1 Corinthians 15:35-58, Change is Inevitable

1 Corinthians 15, be reading from verses 35 to 58, to the end of the chapter, hear the word of the Lord. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised?

With what kind of body do they come? You foolish person. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

And 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 is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.

There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one kind and the glory of the earthly is of 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 it is it 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.

It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there's also a spiritual body.

Thus it is written. The first man, Adam, became a living being. The last Adam became a life giving spirit.

But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust.

The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven.

Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

I tell you this, brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed for this perishable body must put on the imperishable and this mortal body must put on immortality when the perishable puts on the imperishable and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written.

Death is swallowed up in victory. Oh, death, where is your victory? Oh, death, where is your sting?

The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our

Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the

Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. May the

Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. Well, a great philosopher once said, change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

People love and hate change. They want their life right now to remain pretty much the same. Most people do.

Maybe a few changes here and there, some variety to spice up life, you know, and maybe an upgrade in their

TV service, occasionally a new restaurant to go to, maybe occasional change of wardrobe, a few new clothes, a new iPhone if it comes out.

But mostly they want to stay the same, just a little better.

Now if after a while enough people in society become discontent, they will start to clamor for change, give us change.

But when real changes start to be proposed and made, a leader soon finds that there were, you know, there were reasons the things were the way they were.

Whatever got me people, some people discontent. A lot of people wanted things that way. That's why they were that way.

They wanted the old Coke. They want the same old shows on TV, so they'll endlessly watch reruns of TV on TV land or maybe

Andy Griffith for the hundredth time, you know, and their old health care plan. They liked it. The archaic

Bible translation, they could hardly understand it, but that's what they, what's what they want to keep, whether it be politics, churches or families.

People veer from either craving change to fearing and resisting it. As President Woodrow Wilson said, if you want to make enemies, try to change something.

I remember in the early eighties, my aunt giving my grandmother a gift, a microwave oven and what a nice gift, right?

Everyone was getting them by then, but my grandmother didn't want it. She just flat turned it down. It would mean change.

She said, what will I do with that? She had gotten along fine, you know, probably over 70, 60, 70 years by then without a microwave oven and family tried to explain to her the uses of it, but she would have none of it.

Having a microwave oven would mean having to change and she didn't want that. But change is inevitable except from vending machines.

And yet people are resistant to change so much so that with every change, we experience some stress.

Every change brings certain stress, the more significant the change, the higher the levels of stress.

Some people have measured it in points, stress points, and they'll say on a scale of one one to 100, getting married is 58 stress points, which is slightly more stressful than getting fired from a job, which is 50 stress points.

But getting married is slightly just barely less stressful, just five points less stressful at 63 points than going to jail.

The joke being, of course, marriage, jail. What's the difference? The most stressful event at 100 points is the death of a relative, close relative.

Change is stressful and we like to avoid stress. And so we like to avoid change if we can.

But change is inevitable, except religious people, you know, churchgoing people don't always understand this.

Religion and change have a bad relationship. The problem has been that many religious people think that everything they do from the way they dress to the

Bible translation they use to the order of service, the style of music, the activities they do, that all of it is a command from God and none of it can be changed for any reason whatsoever.

And that's the way we've always done things. And if someone tries to change those practices, tells us to update our

Bible translations so we can understand it or to sing music that sounds pleasant to living people, to dress normally, to pay attention to what the

Bible says about how the church should be run, not just the way we've always done things. There will always be someone who passionately defends the status quo.

Just this past week, I saw an article online about why you should ditch the projector, go back to the hymnals.

I mean, it really is for no other reason that, you know, you don't want to change, which is odd from my point of view and studying the

Puritans, do you realize that the hymns are new too? At one time, every single one of them was new, right? In fact, for the first 200 years of Protestantism, except for the

Lutherans, most of us sang from the Psalms. And then along came the hymns writers like Isaac Watts, and they said, no, we don't want to change.

Some people resisted him. Then after a while, people thought that that's the old time hymns. We've always had old hymns.

Well, no, we haven't. But anyway, going on and on like that, as John Kenneth Galbraith said, faced with a choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

And religious people are the worst at that, which is really ironic and it's kind of tragic, kind of sad, really, you know, because the church is we are supposed to be, the church is supposed to be telling everyone else, you need to change.

You need to change your whole life. You need to turn around from your old way. You need to go a new way. We're telling everyone else to change.

We're saying that we have been changed. We're saying that we're expecting the greatest change in the future.

