This message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. At the end, we will give information about how to contact us to receive a copy of this or other messages. Good morning. You know, really, it was such a blessing this last week, and I'm so grateful to be here. I'm so grateful for the love that has been pouring out from so many of you for the prayers that are so continuous for us. And that's actually something I would very specially request of you. Please never stop praying for us. Particularly, I know my own need for it, but for us as well. So I'm grateful to be here today. With that, let's open up our scriptures. We're gonna be in Matthew chapter 16. And I'll start us in verse 13, although we'll just be focusing on verse 18. Now, when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the son of man is? And they said, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do 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 Barjona, 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 hades shall not prevail against it this is the reading of god's word you know having the chance to to take a pause here and preach on on just subject to do just sort of a short series you sort of you you rack your brain and you stretch your heart for What is it that I should preach? and lacking any specific texts that talk about beards or soccer I I Went to a more important topic And true though, it's it's a conviction a deeply held conviction on my heart that that the church is not well esteemed among Christians. That the church is not well understood among Christians. And for this reason, much prayer and passion behind it, I want to set out with you through a series I've called Reclaiming the Church, because I think very much the understanding of what we have in the church, what we're receiving in the church, what God has done in the church, it needs to be reclaimed among Christians. Christchurch isn't in any danger, but Christians could do well to understand that better, to understand what's going on there. Do you ever ask yourself, you know, why we bother gathering on Sundays like we do? I mean, sometimes it's that almost someone's question just floats up and you say, yeah, why are we bothering to do this? Why can't I go skiing today? Besides that there's no snow. Why can't I do the thing that I wanted to do? Oh, I have church. Why do I bother with that? See, maybe you're the person who you don't really have strong feelings one way or the other, but you just kind of think, well, you know, that seems like a really nice way to spend my Sunday. I'll go to church. Now, maybe not. Maybe you look at the Lord's day and you cannot figure out why you bother coming. Why are you still doing this? Life's busy enough without doing something that you just find kind of maybe purposeless. I hope that there is some of you, I hope there's many of you with these kinds of thoughts on your heart because the sermon series is for you. The sermon series is very much for you. There are so many people who are a part of the church and have very little understanding of what the church is. They have so little understanding of what they're supposed to be doing in the church, what they're supposed to be receiving in the church. You know, on a personal note, I struggle to take vitamins. I struggle to take vitamins because there was times I did for years and I just could not figure out what they were doing. And so losing that motivation, I just kind of fell off that one. I could not connect why I was going through this routine with what it was doing for me, right? Now, similarly, I think we have that with people in the church. People know that the Bible calls us to be a part of a church, to share in that fellowship, but they don't know what it's doing for them individually, and they don't know what the church actually is. So they struggle. Very understandably, they struggle. They struggle to commit to a church. They struggle to find blessing in this church that they just really don't understand. And you see these struggles everywhere. I was reading, I was reading about reasons people leave the church. And actually this was focused on teenagers and younger people. So I didn't pull over all the reasons, but some of them, they just felt so universal. And so let me just share some of these. I simply wanted a break, so I left the church. I simply wanted a break. You know, there's this idea that I just need a refresher. It's totally good, maybe even healthy, that I walk away for a while, and then they never come back. Though they still want to attend, they've just become too busy, so they left the church. They disagreed with the church's stance on political and social issues. So they left the church. They chose to spend more time with friends outside the church. So they left the church. I mean, what you see in all these reasons is you see a breakdown. You see a breakdown in an understanding of what the church really is. Let me illustrate the point. I mean, let's substitute in, for all these reasons, marriage. Okay? I simply wanted a break from my marriage. Though I still like the idea of my marriage, I'm just too busy for it. I disagreed with my spouse's stance on political or social issues. I'm sure none of you have experienced that. I chose to spend more time with friends outside my marriage. I say this because as soon as you hear it that way, if that were the case, if someone's reasons for thinking that way about their marriage were these, you would say, you don't understand what your marriage is. You don't understand that your life is supposed to orbit around your marriage, not the other way around. You're not supposed to be fitting in your marriage into everything else you want to do and it's priority number five or something like that. And very similarly, The scriptures are painting a picture for our lives where our lives to a great extent are