Jesus has given the keys of the kingdom. Now, you all know what a key is. You probably have some in your pocket, in your purse. What do you use the key for? Too useful for opening or closing a lock. It opens and it closes. What is it that opens and closes heaven? It's the gospel and the discipline of the church. I'm Bert Pattinson. Question 83 asks, what are the keys of the kingdom of God? And the answer is the preaching of the holy gospel and church discipline. By these two, the kingdom of heaven is open to believers and closed to unbelievers. Now, this same truth is propounded as well in Westminster Confession of Faith, in chapter 30 of the Church Scripture. Listen to what our Confession says in paragraphs 1 and 2. The Lord Jesus, as King in heaven's church, hath therein appointed a government in the hand of church officers, the state from the civil magistrate. To these officers the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed, by virtue whereof they have power, respectively, to retain and remit sins, to shut that kingdom against the impenitent, both by the word and censures, or church discipline, and to open it unto penitent sinners by the ministry of the gospel, and by absolution from censures, as occasion shall require. The keys of the kingdom are bound up with the church's ministerial and declarative power. A power to minister the word of God and to declare the gospel as the only means of salvation and through the preaching of that gospel and the offering of that gospel to open up the door into heaven. And by declaring through the preaching of that same Gospel that those who will not repent and those who will not believe, those who would be under the discipline of Christ and under the discipline of His Church for their repentance, to them the kingdom is closed. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see it illustrated for us in the earliest days of the Church. Peter, when he preached to the Sanhedrin in Acts 4, exercised the keys in closing, or binding, the church and the king of the house. He used those keys as he proclaimed in chapter 4, verse 12. That there is salvation in none other, for there is none other name under heaven given to all men by which we must be saved. And those members of the standard, as they remain in their impenitence, as they remain in their unbelief and with their hard hearts, Peter says, because there is salvation in no other but in Christ, the kingdom of heaven is closed to you. It is closed to those who want mercy. But then we have this loosing of the kingdom, this opening up of the kingdom in Acts 2 as Peter preaches at Pentecost. And what does he do? He proclaims Christ and he offers him freely to all who will receive him. This is how the church continues to use the keys. Preaching the gospel. and by awarding the impenitent, by opening up the way to God, by pointing people to the cross, and by awarding the impenitent and lost by pointing to the everlasting penitent commission. The Church, as I said, is first mentioned here in Matthew 16. It's developed in the epistles. primarily through the instructions that Paul gives to Timothy and to Titus in what we typically call the pastoral epistles. It's developed in Acts where we see patterns of church government. For example, in Acts 15 in the Jerusalem Council, it's to that passage that Presbyterians go to see, in essence, our first general assembly as elders are gathered from around the church. to decide the issues that pertain to the life of the church. If you want to see more about the government of the church, I really commend to you a book by Thomas Litherow called The Apostolic Church, Which Is It? And that will give you the biblical principles of Presbyterian form of government. But we see it developed through the instructions in the pastoral epistles, and also through the metaphors that are used in those epistles. Metaphors like the church as the body of Christ, or the bride of Christ, or as the temple of God built on living stones. But in closing tonight, I want to just point out a couple of things of why this doctrine of the Church is so important for us, primarily from the catechism here in questions 54 and 55. The Church is that body of believers, as we had mentioned earlier, that is chosen and gathered. A body of men and women who are elect and who have been evangelized. And if you have embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ by faith, then you can say with the Catechism that I believe that I am and forever shall remain a living member of God. A member of that body, and what a comfort that is to know that you're a part of the Church of Christ. God has brought you into the assembly of the saints and he will gather you up into heaven for the general assembly of the firstborn. But then it is in the church that we experience the communion of saints. Communion with Christ, we find this in Question 55. Believers, all and everyone as members of Christ, have communion with Him and share in all His treasures and gifts. The communion of the saints is not just our fellowship with the Lord. It is our fellowship with one another as we exercise our gifts for the good of one another. Again, Question 55, the second half. That everyone is duty-bound to use his gifts readily and cheerfully for the benefit and well-being of the other members. This is why it's so important for believers to be involved in the Church. to be present at the worship of the church. That's why I said this morning, one of the reasons I said it, the church is not optional. It's not a voluntary civic organization that you can choose to join or not. If you're a Christian, you are automatically a part of the body of Christ. You ought to find that membership expressed in a local assembly of believers. Because you are a vital part of that body. Can you say that you're not important? Can you say that you are not essential for the health and the building up of everyone else? Well, let me ask you this. Which part of your body would you like to deny? A hand? Well, you know, I've got two, after all. A foot? Yeah, I have two of those, too. A leg, an arm, an ear, an eye. For the body to be whole and to function as God intends it, we want all of the parts present and in working order. The same is true of the Church of Jesus Christ. Because we have all been given different gifts. And those gifts, you may view your gift as insignificant in mind, but don't do that. Don't short shrift your gift from the Spirit. Because your presence, and your words, and your prayers, and your encouragement, and whatever ways that God has equipped you to serve your brothers and sisters, It's absolutely vital to help this church. Jesus said, I will build my church. We as his people respond, I believe in the whole universal church that he's building. That's my father. Tonight, we come with thanks for your church. I have the privilege of being a part of that, and I wish you all the best. Amen.