So you think we'd be the most flexible, open to change, easily changeable people around?

Hopefully here were the exception, we're like that, but often churches aren't. The change is inevitable.

This passage tells us that. We all must change and we will all be changed.

And here we see the great change in two parts from verses 35 to 49 is about the body. And then for verses 50 to 58 is about the victory.

First the body. In verse 35, Paul echoes what some in Corinth were asking, that they're just steeped in their

Greek philosophy. They said, how can the dead be raised? You know, the body rots, it falls apart for that corpse to come back to a living body.

How is that possible? Especially if it's been dead for centuries, you know, there's really nothing left or maybe it's buried at sea and eaten by fish or devoured by some wild animals.

You know, there's no body left to be raised. The Apostle Paul doesn't regard this as a sincere question.

It's not a genuine search for truth, he doesn't think. That's why he sharply retorts in verse 36, literally it's, you fool.

Because really they're questioning God as though God can do it. You don't understand the kind of change that is inevitable. These are the kinds of people he describes in the previous verse from we read at the end of last week, verse 34, as having no knowledge of God.

Psalm he said, have no knowledge of God to your shame. These people are the ones asking this of those kind. Now, sure, if it were just a matter of natural laws, we know from nature, nature left to itself, the dead do not rise.

When something's dead, there's nothing we can do about it. But Paul implies the fool says in his heart, there is no

God. Nothing we can do about it if they're dead, but God can do something about it. So they're asking their question, how can the dead be raised is basically saying, you know, there must not be a

God because he can't do it. And Paul says, you fool, don't you understand your question?

You're saying in your heart, there's no God. The fool looks at the world and thinks that what he can see, what can be measured, it could be tested, can be described as scientific laws, that that is all there is.

And so looking at just that, the dead do not rise. What kind of body would they have anyway if they've been in the grave for some time, eaten by worms, the worms eaten by birds and the birds eaten by something else and no one are all gone.

Maybe there's a race of the dead. Are you talking about zombies? Modern scoffers today like to mock the resurrection as being about zombies.

You're talking about the living dead coming out. But Paul cuts them off. You fool. There's a

God who raised the dead. And so there is a reality that is beyond anything that you've experienced or can comprehend.

Change, he says, is inevitable, and that changes the resurrection of the dead.

Well, what would it be like the resurrection of the dead as Christians? They hardly consider that.

We only have imperfect analogies, some of them here, but we have an illustration in the resurrection of Jesus himself.

His body was raised. It wasn't a metaphor for Jesus's spirit ascending to heaven.

His his ethic, his his ideas being triumphant. No, his body was literally raised.

He wasn't just a ghost that came out of the tomb. He could be touched, he could eat fish and tell people here, touch here.

People didn't see through him. He wasn't semi -transparent. You know, the two on the road to Emmaus would have said, hey, what's up with you?

We can see right through you. No, you know, like some of these ghost movies where you can kind of kind of see something there and kind of then you can see right through him.

No, he had a real body. That's the reality. Some in Corinth were denying. And that's what Paul is setting out to prove.

And really in this whole chapter, it is in verse 36, this body, he says to the resurrection body, this body is like a seed planted in the ground.

And first, he emphasizes that normally, naturally, the seed will die, in other words, is buried in order to produce that later life.

And then he shows the difference that there's a discontinuity between the seed, this body and the crop, the resurrection body, a seed and the plant it produces, you know, look very different, don't they?

But probably most of us couldn't tell what plant, given a seed, probably couldn't say, well, that's a whatever plant, except for corn.

You can tell corn. But besides that, most other plants, you can't really tell. Most of us couldn't. I couldn't anyway, given a seed, what plant is supposed to come out from it.

So there's a difference between the body that is sown, this body, and the body that is raised, the resurrection body, discontinuity, like a seed.

But the analogy also shows us that there's a connection. There's some continuity between the seed, this body and the crop, the resurrection body.

After all, the seed and the eventual whatever it is, wheat or grain or may look very different, but they are connected.

There's a connection between the seed and the crop, right? Eventual plant. And today, I suppose we'd say, no, we only know about science.

You know, there's a connection of DNA or RNA between a seed of the crop. The seed underwent a change.

It was changed to become the eventual plant. So in the same way, our bodies now will somehow be changed to become a new kind of body.

That will be a very different kind of body, but it will still have some connection with this old body.

