The Resurrection of the Body [Sinners & Saints]

Hello and welcome to the Sermon Podcast of Mission Hills Church, located in San Marcos, California.

Thank you so much for listening.

We pray that this message blesses you and your walk with Jesus.

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believed in vain.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I was persecuted the church of God.

But by the grace of God I am what I am.

And his grace toward me was not in vain.

On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Whether then it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed.

Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised.

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive, but each in his own order.

Christ, the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.

Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom of God the Father, after destroying every rule and every authority and power.

For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

For God has put all things in subjection under his feet.

But when it says all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is expected, accepted who put all things in subjection under him.

When all things are subjected to him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to Him who put all things in subjection under Him, that God may be all in all.

Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead?

If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

Why are we in danger every hour?

I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day.

What do I gain if humanly speaking I fought with beasts at Ephesus?

If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

Do not be deceived.

Bad company ruins good morals.

Wake up from your drunken stupor, as it is right, and do not go on sinning, for some have no knowledge of God.

I say this to your shame.

But someone will ask, how are the dead raised?

With what kind of body do they come?

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.

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 is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.

There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one kind, and the glory of the earthly is another.

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

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 is raised in glory.

It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.

It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

If there is the natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

Thus it is written.

The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

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

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

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

This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning, everyone.

Great to be with you all today.

Uh Asif and Nusrat, great to have you with us.

We're honored to have you join us this morning in worship.

Um, as we continue our series in 1 Corinthians, uh we're we're kind of coming to the end of the whole series, and I have my clicker that I get to use for the first time in four months, so I'm very excited about this.

I might get a little crazy.

But just as a reminder of where we've been so far, uh the letter that Paul writes uh to the church in Corinth is broken up into five basic sections.

Uh the first four chapters are about the divisions of the church.

Then the second section in chapters five through seven is about sexual immorality and marriage in the church.

And then chapters eight through ten, the apostle Paul addresses some personal convictions and how freedom and love relate as a Christian in the church.

And then chapter and then the fourth section, he talks about disordered worship.

They were having problems with communion, with spiritual gifts, all kinds of things that we talked about there in chapters 11 through 14.

And now as we come close to the end here, chapter 15, the Apostle Paul is going to address some false beliefs about the resurrection of Jesus.

And that's where we're going to be kind of focused on and camping here today.

Now, the resurrection is really the heart of the Christian faith.

It is the fundamental claim, not only of what happened to Jesus, but also of what happens to all Christians.

It is the heart of the Christian story.

And it's this the heart that I really want us to be attentive to today.

What it means to be a Christian, what it means at a very basic level to be a Christian, is to be a person who has placed your faith in a basic story.

And the story is this that human beings sinned, they rebelled, they fell short of the glory of God, of what God had called them to be.

And because of this, mankind was handed over to death.

And that in the midst of the story of death, as death claimed generation after generation after generation, right in the midst of the story of death, God sent his son Jesus, who took on human flesh and human blood and died a human death on a cross.

And then three days later, after being buried in the tomb, he rose from the dead.

And after his resurrection of the dead, he promised to return and to raise all those who would place their faith in him.

This is the basic plot of the Christian story.

And to be a Christian, it's to say something like this I'm a part of that story.

That story is not just the Christian story, but that is the story that defines my life.

That I was a sinner, that I was dead in my sins and trespasses, that because of what Jesus has done in his death and his resurrection, now God has promised to grant me what he gave to Jesus, which is resurrection from the dead and eternal life.

And my heartfelt prayer this morning is if you're a guest with us, if you don't know Christ, if you don't follow him, that today would be the day in which you call out to him, you place your faith in him, and come to own this story as your story.

It is a story that will flood your life with hope as we come to see this morning.

Now, 1 Corinthians 15, it says a lot.

I could do a whole sermon series just on this one chapter alone, and we're not gonna be able to cover all the details of this chapter, but what I want to do is kind of give us an overview of everything that Paul says in this chapter so that we get a sense of the context of the argument that the Apostle Paul is making.

And so that's where we're gonna focus here today.

And what the Apostle Paul does is he's writing to address a problem.

That's what we've seen throughout the entire letter.

Several different times throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul mentions the broken ideas, the messed up beliefs, the flawed ideas that the Corinthian church has, and he writes to correct their ideas.

And so the same thing is true of the resurrection.

Paul writes to this church, and there are members of the church in Corinth who believe that there is no resurrection from the dead.

Chapter 15, verse 12, he asks this: How can some of you say there is what?

