Resurrection Bodies

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. We are finishing our series today called Embodied with, I think, a fitting ending. We're looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 15 this week. Next week, though, we start a new series called The Big Relief. It's really how the gospel of Jesus Christ, God's grace, the victory we have through Jesus, relieves us of so much of the pressures that life can put on us. Whether it's the quest for status or for satisfaction or for a sense of righteousness, trying to look good, all that type of stuff. We can let all that go and just bask in the glory and the goodness of what God has given us in Jesus Christ. I think this is going to be a great series. There is a book that actually goes along with this. I read the book. That's how I got the series. Let's put it that way. David Zoll wrote this book called The Big Relief. I think you could really enjoy reading it devotionally throughout the summer as well. I think much of our thoughts about eternal life, what we call heaven, is more in line with a man named Plato and Greek philosophy than it is necessarily with what the Bible teaches about the resurrection and the life everlasting. I think many of us are that way. What I mean, I think I grew up with kind of a spirituality that believed the whole goal of life was to get to heaven. It looked kind of like this cartoon, where you're kind of sitting around floating on some cloud somewhere, maybe kind of angelic looking. I don't know why we're supposed to have wings and all that stuff and a halo on our head. Does that look like a fun life to you? No. I guess the goal was to get there, but I'm going like... No wonder Warren Beatty, there was a comedy, do you remember Warren Beatty's movie called? Anybody? Trivia here. Heaven Can Wait. The whole story was he'd rather be in love on earth, to love on earth, than to be in heaven. Well, if this is the kind of heaven that we're looking forward to, it seems to be anticlimactic compared to some of the joys that we have, even though they're momentary and limited on earth. And I have to tell you, thank God, that's not what the New Testament is talking about when it talks about the resurrection of the body. I mean, the question with this, and this is the things I ask. I was a weird high school, grade school kid in a sense. I asked questions like, well, if the whole goal is to just get to heaven, then what's this whole life about? I mean, why am I here for so long? It's just for me to be prepared to get to heaven. If you die and you go to heaven, this is the way I thought. And then Jesus says he's coming again to judge, and then you're ripped out of heaven, come back to earth for the judgment, and then you go back to heaven. What? Anybody ever think like that? Ask those types of questions, or I was just the weird kid. You, yeah. See? And you're going like, now, I never had a dog, so I never worried about whether the dogs go to heaven or not. Never had a dog, but maybe you've always wondered, well, what about all this creation? What about all of this stuff? Now, contrast this all to what N.T. Wright says. He's got a great book. This is another book you could read over the summer. It's called Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. And he says this, Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project, not to snatch people away from earth to heaven, but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That is, after all, what the Lord's prayer is about. We pray it almost every Sunday here. You pray it quite often. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The two are to come together. That's the whole point. Now, where does N.T. Wright get this idea? Not just from the Lord's prayer. I think also from 1 Corinthians 15. It's called the big resurrection chapter, and it's really a long argument, by the way. It's an argument because there were people in Corinth. Corinth was, well, bless their hearts, right? This is what you would say in the South. Corinth was a church not much bigger than us, and it was really messed up in a lot of different ways. And it was messed up because they were really in this Greco-Roman culture and had all these ideas and just imported them into Christianity, including the idea, the Greek thought, that the real goal is to unzip this body someday. Like I said last week, that the body is the tomb of the soul, is the way they described it. And it's like, wow. They really didn't like the body. They thought it was limiting. Well, you know, it is somewhat. And aches and pains the older you get, and wrinkles, and you name it. We got it going, right? And so they thought perfection was never having to change, everything being great, and you could only do that in some ideal spiritual sense. So there were Corinthians in this churc...