And Paul looks at the world and sees hints of this principle, illustrations of the resurrection around him, that the seeds of the plant is like our present body to the resurrection body.

The difference in kinds of bodies between land animals and birds and fish and people is a reflection of the difference between the kinds of bodies we have now and what we will have after we have been changed.

The difference in kinds of bodies in space is the difference between the earth and the sun and the stars and the moon are like the difference between this mortal body we have now and the immortal body we will have.

He is saying that there is a principle of different kinds of bodies. And just because we have only experienced one kind, just because we all in our experience, all we've known is this mortal body, doesn't mean that there aren't other kinds.

The immortal, we never experienced it, but just because we said we never experienced it doesn't exist. Well, you know, what kind of person says something they haven't seen doesn't exist.

There's a very limited kind of bigoted person. So don't be like that. Now, imagine if you were a fish. OK, you imagine that, say a tuna, you're deep at sea and all you've known all your life is fish.

Your entire existence has been taken up by swimming. You had no idea that there's such thing as air and dry ground.

You get your oxygen from the water. Then another tuna comes along and tries to convince you that there are other kinds of bodies.

You know, there's other things out there, not just fish. There's things, there's bodies with appendages called legs instead of fins.

They walk around on two of them on something called dry ground. You can believe that.

And not in the water, but in the air, whatever that is. You would think that tuna is out of his mind.

That's just one crazy fish. There can't be such a thing. I've been I've been almost all over this world swimming and I've never seen anything like what he describes.

That's just craziness. It would require revelation from beyond. Or maybe you finally getting caught by one of those two legged creatures with a hook in your mouth or through it, bagged in the net before you believe that there are those kinds of bodies.

Now, we have only experienced our mortal bodies all our lives, ourselves, our family, our other people, our pets, our livestock.

We see grazing the birds that we see flying. All we know is perishable mortal bodies. And so we assume all bodies are like that.

But Paul comes telling them and us, we've seen another kind of body when

Jesus rose from the dead. There's a whole realm of glorious bodies that we've never yet even gotten a glimpse of.

One blinder that obscures our vision of this realm is an unbiblical idea that many people have, including many

Christians, that we have today of of heaven. Many people think that when they die, they will go to heaven.

And if God sees them as Christ is dressed in the righteousness of Christ and and he's given them the resurrection power that makes the spirit come alive, he's the life giving spirit.

He's made them. He's given them life, enables them to believe and repent. Well, then that's true. They will go to heaven to be in the presence of the

Lord. Like Paul said, to be absent for the body is to be present with the Lord. But many, if not most, if not the vast majority of people now think that, well, the story just kind of stops there.

Heaven is my home. We'll go there. They think when they die, they will go to heaven and they'll be there forever. Kind of spirit floating around with no body.

This world is not my home, they say. When we die, then we go home. Here we're just strangers.

Now, it's true that what the Bible calls the world, this world system, society, maybe want to call it culture, the system of values and assumptions advocated by sinners, you know, saying maybe money is the pursuit of life or pleasure or whatever.

This this world is not our home. But the planet is.

Earth is our home. And the body is our home. You know, the picture in heaven, the final destiny for us is a new heaven and a new earth, and we're in new bodies.

That's the eventual. That's the destination. The idea of living eternally is a kind of ghost just floating around, you know, plucking a spiritual harp on a spiritual cloud, completely immaterial.

That's unbiblical, it's un -Christian. We will be raised in a body.

You see, the Greeks, people of Corinth and people around them, believed in the immortality of the soul, that we have a spirit that lives forever.

Now, that was so that was not what Paul is fighting about with these people. He's not arguing about that.

They both believed in that. He's adamantly insisting here that we will have not just a spirit, but a body.

And body is the word here used over and over again. In Greek is soma, body, body, body.

And including in verse forty four, the resurrection is not about becoming a ghost that can now live in heaven. In second

Corinthians, chapter five, verse three, Paul says that to be without the resurrected body, he says it's like being naked.

It's to be without a body is to be without something like clothing. It just feels so natural and comfortable and right, like it's part of you, maybe not, you know, it's not essentially part of you, but it's just you feel incomplete without it.

And so how do we get how do we get that new body? Change is inevitable.

This body will change one way or the other. Either nature will take its course and it will die is in verse fifty one or we shall be changed, be changed either way.

And God will give us a glorified body. We won't all die, but we will all be changed, he says.

Notice verse thirty eight that it is God who gives us the body. He is the active one.

