"The Sanctifying Weight of Glory" 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Read our passage for us.

2 Corinthians 4, verses 16, 17, and 18.

2 Corinthians 4:16

Paul writes, so we do not lose heart.

Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.

For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

It is a relatively new phenomenon in church history, what you have in the American church today, that so prizes youth in the church.

There's this idea in the American church right now that the mark of a strong and healthy church is a church with lots of young people, a strong and healthy youth movement.

And I think part of that is kind of our American consumeristic culture where TV shows that have high viewership and that demographic are more successful than others, and you know, advertisers think that people in that age group spend more money, more income, or whatever.

And so that has trickled down into the church.

I think some of it is these uh wringing hands kind of stories or books that people write about how if you know if the church doesn't change its ways, it'll cease to exist in ten years.

If you don't look more like the world is what they all have in common.

If you don't look more like the world or you know, play my son's favorite song, then the church will die.

I'm exaggerating a little bit with that, that last part.

And I I mentioned this just because it's so unique in church history.

Through most of church history, the mark of a strong church wasn't a vibrant presence of youth, but a vibrant presence of the elderly.

You want to find a strong church, you look for those who have lots of old people at it.

Because there you'll find maturity.

There you'll find people that have walked with Jesus for 50, 60 years rather than those who maybe you're just trying things out.

You know, there's a thing about a church that caters after or pursues a kind of young vibe to it is it almost inherently has to go after some form of immaturity.

Because you're trying to create a church that draws the immature, and I don't mean immature with any kind of disrespect, I mean lack of life experiences.

People who are doing things for the first time versus people who've been doing things for for decades.

And the result is, you know, a young adults movement in the church, and many people who identify as young adults are older than Jesus was when he died.

It's ironic.

But there's a certain sense of maturity and gravitas in a church that is marked by the elderly.

Not people that are coming to church maybe because there's an attractive girl there, or coming to church because their boss goes there, or maybe just for even good reasons, like they've heard about Jesus and they want to, you know, follow him and and and see what this is all about, kind of thing.

And the church draws a lot of people that are like that, but there's something about the decades that sift those people out.

And when you find somebody who's been going to church faithfully for 40 or 50 years with a love for Christ, you've kind of got over the whole, we're just checking this thing out to see how it is phase.

You're in the you've built a life in the church kind of phase.

I mentioned that just to draw to your attention how intoxicating the appeal for youth can be.

Not just at a church level, but at a as a personal level.

Our culture has kind of baked into us this idea that youth is not immature, but that youth is good.

And the word immature morphs to the word cool and loses his negative connotations and takes on positive connotations, and there's this idea that you want to be young.

It's as if Ponce de Leon is still exploring.

And you're, by the way, are you still aging.

The fountain of youth hasn't been found, and you're getting older.

Let me tell you a sobering fact.

At the end of this sermon, you will be an hour older than when it started.

Will you be any wiser?

I don't know.

You can let me know.

Let me give you an outline as we tackle this passage.

Four sanctifying contrasts between glory and glamour.

Four sanctifying contrasts between glory and glamour.

Because there's a tension there between maturity and immaturity, between internal beauty and external presence or pretense.

There's a war, really, between a spiritual world and a physical world.

And it is played out in our bodies, it is played out in our longings, it is played out by how we view the world.

In this passage here, verses 16, 17, and 18 in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, lay out this tension.

2 Corinthians 4 · chapter mention

I read it a second ago, but I just want to draw your eyes to the reality in these three verses that almost every word is fighting with the word next to it.

Everything in this passage is in contrast.

I mean, look at it again.

We don't lose heart.

That's Paul's introduction.

We talked about that phrase last week, but though our outer self is in contrast with our inner self.

Wasting away is in contrast with being renewed day by day.

Light is in contrast, contrast with weight, momentary with eternal, affliction with glory, seen in verse 18 with unseen, transient with eternal again.

It's this constant pull.

You have a choice to put on glasses.

Are you gonna see what's on the outside or are you gonna see what's on the inside?

Are you gonna live your life in the pursuit of youth or in the pursuit of maturity?

You've you've got to choose.

Let's work out these contrasts here first.

The working of glory.

The first contrast is the working of glory.

And you see this pull in here between wasting away and renewing.

I mean, clearly this little section here is about, in general terms, the aging process.

Paul says in verse 16, though our outer self is wasting away.

He's speaking of the fact that he is growing older.

In chapter 5, verse 1, the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed.

Verse 2, in this tent we groan.