No resurrection from the dead?

How can some of you say this?

This is the problem.

That there in Corinth, in some of these house churches that were meeting in the city of Corinth, this teaching was beginning to spread that there was, in fact, no resurrection from the dead.

Now, our text doesn't say this, and so we'd have to, to some degree, reconstruct the context, because we're not entirely sure what they actually did believe in Corinth, other than that there was no resurrection from the dead.

But likely it was something like this.

In ancient Greece, it was very common to believe in the immortality of the soul, that your body was a kind of prison.

And then when you died, you escaped your body and went on to immortality.

That the soul was immortal, but the body wasn't.

This was a very common belief in ancient Greece.

And there was different forms of that that showed up, but it's likely that what these Christians believed was that the resurrection was irrelevant, an irrelevant part of the Christian faith.

That you didn't really need to believe in the resurrection.

All you really needed to believe in was the immortality of the soul.

So I want you to kind of lodge that away in the back of your mind as we continue.

So this is the problem.

In Corinth, they're spreading around this teaching in which they're saying there is no resurrection from the dead.

And so Paul is gonna give a six-part response.

He's gonna say six different things in response to this false belief about the resurrection.

So that's what we're gonna walk through, and we're gonna see Paul's different responses and how he's gonna correct this broken idea that these Corinthians have about the resurrection of the dead.

So, first, the first thing Paul's gonna do is he's gonna remind them that they're Christians.

Hey, remember the story that you believed in, that you received, that you placed your faith in.

Remember that story?

That story, right at the heart of that story, was the story of a resurrection.

1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses 1 and 2.

1 Corinthians 15:1

Now I would remind you, brothers, of what?

The gospel.

That's the story.

I would remind you of the gospel that I preached to you, which you received.

Remember, you receive this.

You stand in it, and you are being saved by it.

Remember the message that I preached to you?

And then he goes on in the next 11 verses to tell them the gospel.

That Jesus died on a cross, he was buried in a tomb, three days later he rose from the dead, and that there were eyewitnesses of his resurrection.

The 12, the original apostles, they saw him resurrect from the dead.

Over 500 other eyewitnesses saw him resurrect from the dead.

Paul says, I myself, I saw him raise from the dead.

This isn't just a spiritual resurrection.

It's not like he was a ghost.

No, we saw his physical body come back from the dead.

If you want more of these eyewitnesses' accounts, you can go back to the Gospels and you can read famously about Thomas, one of the twelve, and he puts his hands in Jesus' wounds in his side.

And he comes to believe that Jesus wasn't just a ghost, he actually came back from the dead.

Jesus sits with some of his other disciples and he eats some broiled fish.

Jesus rose from the dead, and they're eyewitness accounts of this.

Paul reminds them of the gospel.

Remember that at a fundamental level, the reason why you're a Christian is you have already believed in a resurrection.

It's a gospel they have believed in already.

The second thing he reminds them of is he gives them some counterfactuals.

He helps them imagine a scenario.

Okay, I want you to imagine, real quick, Corinthians, Paul says to them, if Christ wasn't raised, what would that mean for you?

If Christ did not come back from the dead, what are the implications of that?

And he just unfolds these verse after verse after verse.

Listen with me to what he says.

If there is no, verse 13, if there is no resurrection, then not even Christ has been raised.

And if Christ has not been raised, verse 14, first, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

Everything that I'm talking about, Paul says, is meaningless.

It's empty.

And not only that, everything that you're believing in is meaningless and empty.

Then he goes on in verse 15.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if it is true that the dead are not raised.

In other words, I'm lying to you, Paul says.

If Christ hasn't been raised, then I'm telling you a lie.

I'm misrepresenting, not only lying to you, but I'm lying about God.

If you're a first century Jewish leader and you're misrepresenting God, that's the sin of blasphemy and it's it warrants death.

Verse 16.

And if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.

In other words, if there's no resurrection from the dead, then Christ himself did not come back from the dead.

Verse 17.

And if Christ has been not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.

If Christ stayed dead, then his death affected nothing.

Then sin and death are more powerful than Christ.

Your sins have not been forgiven.

Paul teaches them.

And then next, he says this then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ, they have perished.

They're dead.

If there's no resurrection, the dead are still dead.

Verse 19 if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we of all people are most to be pitied.

It's a powerful rhetorical device Paul uses here, this counterfactual.

He is saying to these Corinthians, if there's no resurrection from the dead, you as a Christian are pitiful.

It's embarrassing to be a Christian if Christ has not been resurrected and if there's no resurrection from the dead.

