Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:13-19 NASB)

Peter was given a correct understanding of who Jesus was and for his true confession, he was rewarded with a true confession of who he was in the sight of God and what God would do through him and all after him who held the Apostolic office until the end of time…

God always gives back better than what He enables us to give Him… 🙂

I will build My Church…

This is the thought I want to focus on, the fact that Jesus will build His Church…

And the reality is that He will continue to do so until He comes to ‘pick us up’ in the air…

This being true, that Jesus will build His Church, means that we are not responsible to do this for Him…

Specifically, what this means is that we are not responsible to try and drum up enough financial support (from wherever) to make this happen…

What this means as Hudson Taylor said so many years ago in his quote below is that whatever the Lord needs to do He will provide for…

Depend on it.  God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.  He is too wise a God to frustrate His purposes for lack of funds, and He can just as easily supply them ahead of time as afterwards, and He much prefers doing so.

If the Lord hasn’t provided the financial provision for whatever it is that we believe He has told us that He will do, then we need to wait for that financial provision to be made available…

Waiting teaches us to go through that process of the Lord’s word being refined seven times…

The words of the LORD are pure words; As silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times. (Psalm 12:6 NASB)

After our waiting, we are even more convinced as to the depth and power of what the Lord has promised us…

There is a release of faith in which we experience the releasing of what has been spoken in heaven on earth…

The Apostolic office is the speaking of heaven’s decrees into reality on earth…

It’s not about speaking our will or our desires or our bright ideas into reality as the Lord will not honour these…

It is about becoming surrendered to His will and learning to hear and know (through testing) that what we’re hearing is His will and then the time will come where the Lord will speak that out of us with settled authority – whether it is binding (restraining) or loosing (releasing) – and we’ll know that this has happened in the spiritual atmosphere and will happen in the natural in His time…

But even then after all that, we still need to wait, to wait for the financial provision to be manifested in the natural – we can’t ‘move’ until this happens…

This is God’s final stamp of approval of what He’s told us…

If we wait quietly and don’t try and ‘grab’ on our own behalf what God has said He will provide but instead wait for Him to Supernaturally provide these things, this gives us the most joy before the Lord, in this place of peace we have authority to possess the result of what the Lord has said and His presence fills this and accomplishes the fulfilment of His word…

Turning this around to make it practical, there are many organisations in existence at the present time which would not exist if the above pattern (which I believe to be the Apostolic pattern) were being followed…

These organisations (which are often called churches) are not experiencing the Supernatural flow of heaven’s provision…

They exist based on the donations of those who belong to these organisations…

Some (if not a lot or all) of those donations are solicited from those who belong to those organisations based on fear…

If God owns everything and God has said that He will do something, can’t God do this Supernaturally thus giving His seal of approval to the word which He has (supposedly) spoken?

If God has not provided Supernaturally, then logically speaking that can only mean two things, either, (a) He didn’t say the thing which we believe He did or (b) He is testing us, testing our faith, in the waiting process, to see whether we’ll wait for Him to act (or die waiting) or whether we’ll take matters into our own hands (as the devil tempted Jesus to do in turning the stones into bread when Jesus hungered after His forty day fast) and take God’s place and provide for ourselves…

If we do take God’s place and provide for ourselves then we do not have God’s blessing on the work of our hands…

There is control in that place and the freedom of the Holy Spirit is not there…

The first step in the future of the Church is to come out of that system of control, that is, of financial control…

Only what comes freely from the heart, through the Holy Spirit giving us the generosity and joy to give from our hearts and instructing us to do so Himself without any control from any other source, is what should be given by any of us, then there is no regret…

I believe that no organisation (which calls itself the Lord’s) should request any support or any donations from any of its members to ensure its continued existence…

If it can’t exist with those of us who are leading it trusting the Lord directly to provide, then those of us who are leading those organisations should not be leading them, we should hand them over to those who have chosen to wait on the Lord to provide, or even more poignantly, we should seriously consider whether the organisation we are leading should continue to exist at all, considering before the Lord (and through scripture) whether the Lord has really spoken the vision which our organisation presently exists to execute…

If the only Churches which existed were Churches where the Lord had control of the vision – a.k.a it was His vision – and was providing financially for the fulfilment of that vision – then we would be seeing a true depiction of what Jesus prayed for in John 17 before He faced the cross (this is what we want to be seeing)… 🙂

If all other Churches, who were surrendered to the Lord’s vision for their existence, but haven’t yet received His financial provision, set ourselves to wait, as the one hundred and twenty did in the upper room, then this experience would remove the chaff from all of our lives as we learnt about how insidious our own human control is in all aspects of our lives which the Holy Spirit (in submission to scripture) does not yet have full control over…

This purging would then show us that truly we are, as Jesus said of the Laodicean Church, “wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Revelation 3:17b NASB) and coming to this position would place us in the position of submission to the Lord, of ceasing from our labours, our dead works, and would place us ready to receive Grace from the Lord… 🙂