The Marks of a Good Christian: Hope

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  The Marks of a Good Christian: Hope

  Happy Easter, brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you. Vicky and everybody else. Please turn in your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. We'll be picking up where we left off last week, and maybe some of you are surprised by that thinking, is this supposed to be a special sermon on the resurrection and all that goes with that. Well, just so happens that sometimes where we are going through a book of the Bible as we preach verse by verse...I look ahead a few weeks and then I look and say, wait, actually, we possibly could be studying the resurrection and return of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday, so we kept it at that. And that's where we'll study today and see another mark of a good Christian...hope for those of you that are here and then those that are not, you'll be able to catch up quickly just by a recap. This letter written to a baby church 2000 years ago in a place called Thessalonica. It's still around today in modern Greece. It's on the north side of the Aegean Sea, and this was written around A.D. 50. So only 20 years removed from when Jesus rose and went back to heaven. And Paul and Silas and Timothy went there in Acts 17. They preached Christ and him crucified, that he lived, died, and rose again, and that he was Lord...Caesar wasn't. And so on those two foundational pieces of who Jesus is and what he came to do, people came to Christ. He is Lord, he is Savior. And because of that, Paul had a church on his hands. And it was a young church. They were a mixture of religious Jews and irreligious pagans. And he had a lot to teach them in a short amount of time. So short, because it got cut short whenever the jealous Jews in Acts 17 formed a mob and ran them out of town within a few months. You can imagine if you were at a place like that and somebody came in and preached the gospel and you got converted, how much you would have to learn that you didn't know anything about. Whether you were a Jew, who had to basically unlearn what you thought was true from the Old Testament about a works-based salvation. And then if you were a pagan who had all those different religious ideas going around, all the new ideas, particularly one idea that there is only one true God, Jesus Christ the Lord, and that all the rest are false gods. So Paul had his work cut out for him. He taught on Christ and Him crucified. And then he probably started to teach on the ethics of the Christian life. And we saw that the last few weeks in chapter four. So all of you can be caught up to speed if you've not been here for a while, if this is your only service here. But why we're going to be in 13 to 18 today as it comes next is also because it addresses what we're here 2000 years later, celebrating, which is Jesus rose from the grave and we can have hope for life eternal as well. That because Christ rose, we will rise. And whatever is our promises that we have in him, they are forever. That never ends, not even for a moment between our death here and our life after death. And that's really what Paul is addressing. And we'll see that in that first verse when he says, I don't want you to be uninformed. He's saying, listen up, Thessalonians. Uh, maybe I didn't get to this subject before, but I've been told by my friend Silas and my other friend Timothy, that some of you are wondering about what's going to happen after we die. We believe that Jesus Christ is ruling and reigning right now, and you taught us that he's coming again. But what if we die before he comes again? We're not alive when he comes back. And they would have really been living in that time of thinking he's coming back right now, because all the teaching they would have had passed on by the apostles is be ready, be on the alert. He could have come at any moment like a thief in the night. And so they're really thinking it could be any moment now there's persecution going on around them. And they are wondering, well, okay, we can be ready. But if we die before he comes back are we going to be like a second class Christian? I mean, how long will we stay dead? They didn't have teaching on the bodily resurrection of saints. So they might have been thinking, hey, for those who are going to pass away, who have already passed away since Paul left, what becomes of them? And you'll hear that concern they have for those who have died in Christ. Now he's not addressing those who die outside of Christ. You'll see that here. He uses the same phrase asleep in Christ multiple times to address what hope does a Christian have for life after death. And I think that's the most pressing question we could be wondering about today. We could be celebrating the resurrection today, as we should. But it hits home in a very personal way when you ask yourself that question...am I sure of where I'm going to be when I die? Or the loved ones you have that you're here with today? What's going to happen to them when they die? That's where it brings it right home to your own very heart. And that's a question that a lot of people wrestle with, believe it or not. I happen to be reading this week an article in Good Housekeeping. Don't ask me why I'm reading Good Housekeeping. Shannon does a great job keeping our house, but I came across the title of an article that caught my eye in light of this...What happens when we die? Believers from four major religions guided me through this emotional process. It was an anonymous article by a 28 year old former Catholic. She was in the prime of her life, she says, having the best time. But she thinks back