Gates and Keys

Hi, this is Pastor Daniel Bracken. You're listening to Kings Alaska podcast. I hope the Word encourages you and you get a touch from God that brings transformation and equips you to experience life with people, power and purpose. Thank you for joining us. Enjoy the Word.

There's. The longer I've been studying the Bible, the more I look at Scripture, the more I see themes that, that run from beginning to end all the way through. There's certain, certain ideas, certain themes, certain theologies that run from the very beginning all the way to the end. And those things that sort of unify the Bible and help us to understand that there's one story, 66 books tell one story about the redemption of God, the plan of God to use his people to expand his kingdom, about Jesus all the way in the Old Testament, we see, we see foreshadowings of Jesus. We, we see ideas of how God wants to use his people, his children, and to use them to accomplish his plans.

We see a lot of, well, let's go all the way back to the beginning. We've got the Eden Mandate. Jesus, God created Adam and Eve and he said, go, multiply, take dominion, expand. This is an idea of expansion. And take dominion.

The idea was that the garden did not encompass the entire Earth, but that he wanted Adam and Eve to take his kingdom and expand it and take dominion. So there's two parts of this. There's expansion, there's dominion. We see the same idea comes into Abraham. God approaches Abraham, a man of faith.

He says, you're my friend. You have a man of faith. Now I'm going to bless you. I'm going to take your seed, I'm going to multiply it like the stars of the sky and the grains of the sand. It's multiplication.

He adds blessing to it. I'm going to bless you that you can be a blessing to the nations.

Does the same thing with Joshua. Oh, he does. There's lots of stories, but just pick a few. Here, take Joshua. He says everywhere that you and the people put your feet into the promised land, I'm going to give it to you everywhere.

I'm going to allow you to take dominion. Things that are under our feet in the Bible represent dominion. It represents taking possession of. And he says, this land is yours, but you have to take possession of it.

See, the same thing with, with the King David. To this day, King David's regarded as the greatest king short of Jesus, greatest king of Israel. Why? Because he conquered his enemies. He took possession.

He, he, he, he took, he took the promised land and made it and put it under God. So look, Psalm 72:8 puts it this way. May he rule, have dominion from sea to sea, and from river to river to the ends of the earth. 2nd Samuel 8, 6 says, and the Lord gave victory to David wherever he went.

Now let me. Let me show this in the. In the New Testament. What do we have? We got the Great Commission.

Jesus came and he made a way for us to spread the gospel. He says. Matthew 28:18. Jesus came and said to his disciples, all power has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Now you go make disciples in the nations.

You teach them all the good things that I told you, and I will be with you all through the earth, all the way to the ends of the earth. No, so it's that context, it's that framework that I want to read this passage to you. Matthew 16.

So here we go. Matthew 16:13. Start in verse 13.

When Jesus came. Yeah, I'm sorry. Stand to your feet for the reading of the Word. When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that I. That the Son of man is well, they replied.

Some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say Jeremiah or some other prophet. Verse 15. Then he asked them, ah, but who do you say that I am? Well, Simon Peter answered and says, you are the Messiah, the son of the living God. Jesus replied, you are blessed Simon son of John, Simon son of Jonah, because my Father in heaven has revealed us to you.

You did not learn this from your own as own human being. In other words, you didn't learn this from signs and wonders. My father told you this. Verse 18. Now I say to you that Peter, which means rock, upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell.

The powers of hell will not conquer it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom. And whatever you forbid on earth, or what do you bind on earth, will be forbidden in heaven. Whatever you permit on earth, whatever you loose on earth, will have been loosed in heaven. Amen.

Let me pray for you, Heavenly Father. God, I pray that you would speak through me. Lord, allow me to speak with freedom. Allow me to speak your words with power. Allow me to speak truth.

Allow me to speak with accuracy. God, Father, I pray that the words that I speak today would be transformational to those who would hear here. Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for this opportunity. Jesus name.

Amen.

So, looking at this passage, there's a few definitions I want to clarify that I Want to explain to you that that'll help us understand what's going on here. First of all, we talked a little bit about this when I got here. It's kingdom, kingdom. God has a kingdom. The enemy has a kingdom.

