Your Body - Investing For The Future Series

Introductory Considerations

1. People today are pre-occupied with their bodies. While some of us could take better care of ours, major industries have sprung up to help meet the concerns that people have with their bodies. Many spend hours in fitness centres making sure that their abs are tight and that there is not an ounce of fat to be seen.

2. Beauty products abound - each promising to make us look like movie stars or athlete. Wrinkles must be removed, hair must be tinted to hide the gray and blemishes must made to disappear. Many spend hours in front of the mirror.

3. We are looking for te perfect or ideal body, sometimes using extreme measures, lipro-suction, implants, face lifts and plastic surgery. We want our bodies to be perfect and to last a long time.

4. Yet our bodies were only made to last a short period of time before they die and are gone. We see it in the aging process, even though we try to hide or prevent it.

5. I agree that we should be concerned about our bodies and take care of them, but the body we should be more concerned about is the body that we will have not just for a few decades but the body we will have for eternity.

6. Today we consider the fact that we will, as believers, have a resurrected body and we will consider what it will be like.

7. And while we may learn a few things, we may even end up with more questions than we started with. There are many things we do not understand about our eternal bodies and many things God has chosen not to reveal.

8. Even passage in 1Cor 15 is hard to understand - could go thru all kinds of technical explanations, but instead we will glean what we can from passage so we can better know what it is when we say "I believe in the resurrection of the body!"

9. The people in Corinth found it hard to accept the idea of the resurrection. One reason was they though of body as evil, something to be discarded. Another is that they could not understand how it could be done.

10. How can God take bodies which have deteriorated, burned, or been destroyed in different ways and reconstruct them again? What if a cannibal ate a person? There are all kinds of things that are hard to understand.

Teaching

1. While we get some insight on how the how is not what is most important. The fact of the resurrection is more important. That is what Paul has done in first part of chapter. He testifies to the reality of the resurrection in relation to the reality, the fact of the risen Lord and that we looked at a number of weeks ago.

2. He is not trying to prove the resurrection as a scientist might prove something through arguments or an experiment

3. And so Paul says to those who ask how? "Foolish man". To the Christians that was a strong rebuke. Does not mean one who has taken leave of their senses, but used in the OT sense - as a person who has failed to take God into account.

4. Do we understand really how God created man in first place? how He gives new life to a heart that was dead to sin? No we don’t but we can see examples of how God works and through those examples we get some idea of how God gives us a resurrected body.

5. Begins with example of seed. Take this seed or grain and look at it. Seems dead, to have no life, no indication of life in it at all. How can a new plant come forth from this dead seed? Today we may explain it but it is still a miracle created by God.

a. If God can bring this dead seed to life, he can do the same with a dead body, regardless of its state.

6. Then Paul explains that there are different kinds of bodies - within animal life and within the heavens. All have their own kind of splendour, all are different. So we must remember that we do not just think of our present bodies as to what our bodies will be like.

7. As God made different kinds of bodies - so He can and will make our resurrected bodies different as well.

8.Paul explains how our bodies will be different from present. Will be better than any body that any workout will attain.

a. Our present body, that which is sown is perishable, subject to decay, but it is raised imperishable. (Luke 20:36)

b. Sown in dishonour but raised in glory. (Phil 3:21) Like Christ’s resurrection body. Not radiance but future state of righteousness, opposite of dishonour , humiliated . It will no longer have its present "lowly state". No desires (Mat 22:30), no wants such as food, drink and sleep (1Cor 6:13), and fitted to behold the glory of God (1John 3:2). Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made.