to when her dad passed away unexpectedly when she was 11 to cancer, and one...that makes her sorrowful thinking about his death. But more than anything, it makes her worried about her own. This is what she writes in the opening paragraph. What scares me isn't so much how I'm going to die. It's the fear of what will happen afterward. Will I go to heaven? Will I be reincarnated? Will my spirit die with my body? I start feeling sick when I think about that last one. My heart pounds and I can feel the blood pumping through my veins. I think the truth is, a lot of people out there feel the same way as this woman. They try to avoid thinking about death at all costs. But she alludes to in the article, she could just be driving in the car having the best day. She's in the passenger seat, the sun's out, the windows are down, and all of a sudden she gets that striking fear. What is going to happen to me when I die? And so she goes on a quest in this article to find the answer. But we have the answer in front of us right here today. We've already sung of it, that we have hope in Jesus Christ, that because he lives, we'll live. But that may not answer all the questions we have about eternal life. So we'll get a few of them answered today. Follow with me as I read 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. 
"But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you, by the Word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words." Thus reads God's living and active word. May he bless the preaching and hearing of it today. 
As we walk through this passage to talk about the hope that we have in Christ as Colossians 1:27, Paul calls it...Christ in you the hope of glory. What is that glory that we're hoping in in Christ? Paul is going to get to that question today, but he's going to walk us through a series of questions to get there. And that's how I kind of framed this out. I want you to be thinking these questions as we walk through this passage. The first question is, Why do we talk about life after death? Second, we'll talk about, How do we talk about it? Then we'll get to Who is our hope in life after death. And then finally, What is the truth about life after death? 
 But let's think a little bit on that first question. Why do we talk about life after death? Well, the short answer is because we're curious. We want to know. As a lot of people call it...it's the great Unknown. And in verse 13, Paul starts out by saying, we don't want you to be uninformed, as in there's information you can have if you're interested in learning about it. And beyond just being curious like that article went on to say, there's those that struggle with it. They wrestle with it; they're anxious about it. Because they don't have hope. And everybody needs hope. And I think that's a common thing throughout all humanity. People want to have hope. They want to have answers. They want to be comforted. So Paul starts by saying, hey, listen, Christians. I want to talk to you about those who are asleep, and here's why we talk about it, so that you will not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope. That's the need that Paul understands behind their questions about what's going to happen to those people who die, who are believers. And then Christ comes back. He knows what's underneath, that there's a certain level of anxiety, there's a certain level of they're grieving. And notice that he doesn't correct them for grieving. He's not saying it's wrong to grieve. He says, don't grieve, as the rest of humanity grieves. That there's a grief that the godless have that's despair, because there is no foundation for them to stand on when it comes to eternal life. It's a guess at best. And that's what some of these Thessalonians were coming out of, coming out of backgrounds, whether it was Judaism that didn't really have an answer of what becomes of the body. They had some expectation that there is this Messiah character who is going to come to rule and reign on earth, which would be great for the people that are alive. But there were very few that had a full understanding in Judaism of what that means for the regular individual. Do we just have to be really good people and hope that God is pleased with us, and then maybe we'll be part of this Messiah's kingdom? But if you are a Jew that came out of that thinking, and the Messiah has already come, and he's died and gone back to heaven, and you die, the people that are left behind going, well, now, what's in it for them? Or you might have been a pagan coming out of a Greco-Roman culture, some that in that Greek thinking especially, would have had just this idea. And we've talked about it before in Thessalonica, that the body is bad. But the soul and the mind are good. That's the higher living. You want to live at that higher level. You want enlightenment. And you know, actually your whole life living in a body is just a time of futility until you die and you're released into kind of this great mass of nothingness, of souls being united together. And that wasn't very hopeful. And so Paul comes along and says, you know what? There is a hope we can have that we don't need to grieve like everybody else grieves. The unbelievers who have no foundation for their hope and eternal life...it's a bottomless sea of grief. It never rests down upon the floor. It keeps spiraling into greater darkness. And he's trying to address that. And he does it by just coming right out and saying, we're going to talk about this because, Christian, you have a hope that no one else in the world has. And that's his starting point. That's why we talk about it. But then he moves...not immediately, but actually he addresses this later on. 
