Sown in Weakness, Raised in Power | 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 | Pastor Bob Erbig

On December 23rd, 2025, former Senator and University President Ben Sass made a devastating and shocking post on his ex account.

He wrote, and I quote, last week I was diagnosed with metastasized stage four pancreatic cancer and am gonna die.

Senator Sass just turned 54 years old.

His post continued reminding us of the reality that we all face.

He wrote, advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff.

It's a death sentence.

But I already had a death sentence before last week, too.

We all do.

That's a sobering statement.

Well, Ben Sass is known for his political career.

He's also a fellow believer in Christ.

And given the gravity of his situation, I've been amazed at his attitude and outlook.

In a subsequent post, he stated his goal was to redeem the time he had left, which is short.

And so he's written op-eds and started a podcast.

In fact, in a recent deeply moving interview with theologian Michael Horton, Sass bluntly described his diagnosis.

He said, My torso's chock full of tumors, and I'm poisoning myself with chemotherapy, hoping it kills the cancer before me.

It's heartbreaking.

And yet in the interview, Sass and Horton found themselves laughing.

Why?

They called it gallows humor.

Now, if you don't know, gallows is a wooden frame used for execution of a person by hanging.

And they laughed because, as Christians, they understand that while the sting of the diagnosis is real, our victory has already been won on the cross of Christ.

As Sass said, nothing focuses the mind quite like an impending hanging.

Cancer has shattered his idols, forcing him to face the reality that we are all on the clock.

Now, how would you respond if this was you?

I know, in fact, that some in the audience are or have faced this situation.

And even if you have it, one day you will.

It can come out of nowhere because we're all on the clock.

Now, Sass's story gives us a window into a question our whole series has been asking.

What does God do with the body that suffers?

And it's timely because today, as you heard Suzanne read, we're going to turn to 1 Corinthians 15, verses 35 to 58.

1 Corinthians 15:35–58

1 Corinthians 15, 35 to 58, which is Paul's classic and lengthy treatment on personal eschatology and the nature of the resurrection body.

The sermon's title is Sown in Weakness, Raised in Power.

People turn to this passage to answer the question, what happens when we die?

Now, this is the final week of our series, Upside Down Glory, Disability, and the Kingdom of God.

If you're just joining us, I encourage you to go back and listen to the previous six messages, and I trust they will be a blessing to you.

But today's message in Scripture Passage takes that question a step further.

And I'll just voice it this way: What happens to disability in eternity?

Now, over the course of the series, we have defined disability this way.

Disability is the experience of limitation that arises when a person's body, mind, or senses do not function as expected in a fallen world.

Now, many of us today are living with limitations, whether that's genetic conditions or learning disabilities or mobility issues or pain from a disease, just to name a few.

Others are caring for someone we love with a disability.

And if we're Christians and we believe, as Paul writes, the dead will be raised, we should ask, what exactly is raised?

Now, in his interview, Ben Sass said, the hope of the great physician is that he will heal up every part of our body that is decaying and declining.

But what does that mean for somebody with disabilities?

Does this transformation of the resurrection body eradicate our unique embodied history?

Will the person who has never walked recognize their legs in eternity?

Will the person with dementia remember once more?

Will the scars of our earthly journey be gone?

Or will they be trophies of grace like the scars on the hands of the risen Christ?

Now, Ben Sass's attitude and outlook assist here.

He profoundly said, Death is a link in the chain of salvation.

Death is a link in the chain of salvation.

The seed must go into the ground and come out of something new.

What happens to disability in eternity?

Now to answer that question, we'll investigate the process of planting and rising in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul beautifully outlines three actions we should take in response to the question.

And I'll say them this way: Number one, savor the seed.

Number two, shake off the dust.

And number three, listen for the trumpet.

Because in the end, death will not have the last word.

And in the future, as Tolkien wrote, everything sad will become untrue.

So let's pray, and then we'll look at God's word.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for today.

Lord, thank you for the future.

Thank you for the hope that you give to us.

Thank you for your word, which points to a bigger vision of this world than we can see.

Lord, I pray for my friends today who need your ministry.

