Sermon Tone Analysis

Heaven

Of Bodies and Boredom

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

October 5~/7, 2007

 

We are in the second week of our series called /Heaven, /and if you were not here for the first week of the series last week, shame on you.

Don’t you even want to go to heaven?

Come to church, for crying out loud.

I shouldn’t joke about that I guess, because we don’t get to heaven by our works but by faith…so those of you who missed don’t need to feel too bad, a little, but not much.

I do need to catch you up though, because if you miss the main point of last week, then the rest of the series and the biblical teaching about heaven doesn’t make much sense.

So, to give you the big idea from last week that you really need to know, here it is:

 

Slide: ________________ ) */Heaven is going to be great./*

Okay, now we are ready to move on.

No, the main point of last week had to do with the story of God’s redemption, the story that we are all in the middle of right now and the story that heaven is the culmination of.

Adam and Eve were created for perfection, for paradise, and had that for a while, but they chose curtain B when they chose to sin and rebel against God, and when they did, no longer was this earth paradise and life here the way it was meant to be.

This earth and all of life on it was subject to the curse, to futility, so that nothing is as it was originally meant to be and we live messed up lives on a messed up planet.

God however did not just give up on us and move on to some new creation; he in his grace stuck with us.

All the way back with Adam and Eve, God promised that he would send a redeemer and restore this world and humanity back to what it was meant to be.

So our big idea last week was this,

 

Slide: ________________ ) */Heaven is a re-made earth, life as it was meant to be lived./*

Therefore, if you want to know what haven will be like, look around, because we live in the ruins of a once perfect earth.

God will make a new heaven and a new earth, and as we saw last week the two will merge, the heavenly city will be part of the new earth and God will dwell with us and we will enjoy the redeemed planet and universe forever.

If that fills you with lots of questions, get the CD from last week.

Starting today and continuing into next week, we are going to be discussing what life in heaven will be like.

In the rest of this talk we are going to look at two very big questions:

 

Slide: ________________ )

 

* What will we look like in heaven?

Talking about our bodies there.

And

 

Slide: ________________ )

 

* What will we do in heaven?

Let’s talk about the first one first, our bodies.

Aren’t you curious about what you will look like and what your body will be like forever?

As we talked about last week, God is in the process of redeeming all things, restoring his creation to what it was meant to be.

So, our redemption, even though we have a relationship with God will not be complete until our bodies are entirely set free from the curse.

That’s what Paul is talking about in Romans 8, when he says,

 

Slide: ________________ ) Romans 8: 23-24

 

“/Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved…”(23-24).

/The Bible term for this is glorification, when our bodies are remade to what they were meant to be.

This will happen at the rapture, when it says in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15 that our bodies will be raised up and glorified, made perfect.

Slide: ________________ ) 1 Cor.

15:51-53

 

says, “/Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.

For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”

/What happens when someone dies now is that their spirit, as Philippians tells us, is present with the Lord, but our bodies, the remains of them stay down here.

At the rapture, before he takes up the living believers to heaven, he will resurrect the remains of our old bodies and change them forever.

We will receive new, re-made bodies, that will last forever without the effects of the curse.

Slide: ________________ ) Philippians 3:20-21

 

says, /But our citizenship is in heaven.

And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body./

He will take our bodies and transform them to be new, glorified bodies, like Jesus’ post-resurrection body.

So, when Jesus raptures us up to heaven, those who are living will have their bodies transformed and those who have already died will have their bodies rejoin their souls, but they will be transformed bodies.

So, we will have bodies in heaven, which raises lots of other questions…the main question being, what will they be like?

If they are transformed, transformed to what?

Will we have angel bodies, with wings

 

Slide: ________________ ) (show pic of Ty and Sean)?

Boy, I hope not!

Actually, I know that we will not have angel bodies.

A lot of people assume that we become angels when we die, but angels and humans are two separate parts of God’s creation and the Bible is very clear that we stay separate.

We will never become angels; we will stay human beings with redeemed human being bodies.

Does a transformed body mean that we get to help choose how they are transformed?

Like this nose chart, do we get to choose what kind of nose we get?

What body shape we have?

How tall we are?

Our hair color?

That’s a pretty good question.

A recent survey of American women found that 99% of them would change something about their appearance if they could.

Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t say if we get to pick…it just says that we will have transformed bodies.

So what does the Bible say about our future bods?

We get some very good clues from 1 Corinthians 15 and then from Jesus’ resurrection body, so let’s look at 1 Cor 15 first:

 

Slide: ________________ ) 1 Cor 15: 42b-44

 

first: /The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body…just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we[f] bear the likeness of the man from heaven./

He contrasts our current bodies with our future, glorified bodies, in four ways.

First,

 

Slide: ________________ ) From imperishable to perishable

 

Our bodies will no longer be perishable, no longer subject to aging, to disease, to deformity.

People who have struggled with deformities or injuries will no longer struggle there.

That’s true mentally as well.

One time Joni Ericson, a Christian writer and speaker who suffered a severe spinal injury early in life leaving her paralyzed from the waste down, wrote: /"Somewhere in my broken, paralyzed body is the seed of what I shall become.

The paralysis makes what I am to become all the more grand when you contrast atrophied, useless legs against splendorous resurrected legs.

I'm convinced that if there are mirrors in heaven (and why not?), the image I'll see will be unmistakably 'Joni,' although a much better, brighter Joni."*[1]*/

The contrasts continue,

 

Slide: ________________ ) From dishonor to glory

 

The word used here is one that describes someone’s appearance.

He’s talking about beauty, that our bodies here are compromised but there they will be beautiful, reflecting the glory and beauty of God.

You will be beautiful in heaven, which is not as much about having a perfect body shape as it is reflecting the beauty and glory of God.

Some passages talk about how we will glow this radiant glow, though in other places it seems like that isn’t the case.

Whichever, our bodies will be beautiful.

The next contrast is

 

Slide: ________________ ) From weakness to power

 

Our bodies now in comparison to our heavenly bodies are very weak, meaning that they will have the fullness of strength and power that we were originally meant to have.

Does that mean that we will have super-human strength, like superman or the bionic man or woman…be able to run in slow motion and jump over buildings?

When we throw things, hear that noise that the bionic man used to make

 

Slide: ________________ ) (find noise?)?

 

Will I be able to hit my driver on the golf course 700 yards?

Maybe.

What we know is that our bodies will be stronger than they are now.

The last contrast is also a significant one,

 

Slide: ________________ ) From natural to spiritual

 

This doesn’t mean from material to immaterial.