Well, throughout this fall, we have been looking at Romans 8, verses 29 and 30, which are often referred to as the golden chain of salvation. And today we come to the final link in that chain, the final phase of God's long-range plan for all those who belong to him. Romans 8.29 says, For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. I think you know that artists and craftspeople are often described as adding finishing touches to their work, final details that complete and enhance what they have fashioned with their hands. And Paul's words in Romans chapter eight refer to the finishing touches that God brings to the salvation process that he began in eternity past. It's the finish line of salvation. It is the final blessing and benefit that belongs to all who believe in Jesus. The goal to which all God's children were predestined and the eternal purpose of our Father is glorification. Those whom He predestined, He also called. And those whom He called, He also justified. And those whom He justified, He also glorified. This morning we worship God for what he gives us in Christ and for what we joyfully anticipate, the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. As we do so, I want to focus with you on two questions in particular. First, what does it mean to be glorified? And then secondly, when will this glorification take place? To help us get our bearings on these two questions, I wanna ask you please to open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. 1 Corinthians 15, it's on page 962 if you wanna use one of the Bibles in the seat rack in front of you. We're going to begin reading in verse 50 and read through verse 55. So please give your attention to the reading of God's word. First Corinthians 15 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 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 be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 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. Oh, death, where is your victory? Oh, death, where is your sting? This is God's living word for us today and what a magnificent passage, what a passage packed full of promises. The glorification of the believer refers to a future moment when all who are in Christ will receive resurrection bodies, bodies that are not subject to death and decay. You know, no matter what shape you are in and how careful you are to maintain good physical discipline over your diet and your exercise and your sleeping habits, your body is subject to the natural effects of the aging process. Even though the human body is renewed every seven years, that does not prevent its aging, its deterioration, and its eventual deaths. Sorry to have to break that news to you this morning, but anyone who's lived long enough knows this is the way things are. And I'll tell you, anybody who hasn't lived long enough is likely to believe that this process may happen to everyone else, but it's not gonna happen to me. Yeah, didn't we all think that once? Well, the time will tell. The body, the human body is perishable, and according to Paul, it cannot inherit the imperishable. Our current bodies are suited and equipped for life on earth. They are not suited and equipped for life in heaven. Just like our own bodies, Jesus' earthly body was comprised of flesh and blood. And just as is the case in what will happen to our bodies, Jesus' body also had to be transformed before he could return to his Father. Our bodies must be made different in order for us to inherit heaven. Backing up just a few verses for where we began reading a moment ago in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul uses imagery from the world of agriculture to tell us that our current bodies are sown as natural bodies, but they are raised as spiritual bodies. Look back to verse 42. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, 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 a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Think of it. You plant a dried-up, hard kernel of seed corn, and what do you get? You get a corn stalk with many fresh ears of corn. You plant a dried, worn-out old body, and what do you get? What emerges? What emerges in its place but a brand-new spiritual body? It is not your current body that will enter the life of the world to come. Neither the living nor the dead will go into the kingdom as they are when Christ returns. Both must be changed. Note what Paul says again in verse 51, but we shall all be changed. And again, at the end of verse 52, we shall be changed. writing elsewhere in Romans chapter 8 verse 23, Paul describes the great moment of glorification we're talking about this morning with these words, he says, we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Every time you groan as you bend down to pick up whatever it is you've so clumsily dropped on the floor, and every grunt that comes out of you as you struggle and strain to get yourself up out of a chair, it's all part of a universal symphony of sighing and groaning that goes on throughout creation as it waits to be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God." That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? So when will this happen? Like the psalmist cries out to the Lord, how long, O Lord, how long? This amazing moment that all who belong to Christ look forward to with such eager expectation does not happen at the moment of our death. All who die in the Lord before Christ comes back have the assurance of 2 Corinthians 5 verse 8 that to be absent from or away from the body is to be at home with the Lord. When our spirits leave our bodies, they are made perfect in holiness and they pass immediately into the presence of the Lord. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, which is a very excellent summary and pulling together of biblical truth on many, many different important doctrinal titles, it speaks of this in this way. It says, the souls of believers are, at their death, made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory. And their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection. So no matter how glorious the transformation is that takes place for the people of God when they die, no matter how true Paul's words are for us in Philippians 1.23, that to depart and be with Christ is far better than anything that we can possibly experience in this life. The glorious transformation all believers experience at death is not the final state of glorification that Paul pictures for us here in 1 Corinthians 15. Look back to verse 54 of our text for this morning. 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. The moment of our glorification is synonymous with the moment when death is swallowed up in victory. Glorification is inseparably linked with the destruction of death itself. So when is that? When does that take place? The Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 15, 26 that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Though we as believers do not need to live in the fear of death, that does not eliminate the fact that death is an enemy. Death is not what God designed for us. Death is the wages of sin. The redemption Jesus secured for his people is a redemption not only from sin, but also from the consequences of sin. Death will not be swallowed up in victory until Christ returns. And at that very moment that death is swallowed up in victory, we will put on immortality. Our spirits will be clothed in our new glorified sin-proof bodies. Can you imagine living in a sin-proof body? I cannot wait. Death will have no further power to inflict harm. Death and all of its apparent victories will be undone for God's children. What looks like a victory for death and like a defeat for us when our bodies die and decay will ultimately be reversed so that it is death itself that will die in defeat, and our new bodies will live forever in victory. Glorification is the complete, final redemption of our whole body and spirit. Glorification results in us being fully and finally conformed to the image of our risen, exalted, glorified Lord Jesus Christ as Jesus transforms our lowly body to be like his glorious body. In their original perfect state, Adam and Eve live with the wholeness and the completeness, the freedom and the joy that comes from having the synthesis of a perfect soul housed in a perfect body. And during the days of the early church and even in various kinds of false teaching that continue right up to this moment, there emerged a misguided notion that evil is rooted in the physical or the material world. Such teaching argues that the body is bad and the spirit is good. And in order for us to be fully free, we have to be emancipated from all of our entanglements with the body. The immaterial soul must overcome the degrading influences of the fleshly body. However, all such false teaching is at odds with the fact that God created man and woman with both a body and a soul and pronounced both together as being very good. So quite to the contrary of what false teachers maintain, sin has its origin and has its seat in our spirits. Look, back in Genesis, it says, Eve saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. Before Eve ever took a bite of the fruit, before Eve ever ate of it, Eve's mind and Eve's spirit were corrupted by Satan. Only after Eve ate of the fruit was her body plunged into corruption. But in glorification, God rolls all of that back, rolls us back to our original default conditions, making us what we were designed to be, a perfect synthesis of body and soul. When this happens, Paul says, we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. This will not be a long, sustained, drawn-out process. It is instant. It is a supernatural metamorphosis that is an instantaneous recreation from one form to another, from earthly to heavenly. The word that Paul uses for moment is the Greek word atomos, from which we get our word atom, something that is too small to be cut or something indivisible. The Holy Spirit inspires Paul to use this word to picture the tiniest amount of time possible. It is the smallest possible amount of time in which our perishable bodies will be made imperishable. It's interesting to contemplate that the first century mind and the language in which the New Testament is written did not have any categories to understand what scientists would later discover about the structure of the atom and the sub-particles contained in it, the electrons and the protons and the neutrons. But as you well know, science has learned how to split or divide the atom to harness the power that results from such splitting and such power can be power for evil, power to destroy as in the atomic bomb or it can be power to accomplish positive purposes such as the case with nuclear power. And this is not what the text is getting at. I just want to imagine with you for a moment, imagine the force of power that is unleashed in that atomos, in that twinkling of an eye as God changes your earthly, perishable, corruptible body into a spiritual, imperishable, incorruptible body in