The Death and Resurrection of Your Body

Lord, we thank you for this, opportunity for us to come on this Lord's Day and to look at your word and who is worthy. To preach your word, who is worthy to hold your word, and yet you have ordained that the Word of God, that the gospel would be preached by sinners saved by grace. We ask that you would grant, that your word would be preached in power, in love and truth. We ask that you would grant that you would give us all ears to hear, to believe, obey and worship you.

We ask that you protect us from the devil who would want to inhibit the preaching of your word and the hearing of it and the obeying of it. We pray that you'd fill us with your Spirit now in Christ's name, we pray, and all God's people said, Amen. I'm gonna be continuing a series that's only been going on for about a year now. Called God in Your Body.

We started this last July, July 10th, in fact, we introduced this particular series, and we started with the scripture passage in 1 Corinthians 6, where it says, Paul says, you are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. And so we've proposed that we want to try to hold up all of our ideas about the body and take every thought captive and cause it to be submitted to Christ and we've suggested in the series starting last year. That, we do things in our culture we catch culture like we catch a cold.

We don't, people don't just thoughtfully go about becoming a culture, they just catch it from their environment. but as Christians, that's, it's not acceptable for us just to catch our culture like we catch the cold. We wanna take every thought. And submitted to Christ and say, Lord, is this the way we as Christians should think and behave?

One of my favorite theologians and, and Bible thinkers is a man named Doctor Peter Jones, and he, he came in, and taught in the United States in the 1960s. He came from England and he was amazed at how Christianity had really had a hold on the culture. they just weren't seeing that in Europe and so he felt, he and his wife when they were in the United States in the 60s, that it was amazing how many people just applied Christian principles in general. Then they went and taught in France for about 2025 years and came back to the United States about 25 years later and he was shocked at the shift in the culture in the United States.

And as he began to think about it and write about it and pray and look at the scriptures, the main shift that he saw was a shift from what we would call dualism to monism. Dualism is the idea that there is a creator and there is a creature and they are distinct. God is the creator and he has given out His word and there are creatures who exist to serve and love and worship that God. And, and that is basically what Western thought has been based on for really hundreds, really two millennia.

The shift that he observed is one that is back to what's called monism, that there is no distinction between the Creator and the creature. it's all one and really the creature is God. And we have the right to do anything we want because there really is no God other than ourselves or the God that we create in our own minds. And that has had an effect.

Our culture has caught it like the cold. In fact, Time magazine indicated about 10 years ago that we are now more Hindu in our belief system in the United States than we are Christian. And that has had its effect. Culture gets externalized in the way that we do our religion and we can observe culture probably most predominantly in what we do with our bodies.

People can say that they have certain ideas in their mind, but what a person really believes gets reflected, their controlling beliefs get reflected in what they do with their bodies. A person can say that they despise drunkenness and alcoholism, but if they run around as a drunk and a drunkard, they're demonstrating their true beliefs, correct? And that's part of the idea that we've had behind this series. The big idea has been this, that your body is God's on loan to you.

That if we really understand what the Bible says that there is a dualism, there really is a creator, there really are creatures, and that while we run around in these bodies, and in a sense, they're ours because God has loaned them to us, they are really God's, intellectual property. And he has the The patent or the copyright on our bodies. And so it's not, we can't just say it's my body and I'll do what I want to, right? No, it's God's body.

And as Christians, we need to take our bodies and say, God, what do you want us to do with your body that you have loaned to us? Because he's created it and as Christians, we know that we've fallen and, and we now live in this fallen body, but through Christ, he has redeemed our bodies. He's joined our bodies with Christ, and in fact, we're in dwelt by the Holy Spirit, we said, And he will one day raise our bodies up as Christians, and we will receive a new body. So the body is God's intellectual property.

He holds the copyright, he holds the patent, and in light of that, we went into several different topics in light of that big idea. In August of last year, we asked the question or we, we basically suggested that because God owns the copyright, he cares what we do. With our body and in that part of the series, we defined what the body is. It's not just a machine.

It's not just the ghost in the machine concept that you saw in philosophy that actually we are our body, that it being made in the image of God is not, it's not just our soul that's made the image of God, it's our whole self that's made the image of God and so we are. Our body and God calls us as Christians to worship Him with our body and to wait for his return where our bodies are transformed. Those are the two big ideas from that message as we worship and all the things that we do and, and we wait for the transformation of this body that is still affected by the fall.

Then, November twenty-seventh of last year, we talked about the idea of God cares what we, what you put on your body and, we made some references to clothing and other things like that, but we focused on the hot topic of tattoos.

Why? Because a lot of you were asking about tattoos. What should I tell my children and how should we go about in this life where tattoos are on the rise. And we basically suggested, we, we presented a pro-tattoo arguments and we presented an anti-tattoo arguments.