He's speaking of the fact that people get older.

Things you used to be able to do well, you can't do anymore.

Used to be able to beat your kids in soccer to choose just a random example, and they get older and better, and you get older and worse.

Somebody commented to me, Oh, your daughters are growing up so fast.

And I say, I, you know, I keep telling them to stop.

And my oldest Madison looks at me and says, Dad, you're acting like you're not gonna have an 11-year-old daughter in a few months.

Keep it up, girl, and I won't.

We get older and we hurt, and you know, we take up running and then we hurt our ankles.

We go on diets, we do all kinds of things to try to maintain some semblance of youth, and of course it doesn't work, and we just age.

300 million cells in your body die every minute.

Just to help you out there.

It's 70 billion a day to help you with the math.

And you're dying, and you get to the point in your life where those cells stop renewing, and you just decay, you get get smaller, and your lungs stop working right, and your body shuts down.

This is the aging process, and this is what Paul is describing here.

His earthly tent is being destroyed in verse 16.

His outer self is wasting away.

Now, everyone is going through this.

That's natural to go through this.

Every human being goes through this.

And Paul is speaking about what's real for all of us, the aging process.

But there's a special spiritual dynamic at play also here that Paul's aging process is being accelerated with the trials and persecutions that he's going through.

The Corinthians are making him older.

And you know this sometimes as parents, you can be exasperated and feel like, you know, you kids are driving me to my grave.

That's what was happening with Paul from the Corinthians.

They were driving him, dragging him to his grave.

They were, they were bringing him down.

They were heaping opposition on him, heaping uh scorn on him, and he was internalizing it.

You know, we we say that the, we like to say the persecution rolled off his back like water off a duck's back, so to speak.

But in some senses it did, and you'll see an example of that later on in this passage, but in a real sense, it was hurting him.

He had nights sleeping, he'll describe later, nights where he couldn't sleep because of all that he was going through with them.

And you get this that he's being persecuted from the world, he's being five times whipped by 39 lashes, his back is all scarred because of this.

He's been shipwrecked and left to die in the Mediterranean, and he had somehow lived.

He's been beaten nearly to death and left outside of the Thessalonica gates and thinking that he would be dead there.

He's been abused.

This man has been starved to the brink of death a few times.

He's been left naked and cold a few times.

His body is broken because of opposition to him, and in a sense, he can deal with that, but now he's getting it from other Christians who are saying, Who are you?

Who are you?

He's having a, you could, I don't want to use an anachronistic term, but a kind of midlife crisis here.

Or he has poured so much of his life into the church, and now he's old and he feels like he's gonna die.

And how old is Paul here?

He's probably in his late 50s, maybe.

He doesn't feel like he has much gas in the tank left here, and he's starting to ask himself has this mattered?

Has all of his persecutions, which he says he bore for the sake of the church, has all of those persecutions produced fruit when the church he loves is turned against him.

His hair is gray or gone, his bones are fragile, his back is scarred.

And the Corinthians are accusing him of all kinds of things.

They say, You're a liar, and he says, No, I'm not.

They say you're callous, he says, No, I'm not.

You don't have sympathy, yes, I do.

You don't love us.

My heart, he's gonna say in chapter 7, verse what, two or four, my heart stands open to you.

Verse 2, my heart stands open.

He's telling him, I love you, and these things you're saying aren't true.

And then they tell him you're weak.

And how is he supposed to defend himself against that?

He is weak.

He spent time in prison and not the kind of posh upstate Pennsylvania prison where banking executives go.

The kind of prison where you're chained to a guard, and there's other criminals in there, and there's the common toilet in there, and there's rats, and there's no daylight, and it's damp.

And the I mean, the prison he was in right along the Mediterranean Sea.

This is not a healthy place for him.

He's dying in there.

And they say, You're too weak.

What's he supposed to do?

No, I'm not.

I got another 10 years left, maybe.

And so he says, You're right.

I am weak.

It is wasting away.

Notice the turn of phrase he uses in chapter 4, verse 7.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay.

So he says, I'm weak.

I'm guilty, guilty of being weak.

I'm broken, I'm not gonna last much longer, but inside of me is a priceless treasure.

Yeah, I'm a privy plot pot, yeah, I'm a clay jar that's at the breaking point.

But I have a precious treasure inside of me, and that's the tension he's at right now.

His outer man is wasting away, his tent is failing.

But he knows the truth that the inner man is being renewed.

There is a precious treasure inside of him.

