If you would turn in your Bibles to first Corinthians chapter 15 first Corinthians chapter 15 Probably the greatest well, I think it is the greatest treatise on the resurrection and all of the scripture first Corinthians 15 and We won't have time to go through it all tonight But there are a couple of things that I want us to think together about. So I'm going to give you what they are ahead of time, because they're going to be kind of interwoven back and forth. The first one is, why does the resurrection matter? And we know a lot of those answers already. But it's good to think about that and to work through that in our minds and in our hearts. the early church, to them, in all of their creeds and all of the statements that they made, the resurrection figured very, very prominently, perhaps a lot more prominently than when we now preach the gospel. You know, we focus a lot on the cross, and that's right, we should focus on the cross. But the early church focused not only on the cross, but they made a big thing out of the resurrection, and the reason for that is because if you think about it, living in the time that they live, there's the sense in which, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but there's a real sense in which dying on a cross was not a big deal in the sense that there were a lot of people who did it. There was a lot of people who died. Now we can talk about Jesus living a perfect life and we can talk about the miracles that he did and the great things that he said, But dying upon a cross in and of itself, if you don't have a resurrection, that was what the church was built on, the idea that the resurrection actually happened, that it was witnessed. So that's the first thing we want to talk about. Why does the resurrection matter? And the second thing that we're going to think through as we kind of interweave these things back and forth is the physicality of the resurrection. What do I mean by that, the physicality of the resurrection? Well, we'll get into it more, but what we want to understand is that Jesus himself was resurrected with a real physical body. You'll remember that he said, you know, the idea was given at the time when they first saw him, his followers first saw him, and they would say, well, that's a spirit. And Jesus said, well, if this is not a spirit, come and touch me, feel me, see the wounds. Do you have something to eat so that I can demonstrate that I have a physical body? And during this time here at Corinth, even before, we had the Sadducees who would deny that resurrection was possible. And then you had all of the Roman philosophers. You had guys like Plato who would say, yeah, there's a sense in which we go on existing, but it's in a spiritual sense. We exist as spirits. We want to make the point as we think about this tonight, that Jesus' resurrection was a physical one. And we want to think about what that means for us. So as we begin in 1 Corinthians 15, like I said, we're not gonna cover all of this. The first part of this is Paul wants to remind these Corinthians of the gospel here. And so he said, look, I want you to remember what I preached to you and you received it and you stand in it. That's the first verse, unless you believed it in vain. And what he then talks about is I told you that Christ died for your sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried And then on the third day, he was raised in accordance with the scripture. And then he appeared to many, many people, 500 at one time, the apostles. And then lastly, he appeared to Paul himself on the road to Damascus. And now we come to verse 12. So Paul is going to get into this discussion about why does it matter that Jesus was resurrected? he starts this way, verse 12 now. Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? Now, here's the argument. There were people, just like there are in our day, who would say Okay, Jesus was a good guy. He did a lot of miracles. Maybe he did something for sin. Maybe we can rise to a spiritual plane that he rose to after we die. People in our world today, you know, will think a lot about their loved ones who are like these spirits who are floating around and they're kind of with them after they die. All of these things. Well, these things were going on here as well. And the big thing that we have to understand is, and we can fall into this as well, The body was considered to be an evil thing. Physicality, material things were considered to be really evil, not good. And we have the tendency to do that as well, right? We often say, and there's a lot of truth in it, we want We want to go and be with the Lord. So we don't have to be in these bodies anymore because they get old and they break down and they're subject to decay and all those things. And there's a lot of truth in that. But we have to be careful because sometimes what we think about is, well, I'll just be in the last time when I'm resurrected, when the Lord comes, I'll just be a spirit, right? I won't feel any pain. We want to deal with that because that's what Paul was dealing with here. Resurrection, in the sense that Paul is speaking about it here, is not just a continued existence in some sort of spiritual plane. When Paul talks about resurrection, he is talking about real, physical resurrection. First of all, for the Lord Jesus Christ, who is going to call the first fruits, and then secondly for us, which we'll get into. So, verse 13, 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. So this physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ was so very important, not that he was a spirit, not that he continued to exist on some plane, but it was so important that he physically was resurrected that they said, if that's not true, if it's not true that he was resurrected, then I've spent my life preaching a gospel that is false, and what you believe is false, and it's useless, it's worthless, it's a vain." Furthermore, in verse 15, he says, and we're found, which is the most serious charge, that we're going 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. Now, a very, very serious