Anticipating Our Resurrection 2-8-2020

HEAVEN - SEEING THE UNSEEN ANTICIPATING OUR RESURRECTION Sunday February 9, 2020 Scripture Reference: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 Intro. A. You have heard me say a lot over the past five weeks of this series about our final resurrection. For the next two weeks I am going to center in on our final resurrection and help us see how important this is as we consider our eternal home in Heaven. Let's begin by going to our scripture reference for these messages which is found in 1 Corinthians 15:12-20. "But tell me this-since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? 13 For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. 15 And we apostles would all be lying about God-for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can't be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. 16 And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 18 In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! 19 And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. 20 But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died." 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 (NLT) 1. I remember back when I was pastoring in Fresno there was a seminar that was causing a great stir in the churches. It was called "The Jesus Seminar". The seminar was really all about discrediting the bible and particularly the life of Jesus as portrayed in the Bible. These people came to believe that only 18% of the sayings of Jesus and only 16% of the actions of Jesus were true. One of the things they said was not true was the resurrection of Jesus. The founder of this group said that for him the resurrection of Jesus was irrelevant, but what this man called irrelevant Paul called essential and frankly I am more inclined to believe the apostle Paul than this man. I also found it interesting that while the institute that came up with this seminar is still active the Jesus seminar is no longer active. They hold other seminars, but I guess they figured since they thought they could debunk the life of Jesus they would also try to debunk the life of others in the Bible. The fact is the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of God's redemption plan for mankind and for the rest of the world. Trans. I want us to address a question in this message that I have a feeling has come up in more than a few of our minds. The question is this: I. WHY IS OUR RESURRECTION SO IMPORTANT? I guess you could say I already answered that question, but we need to explore it a little more thoroughly. Listen again to what Paul said. "And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins." 1 Corinthians 15:17 (NLT) I have also talked a lot about this in a general way, but let's get more specific about the fact that our resurrection is a physical one and why it is important for us to believe this. A. Our Resurrection Is Physical. 1. One of the basic statements of faith for most Christian churches is that we will have a bodily resurrection. Here is what part of article 16 in our articles of faith in the Church of the Nazarene says, "We believe in the resurrection of the dead, that the bodies both of the just and of the unjust shall be raised to life..." In 1647 there was something written called "The Westminster Catechism" which became a standard for stating Christian doctrine. Basically, that is what a catechism is it is a written statement of beliefs. In that catechism it said this and still says this, "The self-same bodies of the dead which were laid in the grave, being then again united to their souls forever, shall be raised up by the power of Christ." The strange thing is that while most Christians state this belief, they don't seem to live this belief. A survey was done asking those who believed in the resurrection if they believed they would have bodies in the resurrection and 2/3rds said they did not. If you think this through, I think you will discover that it really makes no sense. We will be resurrected but we will not be resurrected with a physical body. The very word resurrect means to bring back, you can't bring back something that never was. A resurrection without a body is like a sunless sunrise. There is no such thing. R. A. Torrey once said, "We will not be disembodied spirits in the world to come, but redeemed spirits, in redeemed bodies, in a redeemed universe." 2. Genesis 2:7 says this "Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man's nostrils, and the man became a living person." Genesis 2:7 (NLT) Notice that God created a body from the dust of the ground but, that body was still not a living being until God breathed the breath of life into him. It was together as body and spirit that Adam because a living being. You have heard me say several times that we are not essentially physical beings nor are we essentially spiritual beings. We are essentially both. It takes both body and spirit for us to be living beings. Your body doesn't simply house you it is a part of you. We are not like hermit crabs with our spirits just inhabiting these bodies until we can be free to become spirits and yet this seems to be the way a lot of Christians believe. We seem to believe and act as though this body is evil and so it has to be shed but the spirit is good so in Heaven we need to float around like spirits. 