waited till I heard which direction
you took. So I'm not always a song leader,
sometimes I'm a song follower. Would you open your Bibles back
to Matthew 16? Now, nothing about the life and
words and works of Jesus have any significance until we determine
who he is. When our Lord came into the world,
born of Mary, They gave him the name Jesus. Often, if someone
says, who is that person, you just give the name. Well, there
were a lot of people had that name. It's equivalent with the
Old Testament name, Joshua. It means that Jehovah is my salvation,
or Jehovah is salvation. and that was the name given to
our Lord according to the angel said you will call his name Jesus
he will save his people from their sin but no one else knew
that they didn't know that's why he was named Jesus who is he? the Lord often called
himself the son of man and so he says here in verse 15 excuse
me, verse 13, who do people say the son of man is? Now it's clear
that when he said son of man, he meant himself, for he says,
well who do you say that I am? And the same, or the parallel
passage in the book of Mark, chapter eight, our Lord's first question was
who do people say that I am? So our Lord identified himself
as the son of man. Now why would he call himself
that? He was not the son of any man, that is, he had no earthly
father, such as you and I have. His father is God. He did not
call himself the son of Mary, though indeed he was Mary's son,
her firstborn, but he, to my knowledge, never referred to
himself as the son of Mary. He says, I'm the son of man.
Well, first he refers to himself in that way because he is a man. He's human. Human in every sense
of the word, human. They say, well, He wasn't sinful,
that's true. But you don't have to be sinful
to be human. It's true that all humans walking the earth this
day are sinful. But the first two humans to walk
the earth weren't sinful at the beginning. Sin is not the natural
or created state of humanity. And so our Lord was human. Human in every sense of the word. He began as a single cell in
the womb of Mary and went through all the process of gestation. And then he was born at the appropriate
time and then he went all through the process of maturing from
infant to adult. The only thing that he didn't
do was grow old. And that wasn't simply because
he was crucified. Tradition says about the age
33, 33 and a half, somewhere in there. But he didn't grow old, he didn't
age because there was nothing about him of the corruption that
came upon this whole universe because of man's sin. Our Lord
could die, he could be put to death, but I don't believe he ever would
have grown old. Like Adam, he was without sin
and therefore not under the curse. He was human, possessed of all
the limitations that humans experience. He was only in one place at a
time. He had a train of thought. You say, what do you mean by
that? Well, God, as he exists outside of our universe, it's
not like he has this process of thought. He knows all things
completely at all times. He's consciously aware of everything
all at once. He doesn't go from this conclusion
to that conclusion to that conclusion. God's just not part of that system,
but our Lord Jesus Christ did. He learned. Now think of that,
the God who made the heavens and the earth learned. He grew
in wisdom. He was a man, flesh and blood. And of course, as a man, as a
human, he is able to sympathize with us. The book of Hebrews says that
inasmuch as he partook of our nature, he is sympathetic toward
us, understanding what it's like to be a human being. And as a
human being, it means that he can substitute for us. You know, the Jews in their religious
system, given to them by God on Mount Sinai. They often offered
lambs and bulls and pigeons and all kinds of animals as substitutes
for themselves. But these sacrifices never did
put away sin. Why? Because an animal can never
stand in for a man in the presence of God. But our Lord calls Himself
the Son of Man in the sense that languages have used the phrase
Son of for, well, probably since there
were languages, meaning the perfection of or the perfect representative
of. In other words, Jesus Christ
was not just man, he was perfect man, man as man should be. The only one ever to be like
that and stay that way. Adam began flawless, but he fell. Christ began flawless and never
fell. So he is the perfection of humanity. Now, he called himself the son
of man, but he asked his disciples there in verse 13, who do the
people say I am? You know, I'm sure that as with groups such as our Lord and his
disciples. His disciples were among the
people talking with them even more than the Lord Jesus. The
Lord taught, but a lot of the back and forth went between the
people and the disciples. And so he asked them, he says,
who are those folks out there? Who are they saying I am? And there had been some theories
put forward It says, some say John the Baptist. Now
you could see why people would make these mistakes. It's not
like they had modern media as we do today. If people heard
about Jesus, they didn't know what he looked like. And if they'd
heard about John but never seen him, they didn't know what he
looked like. But they heard things about John and his preaching,
And they heard, you know, that this other fellow Jesus comes
along, calling himself the Son of Man, and he's saying the same
kind of things John the Baptist was saying. Talking about the
kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God. Talking about the need
for repentance. And so they assume, well, this
must be John the Baptist under another name. And then others say, Elijah.