thing to misrepresent God. not taken nearly as seriously in our day sometimes as it should be. To communicate things that God has done or God has said, or to communicate attributes about God that are false or not true, or to kind of slant things a little bit in order to go one direction or another in order to make people believe things is really, really dangerous. And here Paul, he said, if Jesus was not physically raised from the dead, if he didn't have a real body, if he wasn't alive right now, then we've misrepresented God. And then he says, your faith is futile. If Christ hasn't been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Now we know this already, but let's go through it just for a minute. We often talk about our sins being forgiven at the cross, that the cross is where the wrath of God fell on the Lord Jesus Christ for our sin. and that payment was made, and that God was just in doing that, that he lived that perfect life, and that in his death, he was the perfect sacrifice to pay for sin. But if we leave out the resurrection, and I'm guilty of this too, and I've said this before, I think, and still remain guilty of it, so I'm obviously not paying as much attention to it as I need to. Sometimes we will tag the resurrection onto that, but it's almost, it feels like a tag on a little bit. But the reality is, if there is no resurrection, there is no sin. Now, why is that? Well, here's one of the things that we need to remember. We know that in order to be saved, in order to know God in the way that he has blessed us with the opportunity to know him, we must be regenerated. The Spirit of God must quicken us. He must make us alive. Um, and what did Jesus say? If I don't go away, there is no spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't come. So now we already get into resurrection life, even though we haven't died yet, even though we don't have a resurrection bodies, what we see is, is even resurrection life here, where we've been raised from death to life, that's the picture in scripture, right? And we say, well, that's a spiritual picture. Well, that's true. now, but we've been given new hearts. And so if Jesus was not resurrected, if he was not physically resurrected, you are still dead in your sins. You're not saved because the spirit hasn't come. The whole setup in the scripture when Jesus talks about this is that I have to go away so that the comforter can come. And when he comes, he's going to convict the world of judgment and of sin and of righteousness, right? So that was where he was coming. So even resurrection life now, the ability to be born again, the ability to live a new life in Christ is predicated upon the resurrection. Without the resurrection, none of those things can happen. Our sins have not been paid for. Why would Paul say that our sins have not been paid for? Because the resurrection was God's stamp. It was his approval. It was his act to say that the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was sufficient for our sins, to forgive us for our sins, so that we might be forgiven. So if there's no resurrection, there's no forgiveness of sins. He goes further. We're in verse 18 now. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. So it goes further than this. Those who've died in Christ. In other words, those who have died, Paul is saying those who have died, believing, putting their trust, basing their life on this gospel that I have preached. If there is no resurrection, if there's no physical resurrection, a bodily resurrection, they've perished. What is he saying? They've gone to hell. Because all this was a myth. And Jesus' sacrifice was not adequate to forgive sin. And we are still under the wrath of God, and therefore we have still perished. So when we talked about this morning, when Ron said, do we believe that Jesus rose again, that God raised him up, that he was dead and he became a living person? If we don't believe that as though it was fact, and if we don't hold to that, then the gospel that we hold on to, we've lost it. It's worthless. It's useless. It doesn't have any power. It doesn't have any effect. It doesn't have any effect in this life. and it won't have any effect in the next life either. We don't just believe that Jesus is some ethereal spirit, kind of wisp-like figure up in heaven somewhere. He is a person that has a physical nature. Now, we may not understand all about that nature. We're gonna get into that in just a little bit, but we have to believe that he's a physical being right now, that the Son of God has a body. So if Jesus did not rise again, then we're all still in our sins, which means that this meeting tonight and all of these things, studying this scripture, this New Testament, all of this is meaningless. I mean, when we get back together, and Lord willing, that will be soon, maybe, may not be, but when we get back together, we're gonna get back into the book of Acts, right? And we talked about in our introduction introduction to the book of Acts that we could say that it's the acts of the risen Christ, right? Or it's the acts of the Holy Spirit, right? The idea is that Acts is foolishness, it's meaningless, it's all just a fairy tale if there's no resurrection. Okay, the last thing he says here I want to spend some time on in verse 19. If in Christ we have hope, In this life only, we are all people most to be pitied. Now, I want you to catch hold of that because I don't think a lot of people believe that in the way that they need to. And I think I understand why. So let me work that out for you. Some people would tell you that, well, even if all of this Christianity stuff is really kind of, parts of it are just kind of mythical, they're not real. maybe some of it's made up, things like the resurrection, the things like the miracles of Christ, the virgin birth, all of these things, it still makes good people. It still makes good moral people. It still makes good citizens. It still makes people who are willing to help their neighbors, still makes people who are generous, all of those things. And so Paul says, If in Christ we have hope