1 Corinthians 15:12-19 Importance of Christ Resurrection
1 Corinthians 15:12-19 · Randy Peterman · Nov 6, 2016
1 Corinthians, No. 43
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926541472374

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Let's talk about 1 Corinthians 15, verses 12-19. I'm going to go ahead and read that. You'll find it at the top of your handout, and hopefully in your Bible. Now, if Christ is preached that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain. Your faith also is vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. You are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.

So this is a very, very clean and linear presentation on the resurrection. I think everybody here was at church last Sunday where my dad talked about the resurrection. He even quoted a snippet from this passage here. So I feel like everybody is at least moderately familiar with the resurrection by now, right? No surprises when I talk about the resurrection.

So Paul says, now if Christ is preached, what is it that Christ preached? We talked about this in the Sunday School class last week. What is it that Paul preached about Christ? His death, burial, and resurrection according to the Scriptures. So it wasn't just coincidental that Christ was lied about, falsely accused, It wasn't coincidental that he was beaten and then crucified and buried. That wasn't coincidental and also not coincidental was the resurrection. And moreover, because of the one who is preaching through this epistle, through this written account, he'd been through things nobody else had in regard to being with the Lord.

Paul, not only did he see the Lord on the road to Damascus, but he spent time with him out in the desert. We'll talk about that a bit. When we're moving into this, Paul has some very personal connections to it. I've got them outlined here in this first introduction section. The first thing here is that He was the preacher. Paul came in. It wasn't just somebody that came in, but Paul came in and he said, this is what we preached. So, Paul was the preacher.

Secondly, the Corinthians were the ones who responded. It wasn't that the Corinthians just heard, but they responded to the truth that was there. There is an accountability for response. When we sin, it's because we responded to the flesh. But when we do righteous things when we're abiding, it's because we responded to the Holy Spirit. So there's an accountability to response. So Paul is calling them out. Hey, you responded to this. I preached it. You responded.

And then, thirdly, the gospel that the Corinthians heard was according to the Scriptures and included his death, his burial, and his resurrection. We find out in other places, like Ephesians or Colossians, where is Christ? Did he just get resurrected and stop there? He ascended too. The ascension couldn't happen if there wasn't resurrection. Paul doesn't call that out here, but let's do that. So let's ask the important question here. Can you preach the life of Christ without the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ?

They're intertwined. The history of it is accounted for. So it's there. This is the last sentence in this paragraph here, but I think it's worth reading out loud. No one had slipped a surprised resurrection in on those who gathered at Corinth. erroneous theology had slipped in instead. There wasn't a surprise of the resurrection, there was a surprise on Paul's part that he gets this report of the Corinthian church that they suddenly have this errant theology that's in there. So he's going to correct those things.

The next section we've got here is about the Sadducees and I'm calling the Sadducees out because you're often When people talk about the Gospels and the life of Christ, you hear about the Sadducees, and so let's talk about them. We heard a little bit about them during the main service last week. I actually learned a few things as I was studying, so I'm going to share that with you. Hopefully you get a little tiny bit more information about the Sadducees than previously.

They obviously didn't believe in the resurrection. Everybody's familiar with that. We're not shocked. But they also believed that there was no afterlife or eternal state. Life is what it is. You're on the earth for as long as God sovereignly sees fit, and you're done. Now how is it that they could believe that? Any guesses how they could get there theologically?

From the Old Testament, you said. They would only look at the first five books of the Old Testament. They weren't very good students of the first five books of the Old Testament, I'll be frank. because there are certain things that are implied or explicitly stated in the Old Testament in the first five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch, that are revealing of the resurrection. We'll look at that in just a moment.

They didn't believe in angels. They didn't believe in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God. So they were certainly not interested in Jesus, and they were really, really not interested in the Holy Spirit either, as they just believed in God the Father, as we would describe things from a Trinitarian perspective. And they also believed that there were no rewards or penalties upon dying, because you're not an eternal being.

To me, that's really sad or depressing. When I think about eternal life and eternal hope, that's actually a relief for me as a saved believer, or as a believer, as a saved person, And it would be devastating if I wasn't saved, right? The idea of just being as long as we're on the earth is all we've got is frankly depressing to me.

So the reference I want to take a look at is Matthew 22 verses 23 through 32. If somebody doesn't mind turning there and reading it out loud, that would be great. Is it but each in its own order? Matthew 22. Matthew 22 verses 23-32. On that day, some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and questioned him, asking, Teacher, Moses said, if a man dies having no children, his brother as next of kin shall marry his wife and raise up children for his brother. Is that where you want me to be?