 How do we talk about it? Well, we talk about it in the way Paul does. We learn from him here. Verse 13, he hits it head on. He answers it directly by saying, you need information. But notice verse 18 at the end of this section, we also are to talk about it in a way that is sensitive. That the goal of the instruction isn't just rebuke and correct and say, oh, you have wrong views about life eternal. It actually is to comfort one another with these words. So you put all this together before we get into the actual content of it in verses 14 to 17, we talk about it because we don't want to grieve as the rest of the world grieves a godless grief. But there's a hope the Christian has that allows your grief to be rightly placed and trust in Jesus Christ. But then he says, let me just tell you that as I'm giving you this information, where this is going to end up in verse 18 is that you're able to be a comfort to someone else. So just think about that as we kind of get into this passage today. Really what you see that framework about starting with the truth and being informed rightly and then ending with the goal as comfort really does wrap up Ephesians 4 nicely about speaking the truth in love. That it's never just one or the other. That you know, if somebody is grieving what you would call excessively over the death of a person. A Christian, even, who they know they're with the Lord. But there's just this still this anxiety or grief or whatever going on that it's not just, well, you know, look what Paul did. He just instructed. But don't forget the aim of his instruction being love, being comfort, being strengthening. And you put those two things together that the facts about life after death do care about our feelings. Even you notice that in the language Paul uses, he's informing them in verse 13 and 14 and 15, he talks about being asleep in Jesus. Now he's not using that to be kind of a euphemism, as in, to soften the blow. What he's saying is the truth of the resurrection. The power of the resurrection is that Christ transformed the entire concept of death. It goes from this eternal hopelessness of knowing when would it end? It would go on. You're just done...to what he says later, at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, that death has been swallowed up, the sting of death of sin has been removed. And so he can equate what we would just see as, oh, somebody died and it's over for them...to what does he call it? He calls it being asleep. And it's not the way we try to use phrases like rest in peace, or they look so peaceful there in that casket, or however we talk about it in those terms, he's saying, no, actually, the best way to think about death is being asleep. You are going to wake up...your body like our bodies go to bed at night. They wake up. He's saying, when a Christian dies it's not just done for them. It's not just lights out. They are what?...absent from the body...immediately present with the Lord. There's not a moment they're away from the Lord from the time of our salvation, brother and sister. When you are united to Christ, Romans 6, you're united with them in life and in death, and one day in the resurrection, the great resurrection. And so that's the truth. That's the hope he's trying to bring...Verse 14. That's the crux of his argument. If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. So his words are words of truth, but they're words of truth that bring comfort. And that was really my hope today in getting to talk to you about the great joy it is to celebrate Easter and the resurrection. The fact that the Lord would have a passage like this for us, that would help some of you who are grieving, who have lost somebody that you love, and they are with the Lord, but there's still something that hurts. And Paul is saying, there's hope for you when you understand the truth of their situation right now. I was on Twitter last fall, and there's a pastor I follow named Conrad Mbewe...He's one of the professors at African Seminary over in Zambia. And he's a pastor of a church there, and he's been at some conferences I've been to, and he's a wonderful preacher. He's nicknamed the African Spurgeon. Uh, he's in his 50s or 60s, a wonderful preacher, a godly man. And he has a son, 32 years old last November, dies unexpectedly of a sudden illness. His son was in ministry with him. His son, you could tell by what he posted about him was his pride and joy. And I remember coming across that post just randomly that the day after he died. And and this is all Conrad posted for others to know and to be in prayer as a picture of his son. Just the biggest smile on his face. And this was his dad's tribute to him. Good night son. See you in the morning. That's the heart behind the comfort of this. Saying they're asleep in Christ isn't trying to avoid the issue. When you know the hope we have in Jesus Christ for those that we lose, even though we know where they are in Christ, it gives us that ability to fight through the tears and through the sorrow and say, good night, son. I'll see you