What are you doing?

Why are you here?

Why would you live the way that you live?

It's pointless.

And Paul will get to that idea further.

He's going to expand upon that idea of why would we live the way we live?

Because he's insistent throughout this chapter that because of the resurrection, we're going to act in a certain way in hope that our actions and our behavior matter.

And we'll get to that in a moment.

So, the first thing he does is he reminds them of the gospel.

The second thing he does is he gives them counterfactuals if Christ has not been raised.

The third thing he does is he tells them the story, the plot of redemption.

How the story works.

And he begins this starting in verse 20, and he does this by telling us that Christ is the first fruits.

The first fruits.

Now, this idea of firstfruits, it comes from the ancient Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament.

And in particular, it's a reference to a certain kind of offering, the offering of firstfruits.

And what the offering of firstfruits was all about was uh the earliest harvest.

There were different seasons of harvest throughout the agricultural cycle, but the first harvest of the year, a portion of that would be offered to God.

And the portion that would be offered to God, it was offered to God because of a very specific reason.

The word firstfruit literally means this a promise to come.

A promise to come.

And in the ancient Hebrew system, this offering of the firstfruits was the reassurance that more was to come.

More harvests was to come.

That this first harvest in the beginning of the agricultural cycle wasn't the last harvest, but there would be more coming.

And in this this offering, what it was meant to remind the people of Israel of is that they could trust God that He would provide, that there would be more to come from His hand.

Paul takes this idea and he applies it to Jesus Himself.

He says, Christ is the first fruits.

The effect of this is to say this Christ, like that first harvest of the agricultural cycle, Christ's resurrection is just the beginning of the story of the resurrection.

There is More to what?

Let's try that again.

There is more to come.

That's the plot.

That's the story of redemption.

Right in any great story, you have some kind of a crisis, some problem that needs to be resolved.

Then you have the climax of the story.

And then after the climax, you have the resolution of the story.

And for the Apostle Paul, the story of redemption fits this pattern.

There's a problem, the problem specifically of sin and death.

And that problem is addressed in the climax of the story, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And that climactic resolution is finally solved when all the dead are raised in Christ.

And he reminds them of this basic plot.

He tells them, he reminds them of the story of humans' great ancestor Adam.

That in Adam everyone died.

If you're a human being that has been born after Adam, you die.

Because in Adam everyone dies.

That's the story.

That's the problem.

That's the crisis that needs to be addressed.

But then in Christ, Paul tells us, all will be made alive.

Death in him will be finally and fully defeated.

So he reminds them if the dead are not raised, then you're in the wrong story.

And then he goes to a few more counterfactuals after this.

He's got a few more counterfactuals, and he gives one that's incredibly strange to us.

Paul says this in verse 28.

Or 29, excuse me.

Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead?

If the dead are not raised at all, why are people being baptized on their behalf?

For many of us modern people, we don't, this baptism of the dead thing is strange.

But it what Paul is doing is he's actually saying, yeah, it is strange.

It's a strange, idiosyncratic practice that nobody else does.

But what he says is, if you're doing that, if you're baptizing people from the dead, why would you do that if there's no resurrection?

What happens to if there's no resurrection, what happens to you when you die?

You're dead.

So why would you baptize for the dead?

The story's over at death.

Baptizing people from the dead, it makes no sense.

This practice, this strange, weird practice that you guys are doing, that no Christians anywhere else are doing, this thing that you guys are doing, it doesn't make any sense.

Even that doesn't make sense.

But above all, Paul says, the thing that makes the least amount of sense is the way that you're living.

Your morals, your convictions that guide your life.

Verse 31 I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I die every day.

What do I gain if humanly speaking I fought with beasts at Ephesus, if the dead are not raised?

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

Do not be deceived.

Bad company ruins good morals.

Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning, for some have no knowledge of God.

And I say this to your shame.

Paul points to his his own life.

And he says, My life would make no sense if there's no resurrection from the dead.

And he tells a story about when he was in the city of Ephesus, another ancient city.

And if you go back to the book of Acts, you realize that there in Ephesus, Paul faced an incredible amount of persecution.

And he's saying to them, Why would I endure all of that for a lie?

Why would I endure all of that for something that's not going to happen?

That is foolish.

Why would I go through suffering and hardship and pain and persecution if there's no resurrection from the dead?

My way of life makes no sense if there's no resurrection.

And then he says, not only for myself, but also for you.

As a Christian, you're going to make certain kinds of decisions.

You're not going to do certain kinds of things.