3. Death is not a part of our original design. I will tell you that it is my opinion (and mind you I do not have scriptural evidence to support this) that this is why we grieve the way we do when someone we love dies. Somehow, we know that this is not the way things are supposed to be. We know we were made to last forever. In fact, here is what the Bible says, "...He has planted eternity in the human heart," Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NLT) Death tears apart what God joined together. God intended that our bodies would last as long as our spirits, but sin came and messed everything up. Here is what Job said, "And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God!" Job 19:26 (NLT) 4. We spent a few weeks talking about the Present Heaven and for a good many Christians there is the belief that in that Present Heaven we will all be just spirits without a body. For those who believe that there is something inherently wrong with our physical bodies it would seem that they believe that our real selves go to Heaven while the fake us, the "shell" as we often call it goes to the grave. **Let me add a little footnote here. Next Sunday I am going to talk about the importance of the language we use when we talk about Heaven. I don't know how many times I have used that word "shell" talking about this body and yet many of our words do not accurately describe what is true about us when we die. Consider this, when Jesus came and died on the cross for you did he just die for your spirit or did he die for body and soul? This is extremely important and here is why. If Christ died for our spirits only and not our bodies as well then as the Gnostics believe it doesn't matter what I do in this physical body because it will not be redeemed or resurrected. I don't think any of us really believes that Jesus just died for our spirits and that is because we understand deep down that we are not just a spirit we are body and spirit these two things make up who we are, who God created us to be. 5. One of the things that I think causes us difficulty in understanding the physical resurrection is that we don't understand the environment in which we will live and what I am referring to is what I have been talking about what the Bible calls the New Earth. Once again there are an awful lot of people who believe that life after death is a spirit life. We will not have actual bodies and we will float around on clouds. *I find it a bit amusing that people think we will be spirit beings floating around on physical things like clouds. Oh yes, I know a cloud is a vapor, but we really see clouds as actual material things. How many times do you hear people looking at the clouds in the sky and saying, "Wow look at those amazing vapors in the sky?" It is also funny that we reject the idea of a physical body in Heaven that we know here on earth, but we don't reject a cloud in Heaven that we would not know of except that they exist on earth. Resurrected bodies call for a resurrected earth which is what God promises to us. 6. Look with me again at what Paul said in V.17 "And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins." 1 Corinthians 15:17 (NLT) Notice that Paul said that if Christ has not been raised from the dead then we are still in our sins. In other words what Paul tells us is that if there is no resurrection, we are all doomed for Hell. Paul did not say that if there is no Heaven then our faith is futile, he said if there is no resurrection our faith is futile. I think Paul makes it clear that he is not interested in a Heaven that is just a spiritual place. God created us for life on earth and it is life on earth we desire, but it will be a New Earth. 2 Corinthians 5:17 is a verse we like to talk about. It tells us that if we receive Jesus as our savior the old life has gone, and a new life has begun. The dichotomy here is that we are new, and we are old at the same time. [] When I accepted Jesus as my savior, I was in Jr. High School. It was a Saturday night at a teen gathering at the home of Dale and Dolores Spidle. I remember that night vividly, but when I went home that night my mom didn't greet me and say, "Who are you and what are you doing here?" She didn't ask "Where is my son Sheldon?" I was a new creation in Christ something inside me had changed, but I was still Sheldon. I was still that dorky teen with acne, and I was still a very shy person, but I was not the same. The change was not in my body but in my spirit and yet my body was still a part of who I was and am for that matter. Our conversion does not eliminate the old us, but it does transform the old us. When God saves us, He doesn't scrap us and start over. He redeems, He restores, and He renews what I was made to be. It is a process He continues to do until I die, or He comes again. Just as we see the continuity between our earthly bodies and our resurrected bodies there will be this same continuity between the earth as we know it now and the New Earth promised to us in God's word. The earth will be new but there will still be things about the New Earth that are familiar to us. What will be new about the New Earth to us are the things the curse has affected. A theologian named Anthony Hoekema said this, "There must be continuity, for otherwise there would be little point in speaking about a resurrection at all. The calling into existence of a completely new set of people totally different from the present inhabitants of the earth would not be a resurrection." 