How many know it's in your spirit you worship God? You know, you make a decision that you're going to give yourself to Him, you'll be surprised as you give yourself how the flow comes and you don't want to stop. So I've just been praying and thinking about where to go for just ministry on Sunday mornings and I felt I'd start a series called Who is Jesus? Who is Jesus? I want to speak primarily from the Book of Revelation, but we're going to open up some other aspects and I want to encourage you to let God talk to you and bring a revelation to your own heart of who this Jesus is.
The Bible's full of Jesus, the great revelation of Jesus, so I'm going to confine myself to three aspects of who He is, and one of the works of the Holy Spirit is to make real Jesus to us. In John 16 Jesus said: the Spirit of God will take the things that are Mine and reveal them to you, so even though I teach you today, you can walk out totally unchanged. You can just have another great message - that was nice, what do I do next? I'll go and have McDonalds. You see? Or we can ask the Holy Spirit to speak to our heart, and when the Holy Spirit speaks to our heart the revelation changes us, so what I want to do is give an introduction today and just open it out, and then in the next three weeks I want to open up three different aspects of who Jesus is, and encourage you to think how to let the Holy Spirit bring revelation to you along these areas.
Some of you may only know Jesus in one kind of way; some of you may know Him in a different way. We've all got aspects of Him, but here's the key foundational conflict that will be in the end times, it's over the person of Jesus Christ. It's not which church you go to, it's not what doctrine so much. It's who is Jesus. This is the great controversy that will be in the world, and will become increasingly an issue globally, and I'll show you why shortly, because we will see as we look into the Book of Revelation how Jesus will trigger off a global war, and how He will actually - and the issue will be who is He, and how will we respond to Him. So I want to just go and have a look, start off first of all in Matthew, Chapter 16, because the Bible tells us that we all have a race to run, and we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, so what does He look like, and how do I keep my eyes on Him?
Those are good questions to ask. Do you know how to keep your eye on Him? Or do you get caught up with everyone, and everything else, caught up with this one's things, and that one's things, offences, anxieties, worries? Or have you learnt how to run your life keeping fixed on Jesus? We're going to help you to do that, and give you some practical keys over this series. But let's just start here in Matthew, Chapter 16, one you're very familiar with, Verse 13. When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples: who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? And some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, some Jeremiah or one of the prophets. And He said: but who do you say that I am? I would love to be able to just sit with each of you and ask you this question; who do you say Jesus is? What revelation do you have of Him? That's very important, because the way you see Jesus will determine how you relate with Him. It'll determine how you run your life, and I'm absolutely convinced of this, that the revelation you have of Jesus currently, if you'll be open to the Holy Spirit, He will increase the knowledge of who He is.
He is like a diamond with many facets. You just can't come along and think well I just know who He is; He died on the cross for my sins. There's much more than that, and we want to open up some of that. Now this challenge took place in Caesarea, it's the centre of the Roman Empire in Palestine, so it's situated right there at the foot of the Golan Heights, and it was a place where there was worship of Pan, half goat, half man. It was a place of idolatry, a place of emperor worship. It was a place where there was conflict over who Jesus was, and Jesus asked the question: who do men say I am? And so they began to say well, some say Elijah. Well why Elijah? Because Elijah was full of passion and prayer, confronted controlling spirits and idolatry. And some say well, He's John the Baptist returned from the dead. Why? Because John was a fiery preacher who preached repentance, so they thought that looks just like John was.