Is Life Over for Me? | J.D. Greear | March 20, 2022

0:36 You guys ready for Easter? Easter at Walnut Creek or the Creek or Easter at the Nut, however you want to remember it. It is coming up soon. And in case you missed the little thing right there in the last part of that video, it did say that tickets are available now for this event. You will need to get a ticket there. It helps us keep things organized. There's different parts of seating all throughout that if you've been to Walnut Creek. And so go on and get it now. Get it for people that you want to bring with you. Tickets, of course, are free. but don't just take like a bazillion that you're wasting. It really does help us get organized to be able to do that. So you can hop onto our website to sign up for your seat whether under the awning or in the lawn section. It's all amazing. I've told you we would love to see 20,000 people there that weekend and we are asking God for that and so I'd love for you to join me in praying for that that we have 20,000 people or however many God wants there to be able to make a big deal out of the resurrection of Jesus on this Easter Sunday.

1:30 You can also sign up on that website to serve, which you may not know this, but back when we did Church at the Ballpark in 2013, it took 1,000 volunteers in order for us to pull that off. And so in order for us to do that for 20,000 people, we need you to volunteer, okay? Everybody turn to your neighbor right now and ask, are you gonna volunteer? Turn right now and say, are you gonna volunteer? And if they do not give, If they do not give an immediate and emphatic yes, if there y'all is even the slightest hesitation, then I want you to say now, Jesus rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. You can get your lazy self out of bed and volunteer. All right, the best part, the best part is that we have figured out a way for you to be able to volunteer and still be able to attend the service. So by volunteering, it's not like you got to give up being a part of this event.

2:22 You know, when we did Church at the Ballpark back in 2013, we had 554 people baptized on that one morning. That takes a lot of volunteers, okay? It's an awesome volunteer job, great volunteer work, but the bottom line is we need you, okay? So hop on over to our website. By the way, you see what I did there? Hop on over like the Easter bunny. Hey, no bunny loves you like Jesus this Easter, okay? Hop on over to our website for more information about tickets, about serving. Also, if you just want to go ahead and sign up to get baptized. Some of you have not been baptized and Easter would be a great time to do that. So you can go ahead and sign up there for that also, okay? All right, 1 Corinthians chapter 15. If you have your Bibles with you, and I hope that you do, 1 Corinthians 15. This is another one of the most significant chapters in the entire Bible. 1 Corinthians 15, as you turn there, let me acknowledge, let me say that I love, love, love how we are a church who celebrates and gets excited about what God is doing.

3:23 We love worshiping together loudly with smiles on our faces filled with joy. But I'm also very acutely aware that every single week here at the Summit Church, there are a number of you who are hurting. Some of you are struggling with chronic pain or incurable diseases. You were somebody that you love, cancer. COVID was devastating for some of you and your families. Some we have that are struggling with emotional and mental health issues, anxiety, depression. PTSD, the effects of trauma. And you've seen the therapist and you've taken the medicines and you've memorized the verses, but it never really seems to fully go away. Some of you, some of you this morning, you feel trapped in a bad marriage and you've prayed and you've gone to see the counselors and you've tried to make things better, but your situation is just not changing. And you're trying to get your mind around, trying to prepare yourself for the reality that it may never change.

4:22 Some of you are frustrated that you're still single. I know not every single person is in this category, of course, but some of you want to be married and you're wondering if that door is ever going to open. Some of you are pretty sure that door has been decisively closed. We have others who feel like they're suffering because of dumb decisions that they made years ago. And you've asked forgiveness for those decisions and you feel assured that God has given you that forgiveness, but bottom line, you can't rewrite the past. And that decision cost you your career or your marriage or your family. Maybe that decision landed you in jail. And so right now you feel like there's a cloud of despair that hangs over your life. And you're asking yourself questions like, is this as good as it's ever going to get for me? Or maybe you say, is life over for me? First Corinthians 15 is written for you. Now, as we've seen, Paul writes the letter of 1 Corinthians to answer questions that the Corinthians have asked of him or to address problems that he has heard that the Corinthians are having.

5:29 Here is a question that Paul is dealing with in chapter 15. It's articulated in verse 12 if you wanna look there. How can some of you say that there's no resurrection of the dead? Paul wants to show them that belief in our bodily resurrection is as core a Christian concept as you can get. This is not a secondary or peripheral belief, something that is a cool part of our eschatology beliefs for the future. This is foundational to the Christian hope. Evidently, you see, there were some in Corinth who were denying the physical resurrection of the body. Here's why. The religious environment in Corinth had been shaped by philosophers like Plato and Plutarch who taught that all of us consist of body and soul, but the body was bad and your soul was good. So when your body died, your good soul left this old piece of trash behind and went on up to heaven where it would enter into a blessed experience, a spiritual experience.