7. Now what will our resurrected bodies be like? We know they have to be a lot different than what we know now, but what can we know about them? The resurrection of Jesus may give us our best clue. When Jesus was resurrected, we know that he appeared several times to his disciples and others. One of those was what we call the Emmaus Road experience. Now after that experience these people who saw Jesus hurried back to tell the apostles what had happened and as they were telling their story Jesus appeared. The bible tells us that the disciples were terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost. We might use that as evidence to say "Yes we are spirit beings after we die" except for what Jesus said to them. "Look at my hands. Look at my feet. You can see that it's really me. Touch me and make sure that I am not a ghost, because ghosts don't have bodies, as you see that I do." Luke 24:39 (NLT) They were not seeing a spirit being they were seeing the same body Jesus had before the resurrection. It is this current body we have that gives us the best idea of what the body we will have in Heaven will be like. Now again this body will be much different in that it will not have all the limitations it has now. Let me illustrate what I am talking about here. [] When you get notice of an upgrade for your phone or a program on your computer do you reject it because you don't know what that upgrade will be like? Of course not. You know what the program is like because you have been using it and you know that the upgrade means that there are going to be improvements, probably some improvements you were not even aware you needed. The program will be new and yet it will still be recognizable. 8. Let's talk about what Paul said a little further down in 1 Corinthians 15. In V.44 he said this, "They are buried as natural human bodies, but they will be raised as spiritual bodies. For just as there are natural bodies, there are also spiritual bodies." 1 Corinthians 15:44 (NLT) Some might be tempted to say "Ah ha there is our evidence for non-physical bodies in Heaven" but you would be wrong. Notice that Paul spoke of "human bodies" and "spiritual bodies". The word "bodies" is the same in both places. The word means flesh and bone. Paul is not and in fact cannot be saying that we will have a "spirit body" because there cannot be such a thing. The two would be contrary. The spiritual body Paul refers to is just to tell us that our resurrected bodies will be much different than these human bodies we know now. Look at a few more verses further down. "Just as we are now like the earthly man, we will someday be like the heavenly man. 50 What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that our physical bodies cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever." 1 Corinthians 15:49-50 (NLT) First I want you to see that our Heavenly bodies will be like Jesus. Here is another verse that speaks to this. "Dear friends, we are already God's children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is." 1 John 3:2 (NLT) No we will not be Him, but we will be like Him. We strive to be like Him now but because of the corruption of sin in this world and the temptations we face even as God's children keep us from being all we were meant to be. In Heaven those obstacles will not be in our way and we can freely become who God made us to be. Now V.50 would seem to discredit the idea of physical bodies in Heaven but that would be a miss reading of this verse. Paul said, "These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever." And he is correct that is why we are receiving a resurrected body, a new body. One that will be similar to what we have now but still very different. The dying bodies Paul refers to here are the bodies under the curse of sin. It would definitely not be Heaven to be there with this body. Conclusion A. Now you might be wondering, "Why is all this information about our resurrection important?" That would be a good question and let me answer it for you. For one thing as we have already seen in the words of Paul, we looked at today, without the resurrection our faith, our trust in God is useless. I want to read our scripture text for today again and let's these words sink in. I think these words themselves do better to explain the importance of talking about the resurrection than I can do. "But tell me this-since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? 13 For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. 15 And we apostles would all be lying about God-for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can't be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. 16 And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 18 In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! (Lost means to be alienated from God) 19 And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. 20 But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died." 1 Corinthians 15:12-20 (NLT) 1. I am not going to offer anymore commentary on these words, but I will give you one more reason this talk about the resurrection is important. It is important because as you will see next week, we will be talking about what this New Earth will be like and how we can only relate and interact in the New Earth if we are resurrected. Let me close with these words from Joni Erickson Tada. I think most of you know who she is. "Somewhere in my broken, paralyzed body is the seed of what I shall become. The paralysis makes what I am to become all the more grand when you contrast atrophied, useless legs against splendorous resurrected legs. I'm convinced that if there are mirrors in heaven (and why not?), the image I'll see will be unmistakably 'Joni,' although a much better, brighter Joni." 7