in the morning. And that doesn't mean even months later that it's still not the hardest thing he said he's ever been through. The greatest test of faith he's ever had in his 45 years as a Christian. But what's that rock bottom foundation that he's finding comfort in? It's that he will see his son in the great resurrection. And so that's how we talk about it. We talk about it in truth, and we talk about it in love. Because the goal, the aim of our instruction is love. It's comforting one another. So now that we've talked about talking about it, let's actually talk about it. Verses 14 to 17 who is our hope in life and death? I asked that question that way in particular, because those of you that know the Heidelberg Catechism, it's question number one...what is our only hope in life and death? We sing it here often that we are not our own, but belong both body and soul in life and death to our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. He is the hope...that's right there in verse 14. The hope for anyone who falls asleep in Jesus, Verse 14, is that when Christ comes back, they will come back with them because they are in him, and they will never be apart from him. That's part of the promise even at the end of Matthew, I'll be with you always, even to the end of the age, whether you live or whether you die. If you're in me, you're with me. And that's what Paul is instructing them on...that our hope in life and death is not in just a statement or a proposition. It's in a person. Verse 14, if we believe that Jesus really died and rose again, and these people did believe it. He's saying, since you guys believe that you have been with me from the beginning, believing in who Jesus is and what he came to do, so can you also trust me now that I'm teaching you on what's going to come next? Notice in verse 15 he backs it up with not just apostolic authority from Paul. He says, we say this to you by the word of the Lord. That which gives us the idea that this would have been some form of a new teaching to them. They did not have the answer of what happens to believers when they die. So he's saying, look, this isn't just the apostle Paul saying this. I'm saying this to you by the Word of the Lord. And because it was something that they didn't already know, this is going beyond what Paul would have already been teaching them from what he knew of what Christ said when he was alive. The teaching that the Holy Spirit promised to bring back to the disciples and the apostles. Sure, he could teach on Jesus, saying, you know, the Son of Man is going to come with the clouds, and you'll see him, and he'll flash across the sky. They get all that. But he adds this Word of the Lord to say, I'm teaching you something now that you didn't know. I want you to inform you with something new about how it's going to go down. And when you think about Paul saying, I'm saying to you this by the Word of the Lord. The Word of the Lord is coming from the only person that's ever died, and actually come back to tell about it. So there's not just the authority of the Word of God behind it, but the one person who has the single authenticity, authority, whatever you want to call it that says, I died, I came back. I'm going to tell you how that goes. There's no one else that's ever lived that has that type of authority to talk about it. And you just have to think about that in our moment in 2024, when again, we constantly hear people want to talk about their truth. Nobody has any idea what life is after death outside of God's Word. Nobody has any idea of what the end is going to be like outside of God's Word. Nobody has any idea how and when it will all work outside of God's Word. That's just the facts of the matter. No one else's life experience, whatever movie you watched or book you read has any authority behind it. That's what Paul is saying here. I'm saying to you this by the one person that has authority to speak on it...God very God. And the God-Man, Jesus Christ, who died and rose again. And now he's telling me how it's going to go. Everything else falls aside at that point. Any preconceived notion of it and all we have are, I mean, people come up with some crazy ideas about how people come back from the dead. And I mean, just on the Hollywood level alone or the book level, all kinds of ideas that somebody can die. And by the power of love, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White or whatever, you know, give them a kiss, they pop back to life. Or, you know, Spock dies and he goes into the Genesis machine and he comes back out. Or Harry Potter's magic wand and resurrection stone. I mean, the list goes on. I was just trying to cover every base of a nerd in this room. Okay. You can continue to find how is it that somebody can die and then come back again? We have the answer right here. They have to be united to Jesus Christ. They have to be born again...found in him. That's the only answer to that question. That's our only hope in life and death. What the Word of God says...goes. And so we tie this to thinking about the