He got a revelation of Jesus, a revelation what He's like and of course we need to continually have that. He got a revelation that He's a king. He's the king and the Lord. He said You're the anointed one, the Son of the living God. He was revealed in this is who Jesus is. He's not just someone, take it or leave it Jesus. This is a Jesus, the Lord. This is a Jesus who is God's anointed representative in the earth. This is Jesus that all nations will bow their knee before. This is who He is and we need to have that revealed to us and become a live, living truth. The second thing Jesus revealed to him was about the church, and you notice what He said - He said upon this rock or upon the rock of revelation who I am, I will build My church. I'm glad Jesus said He'll build it, so when He says He's building His church what exactly is He building? Well of course you see there that word church. Well if you come from a certain kind of background you'll think oh, Jesus is going to build His church. We think a nice building with a steeple and stained glass windows. For you that's church.
Or maybe you've come from a different kind of background and you think He'll build His church, you think dear God, give me nothing to do with it. You see a handful of old ladies in the back of some old building and there's nothing happening. There's no life and there's no next generation. You think right, I don't want anything to do with that. See, so all of us when we hear the word church have a mentality about what God is building, and it's based primarily on what the culture has represented the church to be like and what our own experience - see, if you were raised like I was in a situation with religious orders and so on, then you had certain mindsets about what the church was like, mainly about don't do this, don't do that, don't do something else. You understand, so we come with concepts or opinions and we need to see what Jesus said the church really is.
See when we ran these meetings the other night we had a whole heap of people come in and some of them, oh! [They just went like that, 00.13.58] oh! this is a church! Oh, what kind of church? Tell me about this? I'd like to come - you see, because it just blew away their concepts of church. See, they looked at the building. Now the building is not the church; the people are the church. But the building reflects what's in the heart of the people, so when I go and I see a church building that's run down and everything's run down and there's no excellence, no serving, this represents a people who are defeated. They don't represent the church of the living God; they represent everything people hate which is religious defeat. You see Jesus said - the word He uses is the word ecclesia. He said I will build My ecclesia.
Now of course we look at that and think what the heck is that? Oh, okay, translate it for me, alright. Let's have a go. We'll say church. Oh, okay, a handful of old people running a little wee bizarre out there raising a few bucks. Come on, you get ideas but Jesus said I'll build My - now, to the people who were listening, when they used the word ecclesia they knew exactly what He was talking about, because they were in Roman culture which followed the Greek culture, and the Greek culture which was a democratic culture, the ecclesia were a group of people who were called out. The word ecclesia means called out ones. They were called out like we would elect a government; they were called into a place where they actually governed and represented whoever was in charge. So for the Romans the ecclesia then represented the governing body under the emperor. Think about that. There's a governing body; it was to actually act in close consultation with the emperor in order to outwork in the nation the designs and desires of the emperor. The nearest we'd call it would be caucus.