6:25 Most Greek and Roman philosophers believed in an afterlife. It just wasn't a physical afterlife. And that was because the spirit is good and material things, the body, those things are secondary, lesser, and even bad. Now you say, well, that's an interesting piece of philosophical trivia from 2000 years ago. Why are you sharing that with us? Do people still think this way today? Uh, yeah. Ask yourself, have you ever thought of heaven as some faraway disembodied place, a celestial shore that your spirit flies away to? That makes for really good bluegrass music, but really bad theology. Or have you ever thought about heaven as a colorless world where we sit around on clouds, wearing loincloths, strumming our harps and shooting nerfed bows and arrows at each other all day and wondered like, what in the world are we going to do all day long? Just waiting for choir practice every day at four o'clock. How are we going to, how are we not going to be bored out of our minds in heaven? Right? You thought that? First Corinthians 15, Paul says the whole point of Christ's saving work was to redeem the physical body and usher in God's kingdom on earth, which is a physical, tangible kingdom. That's actually similar to the one we're in now, just a lot more glorious and without the curse. Here's what Paul does in this chapter.

7:38 First, he's gonna ask, did the resurrection of Jesus actually happen? Then he's gonna answer, how does physical resurrection even work? All the, just feels complex, and what are you talking about? And then finally, he's gonna answer, how important is the resurrection and what difference does it make for how we see life today? That's a lot to cover, right? So we gotta get right to work. Verse three, Paul says, for I delivered unto you first of all, as of first importance, what I also received, and that is that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scripture, that he was buried, that he was raised in the third day in accordance with the scriptures. Now you can't see it because in English, it doesn't rhyme. But the way that Paul writes this indicates that this was either a confession or a creed or most say probably a hymn that was sung in the early church. He's quoting it like something they all know, like the lyrics to a song. Like if I stood up here and was like, when we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, you all know I was quoting a song.

8:34 When Paul goes through those lines there, it's obvious he's quoting that kind of song or confession. And he continues, verse five. We also know that he appeared to Cephas, by the way, who is Cephas? That's right, another name for Peter. Peter had a lot of nicknames. I have no idea why, but they all use all of them in the Bible. And then he appeared after that to the 12. Verse six, then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have already fallen asleep. Verse seven, then he appeared to James, the half-brother of Jesus, then to all the apostles, last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, Paul says. In these verses, Paul basically says two things about the resurrection. Number one, it happened. And number two, it's foundational to everything else we believe. In establishing that it happened, Paul points to two crucial pieces of evidence that were fundamental to early Christian testimony.

9:29 And that was the empty tomb. And secondly, the living eyewitnesses. Several hundred of us, Paul says, who saw Jesus alive after the resurrection in different times and at different places, including more than 500 of us at one time. N.T. Wright, who is an Oxford scholar, says that both of those things, the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses, both are crucial parts of the testimony. If we had only the empty tomb, N.T. Wright says, but no eyewitnesses, then critics would have concluded that the body was stolen. But if we had only eyewitnesses and no empty tomb, they would have concluded that the witnesses were deluded or hallucinating. But the two together make for convincing evidence. Now, a lot of times people today especially will say, well, no, this belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus, that was a legend that grew up over time. It wasn't part of the original message, but over the years, as Christians felt the need to beef up their authority, beef up their message, they added in this miraculous stuff about Jesus resurrecting.

10:33 The idea is that Jesus started out as a, just a regular old Jewish holy man. He was a little radical, you know, but he taught some insightful and revolutionary things that unfortunately got him killed. But after he died, his disciples wanted to keep his body of teaching alive. And so these legends started to grow up about his miracles and eventually about his resurrection. And as things got repeated from generation to generation, they got exaggerated as often happens. For example, what started out as his teachings live on in us. Well, that just turned into he lives in our hearts, which then turned into he was raised from the dead and his disciples saw the empty tomb. Here's the problem with that theory that this was just a legend that grew up. Paul's letter to the Corinthians that we are studying was written in 53 AD, that's less than 20 years after Jesus has died. By the way, nobody really disputes that. This is one of the few facts about the New Testament that both liberal and conservative New Testament scholars agree on.

11:30 And already Paul in this letter, written less than 20 years after Jesus died and resurrected, already he's pointing to a hymn sung commonly in the early church that celebrated Christ's resurrection. Even the uber liberal New Testament scholar, Gerd Ludemann, who's basically an atheist, which is an odd thing to choose to study if you're an atheist, the New Testament. But Ludemann says that the hymn that Paul was quoting there in verse three, Christ died, was buried, raised on the third day, according to the scriptures. He says that dates to within two years after the crucifixion. That is way too early for some spurious legend to grow up. Think of it like this. Many of you remember when Dale Earnhardt Sr. died at the Daytona 500 a few years ago. Y'all, that was 20 years ago. Some of you were watching it when it happened. Even me saying this makes you just want to salute. I mean, you saw that in Hunger Games, thought, Are they saluting Dale?