God's idea is to use his children to expand his kingdom, push back the kingdom of darkness. Okay, so there's a conflict between two kingdoms.

We identify the kingdom of God with the fruit of the spirit. Wherever the spirit is, wherever the king is, the kingdom is present. We have got. Freedom is the hallmark of the kingdom of God. Where God is, there's free or Jesus is, there's freedom.

We've got the fruit of the spirit, righteousness, peace and joy.

We also know, as I said, the kingdom grows wherever king is. God's plan to grow, to expand. It's an outward trajectory of God's kingdom. So now the children of God are established, are his agents in the world to expand his kingdom. Okay, so God's powerful.

Obviously he could establish his kingdom with one word, just in the same way that he created heavens and the earth. But he doesn't do it that way. He's put limitations, self limited himself, limitations on himself and for the sake of his children. And he's empowered his children to do kingdom work and expand his kingdom. So what does that look like?

What does that sound like? How does that work? How does a human being do the work of a God? How does the likes of a fallible person human actually expand the kingdom of God? Oh, I've got some good news for you.

This chapter tells us a lot about how this happens. Okay, so Matthew 6 Lord's Prayer, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. That's a trajectory of the kingdom of God through his people, through their prayer, through what comes out of their mouth, their declarations, expanding his kingdom.

Now let's talk about gates. He says this in the gates of hell will not prevail. There's a two ideas that the Bible presents in terms of gates. All right, City gates, kingdom gates. They're part of the wall, right?

This is what allows access into a kingdom. This is what allows people to come and go. In ancient times, you think of a city as a city state where they had a king of that city, which would, we would call a mayor, the leader of that city and a gate. And the person that had the ability to open the gate had tremendous authority, had a lot of power over that city. He could choose to let who came and went.

So it would said that if you had control of a city's gates, you had control over that city.

So there's a sense of power, security, government authority. And there's also a legal connotation with, with gates.

A lot of times when you see the gates in the Bible, they're talking about a legal body, a council, a group of, of people who ran the city, who would often have their meetings or their, their council meetings in the city gate, which was a high traffic. You got a lot of people, an open air meeting and it was open to whomever saw. And they would make judgments about the laws, they would create laws. And the things that the city council would declare, would become, would be enforced in that city or in that kingdom.

It was simply a body of lawmakers, judges, council members. It was the seat of many legal decisions. Now the Greek word for this council is ekklesia. In the Greek, it's the church.

There's concepts of the church that I don't think, or at least I haven't got my head around as operating as a legal authority over a kingdom, over, over the city. That, that when this, these group, these council members. Now this is an ancient idea. This didn't just show up in the New Testament. There's I think Psalm 82.

God sits in a council. He presides over a council of powerful people. That this go. This was in Hebrew tradition long, long ago. And Jesus is talking about this in the New Testament.

He says the ecclesia is the church. It's the church. There's functions that the church has, legal functions of things that they say, things that they allow or disallow, things they declare that have real power, that have real consequences.

Now heaven has a gate and hell has a gate anyway. He says the gates of hell will not prevail. These are the accusations from hell. These are legal accusations. These are.

Statements, demonic statements that come up before you that say, hey, look at your past, look at the mistakes you've made, that you're not qualified, you're not powerful enough, you're not smart enough, you're not educated enough, you're not experienced. All these things that have an element of truth in the natural and they're accusations from the gates of hell. But, but here Jesus is turning it all on its head and says no, no, no, no. Watch this. Let me talk about keys for a minute.

Keys, Keys to the gates.

It was said that, that the man who had a key to the city gate had control over the gate, had control over the city and he's giving us his church. Keys to the gate. All right, this is delegated Authority from the king. This is power he's giving to people, individual people, to the church, to. To allow access into the kingdom.

A good way to look at this. Isaiah 22:22. There's a story about a gatekeeper in the house of David, and he's getting promoted. And it says this. I will give him the key to the house of David, the highest position in the royal court.