You're not going to seek to do immoral things, and you're going to seek to do moral things.

Why?

Why would I do this if you're just going to die at the end?

Here's the idea.

Think of it this way.

If death is the end, if death is the end, and you live a terrible life, what happens to you?

You die.

That's right.

Now, think of it this way.

If you live a really good life, a really moral life, a really upstanding life, and you pay all the price that comes with trying to live a moral life, what happens to you at the end of your life?

You die.

Does that land for anybody?

If you live poorly or you live well, what happens to you?

You die.

Where's the incentive to live well?

I end up in the same place anyway.

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

You might as well go get your pleasure now, because death's coming.

Whether you live well or live poorly.

Why do we live the way we live if there's no resurrection?

So he gives some counterfactuals again.

And then the next thing he does in responding to the Corinthians is he says that the resurrection is an entirely reasonable belief.

It's not irrational to believe in the resurrection.

And he's going to give a few different examples to prove his point.

It's not a flight of fancy, it's not like a Christian is being somehow foolish or being deceived or being tricked to believe in the resurrection.

It's an entirely reasonable set of beliefs to hold.

And he gives some metaphors, some illustrations to help them.

And he talks here about how bodies differ and change.

And bodies are different and they can change.

And the first example he gives is of a seed turning into a plant or a tree.

A seed has a certain kind of body.

In the ancient world, bodies just referred to the physical structure of something.

And Paul says, look, a seed has a certain kind of body.

And what do you have to do with a seed?

Where do you put it?

In the ground.

And what happens to it?

It dies.

But when it dies, it becomes something greater than itself.

It actually takes on a new body.

If you this is a great experiment to do, very simple experiment.

If you looked at an acorn and you had never known that acorns turn into oak trees, if you looked at an acorn, would you ever think that's going to become an oak tree?

No, you would never think that that small little nut would become this giant tree.

But this is Paul's argument.

This thing, this small seed or nut or acorn, you put it in the ground, it dies, and it takes on a new body.

It gets a new glorious body.

It differs and it changes.

And he goes on to talk about other bodies as well.

Animals and heavenly objects like the sun, moon, and stars.

And they differ in glory.

And he goes on to say, verse 42, so it is with the resurrection of the dead.

This same pattern holds.

It's not irrational to believe that bodies can differ and change.

It's an entirely rational belief.

So it is with the resurrection of the dead.

One day, they're going to put your body in the ground just like a seed.

And then one day, out from the ground, a new body is going to come just like a seed does.

It's an entirely reasonable belief to hold, Paul is telling them.

And then he talks about the story of Adam and Christ again.

He goes back to this story.

And he tells us that Adam's body, he calls him the man of dust.

And he's pointing back to Genesis chapter 2, in which we're told about how Adam was formed.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

And if you remember the story in Genesis chapter 2, Adam is formed out of the dust of the earth.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

His body is made from earth stuff, from the mud and the muck.

That's where his body came from.

That's where it originated.

And that body is going to go back to where it came from.

From dust to what?

To dust.

From dust to dust.

And then he says, but Christ is the man from where?

From heaven.

His body actually originates from a different location.

He's the man from heaven.

And then he goes on to say this: look, right now, all of you, you have Adam's body.

It's from the dust.

It's earth stuff.

It decays, it decomposes, it stretches.

Right now, like my tummy has stretched over the last few years.

That body, it has a kind of glory, just like a seed has a kind of glory.

But it's going to be planted in the ground, and then it's going to receive a new kind of glory.

A greater glory.

It's, as Paul says, we will bear the image of the man from heaven.

Our bodies will be, as Paul says in Philippians chapter 3, verse 21, our bodies will be like his glorious body.

Philippians 3:21

It's a fascinating image that Paul uses.

Now, how many of you, when you look at an acorn, are like, wow, that's incredible?

None of you.

Right?

Nobody thinks an acorn is incredible.

Now, how many of you have seen a glorious oak tree?

There's some oak trees, even here in the area, and these trees, they spread out and they're incredible.

They're vast, they're powerful, they're strong.

And all of that came from that little unimpressive acorn.

And Paul is saying that you start as one and you become the other.

You had the body of the man of dust, but you're going to receive the body of the man of heaven.

It's reasonable, in other words, to believe in the resurrection.

And the sixth and final part of Paul's argument is he's going to tell them a secret.

We see it there starting in verse 50.

The last part of Paul's response, let me tell you a secret, he says.

Starting in verse 50, I tell you this, brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Behold, I tell you a what?