resurrection from Friday night. What did Christ's death have to do with his resurrection? Well, you put those things together. What Christ's death did on Friday was paid the way. Paid for our sin. But him rising on the third day, one fulfilled the prophecy. What the Scripture said was going to happen, what he said was going to happen. But what Friday paid...Sunday paved the way. As in, he rose, so we will rise. Romans 4 tells us that he was raised for our justification, as in our salvation, we can be sure is complete. Not just because we have witnesses. We have the Word of God telling us he died on the cross. But the proof that he broke the power of sin and death fulfilled God's law. And the punishment for those who die breaking God's law...death from Adam on. He's now broken that power. And he proved it by coming back from the dead. So that's how we relate Friday to Sunday. That on the cross he conquered sin. And Sunday he showed that he conquered death. And so he could say, oh, death, where is your sting? Where? Where is any of it now? Because Christ has conquered it. And that's what gives us hope, the word of God. 
Which then moves Paul to now address the matter of life after death. He gives us our security. Who's our hope in it? He's told us how we should talk about it, why we should talk about it. And now the fun part in 16 to 17. What do we need to know about it? What is the truth about life after death? Well, he talks about it from three perspectives. From Christ's, from the dead, and then from those who are alive. First, we'll talk about the return of Christ, verse 16, for the Lord himself will descend from heaven. Okay, that matches up with what?...Acts 1. Jesus goes back up to heaven. The disciples are standing around wondering what they should do. And what do the angels say to them? Why are you guys standing around looking into the clouds? He's going to come back in the same way that he left. But now your mission is go into Jerusalem, Judea, just like he just told you and be my witnesses to the ends of the earth. So Paul is corroborating that teaching from that Acts chapter one, to say he's descending from heaven just in the same way that he left. He's coming back that way. Now what we get added to whatever we already know from the Gospels is this, cataclysmic event that Paul is trying to make very clear in this new teaching or expanding teaching, that this is not going to be a secret. For these people that were worried that they might have missed the return of Jesus Christ. You're going to see it and you're certainly going to hear it, verse 16. If there's anything that's emphasized here, besides you'll see with your own eyes the Lord himself. So it's not going to be a projection, an image, a ghost or something. No, it's the Lord himself. He's coming back in the way he left. But the emphasis is on...it's going to shock you, wake you. It's going to get your attention. With what?...a shout, the voice of the archangel, the trumpet of God. Are those all specific separate things? Or is he just trying to kind of collect language from throughout the scriptures and say, hey, all these different ways that God would get the attention of his people through noise. That's how loud and, aware you will all be of what's going to happen when Jesus returns. Nobody's missing it. A shout...that word used in the time of Paul that he uses for this is like a commander to his army, a chariot driver to his horses, a hunter to his hounds, a shipmaster to his rowers. Whatever you could think of for the person that's in charge saying, this is now the time and wakes everybody up from their slumber...that's the power of this shout. With the voice of the archangel...does that mean it's the archangel doing the shouting? Is Jesus the one shouting? And then the archangel is singing backup vocals? We don't know. I mean, this isn't the kind of thing Paul is writing for us to, to get into the weeds of and get in debates over and write me like a three page email because you exegeted this passage. And well, the shout is clearly Jesus and the archangel is clearly Gabriel, and the trumpet is borrowed from the guy that played the shofar back in the Old Testament. Like, we don't know. It could just be Paul trying to lump all those things together, saying, you're going to know it. When God wants to get the attention of his people, he can make a noise loud enough to get everybody's attention around the whole world at the same time. In the Old Testament when you think about that trumpet of God, what's that like? Less thinking about the instrument, more thinking about the sound. Exodus 19 when God was visiting Moses on Sinai. Verse 16, it came about on the third day when it was morning, there was thunder and lightning flashes with a thick cloud upon the mountain in a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. So that's what we're talking about here. It's the sound of a trumpet, the trumpet of God, that everyone is going to know that Christ has returned, and it's time for him to bring his people to himself. So that's the return of