12:23 No, they were not, okay? The point is that if somebody today started to say, oh, no, no, Dale resurrected right there on the track. He got out of the car. He walked a few laps around the Daytona 500. He shook hands with a bunch of his fans. And then he drove the number three straight on up into heaven. There's a bunch of people that would say, no, I mean, I love Dale too, but that didn't happen. Even if we couldn't go back and review the video footage, some of you would say either I was there or I knew so-and-so was there watching it live and that did not happen. Paul's like, look, if you doubt my claim, ask all these people who saw him alive, all these people that are still alive who could validate this claim. Now, maybe you're like, well, maybe they were just hallucinating. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Paul says, look, it was 500 people at once. 500 people don't typically hallucinate altogether seeing the same thing at the same time. And if it was just a hallucination, Jesus's enemies, the Romans or the Jews would have just produced the body and nipped this fantasy in the bud, right?

13:21 Now, you've got another alternative explanation that says the apostles were lying and they knew they were lying. The problem with that is that I can't think of a plausible motivation for them to lie. When you propagate something you know is a lie, and that's happened in history, but when somebody propagates something they know to be a lie, it's almost always to gain some monetary or political power. But like Paul acknowledges in this chapter, the apostles' confession that they'd seen the risen Jesus, that brought them none of those things. In fact, the opposite. It brought them persecution and poverty and death, and yet they kept right on claiming they had seen him anyway. All this to say, I agree with N.T. Wright, who says that all the other explanations for how Christianity got started, the explanations for the absolutely remarkable and miraculous birth of the church, and it's incredibly rapid spread throughout the earth against all odds, Every other alternative theory is far less compelling than the one that the early Christians themselves provided, and that is Jesus actually rose from the dead.

14:27 I love what the German historian, theologian, Wolfhard Pannenberg, I think he hits the nail on the head with this. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong, watch this, that nobody would really question it if not for two things. First, it is a very unusual event. It's miraculous, and people just don't like to acknowledge miracles. And second, if you believe that it happened, you would have to change the way that you live. In other words, just historically speaking, it's pretty verifiable. The only reason people wouldn't do it is because it's kind of miraculous. And a lot of times historians don't wanna engage in the miraculous. And secondly, it demands, if it's true, it demands a radical change in the way you live. Paul's like, it may be unusual, it may be miraculous, but that didn't mean it didn't happen. Paul says it did happen and it changed my life. I went, verse nine, from a career as a persecutor of the church and a rising star in Jewish government. I went from that to being a poor, persecuted proclaimer of the gospel.

15:22 There's only one thing that did that to me and that was seeing the resurrected Jesus. And then he says, far from being a secondary Christian truth, this truth is the foundation of just about everything else in the Christian life. In verse three, he says that the truth of the resurrection is of first importance. First importance implies that there are other genuinely important things also, but only this is of first importance. Everything rises or falls on this. This is everything. Without this, we have nothing. Paul says, he goes through a little list here. Verse 15, if you say that Christ didn't rise from the dead, you got a number of problems. First, if Christ didn't rise from the dead, let's just be honest. That makes us apostles a bunch of liars. This was not a tangential part of our message. It was not a footnote. Paul's like, it's the core. Verse 15, look at this. we are even found to be misrepresenting, lying on behalf of God.

16:16 Because we testify, this was the core thing we were saying, that God had raised Christ. If Christ didn't rise, we're not just a few, you know, often a few details. We're not just misguided religious zealots. We're frauds, we're phonies, because we have staked everything on this claim. Second, he says, verse 17, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you're still in your sins. You see, the resurrection was the validation that God had accomplished our salvation on the cross. So if Christ didn't rise, Jesus's death didn't really accomplish anything. It was just a random martyr of another good man. And so your faith in Christ, Paul says, your faith in Christ the Savior has been misplaced. Thirdly, verse 18, he says, if Christ is not raised, then those who have fallen asleep in Christ, they have perished. If Christ didn't rise from the dead, all those saints in the Bible who died believing the promises of God, they're not better any better off than those who paid no attention.

17:09 Faithful believers in the Old Testament always looked forward to some future earthly hope. Job, for example, I know that my Redeemer lives and in the end, he's going to stand on the earth and I'm going to stand with him. If Christ didn't rise from the dead, then old Job was wrong. There's no earthly future for Job or Abraham or David or anybody else who hoped in it. Fourthly, verse 19, if in Christ, Paul says, we have hope in this life only. In other words, if the only advantage of being a Christian is that you get peace, love, and groovy vibes with each other and good families, we are of all people most to be pitied. If the benefits of Christianity are only what comes in this life. Listen, let's just go ahead and acknowledge it. It kind of stinks. I mean, I realize there's a lot of great things about being a Christian. We're all friends, and that creates an amazing community. But let's just be honest. Christianity is hard. It involves a lot of difficult decisions.