He puts that in there. He gives us the body. It's not nature. What he's describing here is not a process of nature just left to itself.

It's not something that in any way we are capable of giving to ourselves. God must do it.

And he's saying promising God will do it. Our present body in verse forty two is perishable.

God will give us an imperishable one. It is dishonorable, is prone to tempting us with with lust or gluttony or laziness.

God will give us an honorable one that never draws us away from him. That's why it's spiritual. It draws us to it will draw us to become spiritual.

It is naturally weak. It's prone to diseases and wearing out and fatigue, getting cold or whatever.

Simply, it's just fragile, right? Your cartilage can wear out in your left knee so you can't run anymore.

Something like that. God will give us a body that is powerful and sturdy and strong where the cartilage never wears out in your left knee.

It is what the ESV and many other translations call a a natural body. And just here, our

English language gives us some problems. The word Paul uses here, natural, is psuchikon, pronounce the

P there, which can mean soulish or sensual, such a soulish body connected with the soul or sensual body is the word we get our word psych from as in psychology or psychiatry.

Natural, I don't think it's a bad translation. But our problem is that when we see that we see natural body, we think, well, then the other body coming, is it what is it?

Is it unnatural? It's even supernatural. And then we think supernatural.

Well, that means is that a ghost? And so he says in verse 44, we will have a spiritual body.

And many people would then see that word spiritual and they'll think, well, aha, that's just what

I thought all along. We're just going to be spirits. That's all. But that's not what he says.

That's what the foolish people he's arguing with here in the chapter of saying he is asserting that we will have a body.

It's a body that's oriented toward the spirit instead of toward the soul. But it's still a body.

The word for body there means, believe it or not, you know what it means? You won't believe this. You really won't believe it.

It means body, it will be a different kind of body as a bird is different than a fish, but it will be a body.

That spiritual body, the change resurrection body will come to us, he says, from the last

Adam in verse 45. He is the one who gives us life so that we are first alive in the spirit like him, the life giving spirit.

And eventually we are raised to life. In the body, the first Adam brought us death and the last

Adam brings us life, a whole complete life.

Including life for our body. Now, what kind of body is this? Might ask, you know, what kind of body is this?

This has got to be something far beyond our experience so far. It is like what

Jesus was raised with, what Paul here calls the man of heaven.

We will have a body just like this. He was raised with the spiritual body, a body that could touch and be touched, that could eat and drink.

But could also go beyond the limitations of mere natural bodies. He was the last Adam, the head of a new race who brought life to all the people for which he is the head of.

The natural or soulish man comes from the first Adam. The first Adam brought death to all the people that he was the head of, which is all of us.

But we can also have Christ now is our head and get life. The natural or soulish man in the natural or soulish body is first.

It's like Adam. The first Adam was first. And then Christ comes second. Then comes the spiritual.

Adam was before Christ. Our natural or soulish body is before our resurrected body.

The natural is changed to the spiritual. Change is inevitable.

The changes to our body. And it is the final victory. From verse 50 onward to the end, he tells us about the victory.

First, he says flesh and blood. There's a different word there for flesh, not the word body. Flesh and blood will not get this victory.

That is, this body made of dust and animated by soul cannot receive what is spirit and immortal.

The victory over death is not earned. Notice that we use inherited.

Flesh and blood will not inherit. It's inherited. The victory is inherit something like, you know, as an older relative might bequeath something to you, money or a house or something valuable.

You know, you don't get it because you work for it. They earned it and you get it because of your relationship with them.

So here we get into the kingdom of God. Flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God, which means those who do inherit the kingdom of God.

They get it because of our relationship with Jesus. We inherit our entrance into it. There's nothing we can do in this body that will make it possible for us to enter the kingdom of God.

That is the realm where God rules, where everything is done his way, ordered perfectly as he wants it to be.

This flesh and blood cannot achieve it. We can't earn our way in.

We need to inherit it. But if the Greeks, like a lot of people today, if they thought heaven, the kingdom of God, was about being a ghost floating around on a cloud, plucking a spiritual harp, the

Jews like by Paul, maybe like maybe like Chinese thought the next life heaven was going to be a lot like this one, just maybe a little better, you know, like the marketing technique for an old cereal that's declining in popularity.

They do a little tweak, a little something, add a little more sugar or whatever, and they put a stamp on the box, new and improved.