on this life only, we are to be of all people most pitied. Why? Because Jesus didn't come to make us moral people. He didn't come to make us moral people. And you have to understand that. It's a byproduct. He came, first of all, because God was going to be glorified through his death, through his life and death. And he came for his own glory, that he would receive glory at the right hand of the Father. He came for those reasons. And we, in that process, we are made like him. We are given new lives and new hearts through that regeneration that we talked about. But here's what that produces, and you can't forget this. We're not just trying to be the moral club, right? We're not trying to be the good people. We're not trying to be the people that everybody look at and think, well, you guys are the people who just do everything well, and we would like to emulate you. No. What we believe causes us to live counter to the way that this world system operates. What we believe causes us to have priorities that are very, very different than those around us. What we believe gets us persecuted. What we believe makes others think that we are strange. What we believe means that we constantly, on a daily, sometimes moment-by-moment basis, are struggling with our sin, and our own selfishness, and our pride, and our foolishness, and all those things, and we fight with those things. We care about people who no one else really cares about. We associate with people that can't give us anything. We toil, we give our money, our priorities, our time, all of those things we give to this thing because our lives have been completely owned by it. The reason why people don't understand this statement, this statement about how we would, you guys should be the most pitied people on the face of the earth if the resurrection isn't true. or if Christ is only for this life now. If that's true, you should be pitied, because this life is difficult. It's meant to be. It's glorious. It's good, but it's difficult. We miss that. That doesn't sell a lot of Christian books, and it doesn't get a lot of downloads for sermons on the internet, but the truth of the matter is, God called us to come and die. He called us to lay down our lives so that He can do whatever He wants to do with them, and what He wants to do with them is conform them to the image of Christ. And we have all this stuff inside of us that doesn't want that, and that's difficult. So we can see that when we're talking about real Christianity, not just a cultural Christianity, not just a societal Christianity, but real Christianity, If it's only for this life now, we spend a whole lot of time doing introspection. We do a whole lot of time in repenting. We do a whole lot of time in comparing ourselves to the scripture, finding that we're falling short. We get these rough edges of sin rubbed off of us, and we try again. We continue to move on in this walk, and it's difficult. It's hard. So he's saying, look, you guys, understand that it's not just about this life. Look at Paul's own life for the example of that. If there's no resurrection, Paul's life was pointless. Besides that, everything he wrote you should consider to be a complete lie because his conversion was predicated upon the risen Christ appearing to him. And if Christ didn't bodily rise from the grave, and appear to Paul, then everything the man said is a lie and you shouldn't listen to it. That's how serious this is. That's how much we need to consider the resurrection in terms of our daily living and what it should mean to us. Verse 20, and then we're going to move a little further than this. But Paul is confident here, right? He says, But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For if by one man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. And then we'll have this whole thing here that I won't spend time with now, but you should read the whole chapter later, talking about how death comes through Adam, But life and eternal life would come through Christ. So before I move on to the next piece of this, what I want us to get a handle on is this. The word of God that we treasure, we call the church's Lawless Bible Church. We believe that God works in and through his people for his glory through the scripture, right? and we hold on to that. But we know, and we often say, that the Scripture itself is mediated to us by the Holy Spirit. That the Spirit of the living God comes and makes those words and makes that character of God and His acts and His wisdom alive to us in the pages of Scripture. so that we can then take them in and they change us. So again, the scripture itself is pretty useless if there's no Holy Spirit. And Jesus himself said, I have to go away so that this Comforter will come. Well, here's the thing. The Spirit doesn't come until after Jesus' ascension, okay? He proves that he's alive with many infallible proofs. And then he goes, and we're about at our place in Acts now, where we're going to talk about Pentecost and the Spirit comes, the Holy Spirit comes. That should mean everything to us. We should hang on tightly to those things. So let's move down in the chapter a little bit. There's a lot here, and it's good. But I think we're going to begin again at verse 35. When we start in verse 35, what we're going to talk about is, what is a resurrection body? And there's going to be a mystery in all of this. We're not going to be able to unpack all of this completely, and we're not going to be able to understand it Completely and I don't think we're supposed to be able to but there are some things that we can get and we need to get so when all things have been completed Paul says in this chapter that the dead in Christ Are going to rise right that they are going to meet him where they're going to have a body Like he has like his resurrection body. Okay, you're not going to be spirits floating around and places, you're going to actually be a physical body. Now, for some of us, that's hard, because the physical body that we have now doesn't cooperate very well with us. It has limitations. It doesn't do the things that