He knows the truth that he told the Corinthians already in the book of 1 Corinthians.

He says, unless a seed dies, the tree's not gonna grow.

He knows he's gonna die, and he knows that there is a resurrection ahead.

We looked to those verses last week in the middle of chapter 4.

He knows, as he says in verse 12, death is at work at him, but life in the life of a church.

He knows that the Lord Jesus in verse 14 will raise him from the dead.

So he knows that as his outer man fails, his inner man is being.

And the word he uses here in verse 16 is it's being renewed, it's being regenerated, it continually regenerated.

When a person comes to faith in Christ, their dead soul is made alive.

That's the initial work of regeneration the Holy Spirit does.

And then through your Christian life, that Holy Spirit abides in you and is constantly doing his work, constantly making you new.

And so the outer man is getting worse.

And the inner man is getting wiser.

But now, in a spiritual sense, the outer man is being worn down in often cases because of persecution and opposition and gossip and slander and even physical abuse from believers, in this case, but the inner man is getting sanctified and stronger, not just wiser, but more godly.

As the Holy Spirit continually brings new life.

It should be that as you get older, you get godlier.

It should be that the older people are marked by a sense of godliness.

I know that's a general principle.

It's not always true.

There's lots of foolish old people.

But the general trajectory of any believer's life should be increasing godliness.

And listen, we know it's not a straight line, right?

We know your trajectory of godliness in life is not just a straight line from conversion to glory.

There's lots of stumbles and steps and backsliding and fighting and failing.

It looks more like the stock market.

But it's trending up.

Don't take that as investment advice.

Talk to a professional.

But it's trending up.

It should be that as you get older, you get godlier.

You're like an oak tree, a spiritual oak tree, believers are, where every year should add another ring.

Every year to put to death a layer of deadness, put to death sins that you've been dealing with, and grow in your understanding, add rings, new facets of God's character that you've learned, new facets of his glory that you appreciate, and you keep getting more mature.

The truth in this passage is this is all in the indicatives here.

There's not imperatives here.

In other words, this is Paul's just describing what happens.

He doesn't tell you, hey, you want to grow older?

Do these four things.

You'll grow older.

You don't need to say that.

It just happens to you.

I don't need to say it.

It's an application of today's sermon.

Everybody go away and come back next week seven days older.

Go.

It's just gonna happen.

Whether or not you want it to, whether or not you fight against it, whether or not you do anything or do everything, it's gonna get older.

The same truth is at work in you spiritually that you should be growing godlier.

Now, obviously, there's means of godliness.

You're reading the word of God, you have Christian fellowship, you're the means of grace.

It's assumed that a Christian is availing himself of those things, and in light of that, you're growing godlier.

You can't stop the aging process.

Not even whole 30 can do it.

Have you tried paleo?

No.

The same is true with the sanctification process.

You grow if you're a new creation.

It should be that the the older the person is, the more fit they are for glory.

That's this process here.

The second contrast Paul gives you not just the working of glory, but the world of glory.

The world of glory.

There's a visible versus an invisible world.

And they're at tension with each other as well.

Look at verse 18.

We'll get back to verse 17, but look at verse 18 for now.

We look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.

And this is a linguistic puzzle right here, because he's saying we do not look at the things that are seen.

Well, what does that mean?

How do you not look at what you can see?

How do you not look at what you can see?

You have to train yourself.

And instead he says you look at what is invisible.

Well, how can you look at what's invisible?

You have to understand that what can be seen is external.

It is the glamour, it is the youth, it is the glitch, and it is failing, it is fleeting.

Beauty is deceptive.

It is fleeting, Solomon writes.

It doesn't last.

And woe to the person who puts the focus on the externals.

We use the word attractive as if it means anything.

I pity the poor single person who says, I'm single, but I just hope to marry a really, really attractive person.

That's what I'm looking for.

A really attractive person.

She's got to be hot.

That's it.

Oh, you'll have a great marriage for five years.

What a great marriage you'll have.

Was marriage longer than five years?

Oh.

Good luck.

There's just a shallowness of it that you're all aware of that what's on the outside does not last.

And we get that.

We get that.

And yet so often we focus on it anyway.

And it's deceptive.

It's easy to size someone up, you think, by what they look like.

Oh, that person looks young, they look strong, they look wealthy, they look at the car they drive and the clothes they wear.

If they're not successful, they've got a lot of debt.

That's what you can learn from the outside.

And none of it matters.