And the reason they said that is there was a promise in the
Old Testament that before Messiah would come, there would
be one who would come in the spirit of Elijah. And Elijah
was known for the miracles that he worked. And since our Lord
worked so many miracles, they figured, well, this must be that
Elijah that was promised. And they'd actually ask John
the Baptist that same question. And our Lord even said, when
they asked the Lord about John the Baptist, and he said, and
if you want to think this way, it's right. He is that Elijah
that was to come. John was the forerunner to Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ wasn't the forerunner
to anybody. But they thought that this Elijah,
that he might be that this Elijah, the forerunner of Messiah. And then others thought maybe
he was Jeremiah or one of the prophets. They all had their
theories and speculations. And man today has his theories
and speculations about who Jesus is. Well, we don't need to spend
much time worried about what men or what they think about
Jesus or who they think he is. Because who Christ is cannot
be understood by the flesh, by natural means. So the Lord asked
the more pointed and more important question, who do you say that
I am? Now they had been with him for
some time. I don't believe that this was,
I think this was fairly close actually to the crucifixion. So some of them had been with
him for about three years. They had listened to his message,
they'd seen him work his miracles, they had seen the response that
the common folk had to him, the response the political folk had
to him, and the response the religious folk had to him. They'd
seen all that. They had interacted with him.
They knew him. They didn't just know about him,
they knew him. Not perfectly or completely,
but they knew him. And so he says to them, who do
you say that I am? And Peter, who was often the
first to speak, he answered, you are the Christ, the son of
the living God. Now this is a powerful, powerful
confession on the part of Peter. Our Lord goes on to say in verse
17, blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed
to you by man, not by the flesh, not by natural means, but by
my Father in heaven. Now when Peter said, you are
the Christ, the son of the living God, he said something that a
person cannot know or believe apart from a revealing work of
grace by God. Now people can open this book
and read about Jesus Christ, they can learn about Christ,
they can know what the Bible says about Christ. But to actually
consider Jesus Christ to be the Christ, the Son of the living
God, that's a different matter altogether. All the accolades or all the
compliments, what people think are compliments, that they give
to Christ, usually as disclaimers before they say something demeaning
about him. Well, he was a good man, but
so-and-so, I don't believe he was God. He was a good man, but
he wasn't a savior. Now he's got to start with some
kind of compliment, and whatever compliment they give always falls
so very short of giving a good description of who he is. Peter
said it, you are the Christ. Now the Christ is not a name,
it's a title, it's a description. It actually just means anointed. It's a Greek version of the Hebrew
word Messiah. means anointed one, and Jesus
Christ was anointed with the Holy Spirit of God to do the
miracles he did. He was anointed with the Spirit
of God that he might preach the gospel. I know that he is God. We're going to get to that. When he lived here, he lived
entirely as a human being, not drawing upon his divine attributes,
but relying upon the Holy Spirit for all the divine work to be
done through him. He is the Christ. Now the Christ
or Messiah, that word was applied to three positions. Three positions. in the Jewish
economy, prophet, priest, and king. All three of them were
put in office by an act of anointing. They'd anoint them with oil to
symbolize that they had been anointed with the Holy Spirit
to do something. What do prophets do? Prophets
speak to men in behalf of God. They hear, they learn something
from God, they pass it on. What's a priest do? A priest
represents people to God. It's the reverse of a prophet.