orbiting around the church, around the fact that we belong in the church. And that's something that we won't just be talking about today, but over the course of this month. What is that understanding of the church that we're supposed to have? Another struggle that's out there is, I just don't know how it is that my faith and the church connect. That sounds pretty understandable, right? I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that my sins have been forgiven. I believe in the Bible. I just don't know what that has to do with me getting up to come to a 1030 service at Grace Community Church. I don't see how that connects. The scriptures, again, they talk about this. And they paint a picture where our faith seamlessly and vitally connects to the church. There is no other understanding in the scriptures. And this is something that over these coming sermons, I'd like to shed some light on. Another struggle people have out there is that church feels like just, church attendance feels just like an empty action. Just feels like pure formalism or something like that. And you know the mentality and I think we've all experienced it. I woke up this morning and I didn't really feel like going, but I did. And I went and I heard a sermon that didn't particularly inspire me. Okay. And then I had conversations that felt just very ordinary. So you have a day like that and you think, why do I bother? There's just nothing really special happening there. Why do I bother? It feels empty. Other people, you find that they are looking. They are looking for something and they just don't know what it is. They are looking for that sense of true and spiritual belonging and they just don't know where to find it. Is that here? I don't get it if it is. They know there's something beyond just ordinary life but they look at this and this feels so ordinary too. And I think maybe one of the most severe struggles that people are dealing with Church is seen as just one option among many. Church is seen as just one option among many. In this kind of situation, the church is actually just a competitor for running errands or going to the beach or whatever else you have before you. We will touch on this, but I feel like I have to say something on that. There is nothing like the church out there. And if you're not feeling that, if you don't see that, I hope that you will hear out these sermons and see if we can start shedding some light on it because I promise you there's nothing like this out there. One of the big confusions about thinking that this is just one option among many is we think that this is just our big self-help program. We go here and we gradually become better people and that's why we do it. It's not. You can do self-help elsewhere. You can become a moral person elsewhere. The problem is your morals aren't going to save you. You can go other places and have interesting conversations or be presented with interesting ideas or meet fun people or have fun or do whatever it is, but none of those are the divinely designed and authorized church of our Lord Jesus Christ. That's a big difference. There's nothing like this out there. There is a wealth of totally understandable, but wrong understandings of what the church is. And that's why we're going to spend this time like this. It is our time to reclaim and then to proclaim what the church really is. We'll be looking at a couple things. We'll be looking at the big picture and we'll be looking at the local picture. Now the big picture is that Christ's church is far bigger than we realize. It's not constrained. It's not limited. It's not limited by our location, our times, our ethnicity. It truly is universal. But we also be looking at it in a local sense. The local picture means that we're participating in that universal church through this local church, or if you're visiting through your local church. But right now, right here, this is how we participate in that universal church. It's universal, it's local. And my prayer for what comes of this, my prayer for our congregation, is that we would rally around a common vision for what the church is. The people of God need this. They need it deeply. They need to understand what it is we are. That's something fundamental here. So let's seek that. Let's seek the will of our God for that. Let's seek his will for what it is we do. Let's seek his will for what it is we aspire to. And that our Savior will be honored. And I have no doubts that we will thrive. So as we turn to our passage here, I should just do just slight justice to recognizing that I'm just going to cover just a snippet of what we just read. A profound snippet. but a snippet nonetheless. Our passage is right after Peter's grand slam of a statement. Peter, man, I just love Peter. I've told you this. I've preached up here on this. I love how big he succeeds and how big he fails. Peter is just, I love him. I feel just this affinity for him. I just needed a couple grand slams to complete that now, huh? But it comes right after this beautiful statement though, when he confesses Christ, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. It's a beautiful moment. And it's a beautiful moment in this gospel. We could say a lot about this passage. And actually this is not just a profound passage, but it's also somewhat of a disputed passage. All the more reason we could talk all the more, but we're not going to be covering all of that. We're gonna be focusing on one core statement, and that is in verse 18, and I'll read it again for you. I will build my church, and the gates of hell, or Hades, shall not prevail against it. As I study this text, I ended up with just three important points that we need to talk about. You all have heard enough of my preaching. Three-point does not happen often for me, so relish it now, okay? Your first point, though. Christ built his church. Christ built