Holy Spirit, I pray that you would come and meet us where we are, speak to us, illuminate our hearts.

And may we leave today, both challenged and changed.

For your glory, we ask that in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So first, to lay the foundation, Paul tells us we have to savor the seed.

Now, in verses 35 to 41, he uses this powerful and accessible farming analogy to frame his argument.

But before we examine that, let's back up and remind ourselves of the context since we've not been in 1 Corinthians for some time.

1 Corinthians 15 is all about the resurrection.

Paul opens the chapter by attesting to the veracity of Paul, of Christ's resurrection, in verses 1 to 11.

And then he shifts in verse 12 to confront the Corinthian objections to the resurrection.

They were not atheists doubting God's power.

They did all believe in some kind of afterlife.

But they were influenced by the Greek philosophy of their day, which said this: the physical body is a liability, not an asset.

The influential philosopher Plato taught that the soul is the real you.

Your body is a prison.

And so death is actually liberation from that prison.

And their question was, why would God want to put us back in that prison through resurrection?

Does that make sense?

Now, Paul alludes to this question in verse 35.

He writes this.

With what kind of body do they come?

And the question sounds like honest curiosity, but it's not.

It's more like skeptical mockery.

Have you ever shared your Christian belief about the resurrection with an unbelieving friend?

Have they ever scoffed at that belief and said, oh, that's so silly and unscientific.

We're all just dust.

Well, Paul responds sharply and then moves into the seed analogy.

Look at verse 36.

You foolish person, what you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.

Now, in a biblical sense, a fool is someone who denies God.

And so Paul's giving a sharp rebuke.

In fact, theologian Amos Young writes, in the broader context of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is responding both to those who are incredulous that there will be a resurrection of the dead at all, and to the more spiritually minded of the congregation who anticipate a body less after life, because they associate the body with the impurities of creaturely and fleshly existence.

So again, body bad, spirit, soul, good.

Paul now starts to make a case for why the body is good.

You sow in the Greek is an accessible farming image for the time.

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies, he said.

What you sow is not the body that is to be.

Now, what's he doing?

Well, let me see if I can illustrate this.

I brought a little a little prop with me here today.

I'll submit this.

Does anybody know what this is?

It's an acorn, right?

Now, if you're holding the acorn land, this is actually a pretty big acorn right here.

It would be even tiny, it's tiny in my hand, right?

It's a little teeny tiny acorn.

Now, if you go and plant this acorn in the ground and you give it enough time, do you know what it eventually becomes?

A massive oak tree.

But in order for that magnificent, oh, I dropped, I broke the acorn.

Oh my goodness.

It's dead already, it's in the ground.

Alright.

It eventually becomes an oak tree.

Now imagine if you had no prior knowledge of what the acorn would become.

Nothing about this acorn right here tells you what is coming.

Would you be able to draw that oak tree if you knew nothing about what this acorn was to become?

Probably not.

But the creator knows and he sovereignly controls it.

And so in this analogy, your earthly body is the acorn, and your resurrection body is the oak tree.

Paul further highlights God's sovereignty in the process.

Look at verse 38.

He says, But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

For not all flesh is the same, but there's one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, another for fish.

Right?

He's saying we all have different, we're all made different ways, right?

So you're not going to get resurrected as a dog or something.

But Paul moves from the analogy to the principle here.

He says, God decides what kind of body you're going to get.

If you take notice of that word flesh, that's the Greek word sarx, and that's the organizing principle in verse 39.

Paul is showing there's diversity of fleshly earthly bodies.

He's chosen what type of resurrection body we will get, and he then expands it to creation.

And Paul says, if God's created diversity is in earthly creation, why would the resurrection body be any different?

Our bodies are personalized to us.

Now, do you see he's making this profound point about the nature of the resurrection body?

So if you follow his argument, this is what he's saying.

He says, first, there is a continuity.

That our body and resurrection body are the same person.

The oak tree comes from the acorn, each kind of seed its own body.

Second, there is a discontinuity.

That when the acorn goes in the ground, it does not look like that magnificent oak tree that comes out.

And then third, God is sovereign.