The prophet represents God to the people. The priest represents
the people to God. And again, in the old Jewish
economy, the old Jewish way of doing things, the priest primarily
did that by means of sacrifices and offerings. And then there
was the king. And what did the king do? Well,
if the Spirit of God was upon him, he would exercise authority with wisdom,
and he'd be given power to defend the people of God, to preserve
their peace, to advance their prosperity.
I believe it was when King Solomon was crowned as king. It says, in his days shall the
righteous prosper. And that was said as a compliment
or a blessing upon him, that one under the guidance of the
Spirit of God would rule in such a way that believers would do
well in such times. So when Peter says, you are the
Christ, the Messiah, he was gathering together all three of these offices
into one person. And the Jews understood that
that was eventually going to happen. They had their prophets,
they had their priests, they had their kings. But nearly all
of them proved to be a disappointment in one way or another. They knew
that one called Messiah the Prince would someday come. And in this
one person would be the fullness and perfection of a prophet,
a priest, and a king. And when Peter said, you are
the Christ, he said, that's who you are. You see, he speaks to us in behalf
of God. And he's perfect at that. Why?
Because he is God. Not only that, not only is he
the perfect prophet because he knows all and understands all
things about God and can give them to us in our language, he
is the perfect prophet in that he is the message itself. When God speaks to man, he speaks
to them in the language of son, his son. Philip said, show us the Father,
that'll be enough for us. And he said, Philip, have you
been with me so long? And you don't understand, if
you've seen me, you've seen the Father. It was not just by words
that our Lord Jesus Christ was a prophet, it was by His very
person, by His very existence among them, He declared to them
the Word of God. He showed them in word and in
deed who God is. what his character is. He's a
prophet. He's our priest. As a man, he could substitute
for us. He could stand in the presence
of God for us. As the perfect man, he was a
suitable sacrifice for us. And he, the Bible says, offered
himself without spot to God. Now there's a world of theology
in that one little phrase, but just let me make this most important
point. At least I consider it to be so important in today's
modern American Christianity. Jesus Christ never offered himself
to us to accept or reject him. Why? It would not be suitable
for us to pass judgment on Jesus, would it? I'm not saying people
don't do it. I'm just saying that'd be clear
out of place. Not only that, it was not given
to us to accept or reject him because he was never offered
to us. He offered himself to God and
it was up to God to accept or reject him. I was told as a child, you know,
accept Jesus as your savior. Now I know sometimes people are
correct in what they mean, they just use terrible language to
express it. But accepting Christ as my Savior
was not given me to do. That was what God did. When Jesus
Christ offered himself without spot to God, he was offering
himself in my behalf, and it was up to God whether or not
he would accept Christ and the offering of himself as sufficient
atonement for my salvation. And if God accepted him, then
atonement has been accomplished. Redemption has been paid. Now it's true that people do
accept or reject Christ, but not because he was offered to
them, just because people are by nature judgmental. When we hear about Christ, we
either believe him or we don't. We either trust him or we don't. Now I know this. If he was offered
for someone and God accepted Christ's offering
in behalf of that person, that person will believe on the Lord
Jesus Christ. I know that'll happen. And I know that that means that
that person acknowledges that all that Jesus said about himself
is true. But Jesus Christ is our high
priest, offered himself without spot to God, and thanks be to
God, God accepted his offering. And that's what made it effective
for us. Our faith does not make Christ's
work effective for us. In fact, if you read John 3.16
very carefully, what it's teaching is that Christ's offering made
our faith effective. Our faith would have meant nothing
without the offering of Christ. We could have believed on Him
and we'd have perished anyway. He is our priest and then He
is our King. There is a theory called Lordship
Salvation. It's a bad name for it because
it Well, it's just one of those human names that they give to
a certain set of doctrines, and it says that if Jesus isn't Lord
of your life, then you aren't saved. And I would agree with
that statement until you find out what they mean by Lord of