it. In contrast, if Christ built it, it means we did not build it. It's a product of God, it's not a product of man. From the very get-go, to recognize this will change everything. We need to recognize that it truly does have divine origins. And not just divine origins, but divine upholding. If you want, keep your finger in this passage, and let's just look over at Colossians real quick. Colossians chapter one. Picking up in verse 15, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, all things were created in heaven and on earth. visible and invisible, whether thorns, or thrones, or dominions, or rulers, or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. We can pause there. Savior, the architect, He created it all. He created the stars, the mountains that we marvel at every day. He created each one of us, all the intricacies that go into who we are physically, mentally. He's the author of science, of art, of music, By his willpower alone, he is holding all things together. And this same God, this same creator, this same artist, he built the church. He built the church. And you might look at those things and you think, you know, like your old SAT test, which thing does not belong? The stars, the mountains, human beings, or the church? You might look at this and you think, that doesn't sound nearly impressive enough. No, he built it with all the power and artistry that he brings. The church, in fact, is Christ's prized creation. He calls it his body, over which he is the head. The church is precious to him. It is stunning, is it not? It is stunning that we could be a part of what is arguably the chief wonder of the world. Think about that. The chief wonder of the world, and we just routinely visit and interact with it. Even more stunning that we wouldn't realize it. Even more stunning that we would not realize that we are participants in the chief wonder of the world. Now this might be feeling a little bit elementary, okay, he created it, but I promise you this has such importance. We need to believe this. We need to stand firm on this, that this is Christ's church. Because out there, there is a sentiment that the church is just, I don't know, some popular idea that Christians came up with at some point. If this is just an idea, if this is just some idea of man, I'm guessing you're a lot like me. I ignore ideas of man all the time. I didn't need an amen there, but thank you. I ignore them all the time, not just because they're ideas of man. They might be great ideas. The world is full of probably thousands upon thousands of incredible ideas that I know nothing about, but the reality is I do not have time for them. I do not have time to find them, to process them, to implement them. If it's an idea of man, I just don't rank it that high necessarily. In contrast, I try very hard not to ignore God's ideas. I try very hard not to ignore His ideas. I mean, I do that for a few reasons. This isn't exhaustive by any means, but I mean, we pay attention of God's ideas for so many reasons. I mean, humility. I mean, humility, first of all, Brian was praying it. God's ways are so far above ours. Of course, we're going to go with his ideas, right? Maybe before the fall, of course. Obedience. Sometimes I think we need to maybe hear this explicitly said that God has revealed truth. He has revealed truth for us. And you ask yourself, why? Well, he revealed truth for us so that we would walk in it. So often we look at him and we're like, oh great, that's a really good idea. I'm going to see if I can come up with one that's good. I'd really like to go out my own way, do a little trailblazing here. No, he didn't reveal truth so then we could go see if we could come up with a competing version, right? And frankly, I would obey God out of pure self-interest if I were thinking clearly enough. Right? I mean, if it comes down to it, if you know that one person always has the best ideas on everything, and you have any desire to benefit yourself at all, whose ideas do you go with? The person who's right about everything, right? Now, humanity being what it is, that's not always true. I mean, there's so many reasons why I want to pay heed to what God has said, to what God has done, to what God's plans are more than mine. And as I do so, I hope we do this with joy. The Creator, God himself has given us his attention, has given us his mind, right? Sometimes we take that so for granted, oh yeah, we have the Bible, that's great. He has revealed himself to us. This is my will for you. This is what I have done. This is how I have saved you. These are some of my wonders. Rejoice in that. That is precious. He could so easily have just ignored us, or maybe just wiped us out altogether, but he didn't. He has revealed himself to us. And so out of humility, out of obedience, out of pure self-interest, if you have to, but with joy, let us celebrate that Christ has built his church. And you ask yourself, how? How did he build his church? And this is where we come back to the core of who we are. He built it on the cross. Now, another belief that I think is out there, but not a single person would dare to say out loud, many people seem to think in their hearts that the church was just some side project of God's. The real work Christ did on the cross, but the church was just something sort of extra he threw in there. Not so. How many nails do you think we use to build a house? I mean, just an untold numerous amount, right? I have no idea. Maybe someone here does know. But with Christ, two through his hands, one through his feet, you could say he built the church with three. The church is the fruit of the gospel. You cannot separate them. You cannot separate the church from the gospel anymore that you can separate light from the sun or a beard from Brian's face. Ephesians 5, 25, Christ loved the church and he gave himself for it. Christ loved the church