And this is why Paul himself is going to say it doesn't make sense to look at someone from that perspective.

Again, draw your eyes down to chapter 5, verse 12.

We are not like those in the middle of verse 12 who boast about outward appearance and not what about is in the heart.

Paul says, how silly it would be in chapter 5, verse 12 to boast about what you see on the outside of someone rather than what's on the inside of them.

Chapter 16, or chapter 5, verse 16, look at this.

Now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.

Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

Notice the persecution Paul's going through in his own life, the aging he's going through, has brought some clarity to this, where he says, how silly I used to be that I used to judge people by their external appearances.

And I don't want to make him sound like he's, you know, a California dude here judging people by their car and their, you know, their clothes or whatnot.

Very Middle Eastern mindset could still fall prey to this, judging him by his job or judging him by his education or how many tassels he's got kind of thing.

And oh, he must be a well-learned scholar and esteeming somebody like that.

Or that person is not well-learned.

He's not well educated, he's not from the right town, and so you dismiss those external superficial things.

And Paul used to live like that before he knew Christ.

And notice his little dig in there.

He says, We once knew Christ that way, but now no longer.

In other words, if you want to judge people by the outside, go for it.

But know that that's the same method of judgment that led to people murdering Jesus.

They summed him up by his externals, they sized him up by how he looked, by where he was from, what his education was like, and so they killed him.

So Paul says, I'm not doing that anymore.

Back in chapter 4, verse 18, I'm not going to look at the things that are seen.

This is the essence of faith.

Faith is the ability to see the invisible, to see the spiritual reality that lays behind.

I you know those 3D drawings that used to be popular, you would have to look at, and it just looks like dots, and you get your eyes to go crossways.

And oh, boom, a picture.

I had a dentist that had one of the roof.

Of the stealing.

So she's, you know, drilling them.

Go cross eye.

Oh, a dolphin.

Neat.

That's what you have to train yourself to do, Paul's saying.

You have to get your eyes to see what is invisible, and you recognize that that is where the action is.

I said there's no imperative in here, but that word look at the beginning of verse 18, it's as close as you get to one.

I mean, that's the really the only mandate here, what you're supposed to be doing, is don't look at things that are visible.

Instead, look at the unseen things.

Because you recognize that's where the Lord is at work.

The third contrast here: the wealth of glory.

You've seen the working of glory, the world of glory, now the wealth of glory.

Transient versus eternal.

Verse 18, the last part.

The things that are seen are transient.

They're fleeting.

They don't last.

They don't last.

It's not a lot of good for you.

It's gone.

And that's what your body is like.

It's not very helpful for you.

It's gonna go away.

It's gonna go away.

What you can see is what's not going to last.

1 Corinthians 7, verse 31.

1 Corinthians 7:31

Versus emerized.

The present form of this world is passing away.

The present form of this world is not going to last much longer.

It's on its way out the door.

Hebrews 12, verse 26, Paul says, God's going to shake the earth, and the things that are visible will be destroyed.

Hebrews 12:26

But then he goes on to say, Praise God, that we are not inheriting a kingdom that is visible right now.

We receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Jesus says, store it for yourself treasure, not on earth, where moths can get it and rust can destroy it and thieves can steal it.

Don't devote yourself to focusing on the externals and storing up earthly treasure.

Rather, store it for yourself, treasure in heaven, where there's no rust.

There's no water damage in heaven.

A thief isn't going to sneak into heaven and steal your treasure.

And so you live for the next life, not this life.

You use your resources, your money, your assets, your time, your gifts to advance the kingdom, the spiritual world, not to build a home here in the physical world.

I mean, what are you doing?

The things that are seen are so transient.

So transient.

It goes away.

Things that are special now won't be tomorrow.

Did a yard sale with some neighbors yesterday, and there's a wooden centerpiece that they made many, many years ago, and it was a centerpiece in their home for many years in the middle of their family room, and their family grew up around this.

It was a wooden duck the guy made.

It was really cool, actually.

And uh it was on the table in their living room for their whole their whole life, and their kids grew up in the house and went away, and now they're moving out of the house and five dollars at a garage sale.

Five dollars for the duck.

And you could have had it yesterday if you would have come by.

What lasts?

Of course, the relationships and the family and the time spent there last.

But what really lasts?

You know, you're gonna die, and your kids will remember your name, and your grandkids will remember your name, and your great grandkids will look you up on ancestry.com.

Things that are spiritual become eternal.

Things that are spiritual last.

That's where the the action is.

