"The New You"

Dear Friends in Christ,         

   As best as I can recall, it’s happened 3 times to me now during my 3 decades of ministry.  I’m not the only pastor it’s happened to though.  In fact, just a little over a month ago it happened to Bill Emrick, the pastor up at St. Peter.  It’s kind of strange when it happens though and you have to really be on your toes lest you make a big mistake.  Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?  Probably not because I have purposely made my clues rather cryptic and mysterious.  So let me solve the mystery for you.  I’m talking about those rare occasions when I and other pastors have had to do a funeral and a wedding on the same day.  It happened to me most recently on July 16 when I performed the funeral for Marshall Helm’s mom in the morning and followed it up with a wedding later that afternoon for Derek Hopkins and Kassie Clutter.  And what’s the big mistake that a pastor could make on a day like that?  Well, how about getting the 2 occasions confused?  For what could be more different than a funeral and a wedding.  At a funeral tears of sorrow are shed; at a wedding, if any tears are shed, they are tears of joy.  At a funeral the mourners dress in black; at a wedding the bride and often times the groom dress in white.  At a funeral people come together to express their condolences to the family; at a wedding they come together to express their congratulations.  So when you’re a pastor and you have both a funeral and a wedding to do on the same day you need to be on your toes.  You need to be extra alert so that you don’t get them mixed up for the differences between the 2 are staggering.

   But then the more I thought about it, the more it dawned on me that there are some striking similarities that exist between a funeral and a wedding.  For example, both usually draw families together.  Both usually involve a meal of some sort.  Both usually take place in a church.  And both mark new beginnings.  Did you catch that, my friends?  Both mark new beginnings.  But wait a minute, you might be thinking.  A funeral has nothing to do with a beginning.  Instead it marks the end – the end of a life, perhaps the end of a marriage, maybe the end of a career, and definitely the end of a family as we’ve always known it.  And I would agree with that; however, I would also agree with the statement that the death which causes that funeral does indeed mark a new beginning for that person, provided that person knew Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord.  At least that’s what God makes very clear to us in his Word and that’s what we’re going to spend our time talking about this morning as we consider the theme “The New You.”

   Now just to briefly review what we’ve learned so far in this sermon series on heaven that I’m currently preaching, when a believer in Christ dies, his body and soul separate.  His body returns to the ground it came from according to Scripture and his spirit or soul goes immediately into the presence of Christ or what Jesus called Paradise.  The Apostle Paul makes this clear in 2 Cor. 5:8 when he says that to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord.  And remember what Jesus said to the penitent thief on the cross?  He said, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Now obviously that man’s body would not be with Jesus in Paradise, but his soul would.  And exactly what that soul or heavenly body will be like in Paradise we can’t say for sure, though as we learned a few weeks ago, it will still be you.  It will still be me.  In other words, we don’t shed our identities once we leave this world behind.  Rather they follow us into the next life. 

   And we will remain there in Paradise separated from our bodies until that great and glorious day when Christ returns to this earth and raises our bodies from the grave in what we call the resurrection of the body in the Apostles Creed and reunites them with our souls once again.  Listen to how Paul puts it in the great resurrection chapter of the Bible, I Cor. 15, verses 52-53.  He says that it will all happen “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” 

   That great day that Christ returns will be a great reunion day.  God will be reunited with his children.  Families will be reunited families.  Friends will be reunited with friends.  And your soul will be reunited with your body.  And when that happens, this body that you inhabit right now will be changed.  Now some people don’t like change, right?  In fact, Lutherans down through the years have been notorious for resisting change.  You’ve probably heard the old joke: How many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer?  None because Lutherans never change anything.  But I guarantee you, my friends, that you’re going to love the change that is going to take place with your body on the Last Day.  You’re going to love the new you.

   Now sadly, not everyone in our world believes what I just said concerning a bodily resurrection from the dead.  In fact, the human race has come up with 4 very different views as to what happens to us when we die.  Let’s just briefly review them.  The first view says that nothing happens.  You die, your body is placed in the ground, and you just decay and disintegrate.  I remember talking to someone years ago who believed that and he had no problem with it.  When I said to him that that sounded so bleak and hopeless, he said he didn’t think so and he was perfectly fine with it.  The 2^nd view believes that we become ghosts when we die.  We’ll be phantoms, disembodied spirits that just kind of hang around this world with no better place to go.  View #3 suggests that we’ll be reincarnated into some other form.  We’ll become a cat or a cow or a car mechanic in Kankakee.  And we’ll have to keep coming back until we finally get it right.  And then the 4^th view suggests that after we die we just become part of the universe.  We’ll be a speck of dust on Pluto or flotsam that floats around the universe until the universe ceases to exist.