your life. They mean that you have to come up to a certain
level of obedience. In fact, I was, in the religion I was
raised in, you know, there was a time in which, quote, you accept
Jesus as your savior, and then they start this business about,
well, will you accept him as Lord? I'm sorry. No, I'm not
sorry, but that's just one of those rhetorical statements we
made. Lord comes first. It says, at
the name of Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue confess
that Jesus is Lord. Our Lord Jesus, in his work of
saving Saul of Tarsus, unhorsed him, put him face down in the
dust, and the first thing that Saul said was, who are you, Lord? He didn't know, whoever this was
that could knock him off his horse and put him down in the
dust, he knew this, whoever that is, that's the Lord. And then
the Lord said, I'm Jesus. We don't make Jesus Lord, God
already did. We acknowledge it to be so. But
if you don't acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, if you don't love
and like the fact that Jesus is Lord, you're lost. That's all there is to it. But
acknowledge Him as Lord and then doing a good job of obeying Him,
those are two different things. So this lordship salvation that
says things like, well, you know, if you're a Christian, you're
gonna do this. And they'll list certain things
that they believe all Christians do, and then they'll list some
things they believe Christians can't do. The only thing a Christian
can't do is not believe. There'll be times he thinks he
doesn't, but he always believes. He always trusts Christ from
his heart. Everything else, it's possible. Anything else, you can probably
find a record of one of God's people doing it in the scriptures. But He is the King. He's the
King over the church. He's the King over the world.
He said He's the King over the universe. All authority in heaven
and on earth has been given unto me. He says you are the Christ. Then He goes on to say, the son
of the living God. Jesus, you call yourself the
son of man, and that you are, but I see that you are the son
of God. And you know, his enemies recognized what he meant by that,
because Christ would refer to himself as the son of God. And
they charged him with blasphemy, saying he makes himself equal
with God by calling himself the son of God. He was the son of God in the
very real sense that God is his father. But he was the son before he
was ever born in Bethlehem. But as a son, or as a son, He is, in some respects,
our natural sons. They are copies of us. So Jesus
Christ is the perfect copy, if we could put it that way, of
his father. He is God, every bit as much
God as if he had never become man. And so there is a basic statement
of who Jesus Christ is. He's perfect man. He is the Christ,
the prophet, priest, and king of God's people. He is God in
human flesh. And so the Lord said, Simon,
son of Jonah, that means you've been blessed,
because you could never figure that out on your own, and no
human being could ever reveal that to you. In fact, I think the miraculous
nature of this revelation was proven while Jesus was being
crucified. And there's those two thieves,
and according to one of the gospel writers, both of them were abusing
him, accusing him, cursing him. But one of them was the elect
of God. And so the Spirit enabled him to see something nobody else
could see. Now who would look at that gory,
crucified mess on the middle cross and say, now there's the
Messiah. There's the Son of the living
God. There's the King. Only somebody who had this truth
miraculously revealed to him. And he eventually rebuked the
other thief after the Spirit of God brought him to his senses
and he said, Why do you curse him seeing we're in the same
condemnation and we deserve it? He doesn't. And then he turned
to the Lord Jesus and he said, remember me when you come into
your kingdom. Now from the viewpoint of the
flesh, that's the most ridiculous thing to say to Jesus at that
time. And I imagine if any of the Roman soldiers heard him,
they laughed. Come into your kingdom. He's defeated. He's destroyed. He's hours away
from death. He's in our grip. We've got him. If he ever was a king, he's been
deposed. He'll never be a king again. Oh, but he is the king. He was the king then, upholding
all things by the word of his power, and he is still the king. And he went on to say something
to Peter that people have misunderstood, he said, I tell you that you
are Peter, Greek word's Petrus, and on this rock, Greek word
is Petra, I will build my church. Now there's more than one denomination
that thinks that our Lord was declaring Peter to be the rock
upon which the church is built. All I can say is, if that's true,
the church is in a heap of trouble. because Peter was a weak and
crumbling rock. Actually, he says, you are Peter,
Petros, and the word means a small stone. And on this Petra, massive bedrock