That massive towering oak tree is the fulfillment of everything hidden inside the acorn.

It is God who has chosen what the body will be.

And then finally, in order to fulfill that, death must take place.

You gotta go in the ground.

So you savor the seed, but don't disregard it.

God is doing something in your life right now, and you can't see what you will become, but it's gonna be glorious.

And that's where he moves in the next few verses.

Look at verse 40.

He says, There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies.

But the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another.

There is one glory of the sun and one glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for star differs from star in glory.

So there's heavenly bodies and there's earthly bodies.

There's an acorn, there's an oak tree.

There's a stark difference between earthly and heavenly, but it sets the stage for transformation.

Now, if you take notice of that word glory, that's the Greek word doxa, and that's the organizing category in verses 40 and 41, marking a significant shift from verse 39.

Paul said there was diversity of bodies existing on earth, that's the flesh, but but now he talks about cosmic diversity, the sun, the moon, the stars, they all produce light, but not with the same intensity.

I mean, everybody in the ancient world knew that the noonday sun was brighter than the overnight moon.

Nobody was trying to get a suntan from the moon overnight, even if it was a full moon.

Paul's point is that the resurrection does not simply restore the present body, it transforms it into something greater, no longer an acorn but an oak tree.

And yet, there's an important principle you have to grasp about the nature of the resurrection body.

There's both continuity and discontinuity.

And this is what the text pictures that we're not going to receive a generic body, it's going to be a body specific to you.

Let me give you an illustration.

If you haven't noticed, I am not incredibly tall.

And when I was trying to play baseball in high school, I noticed this acutely and desired to be taller.

And so what I did, literally, I put a little one of these things on my wall in my bedroom without the giraffe, but I put a mark, I put a goal of how tall I wanted to be.

I was just hoping, God, please just make me make me 5'10.

Maybe six feet if you're gracious.

As if it was something that I could achieve.

Friends, God made me five feet seven inches, and he chose to do that.

There's nothing about my there's something about my body that's personal.

And while my body will be transformed in the new heavens and new earth, do I need to be six five?

Right?

Why would I desire that?

See, in the resurrection, we will be recognizable but changed.

To each seed its own body.

So savor the seed, live out who God has made you to be, because we all have a story.

Now, how does this apply to disability?

Well, Johnny Erickson Tata, who we've mentioned, was has written and spoken with remarkable theological depth about what she expects from the resurrection.

She does not expect to be fixed in the sense that her wheelchair years are erased as a mistake.

She expects to be freed and to be more herself than she has ever been.

And so what strikes Johnny is not that she will have legs, but that she will have a body that perfectly does what she was always designed to do, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

And so that wheelchair-formed character, the dependence and the empathy and the depth is part of who she is.

Resurrection doesn't wipe that out, it glorifies it.

And that's exactly Paul's point.

To each seed its own body.

Johnny's resurrection body will be hers, not a generic replacement, but Johnny glorified.

There's continuity.

You're going to be recognizable.

But you will be transformed.

You'll be raised in power.

You will, secondly, shake off the dust.

Shake off the dust.

Sown in weakness, raised in power.

Now we may be recognizable, but we will be different.

In what way?

What is the nature of the resurrection body?

Well, Paul answers that question with four contrasts in verses 42 to 44.

He writes this.

So it is with the resurrection of the dead.

What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.

It is sown in dishonor, it's raised in glory.

It's sown in weakness, it's raised in power.

It's sown a natural body, it's raised a spiritual body.

There's a natural body, but there's also a spiritual body.

Now, if you notice that connector in verse 42, so it is with the resurrection of the dead.

Now he launches into these four contrast examples of how it applies.

Let's look at each.

First, perishable versus imperishable.

Or other translations will say corruption and incorruption.

Our present earthly body is perishable in that it decays, it ages, it suffers, it breaks down.

In fact, we're all to some extent feeling the effects of the perishable body to some degree.

Amen?

Right?

Those touched by disabilities or disease feel this perishing more acutely at times.

This is the nature of life after the fall.

What is sown is perishable.

But our great hope is that one day our body will be raised imperishable, uncorruptible.