When he opens doors, no one will be able to close them. When he closes doors, no one will be able to. To open them. It's the same idea of opening and closing doors. Jesus fulfilled this and we imitate Jesus.

Amen. Revelations 3, 7 puts it this way. This is the message from the one who is holy and true, the one who has the key of David. Here we're talking about Jesus. What he opens, no man can close.

And when he closes, no man can open. This is powerful. The one of the versions of this says that the weight of the key rested on his shoulder of the gatekeeper. I think it was old King James says, what does that mean? What does the key sit on your shoulder?

What does that represent? That's the burden of responsibility. That's government. That's Isaiah says of Jesus, and the government shall be on his shoulder. This is a weighty thing.

This is a heavy thing to have in our power. The ability to grant access to the kingdom of God simply by declarations that come out of our mouth.

The priests in the Old Testament carried around the Ark on their shoulders. This was their responsibility to take the Ark out into wherever it was to transport the very presence of God.

Now, a little bit of historical background about this location is Caesarea Philippi. So in this passage, Jesus has taken his disciples on a little field trip. This is about a day and a half trip from Jerusalem. This is. They really went out of their way to get.

But he wants to teach them a lesson. He's a great teacher. He's an amazing teacher. And he's using this object lesson to teach them a kingdom authority about kingdom expansion. Now, this place Caesarea Philippi represented to the Jews, represents their worst failure.

This was a place where they began and continued to worship false gods, to bring sacrifices to idols.

This was the place that after God had brought them out of Egypt, brought them into the promised land, established his kingdom, they forgot, after a few hundred years, they forgot who they were God was, and they began to mix pagan worship with Yahweh worship. And so eventually they totally forgot who God was. And they looked no different than the surrounding nations. And it was at this place that they sacrificed to false God. Now it's pretty gross, but there was actually human sacrifice from the Jews, from the Israelites at this location.

And here's Jesus standing on top of this location. It's actually a little rock. You can Google it. It's a picture, a couple hundred feet. It's like standing out on the butte.

It's just a rock. He's standing on top of it. There's a cave on the front of the of the cliff and they say it goes down into the depths of hell. It's supposedly by legend it is the gates of hell. Amazing.

What's Jesus doing standing on the gates of hell? Josephus said that it's an endless pit that filled with chaotic waters. Well, all of that is hell. Okay?

And he says, this rock.

So armed with that, let's go look. Take just a little bit deeper in the passage. Okay? Matthew 16, Verse 13. He's asking his people while standing on the rock, standing on the gates of hell.

He says, who do people say that the Son of man is? Which is the term he used for himself. Who do people say that I am? Now this wasn't Jesus just looking for a pat on the back. He wasn't.

This was not an insecure Jesus saying, well, what is my social media? What are they saying about me? Who do people think? What do they really think about me? No, no, no, this is not Jesus.

No, no, no, no. This is Jesus trying to get a declaration of faith from his disciples. Says, who do you. Who do you. You 12. Who do you say that I am?

Tell me. This was the question in the life of Jesus, if he could just get people to declare that. That Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, not just a good prophet, not just a really good man. Anybody can say that. But his children declare with their mouth that he is the Son of God.

And Peter stands up and says, oh, you are the Son of God. He makes that declaration. And Jesus says, yes, yes, yes, that is exactly the truth.

Now.

Then he says to Peter, he says, this revelation didn't come to you by what you've seen me do. It didn't come to you by all these signs and wonders that you've been watching me do. It didn't come to you because you saw me feed thousands of people with almost nothing. It came to you by a revelation from the Father God. We could only make a declaration of faith if we see the Father God do what he does.

If we hear the Father God say, and then we repeat what he Sundays and we imitate what he does. Then we can work in faith. Then we can expand kingdom the. Then we can take dominion over demonic forces. Then what comes out of our mouth is powerful.

Then what comes out of our mouth changes the world around us. It starts with a revelation, and then it becomes a declaration, and then it changes everything. This is how the kingdom of God expands.

And then he says to Peter, on this rock, I will build my ecclesia. I will build my church. Now, what is he talking about, rock? On this rock, there's several, three or four different ideas about what the rock represents. And honestly, I think they're all good.