stone, I will build my church. What rock was that? The truth
that Peter had just declared, who Christ is. That's the rock on which the
church is built. A massive, unshakable rock. Our Lord said that a foolish
man built his house on the sand, and when the storm came, the
house looked good until the storm came and it fell down. He said
the wise man dug down until he found rock, bedrock, and he built
his house on that. And the wind blew, storm came
up, the rain came down, and the house stood. That rock is Christ,
and we're built on that. And then he says this, I'll give
you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on
earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will
be loosed in heaven. Now he was not handing them authority
to let people in or keep people out of the kingdom of heaven. And because in English we don't
make a difference between, you know, when we say you, we can
mean the one person we're talking to or a whole group we're talking
to. Here, he changes to the plural. He says, I give you, meaning
all the disciples, the keys of the kingdom. What's the keys
of the kingdom? It's the gospel. And he says, whatever you bind
on earth will be bound, and that could be translated, will have
been bound in heaven. And whatever you loose on earth
will have been loosed in heaven. When we go out and preach the
gospel, We declare God's way of salvation
in Jesus Christ and men reject that. Our preaching to them has
bound them. And if we go out and preach and
by the grace of God someone receives it and believes it, they are
saved, they are set free by it. But it was not in our power whether
the preaching of the gospel was to one person being bound and
to another person being loosed. Paul put it this way, we're always
a sweet-smelling savor of Christ unto God, but to some, we're
a smell of life unto life, and to others, death unto death.
And he goes, who's sufficient for this? Who can make that distinction? Who can make it so that their
word is life to one and death to another. We can't, that's
up to God. In the remainder of the chapter
he tells them what's going to happen to him. He says in verse 21 that he must
go to Jerusalem, suffer many things at the hands of the elders,
chief priests, and teachers of the law, that he must be killed
and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took him aside, began to
rebuke him, and said, never, Lord, this shall never happen
to you. And I'm sure that what Peter
was thinking is, if they try anything, they're going to have
to get through me to get to you, Lord. And Peter proved that. When they
tried to arrest him, he pulled out his sword, and he tried to killed the servant of the high
priest who was there involved in it, said he cut off his ear.
I think he missed. I think he was going right for
the middle of his head, just split him right wide open, but
he shaved off his ear instead and the Lord said, Peter, put
your sword away and he picked up the ear and he put it back
on the guy's head and it was healed. But Peter said, that'll never
happen. And Jesus turned and said to
Peter, get behind me, Satan. Now, nearly everyone capitalizes
that, but the word Satan simply means enemy, adversary. He wasn't
necessarily saying that Peter was that particular spiritual
being who is sometimes called Satan, others the devil. He just
saying, you're standing in the way, you're a hindrance to me,
you're a stumbling block to me. And part of this was, Peter,
you think no one's going to get to me unless they come through
you? Understand this, no one will
get to you unless they come through me. And that's where salvation comes
from. Our salvation is not in our able defense of the Lord
Jesus Christ as though he needs our defense. It's not in what
we do for him, it's what he does for us. But when he called Peter a stumbling
block, an adversary, he says you do not have in mind the things
of God but the things of men. What he's saying is you're looking
at things like men look at them, not like God looks at them. It's
necessary that I suffer these things or you'll be lost. It's
necessary that I be killed and then raised again on the third
day or you will die in your sins. Quit looking at things like men
look at them, look at them like God looks at them. Men looked at Jesus Christ dying
and mocked Him. When we're given God's grace
to understand what all that means, we perceive Christ crucified
in our hearts and we praise Him. For as He was crucified, He was
one going to war for us. As He was being crucified, He
bore our sins in His body on the tree. And then, Christ went on and
made this commentary, if anyone would come after me he must deny
himself, take up his cross and follow me. They said I'm going
to a cross and if you want to be my disciple you've got to
do the same thing. Now he did not mean they had to be crucified.
