Getting the Body You've Always Wanted - Part A

Can you imagine having a body that is not susceptible to disease at all, or atrophy, or handicaps, or aches, or pains? Imagine having a body that never gains weight, never loses hair, never gets wrinkled, never sags, never droops. Imagine that. Now you're saying that's all I can do is imagine that. But one day it will be reality.

You won't have to imagine that. We live in a culture obsessed with health, fitness, dieting, and beauty. We spend $100 billion each year on stuff to make us thinner, prettier, and healthier.

But all of that spending doesn't seem to be helping. Only 2% of women would say that they think they're beautiful. And if you're one of those people who feel this pursuit of a healthy, beautiful body is futile, we have good news for you today here on Connect with Skip Weekend Edition. As Skip Heitzig shares the secret to getting the body you've always wanted.

But first, we want to let you know about this Connect with Skip resource offer. The Bible makes it clear that Jesus loves the devout and the doubters, priests and prostitutes, the diseased and the depressed. Jesus just loves people, all people, no matter what's their past or their present. Sadly, sometimes it's the people who need love the most, who feel the most rejected, even by the church. But if Jesus loves all people, shouldn't we? We want to help you grasp God's relentless love for people by sending you the complete four-booklet Jesus Loves People collection by Skip Heitzig. These booklets look to scripture to demonstrate Jesus's love for people from every walk of life. Get all four Jesus Loves People titles, including Jesus Loves the Broken and Jesus Loves Addicts, when you give a gift of $25 or more today to help expand this Bible teaching outreach.

To give, call 800-922-1888 or give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer. Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and let's join Pastor Skip as he shares some interesting information about America's love for hot dogs. You know how in the front of USA Today they have in the left-hand corner little fast facts and sometimes they're odd facts and figures. It said that during this summer, it is projected as they go from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the summer Americans will consume 7 billion hot dogs. And that average is out to be, according to this same little piece of information, 818 hot dogs every second are consumed. That is not the way to get the body you've always wanted, by the way. But the body, the physical body, is what motivates people to run, to lift weights, to bicycle, in some cases to nip and tuck and stretch and do everything they can to preserve the body.

Just the diet industry alone is $33 billion per year. There was a poll that was conducted and a very interesting question was asked in the poll. If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?

That's a good question, by the way. If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be? What's interesting is that the results, none of them had to do with character, my habits, lifestyle, almost overwhelmingly it was I would change something about my outward physical appearance.

Age, hair, weight, body type, face, etc. And it seems to even be affecting kids. There was a mom trying to break her little boy of sucking his thumb and she was so frustrated because he wouldn't stop. And finally she said, what good is it to suck your thumb?

And he said, well, it is non-fattening, mother. One day your dream will come true. One day in your resurrected glorified body it will be the body you've always dreamed of having. I broke down this week and saw Indiana Jones.

I wanted to see it and I saw it. And talk about a resurrection, that old guy is still kicking. But at the beginning of the film, and I won't give it away, but at the beginning of the film Indiana Jones is talking to the dean of the college and he's about to go out on an adventure. His friend, he looks at Indiana and they're both getting older, he says to Indiana Jones, we seem to have reached the age where life seems to stop giving us things and starts taking things away.

That's true, isn't it? The older we get we notice that things that we have been given, they start leaving. People that we love start dying, our health starts leaving, et cetera.

And so we groan, as we said last week. Somebody in this fellowship graciously gave me a really great illustration I want to share with you. This person writes, I want to live my next life backwards. I'll start out dead and get that out of the way right off the bat. And then I'll wake up in a nursing home feeling better every day. When I'm kicked out of the home for being too healthy, I'll spend several years enjoying my retirement collecting benefit checks.

When I start work, I'll get a gold watch on my first day. I'll work for 40 years or so getting younger every day until pretty soon I'll be too young to work. So then I'll go to high school, play sports, date and party. As I get younger, I'll become a kid again. I'll go to elementary school, play and have no responsibilities. In a few years I'll become a baby and everyone will run themselves ragged just trying to keep me happy. Finally, I'll spend my last nine months floating peacefully in luxury in spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap.

That's classic. Life in reverse. Can you imagine having a body that doesn't wear out? Can you imagine having a body that never gets tired, never needs a nap, never gets exhausted, never grows weary? Can you imagine having a body that is not susceptible to disease at all or atrophy or handicaps or aches or pains? Imagine having a body that never gains weight, never loses hair, never gets wrinkled, never sags, never droops. Imagine that. Now you're saying that's all I can do is imagine that.

But one day it will be reality. You won't have to imagine that. The scripture teaches that we are both body and soul and God's plan for redemption includes both. And he includes both of them to be eternally together. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. You know the story.

Nobody could put Humpty back together again after he fell and broke into pieces. God's plan is to put us back together again but in a whole lot better shape than before. We continue our little study in this chapter that we began last week. And it's part of a greater series called From the Edge of Eternity. And we're dealing with the resurrection of the body.