18:03 A lot of personal sacrifice. a lot of dying to yourself. Let's just acknowledge this right up here, okay? You've never heard a pastor acknowledge this. I'll go ahead and say it. Church is kind of a difficult hobby, is it not? I mean, you gotta get up on a perfectly good Sunday morning, right? You gotta get dressed. You're like, why am I not sleeping in? You gotta do battle with your kids. Parents, am I telling the truth? You gotta do battle with your kids. Then you gotta come try to find a parking space where the parking guy makes you park in this faraway parking spot. when you can see, you can see a much closer one right up there. But he won't let you get there. You got to park back here in the back. Then you got to sit in a room with a bunch of random people. And some of them are, let's just be honest, weird. A lot of them carry around huge Bibles and say things like, bless you, brother. And just weird phrases. And sometimes the service leaders make you pray out loud. And that feels completely weird since you don't even know the people beside you.

18:58 Church is a terrible hobby if Jesus didn't rise from the dead. if he didn't rise from the dead why aren't you why aren't we all sleeping today and that's not even to mention all those people who have sacrificed their fortunes or gave up their lives to take the message of jesus death and resurrection to others we got a group of missionaries listening to me right now who would vastly prefer to be here with their family and friends but they're somewhere overseas because they're doing this because jesus raised from the dead and if he didn't raise from the dead all those sacrifices we're making for the gospel all this persecution, Paul says, it's all wasted. And we are most to be pitied. Fifth, verse 24, if Christ did not rise from the dead, the whole point of salvation, which was to bring all of creation back underneath the rule of Jesus, that's all failed, right? From the very beginning, y'all, God's purpose has been to redeem what sin curse.

19:53 When God created the heavens and the earth, what did he say? It's good, right? contrary to Plato, God did not look at creation and say, nah, that's all right. No, Paul's like, it's good. And it's still good, even though it is temporarily under the curse of sin. And Jesus wants it back. He didn't go through all he went through just so he could throw away creation in the garbage can and take our spirits up to a cloudless existence somewhere. He died to redeem creation, to cleanse it, to remove the curse from it. Finally, verse 29, if Christ didn't rise from the dead, seeing that you stand in the faith of your fathers is useless. Verse 29, Paul says something very, very confusing that has caused a lot of people a lot of difficulty. And some of you saw it in the chapter getting ready for this weekend and you thought, is he gonna skip that? And the answer is yes, I was going to skip it. And then one of our team said, you can't skip that.

20:47 So here we go. If Christ is not raised, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead were not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Baptized for the dead. What's that all about? Well, let's just start off. It cannot mean what the Mormons say that it means. Where you get baptized on behalf of an ancient relative, you're digging through your family history. You look up 23andMe and you're like, oh, here we go. I got somebody who I know was not saved. I'm gonna get baptized on their behalf. You know, Uncle Peter, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620, he was a hellion. So I'm going to get baptized this morning on his behalf and try to get him out of hell and into heaven. That would make our baptismal services a lot more interesting, I admit, and a lot longer. But nowhere does the Bible teach that we can get saved or baptized on behalf of anybody else. That part is very clear in the Bible. The only way any of us can be saved is by putting our own faith in Christ, right? So it can't mean that. We always interpret hard verses by easy ones, so we know it can't mean that. You're like, well, what does this phrase mean then? Well, there are a variety of options. And if you get a good study Bible, which I hope that you have one, get a good study Bible, it will lay out those options for you. But personally, the one that I find most compelling is to translate the phrase on behalf of, translate that as in regards to, which is one of the ways that Greek phrase could be translated. So the verse would actually reads like this.

22:09 If Christ is not raised, what do people mean by being baptized with regards to the dead? In other words, with regards to those former saints whose faith you are aligning yourself when you got baptized. When we get baptized, we're joining ourselves to the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, right? And all the saints who've gone before us. And we're saying their hope is our hope. But if they're all dead and gone, why be baptized into their faith? It didn't do them any good. The whole point of saying I'm joining in the hope of Abraham, David, and Isaiah is that you'll get to experience that hope together with them one day. Now you're like, well, I got more questions about this. Buy a study Bible, okay? That's all I can say about it for right now. We gotta keep moving forward. After establishing the fact of the resurrection, I love this about Paul. Paul hears in his head the objection from a lot of people he's writing to, particularly the disciples of Plato, right? So he articulates, he verbalizes that objection, verse 35.