We suggested that it's very important as Christians that we're not out just judging people that have gotten out tattoos. at the same time, it's very important for us to not be unthinking about whether we as Christians should go out. And get tattoos. What we suggested in the bottom line here was that we should let our gospel witness, as Paul did in Acts 16, be the controlling factor of anything that we put on our bodies.

In other words, what will give us the greatest amount of opportunity for gospel witness and if anything will inhibit, gospel witness, then we should think twice about doing that. And so I suggested that in my view, no one is going to be offended by my lack of tattoos. I've never tried to witness to a tattooed person where they said, you don't have tattoos. I don't want to hear from you.

Never happened. In fact, I use their tattoos as a bridge to share the gospel. I walk up to people and say, what does that mean? People love to talk about their tattoos.

However, my tattoos may close me off to some opportunities, may close me off to certain job opportunities. We're going to minister to Islamic people in the Philippines and guess what? If I have a tattoo, they aren't gonna want to hear from me because it's very offensive in the Islamic culture. And so we suggested that be careful about judging, but bring everything captive to Christ.

The controlling feature of our thoughts about a subject like that is what gives us the greatest amount of opportunities for the gospel and, and, and then kids, you need to submit to your parents and so on. We talked about that. Then we talked thirdly. And this would have been in December.

That God cares what you put in your body. And when there's a lot of things that we could have talked about, we could have talked about alcohol, we could have talked about, drugs, we could have talked about coffee or cigarettes or all kinds of things. We talked about food. Why did we talk about food?

Because a lot of you guys are asking about food. Every time you turn around. in my experience, and people I'm interacting with, there's one group of people judging another group of people about what they are eating or not eating. And, and this is a pretty common problem in the church, don't you think?

Have you guys experienced that? You go to a restaurant, everybody's ordering certain things, some person is feeling judged by the amount of food they're eating, somebody is eating a hamburger, and so they're feeling judged by the hamburger, and so we're just trying to feel like, hey, what, what does God want us to think about food? And we suggested that, that the bottom line was when we really look at what the scripture says, do you guys remember any of the sermon? OK, some of you do.

OK. So if you guys remember, like if you go online and just Google theology of food on the internet, what you will see in the first several hits and you look at the pictures, you're gonna see you're gonna see stuff about diets, you're gonna see stuff about health food, and you're gonna see people exercising. That's what virtually everybody talks about when they talk about the theology of food is exercise, dieting, eating vegetables and such. When you look at what the Bible has to say about food, it's a very different tale.

It talks about eating unto the glory of the Lord, whatever is put before you. It talks about being careful about giving offense for the sake of the gospel. basically, the three big things that we see in the Bible are everyday eating, giving glory for our food, feasting. rejoicing before the Lord in our food and fasting, that there's times for us to fast and give our attention to the things of the Lord.

So everyday eating, feasting and fasting and then being careful that we don't judge one another and there's these, these passages and like Colossians 2, for instance, say, don't let anybody judge you about what you eat or drink. So that was the big idea on God cares what you put in your body. Again, the focus seems to be the worship and glory of the Lord and the gospel. If my eating or drinking of some particular item is going to close off gospel opportunities, Paul says, I'd rather not eat meat or drink anything that's offensive so that the gospel can stay open.

Does that make sense? So you see a pattern here. What we seem to be seeing a pattern of is that what God really cares about when it comes to our bodies is he cares about us wanting to worship Him and acknowledge that he has the copyright over our bodies. He wants worship and he wants gospel witness.

Worship and witness seem to be the two big ideas that we see on all of these questions concerning our body. And that brings us to really what's gonna be the final message and that God cares what happens to your body in and after death. God cares what happens to your body. In And after death, we're titling this The Death and Resurrection.

Of your body. Anybody ever read Shakespeare's Hamlet? A few of you guys, man, more of you guys need to read it. I'm a, I was a literature major in college and taught English literature for about 5 years to junior high students.

That was a lot of fun. Especially when you're talking about Shakespearean Elizabethan language and whatnot. But this is one of my favorite speeches in all of Shakespeare's works, because of what it tells us about the theology of the body and death. I don't know if the setting, but, Hamlet, had seen some vision of the ghost of his father.

His father had died. He thought he died of natural causes. The ghost tells him, no, I was murdered. His mother remarried within a month, within a month, and, and he's taken the throne.

And Hamlet's going crazy and he's not sure, should I trust the vision, Should I not trust the vision? Boy, all of the slings and arrows of this world, it'd be a lot easier if I could just commit. Suicide The to be or not to be speech is about suicide. is this world is so difficult.

There's so many, there's so much craziness. wouldn't it be better just to end it all with a bare botkin? He says to be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing in them to die, to sleep. And later on, he says, to die, to sleep.

But then he says, perchance to dream. What will happen after I commit suicide? What is this undiscovered country? He says, there's the rub, for in that sleep, what dreams may come.