Yeah. Now there were seven brothers with us, and the first married and died and had no children and left his wife to his brother. So also the second and the third down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had married her. Keep going. Chapter 32.

But Jesus answered and said to them, You are mistaken, not understanding the Scripture, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are still like angels in heaven. But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God? I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Alright. So, based on what we just talked about with the Sadducees, how does Jesus answer this issue of the resurrection, and he hasn't been resurrected yet? He's dealing with the potential in his own life, end or death, and then resurrection. He's dealing with this potential. The Sadducees are coming to trick him. And the Sadducees don't believe in the resurrection. They don't believe in eternity. They don't believe in angels.

And Jesus responds to them after they try to trap him with this question. He responds to them and he counteracts several different nuances of their errant theology. And we don't know, based on what Paul wrote here for sure, that the Sadducees had been the only ones that had brought this influence into the Corinthian church. But a subset of the body there had somehow taken on what appears to be very Sadducee-like theology, this terrible error. And Christ answers here specifically from the Old Testament, within the first five books, and he says there has to be angels that are also not getting married. So Christ is dealing with the Sadducees in a deep way.

When we move forward to Paul's writing here, what we find here is that Christ's answer could be authoritative enough. If the people in Corinth had then, after responding to the gospel, which included the resurrection, learned more about the testimony and the writings from the first four gospels, and taken that in, they would have learned about Jesus defending the resurrection.

It appears that They probably were being philosophers and they were probably trying to be thinkers and think through theology rather than exposit theology. We're going to reason our way through it. A lot of the isms that we run into in theological circles are because people are thinking through extrapolations, not because something is clearly revealed in the scriptures. So as students, we want to hold each other accountable. As brothers and sisters in Christ, we want to hold each other accountable to careful exposition, so that we don't get to the point of error that we find the Corinthians had with resurrection.

Alright, so he is talking about things, he says, now if Christ has preached that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say there is no resurrection? Let's talk briefly, Paul preached the gospel, when you preach the gospel, how do you do it? What is your presentation of the gospel?

It is the word of God. You go to the Word of God and you open it up and you read it to those. It doesn't hurt to have it memorized. I'm not going to say that. But let them read the text of the Scripture. Even if it's on a smartphone or an iPad or something. Let them read it. Let them observe God's Word. Let the Holy Spirit speak to them. If you speak to them from memorization, often in life, we don't have our own authority.

When Paul preached the Gospel, What do you think he did? He probably, according to the scriptures, read the Old Testament prophecy passages, saying this is who the Messiah will be. He's going to be Jesus. And Jesus fulfilled these things. See? It's in the scriptures. Let the scriptures do the talking. But when we preach the gospel, we preach the gospel using the scriptures, and that includes the resurrection. So there's no question whatsoever about the resurrection's existence, because the scriptures are complete.

They include these ideas. So Paul says, some among you have brought this. It's not extremely clear whether or not these people had responded to the gospel that had brought the error in. and were Christians had been deceived or if they are people who didn't respond to the gospel but were co-mingling. It's not extremely clear to me in the text there but either way the error is present and it's infiltrating those who are believers. Tom? It's also quite possible that They may have heard the gospel a little bit at the time before, but really the person who was presenting the gospel was just kind of giving a quick and dirty read.

And now they've got more questions and they're interested and they're gathering as almost like a congregation to get the real truth. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of giving little pieces of the gospel at a time, but the error had one way or the other infiltrated the body there. Paul's heard a report of it, and he's going to have to correct it now.

So let's ask really briefly an important question, because we know they've had division in doctrine, right? All it takes is one person coming into the Corinthian church that are already divided on doctrine, and they go, hey, I think that the resurrection isn't real. The Sadducees believe it. It can't be that crazy, right? And then more division exists in the church.

So either way, the response needs to be consistent. How should we deal with heresy in the church? Because this is heretical, and Paul is going to make it really clear in the coming verses. But how do we deal with heresy in the church? Should we let it fester and grow? Address it right away. And what are the measures that we should take? We go back to the scriptures and what if somebody doesn't respond to the scriptures?

Bring people together and then sometimes you have to cut people off and that's hard. I've been through a few of those situations in my life where somebody's theology is way off. And if the leadership in the church doesn't address it quickly, what happens is you have whole church splits that take place.

It ends up being more than one family or one person that is impacted by it. It can be a whole body. And so when we have heresy like this, Paul's coming in to correct it. He's going to make it so that it's really, really clear. But we see later on in Southern Corinthians that the divisions in the body still existed whether this was addressed or not.

