Matthew 16:18
After hours of cleaning my church one Friday, I stood by the long narrow glass windows next to the front doors of that quaint church building in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I had mopped the floor of the fellowship hall. I had vacuumed the entire sanctuary. Having passed the half way point of my big job of cleaning, the work I had left involved vacuuming the downstairs and cleaning the bathrooms. On many Fridays, that point was a period where I would take a few minutes to pray and to rest. To the right was a large painting of Jesus. Often I would look at the painting and speak to Jesus.
It was a period of my life where there were a number of frustrations regarding church, my ministry calling, and regarding my challenging personal circumstances. Yet that day, looking out the window, past the empty parking lot, and past the tree tops in the little valley below the small ridge the church was on, I stared at the steeple of a little white church in the distance. Though I knew the area of Wheat Ridge fairly well, I had no idea what church that was. Yet looking at the top of that church, a Biblical fact which I had learned as a rather new Christian fully bloomed in my heart. I knew that Jesus’s Church is neither a building, nor a Christian denomination. I knew it is not even a Christian ministry. Rather Jesus’s Church is people who follow Jesus, with Jesus as the creator and sustainer of the Church.
Paul said, “…Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior” (Ephesians 5:23 NIV).
As stated by me in the last piece which looked at this passage as a whole: “The church of Jesus is on the rock of faith that Jesus is the Anointed One!”
Thus Jesus’s Church comprises of all people who genuinely believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah.
All people who believe in Jesus are saved, and they become a part of Jesus’s Church.
Jesus’s Church is a spiritual body. Now this body has physical elements, since believers in Jesus are physical beings. Yet the core is spiritual, just as God is Spirit (see John 4:24). The salvation Jesus offers every person involves our souls! Jesus brings up the subject of a “soul” soon after in this chapter, which we will look at in the future.
Now, we need to ponder the fact that genuine believers, whatever their Christian institutional affiliations, are members of Jesus’s Church.
My next piece will continue to examine this subject of church, and we will further consider this verse where there is an important revelation from Jesus that the “church” is His church.
Hunter Irvine