we would like for it to be able to do. And in fact, it causes us problems with its cravings and desires. I think sometimes we get confused in other parts of scripture, too, about this physical body, as though the physical or the material is a bad thing. When Paul spends a lot of time in Romans talking about the difference between the Spirit and the flesh, Paul is not impugning the physical body when he does that. The flesh that he talks about, that we are to wage war against, yes, there's a sense in which part of the flesh resides in this physical body, but it's also this unredeemed part of us that has not totally been made over into the image of Christ. Right? It's those desires. It's those thoughts. It's the part of the person that we still are that would be considered the flesh. And so sometimes I think we can get the wrong idea and say, well, that's our physical body that he's talking about there. And so the physical body is bad. No, we're going to get one that's a whole lot better. but there's a reason that God gave us physical bodies even here on this earth. And we could go a long way toward talking about what that reason is, but think about it just for a minute. Think of all of the blessings that we are able to receive because we have physical bodies. We can touch, well we will be able to at some point hopefully, and we can smell and we can taste. We can experience things through this body. Paul talks very specifically in Romans about glorifying God in our body. And so that leads me to believe that we need to have a physical nature for God to be able to get the glory that he wants from us while we are here. And I want to make the case as we look at these next verses that that is also going to be true in the end of all things. So verse 35 now. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? And I like Paul because he says things, he says, you foolish person. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. Right? That's, that is a, That is a principle throughout all of scripture. There must be death before there is life, always. You were dead in your trespasses and sins, right? But God, who is rich in mercy, has now made you alive, right? The death and the life. So 37, what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or 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's one kind for humans and 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 star differs from star in glory. So he's saying, so now it is, verse 42. So now it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. So here's where we're gonna camp for just a minute about these resurrection bodies that we are to be given. We're going to find a few things here that are going to help us understand that. So what is sown, that body that we have now that dies, that goes back to the earth, is perishable. But what will be raised will be imperishable. So what do we understand about it? We understand that the body that we will be given will not suffer any sort of decay any longer. that it will, it doesn't have an expiration date on it, that it will last forever, that what he does when he creates this new body that we are to be given is to give us a body that is uniquely fitted to spend eternity with him. And we'll talk about in a moment what we're going to be doing in all of that eternity, but keep in mind He's not talking, and I keep saying this, but I just feel like it's so important that we keep hammering this. He's not saying you're just going to be a spirit in the presence of God, communing with God's spirit, communing with the spirit of the universe and all those of God. No, no. When all of this is over, you're going to have a physical body, a material body. And that's good. That's God's plan. That's what we should long for. So it won't be perishable. 43, it's sown in dishonor. It's raised in glory. I don't know everything that that means, but I can get a piece of it. It's sown in dishonor. We know that these bodies are frail and we know that we don't use them for good things and that they're marred by the curse of sin that has come upon the earth because sin entered into it. We know that even death itself occurs because of the sin that has infected us all. And we know that's true because we practice it, we think it, we breathe it, it is only a miracle of God that we're able to escape it, that we're able to gain victory over it, and thanks be to God that He gives us that victory, sometimes a little bit at a time, not as quickly as we would like, but He does give it to us. But ultimately, what is raised is going to be raised in glory. It's going to have a worth to it and a weight to it. It's going to be glorious. We understand that the glory that we're going to have is going to be just like our righteousness, an imputed glory. in that time, God will give it to us, and it will be a necessary glory. And if we just think about the God that we serve, we can understand why that would be so. It will be necessary for us not to be as we are now, to be in his presence, to be in that place with him, where there will be fullness of joy for all eternity, and the glory of God, and even to worship him, to be in his presence, to be in his physical presence, will require us to have a glorious body that is able to sustain that. Because we know now, the scripture tells us, nobody has seen God and yet lived. That's impossible. He dwells in unapproachable light. We're unable to approach him in that way. This is why we've been given a mediator. the last part of that there, that verse 43, it is sown in weakness, but is raised in power. In power. I think about that, and I think about the deepest longing sometimes of the believer's heart is to be able to serve God without hindrance. From from his or her own sinfulness, from our own weaknesses, both physical and spiritual and character-wise and all of those things. We don't have the ability to do that, sometimes even if we'd want to, and sometimes we don't even have the want to, right? We crave, when we're craving it right, in the right way, even here, we crave power. Not our own power, we crave His power to work through us. so that we might be his witnesses here on the earth. We crave his power so that we might be able to pray. We crave his power so that we might be able to worship. All of those things. Without power, we're unable to do that. But there'll come a time when those things are all we do. We sing his praises. We worship. We fellowship with the saints and we fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ himself. That requires power. And again, not just some sort of spiritual power, but a physical power, a new body is necessary. We have to have that in order to happen. That's what's going to happen to us. Okay, the last part. If there's a natural body, then there's also a spiritual body. So that could be a little bit confusing. But I just want to say this about it. There is a spiritual component to it. What he's saying is that we're going to be able to interact with God on a physical plane, but also on a spiritual plane perfectly. We'll have perfect fellowship from all eternity. for all eternity, because we will be fitted to be able to do that, because we'll be given this body. So I wanna close with just a couple of things and then we'll finish up. Don't think, don't buy this stuff about, it comes from, It comes from other sorts of religious practices. It comes from some Eastern mysticism. It comes even from the early Greek and Roman philosophers that the body is a bad thing. Okay, we're going to be raised with a body and that's glorious. That's the way that God wants it. The second thing is why Why is that important? Well, we covered a lot of that, but let me just be succinct so you've got something to hang on to. We cannot participate in the worship and the fellowship of the Lord Jesus Christ throughout all eternity if we don't have a physical body. It is going to be necessary in order so that he might receive the worship and the glory for all eternity that he deserves. But in that, it's also going to maximize our own pleasure and delight in being able to do that. When Jesus, I think about this as I think about this, when Jesus first appeared to them, I mentioned this earlier, and he said, you know, see, a spirit doesn't have flesh and blood as I have. You kind of get the idea that if this were a spiritual sort of ethereal sort of a thing, that the experience, that the physicality of being together, that the wonders of being in Christ's presence, all of those things that we would not be able to experience them in the way that we will be able to because God is going to be so good to us and give us a body like the one that he gave the Lord Jesus Christ when he was resurrected from the dead. Now, I know that this is going to then raise some questions that I don't have answers to, but I'll address them just briefly, and then we'll be done. So people say, well, okay, so that's true, but the dead haven't been raised yet because Christ hasn't come yet, and so what happens to people in between then and now, and what does all of that look like? And I don't have all the answers from that. I do believe that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, because that's what the Scripture says. What that entails, I'm not exactly sure. But when I think through Scripture, particularly the Revelation, what strikes me is that John, watching those things that were going on in heaven, watching the worship of the Lamb, watching the 24 elders casting their crowns down, all of those things require a physical body. And so I have a suspicion that time and all of these things may not work the same way for us in that plane. And I don't have that all down yet, and I wouldn't certainly not try to make any sort of doctrinal statement about any of those things. I just think that by and large, what we're looking for and what's important to us is ultimately the consummation of all things. And think about it. Jesus told his disciples, I won't drink this cup again until I drink it with you new in my kingdom. Spirits don't drink. They don't participate in the marriage supper of the lamb where Christ receives his bride. none of those things happen for spirits. They happen for real physical people. And so part of this that we need to hang on to is that we're going to be able to experience God in a whole way that we can't even imagine right now. We only get little glimpses in these shadows that we live in now, but then all of those veils will be removed. and all of our physicality and all of our mental sense and our souls and our spirits will all be fitted to be with the Lord Jesus Christ forever and to worship him and to give him glory and honor. And so when you think about the resurrection, you must remember, think about the fact that if Jesus hadn't risen from the grave, your faith would be useless. And because he did rise from the grave, you can count it as a surety, if you believe that he physically rose from the grave, that you also will rise. And you also will be given a body that is like his. Let's pray. Father, we're grateful for the goodness that you continue to bestow upon us. And Lord, the future that you have planned for us is an amazing thing, something that is hard for us to even grasp. And Lord, we know that we don't deserve to even think about these things, much less experience them, but that's what you have planned for us. You have said that you will give your people these things. And so God, we now, as we as we think about what we celebrate today. Lord Jesus, as you were resurrected with a real body, we thank you that you paid for our sins on the cross. We thank you that the Holy Spirit was sent to regenerate us. And we thank you that ultimately, in the end of all things, when your kingdom finally comes, in the last things, that we will be with you in all ways possible, Lord, physically and mentally and spiritually and emotionally, that all of those things will be completely fitted to glorify you for all eternity in your kingdom. God, it takes our breath away to even think that you would give us such an awesome privilege. So we thank you and we pray that you would help us think rightly about these things. In Jesus' name, Amen.