The church was really messed up there and they didn't do a good job of promoting clear biblical doctrine. They wrestled through it as though multiple choices were good choices. And that's not optimal. So he says, but if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised. The very notion of the resurrection missing as a theological truth and heavenly or vain event is absurd.

We have it revealed and we have it witnessed. We talked last week about the number of witnesses, over 500 men, not to mention those who went to the grave. which looks like it was about six gals and at least several of the apostles immediately. Could be all of them. How about Paul? Did Paul ever go to Jerusalem? Yeah. I've got some cross-references there.

Acts 11.30 and Acts 12.25 tell us he went to Jerusalem and he came back from Jerusalem. While he was there he could have gone and looked at the grave. I'm guessing he probably said, I've walked with Christ in the desert. I've seen him on the road to Damascus.

I've been taught. I want to go see the grave. Show me the grave. It's not recorded, so that's supposition. I'm going to call that out on myself. But there's a great likelihood that Paul probably took at least an excursion to go see the sites. When you're testifying to the gospel, you would like to have all the information you can. was here. This is where it happened. This is Mary meeting these people. That kind of stuff is not unheard of or unimaginable in this case.

So, what does it say about the power of God if Christ could not be raised? There isn't any. It's either very weak or there isn't any at all. What does it say about the wisdom of God? To send his son and crucify him and bury him and leave him there. The wisdom is highly questionable. The power is highly questionable.

All these things are consequences theologically if Christ has not been raised. I also think of Christ. He was eternal and he gave up his deity and died. We didn't give up his deity, but he died. I can't imagine what it would have been like listening to him talk. Because they were absolutely spellbound.

Sure. We have the gospels that record the life of Christ and record the events of the death, burial, and resurrection, right? the crucifixion, the death, the burial and the resurrection. But we will be staying in that Word for eternity. Yeah, and we will.

And then today I love, today in the main service we're going to go over the stranger on the road to Emmaus where Christ is resurrected and these two men are walking along the road and they happen upon this third guy and they ask him, have you not heard what happened in Jerusalem?

And they walk with Jesus and he reveals the truth from Moses forward and they don't know it's Jesus. Like literally God covered their neurological network so they could not take in and recognize this is Jesus. And then they're eating dinner and he reveals himself to them and they're like, oh, we walked and talked with Jesus. They were so excited that when Jesus revealed himself, Jesus disappears, and then they get up, it's night time, and they go back to Jerusalem, because they've got to tell people.

Walking with Jesus and listening to Jesus talk would have been amazing. After the resurrection, even more amazing! And these people are questioning it. So this is a big deal. Some among you are teaching this, but if not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain. Your faith is also vain. So let's talk about what is vanity. We briefly looked at vanity in some of the lesson last week, but what is vanity? What's our working definition of vanity or vain?

Okay, it's empty-handed or without value or producing no results. There's a extremely nerdy computer programming thing that I deal with all the time where there's this idea of something that is null. It is the best a computer can do to represent nothingness. that somebody has referenced this variable, like an algebra, write an x or a y, and x is worth null. You can't do math on it. You can't compute with it. You can't calculate. It's null. It's nothing. It's vain. It's void. And so when I ran into vain here, I thought, oh, this reminds me of computers. I will tell my Sunday school class about computers. And I thought, I hope I don't bore you to death with computers.

But the thing is that hackers and people who do gross terrible things try to find places where you screwed up and made something null. They'll try to exploit the nullness of something. It's a null pointer exception is what they call it. And so what Paul is calling out here is saying you have a null pointer exception. And now that is all the computer things I'm going to talk about this morning. But there's an error. There's a logic error and the program can't execute. The reasoning is broken. There is no logic here.

So, when he says vain, the idea of nothingness, or the idea that you have a reference to something that represents nothing. The reason why we can call someone vain is that they think great of themselves, but they're nothing. So, Paul says here, our preaching is vain. We are teaching you nothing. There's no value in it. There's nothing here.

Would you, perchance, risk your life like Paul did, for nothing? Would you be like Stephen, laying your life down, sadly at Saul's watching, right? For nothing? For vain? For vanity? So he says, Our preaching is vain. There's nothing there. And your faith also is nothing. It's vain. There's nothing there. It's empty. That's a really heavy thing to think through, because what we look at in our own lives when we worry about the value of our energies, do we want to put our energies into something that is vain and has no value?

No. But these Corinthians, always the philosopher, always being philosophical and always doing things, are taking on this idea because it's philosophical, but not recognizing the consequences. So the vanity is here. Why does Paul emphasize vanity rather than just saying our preaching is wrong?