23:05 But someone will ask, how are the dead even raised? with what kind of body do they come? I mean, you know, we got these bodies and they got all these problems, amen? Who wants to live with this thing forever? And what about people who got cremated or died in a nuclear reactor meltdown? There's nothing even left of their bodies. How are they gonna get resurrected? Be honest, how many of you have had these kinds of questions? I remember hearing one time, true story, about a believer years ago who was buried underneath an apple tree back before they wouldn't always bury people in coffins. They just buried this guy under an apple tree. And years later, they decided to transport his body to an actual graveyard for a more proper burial. So they dug up where his body was, but they couldn't find the body. But where his body was, was an oddly shaped tree root, which was now in the shape of the guy's body. So evidently this apple tree root had sucked up this guy's body, processed it for nutrients and turned him into apples.

24:00 The best part was this was a popular apple tree that everybody in the town ate apples from. So the question was, when the resurrection happens, do people who have eaten from this apple tree have parts of their bodies just fly off their bodies because his body was part of theirs? How does this even work? Now, in the following verses, Paul does not fully answer every question, but he does give you the basic parameters for how to think about this. In verse 36, he uses a seed analogy to describe resurrection life. Check this out. I love this. verse 36. What you sow doesn't come to life unless it first dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be. What you sow is just a kernel, a seed of weed or some other grain. Our physical bodies are like a seed of what we will later become. A seed is made out of the same stuff as the full-grown plant, but the full-grown plant is a lot more complex and a lot awesomer, Right?

25:01 It's not really a word, but you know what I mean. A watermelon seed and a watermelon are made out of the same stuff. But the watermelon is awesome and complex and rich and colorful. The watermelon seed is just a boring little black teardrop that you spit out of your mouth. Or think about a tadpole compared to a frog. Or a tiny human embryo in the womb compared to a full-grown adult. It's all the same stuff. It's just the adult version is so much more complex and beautiful and rich. If you as an embryo, just think, if you as an embryo could somehow have understanding and you could have seen yourself as an adult, what you were going to become, it would be hard to believe that you were going to become all of this. I mean, just imagine Zygote JD seeing me now, right? He would be so proud. That's similar to the change we go through again in the resurrection. So if you're taking notes, here's your first answer to Paul's question.

25:56 What are our resurrection bodies like? Write down, awesome, awesome. Verse 37, this body, this body right here compared to my resurrection body is like a watermelon seed compared to the full grown watermelon. Y'all, I can't even get my mind around that. I'm gonna be athletic, good looking, limber. I'm gonna have no more aches and pains. I won't gain unwanted weight. I suspect I'll be able to fly. I'll probably be able to walk through walls. I say that because Jesus did all those things in his resurrected body and my body's supposed to be like his. It's like, I'm gonna be a better version of Neo from the matrix. How amazing is that gonna be? To just wake up in the morning and just feel awesome immediately. I'm definitely not that way now. I wake up in the morning sore and all I did the night before was sleep. Somehow rolling from this position to this position is enough to throw me off for the rest of the day.

26:50 Second quality to write down after awesome, eternal. Verse 42, what's sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. That means no more deterioration. I guess our bodies will have the power of self-regeneration. No more getting old. No more slow decline where gravity pulls everything the wrong direction. Write down number three, beautiful. Verse 43, it is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. Our body is gonna be raised in indescribable beauty. I don't just mean vain beauty, though I think it also includes that. We're talking about real beauty, the sinless beauty of a soul that is united to God now, reflected in a physical body. I've told you before about Johnny Erickson Tata, who's a woman who's actually very old now, but when she was a teenager, she was involved in a diving accident.

27:43 She wasn't walking with God at the time, but she was beautiful, popular, athletic, brilliant. She had it all. but this diving accident left her as a quadriplegic for more than 50 years. Her autobiography is one of the most powerful things that you can ever read. And she says, she talks about how God used us to bring her back to him. And she says, I can hardly believe it. I was shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, and no feeling from the shoulders down. And one day going to have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness, powerful and dazzling. Can you imagine the hope this gives somebody with a spinal cord injury like me or somebody who is cerebral palsied or brain injured or somebody who has multiple sclerosis? Imagine the hope this gives to somebody who is a manic depressive. No other religion, no other philosophy promises new bodies, hearts, and minds.

28:38 Only in the gospel of Jesus Christ do hurting people find such incredible hope. Write down number four, I guess, powerful. Powerful, verse 43, it is sown in weakness. It is raised, Paul says, in power. Again, I don't even know what all that means. It's spiritual power, it's physical power. The Bible says we're gonna be like Jesus and in his resurrected body, he could go fishing, eat meat, like I already said, walk through walls and fly. Whatever it is, y'all, I'm in for it. We're not gonna need things like walkers or wheelchairs or reading glasses. Which is another thing I'm starting to fight now. I'm gonna go ahead and warn you right now. One of these days, I'm gonna do it without even acknowledging it to see what I got written down here. I'm gonna have to pull these glasses out and look on it. And you're not allowed to pay attention to it, but it's happening. And I keep fighting it. But we're gonna get rid of all that stuff. Johnny Erickson taught it again, who I quoted a second ago.