The present process of death and decay will not touch us anymore in the resurrection.

Second, dishonor versus glory.

Now that's the Greek word atimia, which refers to social shame and low status, being treated without value.

And as we've spoken about, those with disabilities can feel shame and lack of value at times in this life.

But the hope of the resurrection body is one of glory.

All the dishonor and pity and exclusion of this world will be reversed.

This contrast gets at the heart of this series.

People with disabilities are often dishonored.

We've raised questions throughout the series about dignity, about the body, about personhood, about who counts and who belongs.

And those aren't just Sunday morning questions.

They're being debated in hospitals and courtrooms and university classrooms.

What does it mean to be a person?

Who deserves protection?

Who gets counted?

Well, on March 7th, as we've mentioned, we are hosting a special underground session with ethicist and author Jason Thacker.

I encourage you to take out your phones and sign up.

We need to know who's coming.

I need to know how much barbecue to have for you.

It's going to be a good night.

Dinners at 5.

The session starts at 5.30.

His topic is and who is a person?

Human dignity in an inhuman age.

Jason will help us engage the bioethics debates our culture is having.

Questions about the beginning of life and the end of life, the inherent worth of every human being, regardless of age, ability, and discrimination or circumstance.

That's the same conviction we've been diving into throughout this series.

And so again, please register on the website.

We hope that you will come to that.

Third, weakness versus power.

And that brings us back to the first week of our series.

That the Greek word for weakness is Athenea.

It's the same word Paul used in 1 Corinthians 12, 9.

My power is made perfect in weakness.

Weakness, as I mentioned earlier in the series, was a word that would have encompassed all types of disabilities.

Now, in the resurrection, God's power will be seen.

Someone who needed help navigating this world, you will be raised in power, the power of the one who created you.

And then fourth, the natural body and the spiritual body.

Now this contrast is often misunderstood.

Paul's not talking about the material and the immaterial.

He's referring to what animates the present body.

While the resurrection body is still a physical body, it will be governed completely by the spirit rather than the flesh.

That sin nature gone.

Now let me return for a moment to our key question.

What does disability look like in eternity?

Will disabilities still be present in the resurrection body, or does God remove them entirely?

And that's a question worth carefully considering because how we answer it says something about how we view people with disabilities right now.

On the question, two main positions have been offered.

Some scholars suggest that our personal identities will be preserved, but our suffering will be removed, pointing to Jesus' remaining scars in John 20 as evidence that marks of our earthly journey carry forward.

Others, and this is where I land, argue that the text points towards something more complete.

That all disability will be transformed, just as Isaiah described in chapter 35.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped.

Then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.

And I think that's literal.

That the blind will see, the lame will leap.

It's not poetry, it's promise.

Paul says in Philippians 3 that our lowly body will be transformed to be like his glorious body.

There's a progression there.

And so the resurrection body, yes, will be continuous.

You will be you, recognizable, the person God's been shaping all your life, but it will be transformed, sown in weakness, raised in power.

And here's what I want you to hear very clearly Transformation is not erasure.

The disability will be gone, but the person will not.

The years of dependence that deepens somebody's faith that goes with them, but glorified.

The empathy forged through decades of suffering that goes.

With them, glorified.

The character shaped by limitation, the patience, the trust, the refusal to take a single good day for granted.

God does not throw that away.

He perfects it.

So think about it this way: when the acorn becomes the oak tree, the acorn is gone, but everything the acorn was is now fully expressed in something magnificent.

The disability was the acorn's shell, the person inside it is the oak tree God always intended.

So when I think about my son, will Josiah be healed?

Yes.

Will he still be Josiah, joyful and present, excited about the people around him?

Absolutely.

More himself than he's ever been.

Not a contradiction, but resurrection.

Which raises the deeper question.

If disability does not define us in eternity, what does?

What is the foundation of who we are both now and forever?

Now, Paul's been alluding to this answer the whole chapter.

And what he's saying, he's about to say, is this our identity is not ultimately found in our disabling circumstances.

Our limitations, our diagnosis, our suffering, our identity is found primarily in whose image we bear.

The Lord Jesus Christ.

And here is where Paul makes a stunning move.