And basically what he contemplates is, what if I commit suicide and what comes afterwards is worse than the ills I am enduring now. He's contemplating the reality of hell. The fact that death may not bring peace, death may not bring a quiet. To our souls, death may bring horror and terrors.

And because of those thoughts, he puts the bodkin away and he says, I'm gonna bear with the ills that I have. And then he dies at the end of the play and tragically, everybody dies, so that's why it's called a tragedy. Everybody dies at the end. for the most part, except for the philosopher.

So, So this is, so this is the contemplation that's in our culture is, here we are living this life and we, there's different ways that you can think about life given the fact that, everybody dies. We can contemplate suicide if life gets too difficult, we can medicate if suffering is too great. if we're all just going to die anyway, we can just go out and just find the, the greatest amount of pleasure and self pleasure. We can be hedonistic as possible.

you only live once, so go out and just, just do the very best you can to enjoy everything that you can. Paul, open up the Philippians one. Paul. has a very different take.

Christ makes all the difference. Outside of Christ, I really think Hamlet's speech is right on and to be or not to be, who would suffer all of these terrible things in, in this world if you could just go off into oblivion. But Paul in Philippians 1:20. He says, According to my earnest expectation, we'll start later.

In nothing I shall be ashamed, but with all boldness, as always now, also Christ will be magnified in my body whether by life or by death. For to me to live as Christ and to die. I gain. And we'll look more at this a little bit later, but in Paul's mind, there is gain in death because of Christ.

If he dies, he gets to go be with Jesus. And he is removed from the sufferings of this life, the difficulties with sin, his own sin, other people's sin, and he's immediately in the presence of Christ. but his ultimate, what he ultimately comes to is I'd rather stay on in the flesh because it's more needful for you, Philippians. I'd rather work the gospel work in this life, because of the impact it will have in you for eternity, even, I'm preferring that now even to going into death and Christ.

And so you have this contrast from what the basic world system says that either death is the end of all things. They try to convince themselves that death is the end of all things. We know that death, death is not the end of all things. You go to one place or another.

But as Christians, we don't need to fear the undiscovered country. That's the big idea for Christians, is, is that the undiscovered country has been discovered and that is, it's been discovered by Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and God has revealed to us what's on the other side, so that we need not fear if we know the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, we're going to give 3 facts about the destiny of your body, 3 facts about the destiny of your body.

And thinking about our death and our burial and our resurrection is really part of preaching the gospel to ourselves, isn't it? Meditating on ultimate realities will help us live for eternity rather than being caught in the spiral of cultural trivialities. If we really think seriously about death and our burial and our resurrection, it's gonna help us live properly in this life. In fact, that's one of the, one of the hallmarks of Puritanism was to teach their children.

They would constantly remind them about their own sin. Their need for Christ, they would constantly talk about death and hell, and they would constantly talk about heaven. with, with little kids, they would talk about death and hell and heaven because those are the topics that are going to help us think seriously about what we should be investing in. We know these are facts because they've been revealed to us by God and Jesus Christ has gone on the other side and come back.

That's the only way that we know that these are facts. We can't go buy a book or watch a movie of somebody who allegedly died and went and had these experiences and came back and now they're telling us those things. We, we have no guarantee that any of that is factual because we already know the devil's a liar. When as soon as you hear people saying that they went to the other side and they came back and everybody's there, something's wrong, that doesn't accord with scripture.

So these are facts because they come from scripture. Let's look at fact number one, your body. will die. Your body will die, or we're gonna get to an exception here in a second.

But for the most part, your body. Will die We see in Genesis chapter 2, you don't have to turn there at this point, but you guys know the story in Genesis 2. God says to Adam and Eve, here's the, all these, you can eat of every single tree. There's just one over there.

If you eat that one, you're gonna die. In fact, on the day that you eat of it, you shall, what? Surely die Right? You shall surely die, or in the Hebrew, dying, you shall die.

The idea is, is this is so certain it will happen. and so they go and they eat. And the quandary is, is that they don't die. They don't appear to die.

Something does die. We've, we've, we see in the text that an animal dies. They get dressed in the skins of that animal as a type of Christ, but the dying process does begin like a glow stick when you snap the glow stick. my kids love those little glow sticks.

You ever play with those? You snap it, it starts glowing. But, as soon as you've snapped it, what happens? It's gonna, a couple of days later, you're like, yeah, it doesn't work anymore and then they want you to buy another one over at the 99 cent store, right?

It lasts about 2 or 3 hours. We know that in, in this life, this side of the fall, the glow stick has begun, Adam and Eve and, and we're in this process called dying. What does it really mean? To die Well, the biblical view of death, we've got what we could call spiritual death like we see in Ephesians 2, that we're all dead and sins, trespasses and sins.

We have eternal death, the final place of the damned, Revelation 20, but what we're talking about here is physical death. Physical death seems to be the separation of the immaterial part of man from the material part of man. We see this with Rebecca when she dies, she breathed her last and her spirit departed. there seems that the body is left behind, but Paul says that for me to die is gain.

