You cannot build a church. After Peter confesses Jesus is the Christ. Jesus makes a thought provoking statement. Matthew 16:18 reads, “ 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.” It is Jesus who builds his church, not us. We can have all the right models. We can raise a mountain of funds. We can craft a compelling mission statement. We can have magnificent worship services. HOWEVER, none this matters, unless it is Christ who is building the church.
You cannot bring in the kingdom. Jesus tells Nicodemus that “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The kingdom is something that we can not see, unless it is divinely disclosed. Jesus says the kingdom is “at hand”, and this is because he was ushering it into the world. We know that this baffled the minds of the disciples and even John the Baptist, for all these men were looking for Christ to usher in a physical kingdom. But at that moment in history, Jesus did not have a physical kingdom in mind. This kingdom would not be a physical kingdom, but a spiritual one. “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 14:17) And until Christ returns, it is this kind of spiritual kingdom that will be present here on earth. Since this kingdom is a spiritual kingdom, we can only expect that the kingdom will be manifested by a spiritual disclosure through the Holy Spirit, not our own devices.
And this should not surprise us because God is in the business of building his kingdom, on his terms, by his means. “For apart from me you can do nothing.” But Jesus does give us a clue to what we can do. “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’” We see this trend throughout the book of Acts as well. It has been suggested that the entire book of Acts is a testimony of the acts of Christ in response to prayer. “Proseuchomai”, the Greek lexical word for prayer, appears in Acts over 20 times, and over thirty times in the ESV. And aside from Acts we can quickly survey the gospels and notice that Jesus “would withdraw to desolate places and pray.” The model Jesus left us was to pray.
If we want to see the Christ’s church be revived here on earth, and we long to see the kingdom come down. We must first trust that Christ is faithful to build his church. Then, we must desperately pray that the kingdom will come and the Father’s will be done.