But I do prefer one. We know that Jesus is the rock, the foundation of the church. He's what we built the church. And we also know that Peter's name meant rock. So maybe he had his hand on Peter's shoulder and says, on this rock, I will build my church.

And he was. He was a. A. A pillar. He was a church father.

Now, all 12 of them were. Were church father. Well, minus Judas, 11 of the 12 were rocks that Jesus would build the church on, right?

But look where he was standing. He was standing on the gates of hell. He was standing on a rock and said, on this rock under my feet, this is where I'm going to build my church. Now, what a weird place to build a church, really. I mean, does this mean next week we all go to Caesarea Philippi and have church on top of.

But probably not, no.

So.

What this represented was Israel's greatest failure. The worst day in the history of Israel, the worst season, worst period, was what this rock represented. And what Jesus was saying is, on your worst day, if you will let me redeem that, I will build my church. On your worst failure, if you redeem that, and let me heal that, and let me change the way you see, and let me change your past, and let the way you perceive your past, I will establish my church. On your worst day, on your biggest failure, on your worst pain, that place where the enemy came in and said, oh, I've got you.

Oh, you failed. You blew it. Oh, you hurt everybody around you. You disqualified yourself. If you will take that to the cross, let him redeem that.

Let him heal that. He'll say, oh, no, no, no, no. I'm going to use your weakness to show my strength.

Second Corinthians 12, 9, and 10. Paul puts it this way. He's talking about all of his pain and his suffering and all the trials, tribulations that he suffered. And he says, in this thorn in the Flesh that he is asking God to take away. And he says each time I said, each time he asked, God would say my grace is sufficient.

My grace is all you need. My power works best in your weakness. So now I'm glad to boast about my weakness so that the power of Christ can work through me. That's why I take pleasure in my weakness and in the insults, the hardships, the persecutions, the troubles, the sufferings of for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Verse 19.

He moves on. He says the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth, he says, is going to give to his people, his children, his disciples. And whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will have will have been loosed in heaven.

Now this idea of binding and loosing again is legal terminology that meant whatever demonic power that you have bound through your declaration will have been bound in heaven. Whatever you have determined to be legally binding based on what you've seen the Father do, what you've heard him say will be, will have been bound in heaven. There's a direction to this, from heaven to earth. And whatever you loose on earth. Now listen to this.

Will have been loosed in heaven. So why did Jesus come to earth? Why? To destroy the works of darkness. To set the captive free.

He's still doing it through you and me, through. Through our declaration. Whatever you decide, whatever you say is free, is free. Whatever you declare freedom in a location, there's freedom. Whatever addiction, whatever, whatever lie has been plagued you or those around you, those who've entrusted to you and you declare freedom to them.

God's backing this up and says there is freedom in your declaration declaration. Freedom is released in your declaration. Isaiah 60:1 says, Spirit of the Heaven, the sovereign God is upon me. Why? To set the captive free.

To declare the goodness of God. To declare the gospel of God. To heal the sick, to raise the dead. To bring freedom. Freedom from what?

From addiction, from pain, from life? Freedom. That power to declare freedom is given to you and I as members of his church, as his children. This is God's children have a responsibility to be gatekeepers with the keys to the kingdom.

Allowing or disallowing access to the kingdom.

This is you and I doing his work. We're in the family business. He's delegated family business to you and I. My wife and I had a family business. We're passing it off to our kids.

This just means a lot in terms I understand, at least I think I do, of what it means to pass on a family business to the next generation. And this is God passing to us. It's like he's giving us his credit card with the bank account of heaven. Oh, this is my father in law's analogy. And he's giving us this card.

And he says, here, use this card how you. How you see fit and that you now have access to this huge unlimited resources. But you use it. Here's the PIN number. Here you go.

Use it. Your name is on it. Use it. This is us borrow, not borrowing, but. But speaking in concert with God, using his words.

Use God's words through your life, through your mouth, to bring freedom to the world around you. This is God's power working through your hands to heal the sick, to set the captive free, to raise the dead, to declare the goodness of God. It's our responsibility now to take kingdom work and make it ours to take the business of our holy, our Heavenly Father, and be the kind of employees, to be the kind of children that make him proud.