And so the kingdom of God, many people didn't think the new the kingdom of God, the next life heaven would be just like this one, except if this is the

Jews, except, you know, except for those those depraved, brutal Romans ruling over us. We'll have our own king from the line of David or maybe like some today instead of the old stuff we used to have.

We'll still have money, but maybe have more of it. We'll have cell phones and houses and cars just like here.

If only, of course, your descendants need to do their job and send it to you via burning.

But the transition or from this life earth to the next, this life where the

Romans or the Gentiles rule, the transition or the differences, it's not so great.

It's not so much. Does it take that big a change? All it takes is the right king ruling over us.

You're Jewish, the right laws enforced. I mean, some people today think we only get the right people in power, the kingdom of God can come.

Maybe it takes the right relatives sending you the money, flesh and blood, what all these ways have in common, flesh and blood.

They think this mortal body, this kind of life can enter the kingdom, can go to heaven.

If only we make a few changes, a few tweaks, we think the Paul says no.

No matter what we do, we cannot, as we are in these mortal bodies in this system, enter into the kingdom of God in verse 50.

So if we are are to enter the kingdom of God or the language we usually use today or go to heaven, no, that's not the language

Paul uses. But whatever, if we're to go to heaven, change, radical change, not just in a few revisions, you know, a few

New Year's resolutions, lose a few pounds or whatever, a few minor improvements, a bit of editing on our life, a new paint job, some wax.

No, not that real change, that kind of change is inevitable.

Now, how will it come about? We looked at earlier the analogy of the seed Paul use that analogy of a seed in the ground.

This whole body is like the seed. The new body is like the eventual crop. Well, we could think, well, then it must be like that change.

It's first a little bud out of the earth and a blade is going to be slow growth, a gradual development.

But Paul here says quite clearly that the spiritual body is not like those natural bodies, that the change will come in a flash, uses a word like that in the twinkling of an eye, an indivisible, indivisible moment of time.

We shall receive an inheritance bequeathed to us, a spiritual resurrected body, and that will be our life after life after death.

That is the change, a resurrection change, a victory of life from death.

Change is inevitable, says here in verse fifty one, we shall all be changed.

There will come a time when the currently reigning Christ puts all his enemies under his feet, including the rain and the ruin of death, fully subjugated mortality, perishability, the mere dust and soul will be ended and all the dead will be raised, immortal and spiritual bodies, but physical bodies.

Then at that time, at that time. Then we'll be able to mock death, where's your sting now, death, but that's not yet the victory is the final victory over death, over the death and decay of this body.

Well, the NCAA has figured that schools cheat, colleges cheat on recruiting players or paying players for one reason, obvious reason to win.

And so they've been punishing schools that get caught by retroactively altering the results of games so that teams that won with illegally recruited or rewarded players will now the record will show they lost the games with them.

That is, they will now change the result of oblivious. I don't know if they do the basketball and they do a football football games that actually ended, you know, an actual fact.

They ended with the cheating school winning, but they'll change the official result to show that the cheating school lost.

They will make them in their terminology vacate wins so that the official statistics now show that the cheating school that that at one time had won now has a losing record.

So the NCAA makes them forfeit past games so that a team that once was a champion is now in the records a loser.

Here, first Corinthians 15, we see that in the end, death will be required to vacate all its wins.

It will forfeit every victory and not just in official statistics as in the NCAA, but in reality, death will be changed from a champion to a loser.

If the final destiny of Christians were merely to be disembodied spirits floating in a vaporous, immaterial heaven, then the death of the body would never have been conquered.

The ruin and the reign of death brought to our bodies would never have been reversed. Jesus would not have to be raised from the dead.

Sure, there would be no more death there that is in this heaven, but its victories in the past would still stand.

Its physical victories would still exist. But what Paul is saying here is that all of death's victories will be forfeited, will be taken back from it.

Christ was the first. He's the model, the life -giving spirit who even now makes it possible for us to believe and to live.

But eventually, every person who has ever been conquered by death will be given up by death.

And all those still alive, you know, when this happens, all those still alive at the end will be changed in verse 52.

That is, they will go right from this mortal body to the immortal one without having to pass through death.

And this will be, he says, at the last trumpet. That is, at the very end, the trumpet will announce his coming, announce this resurrection and their perishable, immortal, weak body will be transformed without having to be planted in the ground like seed transformed directly into an immortal spiritual body.

And as much as some people fear and avoid change, that change is inevitable. He says, we shall all be changed.

And that change is the victory. Death, which used to be as inevitable as taxes, will have no more victories to its record.

