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Introduction
I don’t know if you noticed, but today is a weird day in the life of our Church in that we have no senior pastor.
This person, this leader, this position that many so often associate with the ministry of the Church itself is for just a brief moment vacant.
Pastor Tim’s last day with us was last Sunday, and Pastor Danny will hit the ground running tomorrow.
But for now, we are without a senior pastor.
Yet we are all gathered here, today, as the Church.
I want to lead us in a thought experiment this morning that I hope gets our wheels turning on the topic of the Church.
For just a moment, throw away everything you know and have always known about the Church.
Throw out buildings, gatherings, programs, pastors, staff
Throw out strategy and worship and mission and evangelism
We’re starting from scratch here.
Now all you have is the New Testament.
Nothing else.
It’s just you with your Bible.
And your task is to build a Church, whatever that means.
Think for just a second, what would that Church look like?
Do you read anywhere in the New Testament about buildings or programs?
Do you read anywhere the instructions for worship services?
Anywhere that says, “sing three songs, preach a sermon, and then issue an invitation.... and pass the offering plate somewhere in there”?
You do see the words pastors, and elders, and deacons show up
You see a mission
You see the word disciple
Now, after only reflecting for a brief moment, let me pose this question:
If all you had was the New Testament, would you come up with the Church as it exists today?
There may be some similarities, but what would be different?
Well what I want to do in our brief time together this morning, on this weird Sunday, is get a firm grasp of what we mean when we say, “The Church.”
More importantly, I want us to see what Jesus had in mind for his Church.
Now I’m not here to suggest we should do away with programs and buildings and modern worship services and so on… those things can be good.
What I am here to suggest is that we, as the Church, need to take great care to keep the main thing the main thing, so as not to abandon our first love, as the Book of Revelation puts it.
How does that sound?
Sound good?
Everybody with me?
We’re doing important work here today.
Pharisees and Sadducees
Before we begin to take a look at what the Church is, it will be helpful to see what the Church is not.
In Matthew 16, we see two groups of people who are in opposition to Jesus: these are the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
These groups formed what was called the Sanhedrin, which was a Jewish council that ruled over all Jewish life.
They appear together here, but the truth is these groups were very different in their theology and idealogy.
The Pharisees were the conservatives who held to a strict observance of the law and tradition.
This group viewed themselves as the elite, and their piety made them better than everyone else.
The name “Pharisees” actually means “separated ones,” and that’s exactly how the Pharisees felt about themselves.
So this first group, the Pharisees, is marked by self-righteousness.
And even more than that, they felt that things should always go well for them and that they were always right since they kept God’s law to the letter.
Have you ever felt that way?
I know I have.
I remember times when things didn’t go my way, or the way I thought they should, and these thoughts would come up in my head like, “Why is this happening to me, and not them?
Why am I the one suffering and not them?”
Church, I pray we heed the words of Christ when he says, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.”
Now let’s take a look at the Sadducees.
This group was predominantly made up of wealthy Jews.
They were the ones vying for political influence and favor from the Roman government and all-around social approval.
This group denied the resurrection of the dead, so they lived by the YOLO mantra, “You only live once.”
So this group was marked by self-indulgence.
They loved to work around the rules so that they could justify doing what they wanted.
This is the mindset that says, “It’s not hurting anyone.”
or “God wants me to have the best, most enjoyable life possible.”
Have you ever said things like that?
Maybe there’s times when you justified your own selfishness or vain endeavors because you weren’t hurting anyone.
Again, let’s take care to beware the leaven of the “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
So it should go without saying, the church is NOT marked by self-righteousness or self-indulgence.
So what is the Church?
What I want to lead us to see this morning, based on Matthew 16, is that at the most basic, fundamental level:
The Church is the community of people who know Jesus intimately, proclaim Jesus confidently, and obey Jesus sacrificially.
REPEAT
Let’s expound on that a little.
I. Know Jesus Intimately (vv.
13-15)
Beginning in verse 13, we see that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and he’s differentiating between his disciples and the rest of the world.
Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
The disciples respond with some common answers: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or some prophet of the like.
But then Jesus turns to his disciples and says, “But who do YOU say that I am?”
At this point, his disciples knew him better than any other person alive — They knew Jesus intimately.
And since they knew Jesus intimately, or rather, since Jesus related to them so intimately, they knew the truth about who Jesus was.
I don’t want us to miss one important point here.
It is likely that these “others” who Jesus was talking about could have been the very people following him around, the thousands of people that we mentioned last week.
If you asked these people if they believed in Jesus, they would answer, “Yes, I believe in Jesus.”
But the more important question is the question that Jesus himself asks, “Who do you say Jesus is?’
Approximately 85% or Americans say they believe Jesus was a true historical figure.
Among that 85%, so among those who believe Jesus actually lived, almost all of them around (more than 9 out of 10 of them) believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead.
So plenty of people believe in a man named Jesus, but I wonder how these people might answer if they were asked, “Who exactly is this Jesus you believe in?”
The truth is, who you say Jesus is will determine how you follow him.
If you say Jesus was a good teacher, then you will follow him like a good teacher, picking up bits and pieces of teaching that best apply to your life and ignoring the rest.
If you say Jesus lived an exemplary life, then you will try to live by his example, and possibly fail to give any thought to God or eternity.
However, if you believe that Jesus was and is the promised Messiah who came to the earth to redeem humanity to heaven, conquering sin and death, to reign and rule over us as Lord, then you will follow him as such.
The Church is made of up people who know Jesus for who he truly is and live in accordance with that truth.
The Church is the group of people who stand with Peter and say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Which brings us to the next point:
The Church is the community of people who:
II.
Proclaim Jesus Confidently (vv.
16-18)
Look with me in verse 16:
Remember back in verse 4 when Jesus rebuked the Pharisees and Sadducees for looking for a sign, and he said, “ no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”
And then here, Jesus calls Peter Simon Bar-Jonah, which means Simon, son of Jonah.
Don’t miss this, Peter’s father was not named Jonah — it was John.
Which is close, but I believe Matthew has stitched these stories together to tell us something.
The phrase “son of” appears all over the Bible, and often it does mean what we mean by son — male offspring.
But there are other times when the Bible uses this phrase metaphorically:
sons of destruction
sons of disobedience
sons of light
sons of God vs. sons of the devil
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