Christ. What do we learn about the resurrection of the dead? Verse 16, and the dead in Christ will rise first. So this is now answering the question some of them were troubled about is, hey, somebody that is a believer in Jesus Christ is trusting in him for salvation. What becomes of them when Jesus comes back? Are they second class Christians because they missed the whole thing. They got in late to the show. No, he says, they're actually going to rise first. He says in verse 15, we who are alive and remain will be here until the coming of the Lord. Paul includes himself in that. But we won't precede those who have fallen asleep. So the resurrection of the dead, those who die asleep in Jesus, verse 14, they...however, it is in the timing of God in the way that he can unite body and soul in the return of Jesus. They're going to beat those of us who are alive. I mean, talk about a photo finish. I mean, it's all going to happen at the same time. Verse 17, then we who are alive, and he uses then to give just however much millisecond of time that is, we who are alive will remain, be caught up. But I want to take you to 1 Corinthians 15. Now remember this...these believers didn't have 1 Corinthians 15. So, we're cheating right now. If I were going to be true to this text, I would just tell you only the facts here. But later on, these Corinthians were actually doubting there was a resurrection. So Paul has to teach this church. Let me get you some more details on how cool this is going to be. And so 1 Corinthians 15, we get some details on everybody being changed in this moment and the return of Christ. But those who are dead in Christ will rise first. How fast does this happen? 1 Corinthians 15:51 behold, I tell you a mystery. And notice he says a mystery. As in, it's not something that there's not teaching on. He's just saying in your own minds, it's going to be hard to fathom this. So prepare for that. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, which is kind of the theme verse for every nursery worker. Those babies that...thank you. So we will not all sleep. We know that's Paul's talking about some of you will still be alive when Christ returns. We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. So across the board at the return of Christ, if you're in Jesus Christ, alive or dead, you're going to get that transformed, glorified body like he had. How's it going to happen? Verse 52, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. The word for that in Greek is super duper fast. It's a really cool word. None of you would recognize it if you saw it, but it's really the word for a blink of an eye. And just like I blinked a millisecond ago, that's what's going to happen when Christ returns and the shout comes and the dead hear it. Now remember when I say the dead hear it, they're actually alive in Christ. So this kind of helps us to have a sanctified imagination about...am I going to, you know, if I'm walking by Oakwood Cemetery, I'm going to see a bunch of corpses fly into the sky...in the blink of an eye. Well, truth be told, dust to dust. If anything you're going to see, it's a bunch of dust. If that's even going to be something visible because the person is with who?...he's with, Christ. We're always going to be with Christ. So how in the perfect work of God, he unites that person with their glorified body is totally up to him. He created everything we see out of nothing. He's going to know how to go shrink, put it back together. Now, on the other hand, hears us down here. We've got to get from down here up there. Which brings us to the rapture of the saints. Uh, go back to Thessalonians. We've talked about the resurrection of those dead in Christ. Verse 17, then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them. At least we can all agree on the place. We don't always agree on the time in Christianity, but we will be in the clouds meeting the Lord in the air. There's no arguing with that. Now, why that's so awesome isn't just because we get to hang out in the sky, but we shall always be with the Lord. This is the first great reunion of all God's children past, present, future together. It's amazing. Tongue and tribe and nation hanging out in the sky. Glorified bodies. No longer arguing over the timing. We all made it. And that's the rapture of the saints. Where we get the word for rapture is that caught up together with them in the air. It's a Greek word rapere. And that's kind of this idea in the word there. And it's used elsewhere in the New Testament by Paul of somebody being removed quickly from something. In John 6:15, when Jesus was teaching to the crowds, he withdrew to the mountain because he perceived the crowds were going to try to take him or snatch him away by force...sweep him up. Or Matthew 13:19 when Jesus is teaching on the parables of the four soils, and he scatters that first seed and it says, the enemy, like a bird, comes down and snatches away from the heart that which was sown...same word. So when we think of the rapture again, it is what the scriptures say it