So it will so it will then be open to our jeering. Where, death, are your victories now?

You used to boast, death used to boast and mock that it could bring anyone down from the greatest athlete to the greatest saints.

You even appeared for a brief time to have triumphed over the last Adam. But where are all those victories now?

You don't even have one to show for your long reign. That's the victory.

Death stung us through sin and that sin, our sin, says was empowered by the law, showed us what not to do, showed us what to do, showed us, said, don't do this.

But we simply did it anyway, sinning and dying, stung.

The law, the commands from God of what to do and what not to do, like the first Adam in the garden, you know, don't eat of that one tree.

All the other trees you can eat up, but not that one. But because we in Adam wanted to be like God, not submitted to him, but like him, we decided for ourselves what is right and wrong.

We thought we could be like God, decide we're going to say what's right, what's wrong. And we just had to violate the law and sin and die.

And so we were stung. But into the reign of death, the father said, Jesus, not to give us a new law, you know, that now now if we just try harder, now we love our neighbor.

At least most of the time we can in this flesh and blood, by our efforts and choices, earn that victory over death and so go to heaven.

No, death stung us for sin. God's commands, whether keep the Sabbath or go murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, or maybe for us.

What we think our commands, what we think of as the new law, you know, don't be nice, don't cuss, at least around some people don't drink, be a loyal family member, be filial.

And I'd say, go to church sometimes, I mean, most of the time, give a tie that that is we think some people think that's just this is a new roadmap.

It's a new law replacing the old one. It finally didn't quite get us there. And if we can only keep it, then we can enter the kingdom of God.

No, that's not the gospel. That's not the victory. The victory is that God saves us through our

Lord Jesus Christ, the last Adam, the life giving spirit who first breathes life into our spirits, brings us up from the death of sin and raises us up to life with God.

And who will one day, in that blink of an eye, that indivisible flash of time, he will then, it's a mystery how it could happen, but he will then change us who are, who were from being under the rule of death from now being immortal to now being immortal.

That victory, if you are born again Christian, really, you are already in the middle of it.

The life giving spirit has raised your spirit up already. He's already given life to you and he will raise your body up in immortal, different spiritual body for Christ.

It is already complete. He's already been raised up physically. He has gone ahead to show us where we are going.

He was raised not just as a ghost floating around, but in the body. So it's done.

And seeing that we can do what Paul tells us to do in that very last verse of this chapter, be steady, be sure, working with the power of that, of that resurrection from that life giving spirit in us, we can, we can continue in the work of the

Lord. The same power that raised Jesus from the grave lives in us and so energizes us to work and everything done in that power will not be futile, will not be for nothing.

That's why a core value of this church is to be active because we believe that we have been infused with the resurrection life of Christ, that the life giving spirit has brought us to life.

And that spiritual power gives us the power to always be active for the Lord, knowing that if it is his grace working in us, working through us, then our activity is not for nothing.

He ends this chapter. But it's sort of a mirror image of the way he began it.

You remember back at the beginning, chapter 15, he began by telling us to remember, he began to tell us, hold fast to the gospel because it's through it that we are saved.

That gospel that may have saved and transformed our hearts years ago will, if we continue to believe it, save our very bodies, too, so that they will be raised, changed.

But he says, if you don't hold fast, if you give up, you don't persevere, then you may have believed in vain for nothing.

That's how he began at the beginning of the chapter and how he ends this chapter by once again telling us to to persevere, to stick to it.

Don't give up or give in. Know that if that resurrection power from that life giving spirit,

God's grace is at work in us now, what we do in that power is not in vain.

Many people hate and resist change, but change is inevitable.

We have all already experienced the change from being stung by death through sin. Naturally, we are dead to God with dead in our sins as the way we're born.

If we do not change, if we are not changed from that condition, we'll we'll still be changed.

Through the resurrection, the spiritual body will still be ours, but we'll then go with that spiritual body into an eternal death, the sting of physical death will be taken away only to be replaced by the exponentially worse, the dramatically worse sting of eternal spiritual death, the change will be from bad to worse.

But because of what God did, giving a body to Jesus, a spiritual resurrected body, he is now

Christ is now our life giving spirit who can raise you up from the dead, who can transform your natural soul, your deadness in your sins, who can transform you into a soul alive to God.

Able to believe now, able to repent, able to trust him and worship

God every day, who can take away every victory of death in your life.

That's what the life giving spirit can do for you. Now, change is inevitable.