He will gain Christ. The idea seems to be an immediate gain. And so Paul would be separated from his body and immediately gain Christ. Jesus said to his father on the cross, into thy hands, I commit my what?

Spirit, his body remained on the cross, but his spirit, the immaterial part of himself as a man was committed to his father. And yet this is not natural. We think in, in the common worldview today is that death is just natural. It's part of the evolutionary process, but biblically death is unnatural.

It would have never happened if it weren't for the fall. And so death is something that's been instituted by whom? God. God is the one that created death.

It's not just part of the natural processes. God instituted death as a punishment for sin. And so the fact that you and I are right now that our glow stick is getting dimmer and dimmer and some of us are more dim than others, right? That's happening not just because of a natural evolutionary process, that's happening because God wills it.

As a punishment for the sin of humanity. just think about it, you and I are sitting here and the and the seconds are ticking. And we are dying. And it's not just happening.

Because it's natural, it's happening because God wills it. That's biblically what death is. When a person dies biblically, he does not cease to exist, nor does he go into a state of unconsciousness. Rather, his body and soul experience separation.

That's from Berkoff, Louise Berkoff. Paul Ben where he says, in the scriptures, life is not viewed merely as existence, but as well-being. Death, therefore is the loss of well-being, not the cessation of being. Every indication in the Bible is that people maintain their consciousness after death.

It's their well-being that is lost, the material and the material is separated. Turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 12, 1 of the greatest pieces of poetry and in my, in the whole Bible, I don't know how you would judge a matter or anything like that, but I just think it's a great piece of poetry. Ecclesiastes 12, what you have here is this discussion of death using all kinds of images for a person who gets old. And young people read this, they may not know it's, what they're talking about, but if you're, if you're getting up there in your maturity, let's say you have a real good idea of what these images.

are talking about. So, just take a look at 12 verse 1. Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth before the difficult days come and the years draw near when you say, I have no pleasure in them. While the sun and the light and the moon, the stars are not darkened and the clouds do not return after rain.

In the day when the keepers of the house tremble. And the strong men bow down. When the grinders cease because they are few, there's few less grinders than there used to be. I'm we're missing one up here.

And they that look through the windows grow dim. I'm just not, I can't see the way I used to. I just got a new prescription. When the doors are shut in the streets and the sound of grinding is low, when one rises up at the sound of a bird and all the daughters of music are brought low, it's like a little noise and you wake up and you can't go back to sleep, but somebody's trying to talk to you from a distance, you're like, what, what is that?

I, I can't. Can't you hear that song? Also, they are afraid of height and terrors in the way when the almond trees blossom and the grasshopper is a burden and desire fails, and man goes to his eternal home and the mourners go about the streets. Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosened or the golden bowl is broken or the pitcher shattered at the fountain or the wheel broken at the well.

Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will go to God who gave it. It's not a very fun. Right, not a very fun view of, of life. But if you've, if you've had the opportunity to care for a parent or grandparent or seeing people grow into old age, you begin to see these things, right?

you get to begin to feel them yourself. One of the most positive people I've ever met in my whole life is our former chairman Ron Needham, just a very positive man. but as he's gotten older, he, I'll ask him, how are you doing? And he'll be like, oh, the Lord is so good.

But I'll tell you what, getting old is tough. And he'll just describe the things that are going on in his body and it just, it just, it, it just aches and he, he mourns that he can't go out on the softball field anymore and play softball. There's things that he used to do in his youth that he used to enjoy. And this is, this is the dying process.

Now, In our culture, we, we rejoice in youth and painlessness. Lack of suffering is the ultimate value and so getting old is something that's despised and suffering and pain is something that to be avoided and, and it must be medicated or maybe euthanized. That's the world's view. Very different from the early church, if the early church erred in any way, they erred in these guys were running to martyrdom at times.

In fact, what was it, I think it was Augustine's mother had to hide his clothes so that he couldn't get dressed to run out to martyrdom. There was some killing going on, killing of Christians. He wanted to go be part of the fun and mom had to hide his clothing. People were longing for suffering, longing for death because they had, they saw suffering as death as, as a pathway to eternal life, and they got very unbiblical in the way that they began to view it, but it's totally contrary to today where we avoid all suffering.

We, we avoid the concept of death and when we start getting aches and pains, we begin to ask why, Lord, why is this happening to me? Well, this has been happening to all of humanity from the beginning, from the fall till now, and suffering and pain is a reminder of the effects of sin on humanity and that the glow is going out of all of us. And therefore we are creatures. We can deny that there is a creator in our culture and we can say that we're not truly creatures, but death will not allow that.

And the process towards death reminds us that we have great needs. And so all of us will die. The Bible says it's appointed for a man to die once, and after this, what the judgment. So God has each one of our deaths on his calendar and he didn't check with you to see if it was convenient.