Transient just means people are going by.

They're going by.

You know, this is a transient church.

People come for a few years and then the military moves them somewhere else.

And we've experienced this.

You become friends with somebody, and your kids become friends, and your wives become friends, and things are great, and then they move.

And the next military family comes in, and you think, should we keep doing this?

And the answer is yes, because you're building families and friendships not just for this world.

And I hope you understand that.

You're building families and friendships for the next world where you'll see people in heaven.

I mean, how great it is that God moves so many people in and out of our church because when you get to heaven, you're gonna know a lot of people there.

Other people that have the same friends their whole life, they're just gonna have a little circle of friends in heaven, but you're gonna know so many people.

If you have that perspective, which requires an eternal perspective, you have to teach your kids and teach yourself.

Listen, this friendship is not just for this world, it's going on straight into forever.

Well, this all leads to the fourth contrast.

This is where the real meat of this passage is: the weight of glory.

You've seen the working of glory, the world of glory, the wealth of glory.

Now the weight of glory.

And here's where these words and tension really pile up with each other.

This light versus weight.

Momentary versus eternal, affliction versus glory.

The word light just means it's so small you don't want to measure it.

It's not even worth measuring.

Think of those bulk food places, and a kid gets one MM out of the jar and goes to the cash treasure.

I'd like to buy this one Eminem.

Well, then I can't even weigh it.

Just take it, it's not even worth weighing.

And that's what Paul says.

That's the word he uses here for his own afflictions.

He says, it's not even worth weighing my afflictions.

Don't even tally them.

Don't even count them.

They don't mean anything, he says.

They don't mean anything.

And you think, how, what kind of afflictions does Paul say don't mean anything?

Think of them.

He's been beaten five times, 39 lashes, shipwrecked twice, left for dead outside of cities.

I mean, he is a crippled man with a scarred back who is dying because of all he's gone through, and he says, Oh, it's nothing.

Don't mention it.

Don't even mention it.

And if you would have gone through one fraction of what he went through, it would have dominated all of your conversations.

It'd be all over your Facebook wall for the next five years.

And I'm sure you know people that like that are just so consumed by their physical illnesses and ailments, and which are serious and are significant, of course, but just notice how quickly Paul dismisses them as light and momentary.

They don't last.

What do you mean momentary?

How long are they gonna last?

The rest of your life.

Paul's not gonna, his back's not gonna heal.

You get that, right?

He's he's gonna go, his body will go into its grave with his scars.

He's not getting stronger as he gets older.

He is decaying, and he says, hey, great, that's just that's only momentary.

It's only as long as this life is.

I remember a lady who was baptized at my the church I was at before, and she went under the water, her wig came off.

And the guy baptizing her didn't know she was wearing a wig.

Learned it right there.

He scoops it up and puts it on her head.

And she turns, yeah, Alex, I don't know how you would have handled it, but that's that's what he did.

And she turns and looks at the microphone and says, it's only vanity, it's only for this life.

It's only for a second.

It's as long as your life is, but it's just a second.

That's what momentary means here.

That's what light means here.

Don't even how do you even time that when you compare it to eternity?

You notice that I had all the other points here, had subpoints of the contrast words, what the comparison is.

This one I don't give you a contrast word.

It's not because I got lazy here, it's because look what Paul says in verse 17.

It's momentary affliction preparing us for eternal weight of glory beyond comparison.

Some translations say not worth comparing, and so the applications don't make the comparison.

It's not worth it.

Glory is so much better than anything you see in this life.

So much better.

This life, the afflictions are light, contrasted with the glory.

And the word glory for weight there in the Old Testament, that's the word they use for glory, the weight of something.

God's weight is his glory.

God's glory is his weight.

It's the sum of who he is.

Now, God's not made of parts.

You can't weigh part of God, you know, you can't weigh one of his attributes.

All of his attributes together are who he is.

That's the being and the essence of God.

He's not divisible.

And so that's why it's a powerful word to describe his glory.

You want to know the glory of God?

It's all of him.

All of him is his glory.

You want to know a boxer's glory?

You look at his record and you weigh him in.

You want to know God's glory?

Look at what he's done and weigh him in.

How big is God?

Who is he?

Let's see what he tips in at.

And it would crush you.

That's the point.

Who God is would crush you.

You can't endure it.

I love C.S.

Lewis's book.

Well, I love his sermon called The Weight of Glory, and he's got allusions to it in his book, The Great Divorce.