He was going to go to a cross literally but he was speaking
of using going to the cross in a metaphorical sense. What happens
when a guy goes to the cross? Well Paul explained it. He said,
by the cross of Christ the world is crucified to me and I to the
world. The world looked on Paul and
in their minds he was as a crucified man, cursed, condemned, dead. And Paul looked at the world
and saw it as a cursed, condemned, and dead thing. It no longer
had an influence on him. It no longer ruled his thinking. And he had no power with them
either. They thought nothing of him. Said, I'm dead to the
world. The world's dead to me. To explain that to a fellow,
a preacher, one time told one of his people, he said, you know,
Brother so-and-so died last week. You know, this is back when most
churches had a little cemetery right next to the church. said,
you know brother so-and-so died last week and we buried him out
there, let's go out there. So they went out there and there's
that heap of dirt, new grave. And he says,
now I want you to curse him. The man said, what do you mean?
Oh, just say awful things about him. Call him everything contemptible
thing you can think of. Well, I don't want to do that.
Well, just do it anyway. And so the guy just, you know, called
him Scoundrel, scallywag, whatever he could think, you know, you're
a worthless person, blah, blah, blah. He said, all right, now
compliment him. Tell him good stuff, build him
up. So the guy said, well, yeah, you're a fine friend. You're
a good man. You are honest, good, said all these things about him.
Now the preacher said, how did brother so-and-so respond to
that? The guy looked at his preacher and said, what do you mean? He's
dead. He can't respond to that. He said, that's what it is to
be dead to the world. You're not concerned with His
blessings or His cursings. It means nothing. We're dead. And so we deny ourselves. We
take up our cross. And it said, whoever wants to
save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for me
will find it. He doesn't, he wasn't talking
just about martyrs, those who actually physically died. Brethren,
every one of us who has believed on the Lord Jesus Christ has
lost our lives for the sake of Christ. Whatever we counted life before,
we said that's not life. I need that life which he gives.
And while God may not require you to suffer much in this world,
he may call on you to do so. And to the one who's already
lost his life in his own mind, if God calls on him to experience
some of that loss, so be it. And then he asked this question,
and we'll stop after this. His first question is, who do
you say that I am? Then he said in verse 26, what
good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world yet
forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange
for his soul? It's so easy to get wrapped up
in the world because it has a lot of pleasures and enjoyments to
offer. but your soul, your life, your
eternal existence. What are you willing to take
in exchange for that? The old phrase, you know, about
selling your soul to the devil, that's not really what we're
doing because you can't sell your soul to the devil. But the idea is this, that if you choose this world,
whatever aspect of it you choose, and you choose to have that over Christ, you have forfeited
your soul in the process. If the time comes when it's actually
put to you, the world or Christ, which is it, your life or Christ,
Your riches are Christ, your friends are Christ, and you choose
the world. You do so at the loss of your
soul. Now, every believer has professed
to have chosen Christ, but Christ tests that profession all through
life. What do you choose? If you're
left to yourself, you will choose the world. If the Spirit of God
works in you, you will choose Christ. But when you choose, It's not as
though you're going to be saying, well, I want the world, but the
Spirit of God is making me choose Christ. Or it won't be, well,
I want to choose Christ, but the Spirit of God isn't working
in me, so I can't choose Christ. No, you'll choose exactly what
you want. It'll be as natural to you as
whether you choose to have the green beans or the corn. But what do you choose? What's
important to you? Christ? and that life that's
in him or the world and the life we have right now. Once you understand
who Christ is, you know the answer to that question. Heavenly Father,
bless your word to our hearts and work in all of us, Lord,
to choose you at all times. For Lord, if you do not work
in us, we will choose that which is natural to us. But thank you
that for many of us you have worked in us to choose what is
good and you continue in that and perfect that work and we'll
keep doing it to the day of Christ. We pray it in Christ's name.
Amen.