He's not saying, hey, are you good? July 26th, round two. How's that work for you? No, he has appointed a day that you will die and I will die.

And, and he is God. He's the creator. There's, there's no need for him to check in with you. This will happen to all of us.

And if we know Christ, then we can say with Paul to live as Christ, to die is gain. If we're with Hamlet, we don't know Christ. Again, he's a fictional character, but to be or not to be. This life seems meaningless.

We'll talk about the judgment aspect here in a moment. Some people, when we talk about just the doctrine of, of death itself, they also ask the question of the doctrine of burial. And I wanna take about like 60 seconds to give you a, a little doctrine of burial. that in our culture, at least the statis, this is an old statistic, 2010, but 33% of Americans are cremating their dead.

it's, and it's expected to be at 60% by around 2018. And now it could be that that's just happening just because it's just more, it's more economical. people will say, really the Lord doesn't need the whole body to be together to resurrect it. He's all powerful, so that really doesn't matter.

the body is not really what it's all about, it's all about the soul, so on and so forth. But at least it begs the question, I know, this could be a difficult topic to talk about because many of you have probably cremated relatives. I've crema, our, our family is having a memorial for my grandmother on Tuesday. She's been cremated.

But the question must be raised, why do we see an increase in cremations in our culture when for 2000 years, at least until the 1960s, Christians have universally buried their dead? Why did they bury their dead? And since the 1960s, even amongst Christians, that's on the rise. Pastors pretty consistently, evangelical pastors say that they don't believe that cremation is the best way to go, but most of them say that it's not really that big of a deal.

And in some ways, it's not a big deal because there's not really any specific passage of scripture that says do this or don't do that. And so that's part of what causes the confusion. Given the fact and then also just given the other things we've talked about the commercialization of the funeral home, the expense of burial, so on and so forth, the fact that, hey, God doesn't, he's, he's all powerful, he can raise the dust up. But there are reasons why the churches traditionally argued for burial, and I want to give them to you just by way of suggestion, and then you guys can search it out yourselves.

The first one is, like I mentioned earlier, is the practice of the church for 2000 years. Could be that the church was just not really thoughtful about it. Could be the church just were overly influenced by Roman Catholicism, or maybe they thought through it theologically and said, no, we want to bury our dead as opposed to the pagans who cremate their dead. The second reason the church has traditionally buried their dead is because of the example of Christ that he was buried, he was not cremated.

Thirdly, Christians have argued that The body is part of the image of God. It's not that our souls are just made the image of God, the whole person is made the image of God. And so due honor ought to be given to the whole person being made in, in the image of God. And And lastly, traditionally until about the late 1890s, most burials were able to happen on people's home property or on their church property.

In the 1890s, in the United States at least, cities began to put their cemeteries outside the city as far as 5 miles away, which is a long way before the automobile, right? So you move the the, the graveyards outside of the city. Then, people in around the 1960s or so, began to see the convenience of cremation. And then we start to remove the headstones because we don't like the reminder.

It's a spooky, horror movie image, things like that. If pragmatically, if somebody, if you guys wanted to research this and to give due consideration to the idea of burying the dead versus cremating the dead, there is this new a newer phenomenon called green burials that is more on the rise. Has anybody heard of this green burials? That's actually something that's very helpful.

I'm not like a big green person, but the green burial movement is basically trying to convince people to move away from the commercialization of funerals to where that they have more control over the ability of, to bury their dead the way they wish to in a way that is not as expensive. You could look it up, look up green burials. Seems to be some really good ideas there. They're not exclusively burial versus cremation, but they're the idea is anti-commercialization.

In trying to give people more control. So all that to say that again, that's, you may come out on one side of the issue on that. I, I wouldn't like dogmatically. I used to believe, my idea was, I said, I don't want people to spend money on my body.

This is just a tent. Why don't you just cremate me and throw me in the ocean. but then somebody challenged me on the issue and had me read a book and really consider the image of God, and then I switched my view. So you can look it up for yourself and, and, and be a Berean, but it is something I think it's not like burial is an image, it's not, it's not like it's something that's disconnected from the church or biblical thought process.

traditionally, churches have had a lot to do with burials. The more individualistic we've gotten in our culture, the more people have just moved away from letting the church be involved in that. In fact, funerals are on the decline in general. A lot of people are cremating their dead and doing nothing.

they're not honoring the dead, they're not, it's just, it's a really interesting phenomenon. But let's talk about the, the exception to this, and that is that the likelihood is that most of us will die, but we have to be careful about saying that because the Bible indicates that Christ I could come back imminently. And so we have the rapture. Look at 1 Thessalonians chapter 4.