Mystery.

That word mystery, it just means secret.

I tell you, a mystery.

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed.

He crescendos at the end of his argument, and he tells them the end of the story.

Let me remind you, you as a Christian know how the story all ends.

And it is the sudden and dramatic defeat of death.

In a moment, Paul says, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, we shall all be changed.

You see, in the other story, the immortality of the soul story, there's no end.

There's no end of the story.

People die, and their souls ascend to some spiritual plane, maybe we'll call that heaven.

But the story just keeps on going.

People are born, they die, they go to heaven, and it just keeps on going over and over, and there's no end.

But Paul says in this story, there's an end to the story.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, death will be finally and suddenly defeated.

And because of this, because of this secret, because you know the end of the story, Paul says, be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain.

Because you know of the resurrection, it means your life and your decisions, your choices matter.

How you live matters.

If there's no resurrection, it doesn't matter.

Go live however you want, because tomorrow you're gonna die.

But if there is a resurrection, all of a sudden how you live matters.

And Paul says, therefore, be steadfast, be immovable, always abound in the work of the Lord.

Paul's concern for the Corinthians, if this teaching about no resurrection starts to spread, is ultimately people will give up on living the Christian life.

Why would I live this way?

If there's no resurrection, why would I live this way?

And so Paul closes his argument saying, there is a resurrection, and because of that, you should continue living the way that I've instructed you to live.

So Paul responds to this broken idea in Corinth.

But I want to do just a few takeaways from this.

A few takeaways.

So what does this all mean for us here at Mission Hills Church in the 21st century?

Well, the first takeaway is that the resurrection is more than the immortality of the soul.

As you can see, it's been several weeks since I've used PowerPoint, and apparently I've lost my capacity to edit.

That's the Latin word, apparently, I don't know, for resurrection.

Resurrectionis.

I don't know.

The resurrection is more than the immortality of the soul.

Here's what I want to say to us here at Mission Hills.

There is a very popular Christian idea that many, many, many Christians hold implicitly, maybe not explicitly, but implicitly.

And the belief is something like this.

I place my faith in Jesus, and then I go to heaven when I die.

How does that sound?

Most of you are like, that sounds right.

Is that not right?

I place my faith in Jesus and I go to heaven when I die.

Now, that's not entirely wrong, just so you're you know sitting there, those of you who may be anxious, it's not entirely wrong.

Paul does teach this that when you die, you are absent from the body and you're present with the Lord.

But if that's the only story, then that is a story with no hope.

If that's the only story, then that is a story with no hope.

Why?

Because death isn't defeated in that story.

You die and you go to heaven.

What happens to death?

Still there, still killing people, death still swallowing life after life after life after life.

Death is never defeated in the ascending of my soul to heaven, into God's presence.

That's something more like evasion.

Death is evaded, or death is escaped from.

That's more like the story.

It's something, if you just die and then go to heaven, and then that's it, that's something more like this.

You've lost the battle and you retreat back to a safe place.

But the enemy that you were fighting, he's too powerful.

If that's the only story you believe as a Christian.

For many Christians, the resurrection of the dead at the end of history, that final and sudden dramatic defeat of death, it's kind of irrelevant.

Like, well, that's nice that it happens, but I'm in heaven.

Everything's chill up there.

So I that's great that that happens, but it's kind of irrelevant to my story.

But for Paul, for Paul, this is the heart of the story.

If you don't believe in the resurrection, you don't believe in the defeat of death.

And if you don't believe in the defeat of death, what you are actually saying is that death is a rival power to God.

That God Himself does not or cannot defeat death.

Now, I'm going to use an illustration from Harry Potter.

And for those of you who may be angry or upset with me about me using an illustration from Harry Potter, you can email me at pastoradam at missionhillschurch.org.

Okay.

If you stick with me here, I think this will come together.

In the story of Harry Potter, there's an arch villain.

His name is Voldemort.

His name literally means to run from death.

Voldemort's the big bad guy.

He's the enemy.

And also, if you're if you've never read or seen the movies, like it's been 25 years, so I'm going to spoil the end of the movies here for you.

And that's more on you than it is me.

Okay, so at the end of the story, there's a final conflict between Voldemort and Harry Potter.

And Voldemort kills Harry Potter.

He dies.

And he goes to somewhere called King's Cross Station.

That's Dumbledore, that's how I hope to look one day.

He goes right to kind of a heavenly train station, a transition point where he would go on to the next life.

Now, if the Harry Potter story ended here, Harry Potter dies and he goes on.