is. We're alive. We're down here. He gets us up there. And just by the blink of an eye, we get beat there by those who are already dead in Christ. Now some of you get really geared up wanting to talk about when this rapture is going to happen. And I'm happy to report you have to come back next week, because chapter five starts talking about times and epics. But that's not where we are this week. So there's your invitation to come back, and we'll talk about it. Now, in between now and then, I approach it with fear and trepidation. I'm going to be hoping that the rapture happens before next Sunday. If God really has an amazing sense of humor, at least in my life, right after I've studied all week to get it right, I'll open my Bible and you guys will see me go shink. I mean, you'll be doing it with me, hopefully. And I told first service we should play a prank on you guys. Is that they bring an extra set of clothes to 9 a.m. and leave them in the seats. So when you guys all come in. And of course, I walk out because Kurtis goes and I'm like, you know, who would have guessed Ashoff didn't make the cut? And everybody else here is like, well, of course we we knew all along. So that's next week. You have to come back for that one. But Paul's aim in all this, he was he was looking at the big picture. He was trying to say, hey, these believers who love those who have gone ahead of them, who have died in Christ, they really are broken over this and they have grief over this. And so his whole goal was to bring them comfort. And I pray that even for you, wherever you are today, brother and sister in Christ, if you have thoughts about life after death and you know you're in Christ, but there's still some anxiety, some despair, some grief when you think about it, I hope understanding just this idea that if you trust him for your salvation now, you trust him for it forever. Wherever that's going to...however, whatever you're with Him, you have Him. He's never going to leave you nor forsake you. Now there's the grief that comes for those who have loved ones who died in Christ. And yet you still think about what's it going to be like for them? What is it like for them right now? And Paul just says, look, the only thing I can give you that is the best thing. And the most important thing is that they're asleep in Christ, wherever their body is, here, there with Him. And you're going to be with them again. What greater comfort can the Christian have? But it does leave one category of person today. And it's like the young lady that we met at the beginning. It's the person that doesn't know if they're in Christ or knows you're not in Christ. At the end of that young lady's article, what was so sad is she went to a Muslim, to a Jew, a Hindu and a Catholic to try to find truth. She went to leaders in those religions...local priest, local rabbi, and she asked them, what is eternal life and how do I get it? And all four gave her the same message when it came down to it. Just keep doing your best. Just keep trying to be a good person. And this is how she concluded her article after getting that advice. I wonder if I'm a good person. Or if I'm doing everything I can. Maybe that explains why I still get panicked when I think about dying. But I think, I hope I have time to continue growing as a person before my last day comes. When you don't give somebody the truth about really what's coming next, they can't have true comfort. At best, they can hope to keep growing as a better person, to keep trying to do good works. But every religion outside of Christianity leaves you with that same responsibility. It's ultimately up to you and how good you are. Which is at the heart of the lie of every false religion. False religion says, if I give to God my best moral effort, I'll just have to hope it's enough to save me. But what does the gospel tell us? The gospel tells us that God gave me Jesus Christ's perfect record. And because of that, I want to serve him because I've been given his perfect record. I want to please him. I want to love him. I want to live for him. He's not making you earn anything. How could you possibly earn anything? When you think about how the gospel works, when you think about what we just celebrated Friday, for those of you who are still trying to put it all together. Where were you 2000 years ago when he hung on the cross and died for sinners? When God accepted his perfect sacrifice. When he said, it is finished, what did you contribute to that?...absolutely nothing. You weren't there. You had nothing to do with any of the good that Christ accomplished on the cross. So what did you have to do with what he was doing up there? What you contributed to what he had to do on the cross was everything bad you've done...all the sin you've committed. That's how you were there. He was dying for sin on the cross. He was removing the penalty of the sinner on the cross. And so the sin I committed yesterday and I'll commit tomorrow...that's what I contributed 2000 years ago. But nothing good I do today had anything to do with what