29:33 And probably my favorite thing she has ever said, I hope I can take my wheelchair to heaven with me. Now, I know that's not biblically correct, she said, but I hope to push my wheelchair right on up to the throne of Jesus. Notice, I'll be walking. And I'm gonna say, Jesus, do you see that wheelchair right there? Well, Jesus, you were right when you said that in this world we would have trouble because that wheelchair was a lot of trouble. But Jesus, the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you. And the harder I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be. So thank you for what you did in my life through that wheelchair. And now, if you will, please send that wheelchair straight to hell.

30:19 Fifth, I want you to write down spirit filled. Verse 44, Paul says it's sown as a natural body. It's raised as a spiritual body. We're gonna know the perfect fullness of the spirit, perfect communion with God. The book of Revelation says that we won't even need the light of the sun anymore because the Lord, our God, will be our lamp and our constant indwelling light. Lastly, verse 49, write down perfectly Christ-like. Verse 49, just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. No more are you and I gonna be needed to be commanded in the ways of God. Y'all are not gonna have to come listen to me or anybody else teach every week. No more are any of us gonna have to urge each other, know the Lord, press into him. Know knowledge of him is gonna fill our hearts like the waters cover the sea. The love of God is gonna be poured out in our hearts and we're gonna be just like him, John says, because we're gonna see him just as he is.

31:14 Church, what is it like? What is it like to wake up one day perfectly in Christ's image? To not feel jealousy or hatred or anxiety or worry or dread or suspicion or self-centeredness or impatience or one of the many emotions that come, seem to flood my heart almost immediately when my feet hit the floor. instead to be filled, to be consumed with love, perfect love, to know joy unspeakable in every moment. Psalm 1611, in your presence is the fullness of joy at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Fullness of joy means joy that could not get any stronger. Pleasures forevermore means joy that could not last any longer. What is it like to have the eternal joy of the Trinity pulsating inside of my heart. I can't wait.

32:09 The Bible promises that in the resurrection, this is what you and I will experience. Paul says, Philippians 3, 21, that in the resurrection, our lowly bodies, the greatest one of you in here, the prettiest, the most powerful, most athletic, your lowly body is gonna be made like his glorious body. So Paul then finally turns. He says, what difference does all this make to me right now? Well, what? He says, because of the resurrection, verse 54, death, you see, is swallowed up in victory. I can look at the death. I can look at the worst things that the world has to offer me and say, grave, where's your victory? Death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin. The strength of sin is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ because he died under the law for my sin. Therefore, it's been removed from me. Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, you should be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord because you know, because of the resurrection of Jesus, that in the Lord, your labor is not in vain.

33:10 Here is Paul's summary of the difference that the truth of the resurrection should make in our lives. Number one, because of the resurrection, death has no more sting for you. Death, whether our own or the death of a loved one, is life's hardest experience because it feels so permanent. But y'all, if the resurrection is true, it's not permanent at all. It's just a temporary change of address because Jesus took the sting out of death. The sting of death is its permanence. That's what Jesus took into himself on the cross so that when he went through death, because he took the sting of sin, death for us would just be a temporary rite of passage. Sometimes we'll say things like, I lost my dad to cancer, or I lost my wife or I lost my baby. Friends, you have not lost them. We know exactly where they are. You've only lost contact with them for a while. That's all you've lost.

34:08 That's why we don't say things like, I'll never hold my baby again, or I'll never see my wife again, or I'll never hug my grandmother again. If they were in Christ, you absolutely will hold, see, and hug them again with your physical arms in the new world. You say, well, what about if my loved one was unsaved. They did experience the sting of death. And because of that, I do too. That's a hard reality. And honestly, I don't know exactly how to answer. I know that in heaven, our capacity for love is increased, not decreased. I also know that the scripture says that he will wipe away every tear from our eyes and make every sad thing come untrue, which I assume means that somehow we will be at peace with the decisions that people made for themselves. I don't know how it's all going to work, but this is one of those places I've just had to learn to trust Jesus in it. Lord, Psalm 131, my eyes are not too haughty.

35:02 I do not concern myself with matters too great for me. I have calm and quieted myself like a young child with his mother. Like a young child, I can rest in your arms content. I trust Jesus even with this. And in the meantime, I plead with everybody that I know and love to come to Jesus. Number two, because of the resurrection, Paul says the worst pain, The worst pain is only light and momentary. Your situation may feel permanent, like I said at the beginning, but it's not. I had a friend a few years ago who was about my age. He had kids, about my kid's age, who was suddenly and traumatically diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain cancer they said would kill him between three to five years. Now, miraculously, and by the grace of God, he's still alive today. But I remember walking with him as he processed through all of this. I remember him saying, he said, a lot of people come up to me and they're very well-meaning.

