Sermon Tone Analysis

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also found it interesting that while the institute that came up with this seminar is still active the Jesus seminar is no longer active.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.