He goes to heaven.

If that's where the Harry Potter story ends, if you were a reader of the story, you'd be like, what is going on?

This is a terrible story.

Because what happened to Voldemort?

He won! He defeated Harry.

And now he goes on to take control and take power.

He's victorious.

He's triumphant.

And Harry just goes on.

He quote goes to heaven when he dies.

What makes the story of Harry Potter so compelling is what happens to Harry Potter.

He comes back from where?

From the dead.

There you go.

There's your spoiler alert.

Harry Potter rises from the dead.

He comes back from the dead and he does what?

He defeats Voldemort.

He defeats the enemy.

He defeats death.

If you as a Christian believe that the story is only I die and then go to heaven, that leaves death in charge of our world.

And Paul says that is a story without hope.

And this is why, as a Christian, What we believe is not just that your spirit goes to heaven when you die, but Paul will say that you are further clothed.

At the end of history, all the dead will be raised.

You will receive a resurrection body.

Because what is at the heart of the Christian story is not just that you go to heaven when you die, but that God defeats death.

That's why Paul says that the last enemy to be defeated is who?

Is death.

And why he ends his message in a triumph.

Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?

Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ, who gives us the what?

The victory.

The Christian story is not about escaping or evading or retreating from death.

It is about defeating death.

It is about the almighty triumph of God over the great dark and evil powers of our world.

It is about victory and triumph.

So, as a Christian, you don't just go to heaven when you die.

Let me just assure you, those of you who are like, where do I go?

When you die, yes, you do go into God's presence.

But that's not the final part of the story.

At the end, when the trumpet sounds, your body will be raised imperishable.

You will receive a body like Christ's own glorious body.

And death will be no more.

This is the great promise of Revelation 21.

There will be no more death.

So, our first takeaway.

The resurrection is more than the immortality of the soul.

Our second takeaway, lit.

I don't know what's going on here.

That is not an English word.

Maybe that's a Pakistani word.

I don't know.

Now as you will live then.

Live now as you will live then.

Live now as you will live then.

Let me just finish by saying it this way.

The resurrection is true.

What it means is that you will live a life to come of perfect love and of perfect freedom.

That's what stands before you in the future.

And what Paul says when he says, be steadfast and be immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

What he's saying is, live now as you will live then.

If you're gonna live then a life of perfect love and freedom, start living that now.

And you might say, well, that's hard.

Or you might say, well, what's the point of living that way if I'm already gonna live that way then?

Well, let me let me reply to you this way.

Would you like to be less loving now?

Would you like to be less free now?

Would you say, you know what, I just love slavery.

I love addiction.

It's so fun, it's so good for my soul to be addicted to things and not be able to stop things that I wish I could stop.

How many of you have ever said that in your life?

Zero.

Right?

How many of you wake up each morning and you're like, today I want to be less loving?

That's my goal.

No.

So live now as you will live then.

To use Paul's other words, pursue love now.

Because that's the life you're gonna live forever.

You are gonna live in love with one another forever and ever.

So now's a good time to get started on it.

Start living the life of your resurrection now.

Let's pray.

Father, as we hold this passage of scripture for ourselves.

First, I want to acknowledge, Lord, that you have called into our room some perhaps who have not believed in the resurrection, either of Jesus or their own.

If that's you, if you're here this morning and you are convicted for the first time that the resurrection is in fact true.

Not only Jesus', but your own.

This morning the invitation comes to you to place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, right here, right now.

The Bible says it this way: if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

So now is the moment for you to place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Right there where you said, Lord, I believe that Christ rose from the dead and through him I will rise.

Father, for those of us here who have placed our faith in Jesus, who I pray for those of us who have said, This is what I want my life to be about, that this morning the resurrection would work its way deep inside of us, so that we would be a people that are steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

That we would be a people who live with great hope, even in the midst of hardship and loss and difficulty and pain, that we would continue in a life of steadfastness, knowing that our labor is not in vain.

That you would make us a sturdy people in hope.

That you would make us a stubborn people in hope.

And Father, for those who have had trouble holding on to this belief, maybe who have doubted, or maybe who just not seen it as meaningful, I pray that today you would work in their hearts by your Spirit to convict them of the truth of the resurrection.

And Father, I commend and commit this church to you for its good and for your glory.

And I pray this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Thank you so much for listening to the Sermon Podcast from Mission Hills Church in San Marcos, California.

We pray that this message blesses you as you love God and love others.

If you would like more information about our church, please visit us at missionhillschurch.org.

God bless.