and he gave himself for it. We are all Believers, we are all members of this church. When he saved us, he did not just save us and leave us where we were. All Christians are saved into the church. And they are saved into the church he loves. They are saved into the church he died for. They are saved into the church he built. Christ built his church. And he goes on into the second part of this verse and he says, I will build my church. I will build my church. And again, just a short word, but a profound one. He does not say I will build you a church. I will build your church and then let you give you the keys and let you just go with it. The church is his. It is not ours. The church is his. And if we believe that again, that will change us. Acts 20, 28 goes on to explain further what it meant that the church is his. And it talks about that Christ obtained the church with his own blood. He paid a high price for a church that we often take for granted. This is an exhortation to us all. How should we value something that Christ died for? How do we rank that? Anything he would die for becomes precious to us. Amen? Anything he would die for. And anyone, I would add. But that's another sermon. We cannot view the church lightly. We cannot view it cheaply because Christ didn't. The reality is, though, that sometimes we do anyway. Sometimes we still view it cheaply. We are cheap in our prayers, We are cheap in our love. We are cheap in our attendance. We are cheap in our participation and in our support. It's embarrassing sometimes when you think about how much he paid and how little each one of us is willing to put in. It's not right. The question I'll leave for each one of us. And I'll leave it between you and the Holy Spirit. Because His discernment is true, His conviction is true. I'll leave it there. Do you treat the church like it truly belongs to Christ? Do you value what He died for? I encourage you, pray about that. Think about that. But if we move a step further, a step deeper into this, if the church is his, since the church is his, we also have to guard against messing with it. Am I right? If he built it, we can have some fair level of confidence that it's been well built. You know, many of you are so gracious. You were praying that I needed to get a new car to start making the commute. I ended up with a recent Subaru. I did not get the Subaru and then open the hood and just start tinkering with things to see if I could sort of soup it up a little bit more, do a little bit better of a job. I have one, fair confidence in the Subaru folks that they built a, you know, good car. And two, I have a whole lot of lack of confidence in myself to tinker with what they've done. I mean, should that not be our attitude toward what Christ has done? Christ built a church and he did a great job of it. I do not need Christ to pop the hood so I can go play around. I do not need to go around messing with it. I am not looking to improve his church. I'm not looking to alter his church. One of the exhortations I received just last week, but really it's an exhortation for all of us, it's 1 Corinthians 4, 6, and it talks about that a central quality that we are to pursue as Christians is that we are not supposed to go beyond what has been written. We are not supposed to go beyond what is written. In other words, I take that as meaning. God's ways are perfect. God's ways are perfect. And if that's the case, I want nothing less and I want nothing more than what he has told us. Right? Isn't that what perfect means? I don't want more. I don't want less. I want what he would give me. On a local church level, where the rubber meets the road for us, our goal as a church is to have exactly what he told us a church should be like, exactly. We're not looking to freestyle here. We're not looking to edit. We want exactly what he would give us, what he told us the church should be. We are not consumers here. This is not a market-driven thing going on here. I don't want to create a church. I don't want to invent a church. I do not want God to take my ideas. I want the divine architect to tell me what a church should be like. And then I want to pursue that. We guard against messing with the church. And thus far, you know, it's funny, it's a short area, but there's so much to say. Christ built his church, and the church belongs to him. And that brings us to the third point. The church will stand. The church will stand. Jesus goes on here to talk about that the church he built, the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. It's actually this dramatic and just fantastically said verse, right? The gates of Hades will not prevail against my church, he says. No doubt, just certainty. They will not prevail. Now when we hear that saying gates of Hades, some of your translations might say gates of hell. What we tend to jump to is thinking of the gates of Hades, the gates of hell, like it's the devil's fortress, you know, the devil's headquarters or something like that. And that's really not what this is. The idea of Hades, of Sheol in the Old Testament, it's much more like the realm of the dead, much more like the grave. And actually, I'm gonna refer you to Brian's sermon on this. He preached on this just back in May. If you go on our sermon audio and you go to the May 1st sermon, it was a Wednesday, you can hear some more thoughts on this. I don't feel the need to hash back through those. I'll jump to sort of the conclusion here though. that really we're not talking about the forces of darkness here, the forces of evil, so much as we're talking about death. We're talking about death. Death itself will not prevail against Christ's church. In some ways, I think that takes some recalibrating. I think we like the idea of, you know, these like hordes of shadowy demons crashing up against God's pearly white fortress and, you know, that kind of battle