As we mentioned last week, chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians is the most exhaustive treatment on bodily resurrection in all of the Bible. So we begin in verse 35 and here's the layout in this paragraph. Paul begins by introducing two questions. He goes from questions that are asked to illustrations to answer the question. So he asks two questions. He gives three illustrations and he follows that summing it all up by four declarations. So questions, illustrations, and declarations. Let's look at verse 35 for the questions. But someone will say, How are the dead raised up?

And with what body do they come? These are two good questions. The how question and the what question. How does this all work? And if it does work, what will we look like when it does work? Last week there were our Saturday night service.

A lot of people will sit in the cool of the evening out in the amphitheater for overflow. A couple guys were sitting there and one turned to his friend and said, Isn't this amazing? Can you figure this out? Can you get your mind around our resurrected body? And that guy went, I can't even pay my rent, let alone think about my resurrected body.

It's just so enormous a thing to imagine. The resurrection is bewildering. It does prompt questions. And the questions that Paul introduces seem to have been questions that were being asked by people in Corinth in a mocking kind of a way, a sneering kind of a way. These were sarcastic taunts out with the dead raised.

Now here's why. Corinth was a Greek city. It was permeated with Greek philosophy. And as you may know, the Greeks thought very ill of any idea of a resurrection.

It was abhorrent to them. The body, they said, is a prison. The goal is to escape the body and not come back with the body. Who on earth would want to be resurrected, they would think.

Since the goal is to escape the body, why get trapped again? That's one segment that brought these questions. Another segment came from within the church itself. There were a group of people in the church known as Gnostics. Have you ever heard that term, Gnostic?

It's spelled G-N-O-S-T-I-C, Gnostic. And it was a group of people who said they were Christians but their belief system was the whole material world is evil. Everything material, tangible is evil.

And only that which is spiritual, intangible, immaterial is good. So they said a good God would not have created a material universe. Also, they said, Jesus must not have been physical. He must have been a phantom.

He looked like he was real but he really wasn't because everything material is evil. So they had a problem with the physical resurrection as well. They denied the resurrection.

I'm going to bring something up that sort of helps interface with this. Maybe you've caught a couple of the articles in National Geographic on this discovered book known as the Gospel of Judas. Anybody ever heard of the Gospel of Judas? And the idea of the Gospel of Judas, it's the real story. It's the story you as Christians haven't been told.

It's a Gnostic Gospel. And in the Gospel of Judas there are supposed conversations with Judas Iscariot. He is identified in the book as the 13th spirit sent to liberate Jesus Christ from his body. He's been trapped by the incarnation. So he actually did Jesus' service by betraying him to the Romans who would kill him to release his spirit from his body that trapped him. So Judas is now the hero of the story. All of that reflects Gnostic thinking, Gnostic antipathy toward physical resurrection.

That's going on in Corinth as Paul is writing this. I would say things really haven't changed much these days. I would say that if you were to go out on the street and ask the average person, what do you believe happens when a person dies? You'll get a few different responses.

The most overwhelming response is absolutely nothing. They're annihilationists. They believe that you live, you die, your body decays, it's gone.

Nothing happens after that. You just cease to exist. There's another group, I'll call them spiritualists. They think, well, you live forever in your soul in some form or fashion being something or another. We don't exactly know what, but you sort of continue to drift out there as a spirit. Still another group, a growing group I would say in our country, believes in reincarnation. Twenty-five percent of Americans now believe in reincarnation, the transmigration of the soul from one body to another. There's even past life therapists who will tell you what you used to be in that previous body before you got into this body.

Now, here's the point. You die and leave this corpse. It's discarded, no use for it at all. You get a new form.

All of that is the complete opposite to what Paul is teaching. But it forms the mindset of these questions. How are the dead raised up?

What will they look like? Well, we ask some of the same questions, only with a different motivation. We ask questions like, how is God going to raise the dead if, let's say, the guy gets cremated and now his ashes are over four different mountain ranges? How is God going to pull that one off? Or what if a guy gets killed at sea and is eaten by sharks and the sharks go 100 miles away from each other?

Or out in the wilderness, a lion gets one limb, a wildebeest gets another, gets eaten by a wildebeest, the wildebeest gets eaten by a gorilla, and now they're in all these different species all over the jungle. Or what about an amputee? Will an amputee be an amputee forever?

Will a stroke victim be incapacitated forever? These are very real questions that we have. So let's move from questions to answering the questions by three illustrations. Verse 36. Very interesting how Paul begins his answer. He says, foolish one! What you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain, perhaps wheat, or some other grain. God gives it a body as he pleases, and to each seed its own body. All flesh is not the same flesh. There's one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies up in the sky and terrestrial bodies down on the earth. The glory of the celestial is one, the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, another glory of the stars, for one star differs from another star in glory.

So also is the resurrection of the dead. He answers the questions by three illustrations. One illustration from botany, the seed. One illustration from zoology, the species of different kinds of flesh. And an illustration from astronomy, the different kind of stars.