Let me. Let me try to wind it up here. There's a sequence to this story that's really important.

And the declaration that Peter made has. He could only make after the revelation. Okay, so there's. Get the revelation, then make the declaration.

Let me tell you a quick story. I preached a version of this last week.

And we've got a little church in Northern California. And Jennifer was out of town, sitting in the lobby about 10 minutes before service. And a young man walks in, big guy, and he's in tears, just sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. I've been looking for you. I've been looking for this place.

I've been looking so long. Oh, okay. Well, this is a God meeting. All right, what's on your mind? And he just starts unloading.

He says six years ago, he was driving down the road right in front of our church. He'd drive in a truck, and a pedestrian stepped out in front of his truck and he ran over, killed him, and spent the last six years in prison for manslaughter. When he got out of prison, he said. He said God in his words. He said God told him to go forward, find a church or a preacher or some.

Find somebody. And he. What he wanted to do was make some kind of restitution or to make it right. He was feeling bad, he was crying. He had a little box with some trinkets in it as some kind of memorial.

I said, hey, my man, you have come to the right place. You've come to the right place because God can redeem that God can heal that. I don't know how he does it, but he can heal that memory, he can heal that family if you give it to him, if you repent from that. He can use that on the worst day of his life. He came to kings not on the day, but in remembering that day, on the worst day of his life, God says he can use that to build kingdom.

He can use that to display his glory, his honor, his mercy toward his people. His fantastic limitless love can be poured out on the worst day of that man's life. I got a guy text me and calls me every day now he's like, but I just know God is going to use him, he's going to transform him. I look forward to seeing how that, how that ends.

There's one other place in Matthew or in the Gospels where Jesus talks about binding and loosing and that's in the context of unity. In Matthew 18 he's talking about unity. 18, 19 and 20 says truly I tell you whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven. Again truly I tell you that if two or three of you agree on anything that I ask for, it will have been done for them by the Father.

The idea is that where we're binding, loosing and if we're doing it in agreement, in one heart for one purpose, if we're seeing the same things and we're speaking the same things that we see in heaven, that we hear our Heavenly Father speak, God sees that unity in us. He hears our declaration and it's like he's saying, he sits down at our council table and says, oh I vote with you. I see a unanimous heart here. And I put my vote, I don't know, whatever it is, whatever I see unity, I see a declaration from heaven. Now I'm going to cast my vote with you.

You and you want God to vote with you. I mean that beats the alternative. I'll tell you what, you want to partner with the power of heaven, there's a, there's a unity aspect to this that, that we need to get a hold of.

There in, in practical terms when we're to apply this. I think where we apply this on a daily, daily basis is in our families, in our, in our homes, around the dinner table. Sometimes we hear things. Our kids have gotten a hold, ideas that they've brought home, attitudes they brought home or some misconception, misunderstanding and it's our responsibility as parents to shut it down. No, no, God does love you.

Absolutely. There is a God and, and he does have a plan for you. He knows every hair on your head. He knit you together in your mother's womb. He had a plan for you long before any of your ancestors were even born.

And if we can instill this into them, we can shut down these lies and we can bind up these, these. These lies that have been spoken over our children, over our spouses, and when we see people in bondage. God has put us in a. In a location or church where there's lots of homeless, lots of addicted, lots and lots of broken people. And he's showed us that we have the power to set them free.

Not through years of counseling or medicines or no, just declaration from the word of God has set them free, free over and over and over. And this is expansion of kingdom. Amen. Amen. I just pray that our lives would be lived so connected so that we would be able to hear and see the Father so clearly that he would just sit back and say, I am proud of what you're doing, what you're saying, because it lines up.

It resonates with my plan in the earth that we would bring glory to God with everything that comes out of our mouth, no matter how difficult circumstance. Amen. Well, I hope you were encouraged by God's word. Thank you again for listening to Kings Alaska Podcast. God bless you.

For more great content, go to kcalaska.com and may God's face shine upon you and give you peace.