He takes us all the way back to the beginning and then points us forward to something better.

Now, verse 45.

He says, Thus it is written, the first man Adam became a living being.

That's creation.

The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual.

As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.

Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

What's the argument Paul's making?

Well, he's showing us what comes first, and then he's pointing us toward the promise of redemption.

So first there was Adam, our ancestor, the first living, breathing human.

He was the natural man, the man of dust.

We came from him.

All of us in this room are people of the dust.

In fact, every person on this planet is a person of dust, born in the image of God, like Adam.

But you know the dust eventually disintegrates.

And the dust that Paul is describing here has a connection with Genesis 2, but it's describing the entire weight of the fallen embodiment, the limitation and the decay and the curse that touches all of us.

Do you want to be covered in dust for the rest of your life?

Some of thank you, no.

Amen.

Some of you know my oldest daughter, Jenna, and she's a sweetheart.

She loves people, she loves Jesus, she loves to help take care of her brother.

We found out a number of years ago that she has some allergies, one of which is to dust mites.

Actually, a rather severe allergy to dust mites.

So the allergist told us to get rid of all the stuffed animals in the house to help with this.

And we said, Have you met a six-year-old girl who does not love stuffed animals?

It's not happening.

But when there's too much dust, her nose will get stuffed up and it's hard to breathe.

And one day I think she'll appreciate it when the dust is gone.

And it will be.

So this verse traces the narrative arc of the Bible.

At creation, God made us in his image.

Adam being the first, but then Adam and Eve rebelled and fell.

The fall came in the world.

They introduced the dust, decay and disease and disability and death, entered the world through sin.

But that's not how it's supposed to be.

Paul tells us that God, in his grace and mercy, sent a second Adam, a last Adam, a better Adam to bring redemption to this world.

That he possesses the life-giving, dust-eradicating power of the Spirit.

He's the man of heaven, Jesus Christ.

He took on the flesh of humanity, he lived a sinless life, he died a brutal death on the cross, and then like the acorn, he died.

He rose again as the first fruits, Paul tells us, of the new creation.

And when we surrender to him, when our hearts are regenerated, when we follow him, we are guaranteed that one day we'll not we'll shake off the dust and we'll be made in the image of the man of heaven.

One day he will fully restore the world.

That one day we're gonna shake off the dust.

No more allergies, no more death, no more pain, no more suffering because we're gonna be in his presence.

And our identity is not found in the dust, it's found in Christ.

Now we're about two-thirds of the way through the message, so let's let's have a little bit of fun right now.

We're about to get to the good part of the passage.

So I want you to do three things.

First, if you're able, I need you to stand up right now.

Uh stand up if you can, and uh I want you to turn to your neighbor and say to them, one day I'm gonna shake off the dust.

Turn to your other neighbor and tell them one day I'm gonna shake off the dust.

All right, number three, number three, now, now the fun.

I want you to show them how to shake off the dust.

All right, ready?

Shake off the dust.

Shake off the dust.

There you go.

Good, good, good.

All right, good.

Now you can sit back down.

Thank you.

Church, you have to savor the seed, but you also have to shake off the dust.

1 Corinthians 15, 42 to 49 tells us the resurrection body will be physical and personal and transformed and governed by Christ.

The resurrection body transcends present categories.

Now, this particular topic has been personal for me as I've shared throughout the series about our journey with our son Josiah.

I've um, and I hope that's been special for somebody.

I've often wondered, will I recognize my son in eternity?

Will he be the same Josiah?

Now, Josiah has a lot of excitement about life.

Some of you may have met him.

Just this week, my wife sent me a video of him at school where he learned how to jump off and get two feet off the ground for the first time.

He gets excited about things I take for granted.

We have a slide in our basement.

This is his new thing.

All he wants to do is just go down the slide, down the slide, down the slide, over and over and over again.

I take him out to the store now, and he starts to say hi to everybody really loudly.

Hi! People get taken off guard.

Uh-oh, okay, there's somebody there.

Started grabbing people yesterday, had to pull them back.

Now, in our lives, we have simultaneously had pain and joy.