Your body will die, but there's this one exception, where Paul says the Lord will come down from heaven with a loud command with the voice of an archangel with the trumpet of God and the dead, and Christ will writes first. So those that have already died in Christ, they're gonna be resurrected. Verse 17, after that, he who is, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with him in the clouds, with him in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so, most of us are going to go through this process called death, but there is, are some people who are gonna, as it were, go through the Elijah experience, that we won't go through the death process that we'll be caught up together with the Lord Jesus Christ and our bodies will be transformed.

And so that's another thing that gives the Christian a slightly, not just slightly, but a radically different view of death is, is to live as Christ die is gain. If we die and go through the death process in this life, Christ is right on the other side, but some of us may not actually experience death in the way that most others will. Let's talk about a second fact, the body will be resurrected. Your body will be resurrected.

We have Jesus speaking in, in the book of John about the resurrection unto life, the resurrection unto death, but let's consider, let's stay in 1 Thessalonians 4 and talk first of all about the Christian. Looking there at verse 16 again, where Paul says the dead in Christ will rise. And so there's this concept in the Bible that to the world sounds, it sounds like some zombie freak attack or something. but for Christians, we understand that, let's say that, that all of us do die, that Christ doesn't return in our lifetime and we are buried.

When Christ does return, we will be raised up in, a reconfigured body. It'll still be us. It'll still be physical. That body will be raised, however the Lord does it, where we don't really know.

but we know that the dead in Christ will rise and so you're gonna have this resurrection, that will occur at the return of Jesus Christ. So just, imagine being alive at that time that you're walking down here at the, National Cemetery. And all of a sudden, Jesus Christ shows up on the scene, and you see people just rising out of the graves. this just sounds, doesn't this sound fanciful?

Doesn't it sound like a, a movie or something? but the Lord Jesus Christ tells us it is a fact. This is a metaphysical fact that the dead in Christ will be raised and then they will go be with the Lord Jesus Christ and forever, they will be with him. And so you have this, this idea of resurrection or we can also call it transformation.

So we call it transformed. Philippians says, Paul says in the book of Philippians 3:21. He speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body according to the working by which he is able even to subdue all things to Himself. So that, here the argument that Paul's making is, if, if God's able to subdue all things to himself, he is the creator.

He's the one that's instituted death. He holds death and life in his hands. he's also the one that can transform our bodies into, a brand new body and so there'll be a resurrection slash transformation. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul tells us, behold, I tell you a mystery.

We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed. So there is a pers, a certain group of people that will be alive at the return of Christ, that will not sleep the sleep of death, but they will be transformed. And then there are others that will be raised, having already died. That's.

For the Christian, for the unbeliever, we're gonna talk about them here in a second, but they will be raised as well, but not to the hope, that we have. Their resurrection will be a horrible, terror movie. Let's talk about fact 3. is you will experience, your body will experience eternal pleasure.

We have things in this life that we experience that are pleasures and yet just like Hamlet says and just like it says in Ecclesiastes chapter 12, and if you've lived long enough, there are certain things that were pleasing that just don't continue to be pleasures anymore. I can remember when I was a kid, my, sometimes my mom would bring home instead of coming home and making dinner, which normally we like, sometimes we didn't, but Sometimes he would bring something home and sometimes he'd bring home like, like really cool burritos or hamburgers.

And I remember being a younger person just being so excited that hamburgers were for dinner and you'd just be jazzed about it, right? Or I remember going to a youth retreat when I was a high schooler and And, and getting ready for the youth retreat.

We're about ready to have the youth retreat this next weekend. I'd just be so excited about going to the youth retreat. And then when you get older and you have to plan the youth retreat. You're the one in charge.

It's just not as exciting. I, I, when I have to plan retreats, I'm very excited. The last day when we get home, it's like you're all excited about what the Lord did and all that, but leading up to it is tough. And, and I'll just be honest with you, when we go to the hamburger shop and I'm buying hamburgers for the whole family.

And we're buying hamburgers and everyone wants fries, and then everybody's like, can I have a Coke? And I'm looking to adding all this up for our family. I'm just not as excited anymore. And then when I eat the hamburger, a hamburger just doesn't have the thrill that it did when I was a teenager.

I don't know what it is. It just doesn't thrill me the same way. And the older you get, you don't have the same thrills in this life. But we have a place in heaven where we experience eternal pleasures that are far beyond anything that we've ever experienced here on the earth.

That's part of our doctrine of the body is, is our bodies experience a foretaste of pleasure here, but as we believe in Christ, we're looking forward to the ultimate pleasures in the eternal state. Revelation 21:3 says, and I heard a loud voice, John says from heaven saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. And God Himself will be with them and be their God. And the idea here is this is like the ultimate.

This is like going to the most ultimate Super Bowl or World Series. You've been rooting for your team all year, you get to go to the 7th game and they win in the 9th inning and you're just jumping up and down. That is garbage compared to arriving in heaven. And now everything that all of history has been moving towards is now taking place.