or something like that. And I think we hear that and it seems abstract. Oh, okay, so death won't beat you, you know? Okay. No, this is a big deal. And I'm gonna put forward for you, it's a bigger deal than what it means to beat Satan. Now, don't get me wrong. Christ has done that too. No worries there. We get to have both. It's just a matter of what this verse is talking about. The scriptures talk about Christ is going to put all his enemies under his feet. Satan will very much be under his feet. He's going to bind the strong man, like he sort of hinted at in Matthew. He gave his disciples, when he sends his disciples out, just with a word, he says, you know what? You have authority now to cast out demons. The Savior says so, and it's done. There is no doubt that the forces of evil are fleeing, are defeated because of Christ. So don't worry about that. But there is a bigger enemy than Satan. Put forward here, it's death. There is a bigger enemy and it is death. You know, the average person may or may not ever have some supernatural experience with a demon. But we will all die. Paul follows up on this thought. He follows up on this thought later about how we're going to face death. Flip with me to one more passage, 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And we're going to be just picking up kind of midway through just what's a fantastic section, but for timeliness sake, I'll just, for time's sake, I'll just focus on the chunk. I'm going to pick up in verse 54, 1 Corinthians 15, verse 54, Paul describing this resurrection, this final resurrection, when the perishable puts on the imperishable and the mortal puts on immortality. Don't you love that? That's one of my favorite sayings. And the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory. Oh, death, where is your victory? Oh, death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Man, it's good. It is so good what he promised us is coming at the resurrection when mortals, us, put on immortality. And this triumphant call goes out, the last enemy, the last enemy, death is swallowed up in victory. Death is swallowed up in victory. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. When the time comes for you to die, you can bet this is going to matter whether Christ conquered death. We may not face some shadowy demon, we will face death. And it was going to matter if Christ has defeated him or not. Death has always been the worst of enemies. Even here, how many of our prayers, how many of our prayers are about this, about this war with death? We pray against disease. We pray against violence. We pray against the mass murder that is abortion. And in all of these cases, it comes down to death. Death threatens to take away the core of what we have as human beings. It threatens to take away our relationships. It threatens to take away our memories. It threatens to take away our experiences. No one stays standing against death. Death prevails over everyone. Or that's how it used to be. Death did not prevail over Christ and death will not prevail over his church. Because Christ lived, we will live. And until that last day, Christians, it is now our watch. It is now our watch in the church. The church will continue to face down the gates of Hades. It will be the church that continues to proclaim the law and the gospel of God. Will be the church that will continue to call out to the dead and to the dying. Be reconciled to God and live. That will be us. Ecclesiastes 3.14, I perceive that whatever God does endures forever. Nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it. Christ built his church and it will stand. The church of Christ will stand. When we look at our lives, when we look at what it is we are doing with them, what is better? What is more worthwhile than taking your watch in the unbeatable everlasting church of our Lord Jesus Christ? What's more worth it? Anything else we do, it pales in comparison to that. Now, don't hear me wrong. Don't hear me as saying that we have nothing else we're called to do. We are. And you have full lives, I know it. Everything else pales compared to that. I can basically guarantee that from the youngest to the oldest, from the most naive to the wisest, the church plays so much bigger a role than any of us realize. I can guarantee it. We think that the church is just some short drive from our homes. It's so much bigger than that. We think that what goes on in the church is routine and ordinary. It is so much more than that. The church is nothing less than Christ's beachhead from which he is rescuing souls and defeating death. And then there's this. Then there's this for a closing note. Flip with me to Revelation chapter 20. Let me give you a peek at how this is going to end. Revelation chapter 20, picking up in verse 11. Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence, earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then, death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. In that last day, In that last day, death and Hades will not simply be rendered powerless. They won't simply be defeated. They will be crushed. They will be annihilated. And Christ's unshakable church will still be standing. Let's pray. Our Father, we are so grateful for your church. Forgive us because we're the type that are negligent. Forgive us because we're the types that are forgetful. Forgive us that we have hardly ever prized this church as highly as Christ did. We pray today that you would change us. We pray today that you would convict us of where we have treated what you have given us cheaply. We are so grateful, Lord, that death will not win. We are so grateful that Christ, our conqueror, will win. Please be with us, our Father. Bless this local church in the work we do for you. Build us up. May we see wonderful fruit from what you do here. It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen.