Welcome to Unveiled Faces, a Redeemer Presbyterian Church podcast. Please enjoy our feature presentation. I want to greet you. Well, the saints at Central Valley Presbyterian Church in Ceres greet you. And my wife, who many of you don't know, but many of you do, made sure that I promised that I would send her greetings as well. Her desire would be to be here today. And it's actually... My wife, it is somewhat of an inspiration for what I'm gonna be bringing to you today. As I was talking to George a few weeks ago, I asked him what might be helpful as I bring a topical sermon, and he reminded me that you graciously pray for my wife on a regular basis, and many of you, because you might not know, our family was one of the founding families of this church, We were here for a number of years, and so we know a number of you, but some of you have never even met my wife. And yet you continue to pray for her, and that's a blessing, and we thank you for that. And so he suggested that maybe a sermon relevant to our story might be helpful for you to understand who you've been praying for, but also might be relevant to your own lives as God's principles are in fact universal and applicable to every human soul. So we're gonna be talking today about when God violates your personal space. Not sure if that made sense to you, but it made sense to me. And hopefully by the end of the sermon, it will make sense to all of us together. But let's pray before we begin. Father, we thank you that when you do those things, when you touch us in ways that we find painful and difficult, that we can, in fact, because of the faith you've given to us, because of the new hearts that reside inside of us, because of the work of the Holy Spirit so persistent in our lives, that we can, in fact, embrace those things that you give to us, knowing that it comes from the hands of a good and trustworthy Heavenly Father. So I pray, Father, that as we engage your word this morning, and as we recount stories of your faithfulness, that those who are here, whether young or old, would be encouraged and would find Find the ability, greater than before, to bring you glory, even in the midst of pain. We thank you for these things and we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So I wanna begin by just bringing a few quick scenarios before you. Some of you might be familiar with them, some of you may not, but you will be eventually. Most of you have probably ridden at some point in your life, even you young folks, in an elevator. Anybody not ride in an elevator? OK, so this one you can kind of all relate to. So imagine getting into an elevator. It's a fairly large elevator, and you're the only one on the elevator. But you're going to go up quite a few stories. You're going to be on this elevator for a little while. and you get to the next floor and somebody steps in. Now, what happens typically in a moment like that? You've got two people in a large elevator. What should happen, the social norms are that you split the difference, right? If you're over in the far left corner and a person gets on and it's a large elevator and they move over to the far left corner and are standing right next to you, what does that communicate? Something's wrong. They have violated your personal space. And you're gonna ride, as long as the floors increase, you're gonna be thinking to yourself, how long is this weirdness going to last? It's very uncomfortable. Okay, maybe that's not an experience you've had yet. But maybe your experience is you've been having a conversation, and as you're conversing with this person, they continue to walk closer and closer and closer to you. and you start stepping back a little bit, you know, and they keep coming towards you, and there's no indication in their demeanor that they're recognizing what they're doing to you. You're not even paying attention to what they're saying anymore. You're just paying attention to, how do I fix this? How do I, without being mean, you know, put the arm out? I mean, can't do that, right? It's very uncomfortable. Now, I've never experienced this, but I've heard of, I know this is common. As soon as a woman begins to show in her pregnancy, what do people start to do? They start to put their hands on her belly. Think about how odd that is. Imagine, you know, you just find somebody, you've just met them, you find out, I don't know, they've got a hernia, or they have an innie or an outie, and you're like, oh really? And you just go up and you touch their belly? It's this, Yeah, I don't know if the pregnancy makes it okay, but to me, that would be really uncomfortable. You know, we naturally and understandably expect that others are supposed to ask for some sort of permission before they reach out and touch us, but God doesn't follow those kind of rules. He often, in fact, he inevitably violates our personal space and touches us without permission. Our bodies are not actually off limits for him to touch. Well, let's go back a few years. I am 45, but when I was 19, I was first introduced to Reformed theology. And I began at that time to fill my head with truths that I think, along with you, I really came to hold dear. So some of these truths, see if you recognize them as something that, like me, I fought against some of them and then came to love them. Some of them were very easy for me to receive, but the sovereign grace of God, the deep efficacy of Christ's atoning work, The beauty and the consistency and the trustworthiness of God's revealed word. God's spoken word in the creation around us. The sufficiency of God's word for all of life. The goodness of the material world and our bodies. The expectation we can have for the growth and success of Christ's kingdom and the discipleship of the nations. and the glorious hope of the resurrection. These were all things that maybe I'd heard little tidbits about, but I was confronted with them with such clarity, 19 and 20, that time of my life, and really came after some fighting, after some wrestling, to really love them. But the one truth that I fought hardest against, as I think common for many people in our Christian culture, was God's complete sovereignty. I thought, if God is completely sovereign, that somehow displaces my freedom. I didn't realize until later that it was the very ground of my freedom. During those months, I was confronted with and came to be comforted by passages regarding God's sovereignty, such as, you know, God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. That came to be a comfort to me. The horse is made ready for battle, but every victory is from the Lord. The heart of the king, even the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord and he moves it like a river wherever he wants it to go. The lot is cast into the lap, but every decision is from the Lord. Or how about New Testament? This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross, but God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. Or how about this? Therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation. with fear and trembling. Ah, here's the Calvinist part. For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. And of course, in that process of kind of working through God's sovereignty, I finally stopped wiggling under the uncomfortable clarity of Romans 9, and finally settled into the fact that I was now a happy Calvinist. It did happen. I now, after that period of wrestling, knew more robustly than ever that God was sovereign and that I knew that God was good, and I also knew that the best expression that captures that picture is God's fatherly care for us. I knew that even the painful discipline of God was better than any mere man's attempt at love. So in the kind providence of God, A couple years later, when I was 21 years old, I ended up getting married to the woman of my dreams. And the first seven years were, I would say, bliss. It was unusually calm seas. There were some of the typical learning how to communicate, but even that seemed to go really, really well. Seven years elapsed, every year looking back, and we both marveled. Isn't this supposed to be harder? Can you hear the foreshadowing in that statement? Well, one day, seven years into the perfect marriage, We were driving in the car, and I was cogitating, just thinking over stuff, and it suddenly dawned on me, I thought, isn't it interesting how people will stand in worship with their hands raised up, praising God for his goodness and his kindness, while all around them, people are suffering. There's famines and wars, and tragedy, but as long, and I'm telling Karen this, right? I'm saying, isn't it interesting how people will hold their hands up when all around them it's disaster and darkness, but as long as the pain does not touch them, they can praise God. And then as soon as the pain touches them, their hand is still raised, but it's raised in a fist. Well, God must have been eavesdropping. because it was only a few weeks later that I rush in to our home with my youngest daughter in tow. I think she was two at the time. So I had a five-year-old, a four-year-old, and a two-year-old. And I see my son, the five-year-old, with the phone in his hand, and he's leaning over my wife, who's on the ground, unconscious, and he looks up at me, he says, Daddy, Mommy doesn't want to talk to Auntie Christy. Well, it's because she was unconscious. So I rushed over and tried to wake her and she wasn't waking up and so I called 911 and... Well, what was God doing? This was not an accident. What was God doing? Clearly, amongst many other things, he was saying, what do you really believe? What are you gonna do? We took her to the ER, and long story short, she had a mass in her brain. They didn't know what it was, so they rushed her to UCSF. That was a Thursday, Saturday. She's having brain surgery. They're opening up her brain. The hope is it's just something benign or just a ganglion of blood vessels or something like that. They weren't sure what it was gonna be, but you could tell as the surgeon walks toward me. The look on his face was not happy. There was no smile. And he said to me, he said, I do more of these surgeries in a month than most neurosurgeons do in a year. I know what I'm looking at. Your wife has this or that. He named the cancers. And he said, she's got three months to live. Well, she's been alive for 16 years. So you know, the story is a little bit different than that. But pain touched us. Now, I'd had about nine years at that point of having come to terms with the sovereignty of God. I knew this was a fallen world. I knew that. I knew that death is the wages of sin. I knew that death would take both my wife and me one day. I'd seen enough to know that we all grow old and we all break and we all, there's a likelihood of even languishing. I'd seen death take some far too young. And I'd vowed to my wife for better or for worse. And I'd imagined, as some of you might be doing or have done, well, with this woman, even the worst is gonna be great. But pain and disappointments like this had never touched us before. Except for two times in two deliveries, we'd never even been to the doctor. I mean, it was just, we had no interaction with this sort of experience. So like the strutting private whose speech is all about bravery in battle, it isn't until the bullets are whizzing by your head the bombs are dropping, the bodies of the men who were laughing with you only hours before lay lifeless and broken next to you, that you find out what you really believe, what's really important to you, what's really going on in your heart. When your sergeant yells to you, stand up and run toward the men with the guns, will you do it? What do you really believe, really? Well, the intervening 16 years have been progressively harder and harder. She handled the initial brain surgery and the initial radiation really, really well. But most of her endocrine system was shot. We handled that. That was fine. But then five years later, she broke her neck. Four years ago, the cancer came back. She was back having another brain surgery. She had to go through another round of radiation. I often describe people and say, how's she doing? And here's my description. Some of you may have heard this. If I were to take a piece of paper, a nice, crisp, white piece of paper, and I were to crunch it up, and then to spread it out, and then crunch it up, and spread it out, and crunch it up, well, she's spread back out, but you can't go, your body cannot endure that kind of trauma and not be impacted permanently. A few weeks ago, I was walking up the stairs, It had been a hard day for Karen. She is, by the way, not a complainer. She is a joyful woman, but she's a lot slower than she used to be. I was walking up the stairs. It had been a hard day for her. She was slowly teetering her way methodically up the stairs, and I was standing behind her just to just to catch her in case she fell. She doesn't fall all the time, but she falls enough that it's kind of a constant worry. So I'm right behind my wife as she's working her way up the stairs, and I remember in my heart saying, Lord, how long? How long will we have to watch this beautiful woman slowly disintegrate? That's the moment of decision. That thought, it reflected reality. It reflected the reality of our situation. We see in her what we will, given enough time, we will all be there. It reflected the reality of my heart at the moment. Sad. But when those kind of words slip from your mouth or just slip through the mouth of your mind, what happens next will make all the difference and will reveal what you really believe. What is going to follow the lament? Will I allow the heaviness, will you allow the heaviness of our situation, the sadness of your heart to make the steering wheel of your thoughts and emotions drive you off a cliff? Into despair, into self-pity, into unbelief. That's where we normally want to go. Because we're dominated by a fleshly love of our self. Self-pity feels cathartic. we can grow too easily to like the words that it speaks to our heart. It strokes our ego. It tells us how sad things are and how victimized we are by that person, or that loss, or that hurt, or that situation. Our self-pity, it acts like a lever to elevate us above those who have brought about the hurt or the calamity in our lives. And when the only person to blame is God, Our self-pity raises us above him too, making him, the God of the universe, if it were possible, a debtor to our pain. To blame God is a natural response because in our hearts we know, even the pagans know, that God is sovereign. Consider that Job and his friends, they never questioned God's sovereignty. They knew Job's pain was ultimately brought on by God. That wasn't the question. Would Job respond by blaming God and cursing him like an enemy? Pagans understand in their heart that God rules. They know him as king. They sense the judgment looming, and so they grope for anything that will hide their faces from this truth. They grope for any remedy to prolong death and the judgment that awaits on the other side. They know God is sovereign judge, but not a sovereign father. And yet we say, we know him as father. We pray it, it is the paradigmatic prayer. Our father who art in heaven. We hear it in the passage today. Matthew 6, verses 25 through 34, I'm gonna read it now. Please go ahead and stand if you would, if you're able. Matthew chapter six, starting at verse 25. Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Isn't life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father, there it is, your heavenly Father, he feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? Why are you so anxious about your clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. So if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, oh you, of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, oh, what will we eat? What shall we drink? What are we gonna wear? That Gentiles seek after all these things, and here it is again, your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. So, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all these other things will be added to you. Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Can I get an amen? Please be seated. So what is the comfort in this passage? Why ought we not worry? Well, I think there's at least three things that I draw from this passage, and the first, and none of this is going to be new to you, but it's still true, it's still important, it's still relevant, it's still good. Number one, the God who is in heaven is sovereign. To be in heaven in this context is not to emphasize his distance or his transcendence, no, rather his power is unaffected by the constant flux of history. He resides on a throne as king above kings. He is not affected by the changing world that daily breaks over us. He is in heaven. He stands on the shores of heaven and can reach out to us in our drowning situation precisely because He does not reside in the midst of the tumultuous waves. He is in heaven, and He is sovereign. And as I've already mentioned, God in heaven is our loving Father. Our Father cares, He knows, He hears, He sees, He acts on our behalf, He intervenes, He provides, He nourishes, He warms, He picks us up, He embraces us like a good father. And number three, God in heaven values us far more than the things that he so clearly evidences that he cares about, the birds and the air, the lilies of the field. His care isn't obligation. This isn't a contractual requirement. This isn't a chore. He approaches his children the same way he approached his one and only begotten son, and what did he say when we get that beautiful revelation of the father speaking to the son? You wanna hear the perfect father-son relationship? This is what it says. This is my, look, this is my beloved son. Look at him. I'm so pleased with him, listen to him. Do you hear the care? Do you hear the care of a father in those words? You, Christian, are highly valued. God is sovereign, he is a sovereign father who values you. What comforting words. Consider a similar passage when Jesus spoke to his disciples about fear. particularly fear about persecution. This is from Matthew 10, verses 29 and 30, Matthew 10. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? In other words, from our perspective, they're worth so little, yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. Even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Consider what we do with vacuums and hair. We just vacuum it up and toss it into the garbage. And yet God knows everyone. They're all numbered. Here is the divine application. Therefore, do not fear. You are of more value than many sparrows. What another heartwarming passage. God cares about small birds and baldness. How relevant to many of us, especially the baldness part. God knows us intimately and is governing it all. So the conclusion is, don't be afraid. And this is encouraging. But we may read this without thinking appropriately about it. We might come away with the impression that the answer to our worry is that, oh, no, you don't need to worry because nothing bad or nothing difficult is going to happen to you. But that's not what it says. It doesn't say, don't worry, I'll protect you from every hardship. Consider for a moment what you may never have drawn from this passage. Let me ask you a question. According to this passage that we draw so much comfort from that you'd put on a coffee cup and you'd look at it every morning as you drink your coffee, ah, I'm so comforted. But consider this, consider this question. According to this passage, who is it that gives permission for sparrows to fall and heads to go bald? According to this passage. Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. God clothes and he unclothes. God has numbered the hairs of your head because he places them there, he keeps them there, and he pulls them out. The same declaration of sovereignty that this passage is designed to bring us comfort, that not one hair will fall from your head, not one sparrow from the sky apart from the will of God, means that it is the will of God at times that men go bald and birds die. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Will God provide for your physical health? Yes and no. Will God's touch on your body be always strength and be freedom from pain and debilitation? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Eventually, an absolute, 100% assured no. God will, if he hasn't already done so, shove in, he'll violate your personal space, he'll touch your body or your mind without permission. He is, after all, God. And we belong to him. And the wages of sin is death. We will all grow old and we will all die. Or we'll die without growing old, that happens too. And when the touch finally happens, like it did that faithful day to us 16 years ago, how will you respond? How are you responding? I know many of you, I know you've been touched. You've experienced pain and loss How are we to understand this? The reality of God's sovereignty over skies full of birds and head full of hair on the one hand and a ground full of birds and churches full of bald men on the other hand. Well, I have found great personal comfort in three realities as I try to understand and process and respond to our situation. These three things I think of daily and they encourage me. The three things are the character of God. We've already seen a bit of that. The cross and the resurrection. The character of God, the cross, and the resurrection. So let's consider God's character just a bit more. What are we told about God's attitude toward our suffering? Well, God is not indifferent. Psalm 116.15 says this, Christian, precious in the sight of God is the death of all of his saints. Precious. He does not look on with callousness at the death and the dying of his people, he calls it precious. Precious in the sense that it is special, it is noticed, it's important to him. Psalm 103, verses 13 and 14. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. I preached on this many months ago. For he knows our frame. He remembers that we are just dust. And it produces compassion. We see this compassion expressed in the weeping of Jesus over the death of his friend Lazarus, a death he knew would be made right shortly. He would make it right. But that had nonetheless brought pain to those whom he loved and so brought tears to Jesus' eyes. And that leads us from God's character directly into the cross. We can point to this moment of divine lament over Lazarus. in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, because Jesus took on flesh. He took on humanity. He took on our situation, and it was not a station of dignity. He was born into a little no-account village in Israel, and grew up in a real town that I think of, when I think of Nazareth, I think of Barstow, California. And I think of Nathanael's word, Nathanael the prophet, Can anything good come from Barstow? Can anything good come from Nazareth? That is the situation into which Jesus of Nazareth was placed. But it is precisely this incarnate reality that provides the necessity, the necessity of the context for the gospel story to come to its climax. And it is through the filter of this gospel story that we can properly understand our pain. Let me say that again. It is only through the filter of the gospel story that you can properly understand your pain. The heart of the gospel is the death of the incarnate Son of God on a cross, a real broken body, and real shed blood. God the Father sent God the Son, his beloved Son, to die and to suffer. He knows the indignities, the pain, the loss that is endemic to our experience. God clothed Jesus with a perishable and corruptible body, then he unclothed him, But then he clothed him again with the same body, but gloriously refashioned, now incorruptible and undefiled. In the midst of pain, we forget that we only need to wait three days, and the tragedy becomes a cosmic comedy. We forget that God sits, God sits in the heavens and he laughs at death. And so, we can turn now to the resurrection. We can laugh too. Because of the resurrection, we can laugh even ahead of our own death. Because we know what is coming. We know that though we will die, we will not stay dead. Though our bodies will break, and we'll be laid in the ground, and we'll reach, given enough time, a complete disintegration, There is a day just around the corner, relatively speaking, when there will be a trumpet blast, a shout, our bodies will raise, glorious and incorruptible. And you should be saying amen to that. Can I get a Presbyterian amen? Amen! This is good news! As author N.D. Wilson calls it, he calls graveyards a resurrection garden. Think about that for a second. Graveyards are resurrection gardens. What do you do in a garden? You plant seeds. And what happens? Plants grow. What do you do in a graveyard? You plant seeds. And one day they will spring forth with life. The resurrection, we don't think about it enough. So here's some of the glorious passages that bring me hope, that bring me encouragement in those moments where I'm walking behind my wife up the stairs, thanking God for the resurrection. First Corinthians 4.14 says this. For since we believe that Jesus died, was unclothed, and then rose again, clothed, Even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. That's an expression, children, that means those who have died will be risen with him. Romans 8-11. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to what? to your mortal bodies. Through the spirit who dwells in you. Romans 6, 5. Do you hear all the conditions? If you, Christian, if you understand what took place on the cross and three days later, this is the natural, we should be going, oh, duh. Of course there's this connection. He says it this way, for if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. And what was his resurrection like? Was his body in the ground when the gals went to go look for it? No, the body was gone. When he appeared to his disciples in the upper room, He ate with them, and they touched his body. Now, he also walked through walls, and they didn't always recognize him, and so there are serious differences, glorious, amazing, mysterious differences, but there's also Unity, it is the same body glorified. And we hear that, I encourage you, go home and read, especially those of you where suddenly you're feeling the pain or maybe it's chronic in your life or maybe you're just getting older and you're looking back at pictures and you see yourself and you're like, I used to be like that and now I'm like this. I'd like that back someday. Read 1 Corinthians 15. Here's just some glorious, highlights from that passage. And he's arguing here against those, he's correcting those who are saying, oh, there is no resurrection. They're like the early church examples of the Sadducees. No, there's no resurrection, or it's just spiritual. But someone will ask, Well, okay, how were the dead raised? You might have asked yourself, well, I mean, if your body dies and it's there for a long time, and you kind of get spread out over, are you eaten by this, or you're burned this way, or acid, or you, I don't know, you come up with all these, it is a question, isn't it? How is that gonna happen? And so here's his response to all those questions you might have had. Well, someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? Here's his typical Pauline response, you foolish person, stop being so silly. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. Ooh, he just turned it upside down, just turned it on its head. If you died, how can you be raised again? He's like, no, that's exactly the point. You have to die in order to be raised. You have to die in order to have the life to come. He gives an example. What you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, a little seed. 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. So the picture is here, okay, you're struggling, your body goes into the ground like a seed and is raised, that's the claim, but how is that gonna happen? That makes no sense to me. Look at a seed, the seed you're familiar with. It goes into the ground, and in a real sense, it dies. When you look at the plant, the seed is gone, but it's turned in. Is it the same? Yes. Is it the same? No. For not all flesh is the same, but there's one kind for humans, another kind for animals, another for birds, another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. There's one glory for the sun and another glory for the moon and another glory for the stars, for stars differ from stars in glory. What do we learn from this? Yes, you're glorious. When was the last time somebody called you glorious? Well, what's today's date? Is it the 27th of August, 2022? You are glorious. But there's different kinds of glory. Yes, you're glorious. Made in the image of God, And when your body goes into the ground, it will eventually be raised because you believe that Jesus died and rose again, because the spirit who raised Jesus will also raise you because he dwells in you. You will be raised even more glorious. Even more glorious. And so he concludes, so it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown perishable What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. What is sown in dishonor is raised in glory. What is sown in weakness, struggling to get up the stairs, to get out of bed, to get in bed, what is sown in weakness 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. So are you feeling awfully attached to your body today? You should. It was given to you as a part of who you are. It'll be yours forever. Your eternal state will not be a disembodied one in heaven. The consummation of Christ's cross work is the resurrection of your body from wherever it was laid and wherever it has been spread out over time. However God's gonna do that. It'll be fun to watch, fun to be a part of. You lament the pain. You lament the weakness, the disorders, the sagginess, the paunch. Stop worrying. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning. We have a resurrection to look forward to. Sunday's on the way. Death will not have the last word, even over these bodies of flesh. This life is hard. The pain, the indignities, the loss that we experience in these tents of flesh are real, they're overwhelming. So how can we experience the deprivations of our bodies and hope? Well, let's go back to the first principles. What do you know about God? He's a God of compassion who did what it took to rescue not only your soul but your body too. We remember what the gospel teaches us. All good and perfect gifts come down from the Father of lights. Jesus is the greatest gift of all. He paid for the resurrection of our bodies from the dead. This is the culmination of his cross work, the climax of the gospel story that we have to look forward to. Number three, we believe that we no longer need to fear death or even the process that gets us there. Yes, the God who cares for the lilies and the sparrows and the tops of our heads is also the one who brings all these things low in their time. He will bring us down to the earth one day as well, and the process of going from here to there is hard, but it is all hard mercies. What we've experienced, the Greggs, what you're experiencing now, they're hard, but they're hard mercies. And unless a seed dies, it will not grow again. unless you have to die. We have to die. Not because it's an inevitability, but because unless we die, the glories to come will not hum. You have to die. So is the death slow and difficult? Yeah, a lot of times it is. It breaks slowly. But it's necessary. And it produces something very, very good. So all is grace. It was grace in the garden. It'll be grace in eternity, and it's grace even now as we watch our bodies grown and list like overburdened ships in a storm. The promise we hear in Matthew 6 is not the promise, I'll protect you from every hardship, but it is the promise that whatever injury, disease, or disorder we experience, it's all from the hand of a loving father for our good, and those diseases will not have the final say, even over our bodies, because we have the resurrection of the hope ahead. Here again, these words from Paul regarding the hope we have in the resurrection. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but it's just a kernel. Do you want to remain a kernel? Would you really want to remain in this body? Perpetually decaying for eternity? If you want the glory of the resurrection body, then you must die. 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. Release your grip on the perishable, dishonored, weak, and natural body you have now. Ready yourself for the grave, knowing that you will receive it back imperishable, glorified, powerful, and spiritual. Don't resist God's violation of your personal space. Remember what God says in 1 Corinthians 2. No eye has even seen, no ear has heard, and no mind can even imagine what God has prepared for those who love him. When you embrace God's unfolding plan for you, the goodness of your tribulation, and the assurance of your coming resurrection, it is truly a revolution of joy. There's nothing you can't face. This has been a presentation of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. For more resources and information, please stop by our website at visitredeemer.org. All material herewithin, unless otherwise noted. Copyright Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Elk Grove, California. Music furnished by Nathan Clark George. Available at nathanclarkgeorge.com.