What's the difference between wrong in vain in this case. You have to show the negative case in order to prove all the better the positive. Okay. All right. But what's the difference between wrong, something being wrong, which I would maybe consider that to be the negative case versus null or having or void or having no value? If you have no out to the null, then you're nowhere and you're stuck in no place. If it's negative, you can at least observe the positive, but if its existence is completely missing, then you have a real problem. You can contrast something, that's fine, but when it has zero value in its vein, now you have a real theological ponderance.

What are we doing? What is God doing? Why would God create man in his image and bring us through all of these stewardships that are in the Old Testament, only to get us here and send His Son to not be resurrected. This is a really big theological problem. We have a sin issue. So Paul is going to go into that. What we look at next here is for himself, for he and those who are preaching along with him, he says, moreover, we are even because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the resurrection is not true.

False witnesses. So let's talk about, if you're in the Old Testament, remember the Sadducees like the first five books, but if you're in the Old Testament, what do we do with false witnesses? We stone them. Where do we find that we shouldn't be false witnesses, just in case we want to prove this out? Using the scriptures as a reference. But where in the Old Testament do we find the problem of this false witness thing? How many of you can remember the Ten Commandments? Anybody remember one of the Ten Commandments?

Don't bear false witness against your neighbor, right? So, if you bear false witness against your neighbor, you have violated all the law. All 613 laws, because you violated one of them. And this, Paul says, we would be bearing false witness of God. So what do you do when a prophet bears false witness of God?

You get rid of him. Specifically, if somebody blasphemes or calls themselves a prophet, and they are not, You take them out of town and you let them become geologists, as my dad likes to say. You let them study rocks up real close at velocity. So what you end up here, if we turn to Leviticus 24, 15 and 16, it says if you find somebody who says they're a prophet and they're not a prophet, you take them out and you stone them.

We don't tolerate lying for God. So when Paul says, we are false witnesses, we're bearing false witness of God, that's a condemning, you should die act. So Paul is using this, his reasoning is going to the extreme. Why is Paul going to the extreme with this? He's making the point.

The error that the church in Corinth has tolerated is saying, it's not a big deal. When we say doctrine and doctrinal accuracy are flexible, when we say that we can just believe whatever we want, which is really common in today's culture, when we look at the church across the world, there's a lot of When it comes to the gospel, you cannot believe whatever you want. I might negotiate and discuss at length with you about spiritual gifts. If we need to talk about spiritual gifts, I'll spend days talking to you about spiritual gifts. If you tell me that the gospel doesn't involve the simplicity of what is the gospel, we don't have a lot of time to spend on that. I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you about the gospel over and over again.

It's clear. It's concise. It's not hard to understand. I prayed with both my daughters when they were younger. When I gave them the gospel, in their younger days, they responded to it. They could understand it and they could believe it. I didn't walk away thinking, I hope they understood, because I know the gospel is as simple as it is. You can believe it. You can understand it. The doctrine that surrounds the gospel is clear, it is concise, and it is understandable.

So bearing false witness, Paul would be stoned. Apollos was stoned. Peter was stoned. The disciples were stoned. Stephen, well he was stoned properly early, right? Because this is pathology, if resurrection is false. Fortunately, when Christ died and was buried, and was resurrected, and we were identified with him in those things, we were also ascended with him, so we don't have to be stone, right? We know that theology isn't false.

But I do want to point out briefly here, the consequence of the identification truths is massive if the resurrection isn't true. We spend a lot of time talking about the identification truths here at Holly Hills, and that's wasteful if the resurrection isn't true. We weren't identified with Christ and his death and his burial and his resurrection and his ascension and seeking if the resurrection isn't true. So that's a big deal here at Holly Hills.

So we better make sure we get our ducks in a row and we know that our resurrection that we believe in is real. So Paul then reiterates, if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. That's always a nice thing to hear. You said you believed in Jesus. You called him Christ. I preached it, you believed it, we talked about that already.

Worthless. And the consequences of that worthless face is that you are still in your sins, if that's the case. Instead of the joy of the identification truths, instead of the joy of Romans 6. If we go read Romans 6, and I'm going to flip over there, you can join me if you'd like. We'll read a couple of verses together. Starting in verse 1, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be!

How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life." That's the consequences of this erroneous theology, this doctrine coming in, breaking down the core of the gospel, misrepresenting God, and misrepresenting our eternal life.

So Paul is not mincing words here. He's not going to let them out of his focus until there's no reason whatsoever to reject this heresy. So they would still be in their sins, but they are not, right? We've covered that. They're not. We see that in Romans. Those who are asleep in Christ have perished. Okay, so let's just say that Someone said, I'm a Christian in Corinth. This is awesome. This is exciting. I believe in Jesus.