35:54 And they say to me, oh, when you get to heaven, you'll see the reason for all this. And he said, I guess that's probably true. But he said, the more I read about what God is gonna do in heaven, when I read about the joy and the glory that he is gonna bring us into, I have a feeling that when we get there, we'll look back and say, what pain are you even talking about? I can't even remember the pain so great as the glory and the joy that now has consumed me and filled me. You know, even more, God promises that your pain's actually gonna become a part of, it's gonna become a contributor to the beautiful thing God's making in you. You see how it says in verse 54, death is swallowed up in victory. Think about that image. When you swallow something, it becomes part of you. You digest it and it becomes a factor in making you, you. That's what Paul said God is doing with our pain. It's not just that we had pain on earth and now we're in the theme park of heaven and we forget all about it.

36:51 No, there we see how the pain we went through produced in us the incredible beauty and weight of glory and joy that we experience in eternity. Whatever situation you're in, whatever chronic pain, whatever chronic illness, whatever disappointed dream, bad marriage, being alone, friend, it's all temporary. Paul even calls it light and momentary. That's not to make light of your pain. Paul didn't say that because he'd lived a charmed life free of real pain. No, Paul experienced some of the worst pain possible for a human being to experience. Betrayal, abandonment, torture, loneliness, chronic illness. But Paul said, even the worst of the worst is light and momentary compared to the weight of glory that God is bringing to me in the resurrection. So friend, are you suffering? Does it appear that this suffering might never go away?

37:45 Hang on, hang on. You're almost there. In the blink of an eye, this painful life is going to be behind you. The curse of sin is going to be removed. And you will be in your awesome, eternal, beautiful, powerful, spirit-filled, Christ-like body. In a world with no pain or crying, experiencing the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore in the presence of your Savior. I'm not telling you to stop praying for a change in your situation. Keep praying. Because we know that some things God only grants after years of persistent prayer. I'm just saying that even in the event that the answer never comes the way you want it to come this side of the grave, I'm telling you the worst that this life has to offer is light and momentary compared to the weight of glory and happiness that awaits you in the resurrection. So we can look with Paul at our worst enemy and we can say, do your worst, do your worst. You cannot touch the glorious thing that I've got coming in the resurrection.

38:40 I love how the theologian D.A. Carson says it. I'm not suffering from anything that a good resurrection can't fix. Number three, because of the resurrection, because of the resurrection, Paul said, we can press forward with risk-taking, trial-enduring, death-defying obedience to Jesus. I have a special word right now for every missionary who is listening to me, who has walked away from family and fortune and friends to carry the gospel to an unreached place. and you were listening to this this morning in a place you would honestly prefer not to be, the resurrection says to you, it's gonna be worth it. Your sacrifice was great, but it was only temporary. And Jesus is gonna repay you 100 fold in the kingdom to come. And that means if you don't get to come home right now as much as you want, it's okay.

39:33 Because soon you're gonna be home in eternity forever with Jesus and the ones that you love. And you're gonna be glad then that you gave your life so that other families could be there along with yours also. Friend, what is it gonna be like? What is it going to be like when you've been there for 10,000 years? And now you've gotten to know intimately and well somebody who came to Christ because of your sacrifice. You don't even know who they are right now, but you're gonna know them then. And you're gonna know them after 10,000 years. You're gonna know them and love them as much as anybody you've ever loved on earth. Don't you think that you're gonna be glad then that you made the sacrifices now to see them there forever? Don't you think, if anything, you'll just wish you'd sacrifice more?

40:19 To our missionary friends, I will say, if they kill you, it's okay. Because soon you're gonna be in a place where death cannot touch you and you're gonna be glad that you gave your life so that others could enjoy eternal life with you forever. For those of you at the Summit Church whose courageous stand for Jesus cost you your reputation or a business opportunity or your job, Jesus sees your sacrifice and soon it's gonna be over. You're gonna enter your reward where you won't doubt for a second that every sacrifice was worth it. So be bold. Be bold and death defying in your obedience because only when life to live is soon gonna be passed, only what's done for Christ is gonna last. You know, my mind here has to go to that letter that a very young Adoniram Judson wrote to his prospective father-in-law asking for the hand of this man's daughter.

41:14 Her name was Anne Haseltine, asking for her hand in marriage. This was the late 1700s and Adoniram Judson, one of the first American missionaries, knew that he was called to take the gospel to the very far off regions of Burma. Y'all, this is one of the most respectful, one of the most humble, one of the most transparent letters I've ever read. Listen to this. I'll just do part of it. I have now to ask you, sir, whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring, never to see her again in this world.

41:51 Whether you can consent to her departure to a foreign hostile land, knowing that she will endure the hardships and sufferings that go with the missionary life. Whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean, to the fatal influence of the southern climate of South Asia, to every kind of want and distress, to degradation, to insult, persecution, and perhaps even a violent death. Can you consent to all of this for the sake of him who left his heavenly home and died for her and for you, for the sake of perishing eternal souls, for the sake of the resurrected kingdom and the glory of God? Can you consent to all of this in hope of soon meeting your daughter again in the world of glory, now with the crown of righteousness brightened by the acclamations of praise, which shall resound to her savior from the lost who were saved through her sacrifices from eternal woe and despair.