And as hard as it's been, I would not trade it for the world.

And it's in the new creation where I picture Josiah going down the slide, seeing Jesus, and laughing and clapping, yay! But most important, he will bear the image of the man of heaven.

He will be like Christ.

And Revelation 21 tells us what the new creation that these resurrection bodies will inhabit.

What will it be like?

Revelation 21.

And after I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

He will dwell with them, and they will be his people.

God himself will be with them as their God.

He'll wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things, the former things will pass away.

See, as Ben Sass said in his interview, the great physician will heal every part of our body, and I would say our world that is decaying and dying.

One day, shake off the dust.

And one day we will shake off the dust of this present world.

I mean, even Shakespeare knew we had to shuffle off the mortal coil, right?

Sown in weakness, raised in power.

Now, when's it gonna happen?

At the trumpet.

And you have to listen for the trumpet.

Now, the entire Upside Down Glory series has anticipated this eschatological reality when God's kingdom will invade and transform this world.

We have the opportunity now to bring a little bit of heaven to earth.

And that's why we've we've brought up that this ministry is important, that we can show people what is to come.

And so now we've reached the climax of Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 15.

When will we get this resurrection body?

At the sound of the trumpet.

Look at what he writes, verse 50.

I tell you this, brothers and sisters, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Behold, I tell you a mystery.

We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.

For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

Are you excited about this day?

This is one of my favorite sections of scripture because notice what he says about the coming kingdom.

Flesh and blood cannot inherit it.

In other words, everything has to be turned upside down and changed.

We need a different body.

And it's a mystery, right?

The Greek word mysterion introduces a new revelation.

In Paul's usage, it does not mean something inexplicable.

It means something that was previously hidden that's now revealed.

And so Paul's telling believers a secret here the world doesn't know.

Let me tell you something.

What's the secret?

That we're going to be transformed.

But that verb, that verb, if you look in the original, it's in the passive form, which is intentional.

And what he means is this the transformation is done to us, not achieved by us.

It is done to us, not achieved by us.

The transformation is something God gives to us.

Now, some of you right now, you've been fighting for someone who couldn't fight for themselves.

You've navigated IEP meetings, you sat in the hospital waiting room, you've rearranged your retirement, your marriage, your sleep.

You know what that groaning is like that we talked about in Romans 8.

This passage is for you.

The transformation is done to you, not achieved by you.

You do not have to fight your way to the resurrection body.

God's gonna give it to you.

And in a moment, in a nanosecond, is what that word means.

You're gonna be walking along and maybe poof, resurrection body.

When?

At the last trumpet.

You gotta listen for it.

One day you'll hear the sound resounding as heaven opens up, God's kingdom is finally and fully descending to earth.

And all around you, believers, they're being transformed because God's kingdom is here.

And Paul says, the mortal will put on immortality.

What does that mean?

Are we all gonna be like Thor and we can carry the hammer?

In this verse, mortal means subject to death.

But by contrast, immortality describes the resurrection body's liberation from death's dominion.

That death can't touch you anymore.

We will receive victory in Jesus.

And that's how Paul famously finishes the section.

Verse 54.

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory.

O death, where is your sting?

O death, where is your victory?

The sting of death is sin, the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the death taunt.

This is the gallows humor that Ben Sass and Michael Horton were talking about in their interview.

Death! You have no power here! Maybe not quite so maniacal, but death, you will cease to exist.

They laughed, not to avoid death, but because they knew something death doesn't know.

And so, like Ben Sass, in the face of death, we can laugh, we can be confident because Jesus himself died and he was raised to new life and power.

And so will we.

Listen for the trumpet.

At that moment, you'll be more alive than ever before, and the world will be more glorious than it's ever been.

In his book, The Last Battle, the conclusion of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S.

Lewis describes the characters arriving in Aslan's country and discovering that it's not a different world, but it's the this world, but fully itself.

The mountains are the same mountains, only more.

The grass is the same grass, only more real.

And Jewel the Unicorn cries out, What?

I've come home at last.

This is my real country.

The old Narnia was just a shadow of the real Narnia.

And Lewis is doing theology through the form of story, right?