And you have thousands and millions, millions of people just jumping up and down crazy, rejoicing in the Lord Jesus Christ and God taking pleasure in His people, that's pleasure. You guys ever had the experience where you've been somewhere that you've really had this incredible pleasure and then the, just the hair stands up on your arms or the back of your neck? Maybe you've been, some, big concert or something, you're just like, whoa, man, that was amazing. Just imagine just being in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is there in our presence with all of the redeemed.

This is the patience of the saints. Pilgrim's Progress uses this analogy or this, there's a story where Christian sees these two children sitting down together. One of them is called Passion and the other one is called Patience. And Passion is given a box and patience is given a box and Passion opens up his box and he plays with all the toys and he breaks all the toys and he's just going crazy and then Passion is just, is just waiting.

And Christian says, what does this mean? He always says, what does this mean? You, you, you're looking at, I know what it means, Christian, why are you asking that question? And so the interpreter says, well, passion wants all of his pleasures now, but in the future, he will get rags.

Patience is waiting for his pleasures in the future, in heaven. And so the idea that really does seem to ring out through scripture, and I think John Bunyan portrays it well, it's not like there are no pleasures in this life, there clearly are, but these are just a, a, a foretaste and, and, and the, the pleasures of sin are garbage and it's the eternal state that has the ultimate pleasures. And so when we think about what we as Christians should do in our bodies. Yes, we should enjoy the things that God has given us, but use our bodies largely understanding that he has the patent, he has the copyright, and so, we're gonna find the greatest pleasure in this life by worshiping Him with everything that we have, by witnessing and by waiting.

Everybody say worship. Witness, wait. So we worship Him in everything that we're doing in our bodies. Every time we're gonna think about doing something with our bodies, we're like, can I honestly say that I'm trying to honor the Lord in some sense in this activity?

And that can happen in a lot of different activities. But then I think about, can, what I'm gonna do with my body, will this give me the greatest advantage for witnessing or could this inhibit witnessing? And then when I see this body decaying and I'm starting to suffer, I'm waiting. I'm waiting for that new body.

We're waiting for the transformation. Of the body. And so that's in a, that's in a nutshell, the big idea of this whole series. We could have just done that in 10 minutes and been done with it, is worship, witness and wait.

For the unbeliever, it's a very different prospect. For the unbeliever, it's not everlasting. pleasure, it's everlasting pain. We get this from several passages of scripture.

Just consider, for instance, Matthew 24:30. In that sheep and the goats passage where Jesus says, then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven and all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. That's just befuddling to me that Jesus Christ shows up. And you would think for us, it's time to rejoice and get down, right?

But for the vast majority of humanity, it will be a time to mourn. To realize I was wrong. And Jesus is coming. I've got this picture in my office that I got from Vernon Anderson years ago.

It's the picture of Jesus on a horse with a sword and judgment in his eyes, and it's a, it's a pretty terrifying picture. and this is Jesus Christ coming in Revelation 19, ready to wield out judgment upon those who do not believe the gospel and upon those who have actually harmed, God's kids. Matthew 25:41, then he will say to those on the left, depart from me, you cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil as angels. These will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

How do we know that hell is forever? Because heaven's forever Listen to this verse, Matthew 25:46. These will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. That's the exact same word in the Greek.

I'm not sure why it says everlasting in the New King James and eternal. It's the exact same word. Whatever the time length of heaven is, it must be the same time length for The punishment because it's the exact same word in the same context. You can't say, oh, this one is forever, but this one just means for a long time.

That's hermeneutically just ridiculous. It's the exact same word, same context. Heaven is forever, hell is forever. And so bringing things, trying to land this plane here, the, the big idea, the big verse that we've Emphasize in this series is you are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God.

In your body, it is our body. But God has given it to us. He's loaned it to us. He has the patent.

He has the copyright. He has, it's his intellectual property, but we are stewards and he's given us a will and so we can go out and theoretically do all kinds of crazy things to our body and with our body. But we want to take every thought captive and say, Lord, what do you want me to do? Do you want, what do you want me to do with your body?

The Lord says, I want you to worship me with your body. I want you to witness. I want you to wait. And, and we, we, as we research the scriptures, we realize that God cares about our body.

He cares what we put on it, He cares what we put in it. He cares where we take it. He cares about how it's buried, He cares about its death, it's resurrection. He cares about the body because you are your body.

It's not just the machine and the ghost. Let's talk about a couple of applications here. Live in your body with death in mind. it's really easy for us sometimes just to Go throughout life and just avoid eye contact with death.

We'd rather read the sports page than the obituaries. my first job, one of my early jobs in college was at the Sun newspaper, and they gave me the job to write the births and the obituaries. Every day I get this pile of papers of all these births here and all these deaths here. That was a really good reminder to come into work and, and write the births and deaths for the paper.

We need to keep that in mind. People being born every day, people dying every day, and you and I will die. Unless we're raptured. So we want to live our lives in light of our death.