42:50 You dads, can you imagine, get a letter like that from a guy that wants to marry your daughter? It's only belief in the resurrection that compels that kind of obedience, which leads me to the conclusion. Number four, because of the resurrection, living for Jesus is really the only thing that makes sense. See, every one of us has a soul and body. Both of them are eternal.

43:19 That soul, that body, both of those things are eternal. Do you understand that? And that means that those of you who are united to Christ, your soul is immediately going to enter the presence and joy of God to be absent from the bodies, to be present with the Lord. And there you will await the glorious resurrection of your body to enjoy physically with Jesus forever. Those of you though, who die apart from Christ, your soul will immediately enter into the judgment of God. And there you also will await the resurrection of your body, but it will not be a resurrection unto eternal happiness, but it will be a resurrection to eternal judgment and misery. Did you know that scripture says all of us are gonna be resurrected? Not just the Christians, all of us. Jesus himself said, John 5, the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs are gonna hear his voice. All of us, not just the Christians, all of us are gonna hear his voice and all of us are gonna come out.

44:11 Those who've done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done wickedly to the resurrection of judgment. The book of Revelation and the sea gave up the dead who was in it and then death and hell gave up the dead that were in them and they were all judged, each according, every one of them according to what they had done. And if anybody's name was not found written in the Lamb's book of life, He was thrown into the lake of fire. That is the second and ultimately the eternal death. Friend, I cannot emphasize to you strongly enough the importance of what you do right now with Jesus. He offers his resurrection to you. That's what Paul had given his life for people to know. He offers his resurrection to you now if you repent of your sin and submit to him as Lord and Savior. Some of you listening to me right now, you are going to resurrect to eternal glory. And others seated right beside those people, you are going to resurrect to eternal judgment.

45:10 Listen, for some of you, for those of you that are in Christ, here's the good news. This world, this world is as close to hell as you're ever gonna come. All the pain, all the stuff we go through in the world, that's as close to hell as you're ever gonna come. the bad news is that for those of you outside of christ this world is as close to heaven as you're ever going to get i mean even right now you're tasting some of the good fruits of life even with all its pain and all its misery life can still be good but seeing the second death all that goes away but for those of us in christ god is bringing us to a renewed eternal physical kingdom which includes a glorified and perfected version perfected version of every beautiful thing that we love about the world down here. I can't wait. I've experienced the earthly Hawaii. Imagine what the heavenly one's going to be. I've experienced the earthly ribeye, the earthly Nicholas Cage. I can't wait for the heavenly ones.

46:09 So the question is, which resurrection do you want to be included in? It's coming for you. You got a resurrection coming. You want to be in the resurrection to judgment, or do you want to be in the resurrection to life? They found gravestones of early followers of Jesus in places like Corinth. And when they do, they usually find only one word inscribed on these gravestones, resurgam, which simply means in Latin, I shall rise again.

46:41 Let's inscribe that word on our hearts because Paul said it will fundamentally reshape how we live. Why don't you bow your heads if you would. Bow your heads. How could I talk about this and not give you a chance, not plead with you to come to Christ? if you don't know for sure that you belong to Jesus, you can receive the power of his resurrection. You can receive him as your savior right now. The gospel is that Jesus died to pay for all your sin, but you gotta receive it. You gotta receive him. If you wanna do that, you could just say to him something like, Lord Jesus, I know that I need to be saved.

47:24 I know that only you can save me. Please save me, Lord Jesus. I open my heart to you. I surrender to you as my Savior and Lord. Say it to him from your heart. if you're praying that prayer right now, I want to ask you to do something with every head bowed, every eye closed. If you just prayed that prayer with me, I want you to very quietly right now pull out your phone. Just pull it out and I want you to take it out and I want you to text the word ready, R-E-A-D-Y. I want you to text it to 33933. Text the word ready to 33933. That's going to let us start a conversation with you. If you're serious about this, text the word ready and let's get this started as you, as you begin to follow Jesus.

48:18 And maybe you've never been baptized. Baptism is a visual picture of the resurrection. You're supposed to do it as soon as you begin to follow Jesus. If you've never been baptized, why don't you go ahead and text the word ready to 33933. Text the word ready. It'll let us start a conversation with you that'll get you ready to get baptized on Easter Sunday. Either one of those, just text the word ready to 33933.

48:42 And for the believer who comes in this morning with a broken heart, suffering. can you just right now embrace the truth, resurgam, I will rise again. And can you live, live in that joy and that hope? Father, give us this confidence that leads us to death-defying obedience and to hope even in the worst kinds of pain. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.