11-27-23-ENG.

"As living stones, [you] are being built up as a spiritual house. "

1 Peter 2:5 
THE ROCK'S TESTIMONY

Read It: 1 Peter 2:4-5
If you want to get the straight scoop, go to the source. That's what we have been trying to do this week as we talk about the Church. I referred to the fact that Matthew 16 has been one of the most dissected and disputed puted passages in the entire Bible, mainly because of disagreements over the role Jesus assigned to Peter in the building of His Church. Well, it's not hard to establish that Jesus was not giving Peter an exclusive sive ruling authority in the Church that no other apostle had. Peter was the leader, to be sure. Peter was the spokesman, the "Rock," without a doubt. But, remember, Jesus was speaking to all twelve of His disciples that day in Caesarea Philippi. The authority to bind and loose, for example, ple, was not given to Peter alone. Now Peter did use the keys of the kingdom to open the Church to the Jews on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 and to Gentiles in the house of Cornelius in Acts 10, but he drops out of the narrative in Acts after the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:7). We have said that Jesus' purpose in building the Church was to use many stones coming together to form one mighty slab and that Peter was simply one stone in that slab.

But why not ask Peter what he understood Jesus to be saying? After all, Peter was there in Matthew 16. Other than Jesus Himself, Peter is the best interpreter of that event. Well, we do have Peter's interpretation in today's text. He pictures the Church as a "spiritual house" made up of many living stones-which, by the way, includes believers like you and me today. Here, I believe, is the imagery we talked about earlier this week of a mighty slab of stone made up of many individual stones, forming the foundation of the Church. Now if Peter alone were the rock upon which the Church was built, this would have been a perfect opportunity for him to declare his supremacy once and for all. But under the inspiration of the Spirit, Peter testified to the truth. And for that we can be eternally grateful! Think About It Since you are designed by God to be a living part of His living Church, if you're a church dropout, you're tearing something that was meant to be a unified whole.