The first illustration is particularly helpful. It helps us understand what it's going to be like in our bodies. You see, a seed gets put into the ground. It dies, it decomposes. And the seed ceases to exist in that form.

It is transformed. Though it's the seed, it gets changed into something completely different and beautiful. I was watching YouTube this week, trying to find seeds that grow for this illustration. And have you ever seen the time-lapse photography shots of how plants grow very rapidly? Well, they showed radish seeds put in the ground, decomposing, dying. And then, after a period of time, little roots start to jet out toward the bottom, root themselves in the soil, and then more roots, and then a root system, and then a little stem, and then a little plant, and then the plant grows, and finally radishes.

Fabulous transformation. I'm not saying you're going to be a radish in the resurrection or anywhere near that, but the amazing transformation, that's what Paul's getting at with this illustration. And this simple illustration brings out three important truths about our resurrection. Three important truths. Mystery, number one. Continuity, number two. And improvement, number three.

Now follow me here. First is mystery. A seed going into the ground and dying, and up comes a plant, illustrates the mystery of one of the greatest principles in all of the Scripture.

And here's the principle. Life comes from death. The product of death is life. That's a great mystery.

It's a great truth. Jesus uses the same illustration to speak about his death and resurrection. John chapter 12, he says, Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies, it abides alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit, speaking about his death and resurrection. Jesus could not offer salvation.

He could not offer eternal life unless he first died on a cross. Out of death comes life. That's the mystery of a great principle. Second truth this illustration gives us is continuity. There is a continuity between the seed and the plant. There's DNA inside the seed that is so programmed that will determine that that seed, once dead, will produce something great. Inside of an acorn is the DNA to produce an oak.

The seeds that you're going to spit over your fence this summer, those watermelon seeds, there's genetic coding in each one of those seeds that will produce roots, plant, and fruit, a watermelon. There is a continuity. Just as there is continuity between seeds and plants, there's also continuity between these bodies that are decaying and the body that will come after these. Just think, someday we'll really have the perfect body without changing our diet or having to exercise. The only thing we'll need is a relationship with Jesus.

So if you want to live forever and have more abundant life now, Jesus Christ is the only way to obtain that. And that wraps things up for today. But before we go, Skip and Lenya are in studio today to share a few more insights on this. Lenya? You titled today's message, Getting the Body You've Always Wanted. Is that even possible? Eventually.

Yes, the new one. Think long-term. Okay. Why do you suppose the human body and physical fitness are so important to people or the great physique? And when does our focus on our health become a problem? Because it can be too external. And thank goodness. Why does God want to resurrect our bodies? Well, there's a lot of good questions. In fact, we could spend a program just on those items. But I think that, first of all, we all want to be liked. So we have an image of ourselves. We have a self-image. And we stand in front of the mirror and we do our hair and we get ourselves ready because we want to be appealing. It's part of who we are.

And so that in and of itself isn't wrong to want to present yourself in a way that you could be so disheveled that you're distracting. I know, but you have no idea how hard it is for us that aren't tall like you. Oh, please. You have such an advantage. You can eat so much more.

And hide it. Is that what you're saying? Yes. But then also, let me just add and keep this going a little bit, is that I think it's good to be healthy. There's nothing wrong with having a healthy body. God gave you one shot at life, gave you one body, one backbone, so posture is important, one physique. And so we want to stay with the years the Lord will give us the best quality of life we can. Can you overdo it?

Yes. You can overdo it when physical health becomes the priority over spiritual health. Healthy versus holy. There you go because holiness is spiritual health.

So when it becomes out of balance, then it's wrong. And if we were to spend as much time spiritually on our spiritual inward man as we do on our outward, boy, we'd all be looking good before God. That's right. And so he's going to resurrect these bodies.

So I'm like at the point of who cares? He's going to resurrect it anyway, right? It's all going south. Well, it is all eventually going south and we are all prone to corruption. But there is a day when this corruption puts on incorruption and the body that we sow is the body that is raised. That doesn't mean it will look the same.

It will look markedly different. But it's a necessity because God wants to reverse the effects of original sin, and the only way to do that is through resurrection. The second reason that I would propose is to make ourselves fit for, let's call it, level A or part A of heaven, which is, I believe, a millennial kingdom that will last a thousand years on a reconstituted earth.

We're going to need the kind of physicality that goes along with the environment. So for those two reasons, and I think there are more, but those two are a good start as to why there is a coming resurrection. And Jesus was physically resurrected.

It was his body. Right, and it says that what happened to him is going to happen to us. Exciting. Well, thanks, guys. And if you'd like a copy of today's message, Getting the Body You've Always Wanted, just call 1-800-922-1888, and we'll send you a copy on CD for just $6 plus shipping. And don't forget, we've got the entire series From the Edge of Eternity on CD for you, 17 messages for only $39 plus shipping. Find out more and order today at connectwithskip.com. We'll talk more about that perfect body you've always wanted next time here in Connect with Skip weekend edition, a presentation of Connection Communications. Make a connection Make a connection at the foot Of the crossing Cast all burdens on his word Make a connection Connection Connection Connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.