he did. Everything he accomplished on the cross that Friday was from him. How could you possibly put your own good deeds into that when you didn't even exist? And since we've all come into existence sinners by nature and by choice, what possibly could we contribute?...absolutely nothing. And therein is the good news of the gospel. That the gospel isn't you just trying harder, working harder, and hoping God accepts it. It's absolute abandoning of any hope in yourself, any trust in your own religiosity. Because I'm not just calling out right now to the sinner in here who, if we put your sin on the evening news, maybe it would shock some people. I'm actually more concerned for the really religious sinner in here, the self-righteous who you've been under the illusion your whole life in the church, that you're doing enough good things to keep God pleased with you. And maybe you do a pretty good job. As in, you're pretty good at keeping the law. That's not what gets you to heaven. You get to heaven by the work of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone. He says, I'm the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me. You accept my offer of forgiveness of sin. Entirely and completely without any thought of anything you can contribute. You say, be merciful to me, the sinner. That's the most hopeful thing you could hear today if you're not in Christ. I don't have one thing to tell you that you need to do to make God more pleased with you today than he could already be pleased with, than when you just call upon Jesus Christ to save you because you're absolutely helpless to do it on your own. And maybe up until this moment, you've been hopeless on your own. And now you've been given the good news, the good hope that you have in Jesus Christ. For those of us in Christ, the good news for us is that now we get to use the rest of our lives looking, watching, and waiting for the return of Christ. I like how Paul says it in Titus 2, that because we have been saved, because the grace of God has appeared to all men. Titus 2:11. That's Jesus Christ. He appeared once. The grace of God appeared in him. He brought salvation to all men. What's there for us Christians to do? Verse 12, it instructs us then to deny ungodliness and worldly desires to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age. Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed. That's what we're doing waiting for his return. We're saying, look, you died for me. You didn't die for me to just wait around for you to come back, but to live a life to your glory. To see the possibility all around me, to bring that good news to other people, to invest my life into other people. When you think about what Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, about that which is perishable, becoming imperishable, and how glorious it's going to be to see the saints one another with each other, with Christ. That's why we live for him now, because you're going to see people in heaven, brother and sister, that you invested in, and you'll see them in a way you would have never imagined, glorified, not just will be looking like it's our best like look ever. I mean, whatever that's going to look like for you and I. I don't know...what age will be, how much hair will get back if we lost, will be in our best physique ever. Age 26.5 for a man you know, it's far more than that. What's going to be truly unrecognizable in us is the change from within. All the ways we just can't keep it together. To love God perfectly with our heart, soul, mind and strength. To love others perfectly. And it's whoa. That's you? The great thing is we have to do as believers now, we help people get there. We help each other in that process. And so we get to see a little taste of that even now, as we help each other to grow in our love for the Lord and our love for one another. That's the charge we can get from this passage, is it gets us excited to comfort each other with the truth of this, but then also to say, hey, let's be zealous for good deeds. We take this idea and we turn it into actual, encouraging living to live for the Lord Jesus Christ and denying all the things that we want to do that serve ourselves and rather to serve other people. 
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you that it tells us who we really are, who we are now in Christ, and it gives us the hope of glory of who we are going to be one day in Christ. Lord, that we are not left to ourselves to make change in our own lives. Lord, but you bring it day by day, week by week, as we sit under your Word, as it does its work in our hearts as it transforms us from one glory to the next into the likeness of your Son. So take your Word and use it mightily in us now. We thank you we've had this day now to worship you, to bring glory to your name through the Word, through prayer. And now, in this final song, let our hearts be lifted up so high thinking of the great gospel that saved us and the opportunity we have to move forward in service to you, Father. We pray this in your Son's name. Amen.