We also want to live in our bodies with the resurrection in mind that we're not just gonna die, but we're going to be raised onto a glorious, resurrection and where the true pleasures will be. We live your body, live in your body with the eternal pleasures of heaven in mind that the pleasures of the earth is not what it's all about. It's not just life is good, right? no, eternal life is good.

That's the ultimate thing that should be in our minds rather than the fleeting pleasure of sin. So are we going to live According to the philosophy of Hamlet, to be or not to be, boy, it's just about existence or to live as Christ and to die. I gain. Christ changes everything.

Christ changes everything when we think about death. We can say, Oh death, where is thy sting? Where is thy victory if the Lord Jesus Christ? We're gonna be having a memorial service for my grandmother on Tuesday.

I'd appreciate your, your prayers. My mother, my grandmother passed away a couple of months ago. It wasn't a convenient death. The Lord did not check with her.

And by all appearances, she did not know. Jesus Christ as her sole savior by grace alone, through faith alone. So this is gonna be a very difficult service because on the one hand, my grandmother was made the image of God, and because she's made the image of God, there's so much good that came out of her by virtue of just being a human being. And on the other hand, she was trusting.

In something other than Christ for her salvation. Where are you at this morning? If you were to die today, how certain are you that you would go to heaven? If Jesus Christ were to return, would you be taken with him or would you be left behind?

You see, knowing Jesus Christ really changes everything. You could be suffering, you could be going through tremendous pain, physically, emotionally. But if Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, the one who has died for your sins and been raised from the dead, if you believe in Him by faith, that puts all of that suffering in a totally different category. You suffer for a time.

Momentary light afflictions, Paul says, but then you go to eternal weight of glory forever and ever. We're not just living for this life, we're living for the next, we're gonna sing a hymn here in a minute by Philip Bliss, man of sorrows. This is a man that came to know the Lord when he was young and he, he just, the Lord gave him a, a tremendous voice and He began to write hymns for the church, particularly for Sunday school, and ministered to children, gave his life to the ministry of the gospel.

In fact, he received about $30,000 of royalties for his hymns during his lifetime, which was a lot of money in the 1800s, and he gave all his royalties to the propagation of the gospel because he wanted to see people come to know the Lord Jesus Christ.

He and his, his wife Lucy ministered, but On December twenty-ninth, Of 18. 78. He met his lord in a very tragic way. He and his wife were on a, a train.

And the train was moving across the trestle and the. engineer heard a crack below them. he tried to get across, the bridge, but he heard this loud sickening crack and thud, felt his engine sliding backwards. The bridge collapsed, taking the rest of the train with it.

Out of 160 people, 92 died. And Philip Bliss was able to get out of a window but went back for his wife and they both burned to their deaths. And he had just written the hymn that we're about ready to sing. He had just written it a little bit before his death.

One of the observers of this accident. Noted that. That, that the, the scene was heartrending. This, this particular observer who was a surviving passenger.

He said the mangled bleeding bodies writhed in terrible tortures around them. Some died with prayer and some with shriekings of woe on their lips. And you might say, why did the Lord allow Philip Bliss and his wife Lucy to die in such a horrible way? Part of the point is, all of us are gonna die.

But death is radically transformed for the Christian. We are, if we really think about our state, we are all on that bridge. None of us in this room knows when the bridge is going to collapse below us. We're all on the bridge.

Our lives will collapse. Do the savior of Philip Bliss? Know him today. And you will experience the eternal pleasures of heaven.

Let's pray. Lord, we, thank you for your word that is so clear. None of us have been across that final bridge of death, but we are heading that direction. We thank you, Lord, that Jesus, you have experienced it and you have come back and you have given us facts about, what is on the other side, we are not in the woeful place of Hamlet, not knowing what is in the undiscovered country, but you've discovered it and brought back that information for us so that if we believe in you, we need not fear death.

We can say with Paul, Oh death, where is thy sting? Where is thy victory? We pray, Lord, for, ourselves, Lord, that we would live lives in such a way that we properly, think about our bodies and about, our death and resurrection. We pray for loved ones and friends that may even be in this room that don't know you.

Lord, that your spirit would open up their hearts to believe the gospel so that they would be able to escape eternal death and come into eternal life. all of us are, Heading towards death, we're dying as we speak, and you have given appointed a day in which we will each die. but you have placed the judgment of us all upon your Son Jesus Christ. And so we pray, Lord, that there'd be those this morning that we believe.

That will be transformed, transferred from the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light. We also ask that you protect us from the evil one that would want to pervert. And confuse the message. We ask God that if we, as we give to you that you would cause the gospel to go out throughout this church and throughout the world.

We pray for the pastors, the ministries, the people that we support. We pray for our missionaries. We ask for Team Philippines, Lord, you'd be with them as they head to minister the gospel to, Islamic people in the mining community there in Baggio. Receive our offering as part of our worship.

We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.