a moment. in the twinkling of an eye. You know, the eye moves faster than any other visible part of the body. And Paul's point for us here is that this change will be extremely fast. It will be instantaneous. And now for what is, at least to me, one of the most incredible dimensions about what the Bible teaches concerning our glorification is the fact that glorification is something that all Christians will experience together at the same identical moment. Saints from every time throughout history, saints from every conceivable corner of the globe, all the believers in the Bible, the great catalog of the faithful saints in Hebrews 11, us, those who have yet to come to faith in Christ, those who are yet unborn, no one will get to the finish line of salvation ahead of anyone else. Unless we remain alive until Christ raptures His Church, all of us will die at different times. Each of us has an appointed day on which we will die. Psalm 139.16 says, So death is very individual. In terms of the timing of our death, there is a distinction. But in terms of the timing of our glorification, no one has any advantage over anyone else, because glorification is a corporate experience. We will all be glorified with Christ together. Together we will simultaneously become the pure, undefiled, spotless bride of Christ. Just as was the case when God simultaneously elected us to salvation and simultaneously secured our salvation when Christ died and rose again, so too it will be as a body, as a unified whole, that the redeemed of the Lord will be glorified together. We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. Together, we were redeemed in Christ by the blood of the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world. Together, we were made alive with Christ and raised up with Him and seated with Him in the heavenly places. And together, When Christ comes again in glory, he will present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish. The glorification of God's people will happen the same moment that the Father reveals the full extent of the exaltation and the glorification of the Son. Glorification is an event which will affect all the people of God together at the same moment. Glorification will bring to final fruition the purpose and the grace which God gave us in Christ before the ages began. The hope of all Christian believers is centered in this moment, in the second coming of Christ. And that's what we are waiting for. That's what Paul calls our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. This is why week after week we end our services with an echo of a one-word prayer in 1 Corinthians 16, 22. The one-word prayer, Maranatha, which simply means, come, Lord. And we respond with an affirmation of faith. Yes, it could be today. Even as we come to the Lord's table in a few moments and we hear once again the familiar words, for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. We are reminding ourselves that our shared hope, our shared expectation, the shared anticipation we all have is glorification with Christ. Are you waiting for this moment with confidence? Are you waiting for this moment with unspeakable joy? I know there is so much about this life that is hard to take. There's so much that can wear us down, trials and testings and temptations and viruses and voting. But sometimes our sorrows pile up and it just feels like our spirits within us are being swallowed up and that life is being slowly drained out of us one drip, drip, drip at a time. The Apostle Peter knew all about that. Peter lived and ministered in a tumultuous time in church history, a time that was marked by intense persecution and distress. But what does Peter write to us about how we are to face this? Peter says, Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you, but rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. I urge you brothers, sisters, beloved, develop a confident assurance about what lies ahead for you as you wait for the moment when you and all Christendom will be glorified in a moment. in the twinkling of an eye. Look forward to the moment when death will be swallowed up in victory. Look forward to the moment when you will be united with your imperishable, incorruptible resurrection body. Look forward to the eternal privilege and opportunity you will have as one who will be able to give unending and unhindered praise and worship to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory now and forever. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, thank you. Thank you for the fact that you have given us this word and that you have given us this hope. And Lord, you have called us to it and you have prepared us for it. And Lord, you continue to do your work in our lives to make us to be conformed to the image of Christ. We pray that you would help us to hold on to this and that we would continue to encourage one another in every way. Lord, that we would continue to have a forward orientation that is looking forward, eager and excited about the coming of this great day. We pray that you would just continue to help us to help one another to hold on to this when life is hard, when challenges are great, when the time seems like we just can't endure or bear one more thing or one more day. Lord, help us to come back to this truth and help us to be refreshed and to be renewed by it, even as we come now to your table for the refreshment and the renewal that comes into our lives through the receiving and sharing of these elements. In Jesus' name, amen.