Jesus — “I will build my Church”

Recently I have just been geek­ing out on Matthew 16:18 where Jesus states “I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not pre­vail against it”.  It is one of those pas­sages that just struck me right between the eyes.  We spend some much time mak­ing our plans, bound by the busy­ness of life and min­istry and then won­der where and when God might show up to bless what we think He should be doing.  And when things don’t go our way, peo­ple seem indif­fer­ent, we have less peo­ple rather than more peo­ple we won­der what happened.

But this verse just kicked me in the pants.  Jesus is busy build­ing His Church.  I think more often than not He is wait­ing for us to be atten­tively lis­ten­ing and wait­ing for His voice because He has a great idea on how to build the Church.  So far we have to admit He is fairly suc­cess­ful, with a cou­ple bil­lion saved world wide and grow­ing.  My daily prayer recently for Marsh Creek Church has been for Jesus to be the archi­tect and builder of His move­ment here, and now.  I have been pray­ing that He would give the peo­ple of Marsh Creek and the sur­round­ing Churches a bold vision and big dream of what God has been desir­ing to do in Cen­tral Chester County through His body, the Church.  And that what­ever hap­pens is some­thing that could only be attrib­uted to God.  You see when we under­stand who the builder is, and acknowl­edge thank­fully it is not up to us with our lim­ited skill set, there are no bar­ri­ers to what is possible.

This verse puts the empha­sis back where it needs to be, on the archi­tect of the King­dom we serve.  And what’s more excit­ing is the state­ment that fol­lows.  “The gates of hell will not pre­vail against it”.  That just gets me pumped up.  I am always moved when I see the power of God at work in peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties.  But after read­ing this I am ready to storm the gates of hell because the devil has already been defeated, He has no vic­tory.  Whose com­ing with me?