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Hey, everybody. It's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and you are joining me in the middle of a multi-day arc where we are exploring the concept of apostolic authority, church authority in the New Testament.

And there is one passage that is just a granddaddy of them all for the

beginning of this conversation that we're going to be talking about today. And my little

disclaimer on the front end is that this is one that people can be sensitive about because this is

still a passage that is debated between different expressions of Christianity.

And my goal is to just call it down the middle and try to just be fair to what I see in the text.

But I'm me, and it's not going to be perfect.

So thanks in advance for the benefit of the doubt as we go and dig into Matthew 16 and what Jesus and Peter and the

others said there. All right, I'm going to have Jeff play some music and then we're just going to jump

right into it.

Philemen, yeah, philemen, yeah.

All the Christians still believe that the church has authority, there's a difference of opinion on how that authority is handed down and what gives a church authority today? I don't have the bandwidth nor the

competence to solve that right this second. What I do want to do is go and look at just a little

bit of stuff around the New Testament that would help us understand why Paul would make a comment

like this and why there would be an assumption of

apostolic authority in New Testament times. Okay, well, let's go to one of the most obvious ones

of all of the obvious ones, that being Matthew 16. Now, in Matthew 16, especially for those of you

who are just picking this stuff up and learning about the great wide world of Christian faith

and the

Bible. This is a very important passage from one of the four Gospels. These are the books of the

Bible that tell the story of Jesus, his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. And in Matthew,

...