If you've read that book, you remember the scene where the guy is transformed from this world into heaven.

He's a tourist there in heaven, and he goes walking in heaven, and the blades of grass go through his feet.

Because heaven, think of how glorious heaven is.

The grass is not going to bend under your earthly feet in heaven.

It doesn't bend for you.

It goes right through you.

Your body cannot endure the weight of glory.

It would just pass right through you.

Your body can barely endure this world.

You get tired standing.

And your body decays.

And this is the beautiful thing about what Paul's describing here.

The more your body decays, the more your soul is getting ready for the weight of glory.

I know not everybody gets to die in old age and fullness of days at their house, but many people do.

And they lay down.

It should be the case that is, they they lay down and their life is leaving them, and their body has, I mean, their life is over.

They have run the race.

They're dying of old age, as they say.

Their lungs don't work anymore, and their frail body is just can't breathe anymore, and their heart just can't do it anymore, and they just let go.

Their body cannot endure this world.

It should be that at that moment, their soul is so ready for the weight of glory.

They're so longing for heaven.

They're so through all of the suffering of this life and the cancer and the aging process, it just brought their soul.

It's worked out in their soul.

All the things they're going through is worked out into their soul where they want the weight of glory right then.

And that's what God does.

He transforms them through the suffering, through the aging.

He gets them ready for the next life.

So they can walk in the grass in heaven.

Their soul is safe there.

If you were to find yourself in the plains of heaven now, you'd be a ghost.

You'd be out of place.

But God will make you ready for it.

That's what the weight of glory is working inside of you.

It's all of God's glory at work.

You're being prepared for it.

Man, how is that going to affect the way you view your suffering in this life?

You view your suffering not as something to be avoided, but as suffering as something that is going, it's doing something to you.

It's getting you ready for this.

You want that.

You want it.

I mean, nobody wants suffering, but you want to be ready for the way to glory.

You want to be worked out through it.

Now, speaking of the weight of glory, this works the opposite way as well.

God's glory, as I mentioned, is He's not a composite being.

All of His attributes are His glory, his forgiveness and His mercy and His grace.

That's all part of His glory.

And that's what we're looking forward to in heaven.

But the flip side of that is God's justice and his wrath are also part of His glory.

And your physical body cannot endure that either.

Just as your physical body cannot endure the joys of heaven right now, your physical body cannot endure the wrath of hell right now either.

And so those who go to hell will also need a resurrection body.

Not to endure the forgiveness, the glory of forgiveness in heaven, but to endure the wrath of hell.

And I say that just to make this point.

In the same way you can't endure heaven right now, you could not endure hell right now either.

You couldn't drink the cup of God's wrath.

If you held the cup of God's wrath in your hand, it would burn your hand.

You couldn't endure it.

You couldn't hold it.

It would pass right through you, too.

And so marvel that Christ, who was in heaven with all the glories of heaven, was born into a physical body that, again, was not fit for heaven, that did have to walk in this earth.

And that on the cross, as he was dying, he took the cup of God's wrath.

He held it in his hand, and he drank God's wrath.

The cup that you couldn't hold, it would burn you.

He drinks it himself, and he takes on all of God's wrath for your sin, which you again couldn't endure in this life.

Some will endure it in the next, but no one could endure it in this life.

Jesus takes it on in himself.

Not in a superficial way, but God has made him ready and able to take on that wrath.

You couldn't hold the wrath of God.

But he poured it out on the Maker instead.

And as Jesus drank the cup of judgment, he showed that he could endure it.

So that if you put your faith in him, you won't have to.

And instead, God will get you ready for the glory of heaven.

Lord, we're grateful that you are at work transforming us from one degree of glory to the next.

I pray for anyone here this morning who has never trusted you with their life.

I pray that you would awaken a sense of eternity in their hearts this morning.

They would know that as their body goes into the ground in the future, their soul will live forever.

Lord, give them a longing right now to be ready for glory.

Give them a longing right now, I pray, to avoid hell and receive forgiveness through Jesus Christ who took our cup.

We're grateful for him and his resurrection, his resurrection body.

We know that we will be raised in likeness of him to dwell with you forever.

We pray that day would come quickly, and while we're waiting, we pray that you'd work out that glory inside of us.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You have been listening to Emmanuel with Pastor Jesse Johnson.

You can find more resources like this at ibcva.com.

Here is a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibcva.com.

If you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, DC area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emanuel.

We're located in Northern Virginia, and for more information about when and where we worship, check out our church website.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week if you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.