   All of these views stand in stark contrast to Christianity’s view of what will happen to us when we die.  And the biggest difference is that all of these views completely ignore and do away with the bodies that serve as our homes on this earth right now.  But Christianity says, no, the body will have a part and a place in the next life.  Though in a sense it ceases to exist when we die, it does not cease to exist forever.  For according to God’s own word and promise it will live again, only it will be a body that will be much, much better than it ever was on this sin-cursed earth.  Paul employs an interesting analogy in I Cor. 15 to drive this point home to us.  In v. 35 he says: “But someone may ask, ‘How will the dead be raised?  What kind of bodies will they have?’”  Then in answer to that question, he draws on the analogy of a seed.  He says: “When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn’t grow into a plant unless it dies first.  And what you put into the ground is not the plant that will grow, but only a dry little seed…Then God gives it a new body – just the kind he wants it to have.”  Here’s a picture of a watermelon seed.  Now that seed doesn’t look anything at all like the plant that will emerge from it once it’s planted and it really doesn’t look anything at all like a watermelon, right?  The seed, the plant, and the fruit, though very closely related to one another, are very different from one another.  And that’s the way it will be with our resurrected bodies.  Listen to how Paul puts it a bit later in I Cor. 15, verses 42-43: “Our earthly bodies, which die and decay, will be different when they are resurrected, for they will never die.  Our bodies now disappoint us, but when they are raised, they will be full of glory.  They are weak now, but when they are raised, they will be full of power.”

   My friends, few things should stir our imagination more and instill greater excitement in us than pondering what our resurrected bodies will be like.  And here’s why.  For one thing, you will finally be whole and healthy.  You know, you never have been, have you?  Ever.  Even on your finest days, your body is wearing down, deteriorating, aging.  We are sitting ducks for disease, infections, airborne bacteria, and viruses.  And those are on our good days.  What about our bad days?  As I look over my prayer list in my office, I see (give examples…). 

   Some days I get so sick of sickness robbing people of the good things that life has to offer.  But you know what?  God gets sick of it too.  And to prove that to you, I want to take you to an interesting story in Mark’s Gospel of the day when some people brought a man to Jesus who was a deaf-mute.  He couldn’t hear and he couldn’t speak.  And of course they wanted Jesus to heal him.  Now Jesus dealt with hundreds, perhaps thousands of afflicted people during his time on this earth, so the presentation of this man to him was not unique.  But what Jesus does here is unique.  See if you can catch it.  Mark writes: “After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’ (which means, ‘Be opened!’). At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.”  Now you’re probably thinking that the unique part of this story was that Jesus put his fingers in the man’s ears or that he spit and then touched the man’s tongue.  And while those actions do seem a bit unusual, that’s not the unique part that grabbed my attention.  Rather it’s the one word “sigh.”  Jesus looked up to heaven and sighed.  I believe that sigh says a lot.  It first of all tells us that Jesus doesn’t make light of our sicknesses.  It lets us know that he sympathizes with us when we’re facing life’s struggles.  But more than anything, I think that sigh was Jesus’ way of expressing that it wasn’t supposed to be this way and he was tired of seeing sin and its consequences wreak their havoc upon his human creation.  I also believe it was his way of saying that the day is coming when it won’t be this way anymore.  In fact, Isaiah 35:10 describes that day and those who will be a part of it with these words: “They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

  But not only will all sorrow and sighing cease to exist, you want to hear one more bit of good news about that day and about our resurrected bodies?  Our text for today says: “But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”  We shall be like him.  Let every parent of a Down’s Syndrome or autistic child write those words on their child’s bedroom wall.  Let the amputees and the afflicted, the depressed and the demented, those smitten by cancer and those stricken by strokes put themselves to sleep at night with those words: We shall be like him.  Let every person who is in the hearing of these words and who struggles to sleep or stand or walk or eat or think or focus or keep their balance or keep their sanity because of a difficult situation that you’re facing with your body or mind, let all such individuals write those words on their mind and on their heart: We shall be like him.  Listen, my friends.  The new you will never again experience what I like to call the negatives of this world: no more sickness, no more sorrow, no more sadness, no more stress, no more pain, no more worry, no more anxiety, and especially no more sin.  Imagine that!  Our eyes won’t lust, our minds won’t worry, our hearts won’t hate, our hands won’t steal, our tongues won’t lie, our appetites won’t rage.  For we shall be like him.

   Would you do me a favor this morning?  Would you allow this teaching today to penetrate your heart and give you the strength and encouragement that God intends for it to?  Some of you here inhabit such road weary bodies.  Your joints ache, your skin sags, your eyes have grown dim.  Others of you are reeling from the recent loss of a loved one and are trying your best to make that difficult adjustment, but it’s been tougher than you could have ever imagined.  Still others are wondering where your next paycheck is coming from and how you’re ever going to meet the financial demands that you know are coming your way real soon.  So you need some strength.  You need some hope.  You need some encouragement.  Let me close then with some great hope-filled and encouraging words from the Apostle Paul in 2 Cor. 4:16,18: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”  And what is unseen right now is the new you that we’ve talked about this morning.  But when Christ comes again, that new you will become the real you and you shall be like him.   

Amen.