The new creation is not the destruction and replacement of this world, it's the world freed from the shadow that has always dulled it.

And every person who has loved and suffered and hoped in this world is more themselves in that one, not less.

Do you long for that day?

Can you hear the trumpet in the distance?

If you're living with a disability right now, that word is for you.

Not for your condition to be pitied, not for your story to be used as an illustration.

But you personally are named in this text.

Raised in power.

And here's what I want you to leave with today.

God does not discard the body that suffered, He transforms it, glorifies it, and raises it in the power of the risen Christ.

That's the hope that allows us to love and minister in the face of suffering.

And it's this hope that calls us to action.

And so Paul now, after spending 57 verses, and yes, that's a long chapter, even by biblical standards, talking about resurrection.

He finishes with a therefore.

Verse 58.

Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

And that's how we end.

After seven weeks of defining disability, of talking about advocacy and hospitality and healing and suffering and hope, Paul calls us to action.

He calls the church to bring the kingdom of God to the disabled and beyond.

He's calling us to mission.

Therefore, based on everything I said about the resurrection, be steadfast, be immovable.

In the face of suffering and resistance, don't give up.

Abounding, which means to overflow with the work of the Lord.

See, friends, disability ministry is not a side project, it's an opportunity for God's work to overflow in our church.

So some of you listening right now, you've been giving it all you can.

Some of you serve as a buddy in our kids' ministry.

Some of you are parents who exhaust yourselves caring for your child and advocating for them in school.

Some of you have completely rearranged your lives to care for your aging parents or loved ones who are touched by disability.

Some of you don't know how you're going to get through the next day.

And I think God speaks to you today and he says, This, I see you.

I see the work you're doing in my kingdom to bring heaven to earth.

Your labor is not in vain.

And to the congregation at Millington Baptist Church, God challenges us with this, therefore.

That if you're a follower of Christ, you have this hope of resurrection.

God, God's, you we are called to bring God's kingdom to earth now.

And so I would challenge you today.

We chose to spend seven weeks on this topic because it's important.

Ask God right now, where are you calling me to participate?

As a church, we put together a new disability leadership team that's gonna help us give legs to this initiative.

And we've been meeting and planning on how to expand that implementation and build a wider team.

And so to help us do that and to be more effective in building the ministry, we're gonna ask you today to take one more survey.

You can see the QR code on the screen right here.

I'm gonna invite you to take out your phones and scan that.

Before we come to the table, we're gonna give you a few minutes to fill it out.

If you can't finish it today, that's okay.

If you uh need a physical copy, you don't want to do the phone thing.

Amy's gonna come around, one of the ushers, raise your hand, they'll give you a physical copy, you can fill that out and then drop it in the welcome center after the service or later on.

It's not long, but it's gonna ask you three things.

Number one, uh, how did this series impact you?

Number two, if you have a disability, we would love to know how we can connect with you.

And then number three, if you want to serve, let us know how we can get you plugged in.

Or let us know so we can get you plugged in.

A member of our team will contact you in the coming weeks.

What will disability look like in eternity?

Savor the seed, shake off the dust, listen for the trumpet.

As the worship team comes back on stage for our final song and as we prepare for the table, let me close the series with Revelation 21, 25.

Of the new Jerusalem, it says, and its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there.

Now in the ancient world, city gates closed at night.

The night was when the vulnerable were locked out, when the stranger found no welcome, when the poor slept in the street, when danger came under cover of darkness.

In the New Jerusalem, in the world Paul's resurrection body inhabits, the gates never close.

There's no hour when access is denied, no policy that keeps anyone outside who belongs to the Lamb.

No sensory overload that makes the space hostile, no staircase without a ramp, no barrier that says, not you.

We spent seven weeks learning how to open the doors a little wider, how to lower the barriers a little lower to make room for people who've been locked out for too long.

And one day there will be no night.

The gates will never close, and the city will be full, absolutely full, of people the world told to wait outside.

And so we have the opportunity right now for that to model that city now for the city is coming.

Amen.

The worship team is going to play for just a few minutes.

You can finish filling out that survey, and then after a few minutes we'll sing and we'll come to God's table.