And Paul says, but if they believed in Christ and then they died, the Lord took them home. They just died. They just perished. That's it. That's the end. There's no hope. There's no encouragement. The value of the time that they spent aligning themselves with this false theology, if by that I'm referring to Paul's being a false witness, is just devastating and sad. Which is partially why I don't understand why you'd be a Sadducee. It's basically like the religious version of atheism almost, where it's like, this is it, the end is the end, but I just like to talk about God. who didn't love me for an eternity past, or will not continue to love me an eternity future, that the end is the end. So Paul has now hammered out a silhouette for this bad theology so that it is identifiable, and that error and the consequence is identifiable, and they cannot walk away from this situation thinking, I'm not sure about the resurrection still.

You're not going to get there. You cannot get there from what was revealed, what people witnessed, and you cannot get away from the consequences of that in your theology. If we have hoped in Christ, in this life only, we are to be pitied of all men. We are to be pitied. If we are to be pitied, what is the consequence there? Why would we pity the Christians. Because the reasoning that they took in belief was foolish. They lied about God. They lied about Jesus. They lied about who we are. It was just lies. And if you believe lies, you should be pitied. Right? That's really sad. So this is a very sad state, if it's true.

But Paul is saying this as an exaggerated point. The Corinthians were pretty arrogant, right? We've already established that over and over as we've gone through this book. Paul keeps touching on the fact that they're arrogant and they want to be socially uplifted and socially cool. I would have made a terrible Corinthian, I've never been very cool at anything. The social status, imagine what Paul is doing here, is he's saying, you, if you believe that the resurrection doesn't happen, it did not happen, cannot happen, you will not be resurrected either. are to be pitied. And why are they to be pitied? Because they're fools. Because they're idiots. Because they're morons. Because they have not put their energy into anything valuable. And they're going to look like idiots in front of everybody else in Corinth.

So what he's done is he's walked through the rationale. He's walked through the consequences spiritually, and then he says, socially, you guys are also done. There's no place, there's no foothold, there's nothing to hold on to in the no resurrection theory.

If we're going to say it that way. You are, or we are, to be pitied. But you are part of we, right? You're part of the collective there. So we're actually done early and I didn't expect this. Maybe it's only because I only have four pages of handouts. Paul has gone through the consequences of this false position.

And in the upcoming passages he's going to talk to us about Romans chapter 5 type truths. He's going to talk to us about eschatology and the impact of the resurrection on eternity future. We touched on a little bit of that, but it's important. So the last question I've got here How is the resurrection linked to eschatology?

Can you not look at the next couple verses and give me a good best guess? Well, we have no hope in the future. Okay, we have no hope in the future. So your eschatology is, it doesn't matter. Tom? We've seen the future and he is Jesus. Yep, we've seen the future and he is Jesus.

What's going to happen? What do we know from Colossians chapter 3, verse 4? What's going to happen? And actually other verses too. Let's turn over there just for fun, because we can. Colossians 3, 4. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Your resurrected bodies, your new bodies, you're going to be revealed in glory.

These bodies are certainly not glorious. Each one of us every day wakes up and realizes that something isn't working quite like it used to the day before. It seems like the older I get, the more I realize I did dumb things to my body when I was younger. I have sores and scratches and scars and all the things that are consequences of when I was younger. And I look forward to the new glorified body, the one without the consequences of the Fall, strapped to it permanently. But the eschatology impact of the Resurrection is real. There is no eschatology without the Resurrection.

Other than, I guess, the best Asagis he could say, or someone who is holding to these very bizarre beliefs, is that God will do something in the future, but I won't be there. The beginning for someone who is Sadducee was God alone, by himself. Just God the Father, because remember they don't believe in the Son's resurrection and they don't believe in the Holy Spirit. And the end is the same. God by himself. not a lot there for a Sadducee. And I don't know if the sad people who had infiltrated Corinth were Sadducees or if they were just relatives of the Sadducees. But that doctrine has no place in the church, not in Corinth, not in Denver.

Any thoughts or questions on this? I think Paul is pretty clear, but I don't know, it doesn't mean I was. Well, that term that Paul uses talked about being asleep in Jesus and I've heard quite a bit of writing about that word sleep there and it's quite evident that the unbeliever is not asleep in Christ when he dies. That the believer is what, say again? The unbeliever. Unbeliever. is not asleep in Christ. Yeah, the unbeliever is not asleep in Christ.

But there used to be quite a bit of theology about that word sleep. I brought a little piece of paper along here by another minister. Ken Meyer. Being asleep in Christ is, or being asleep in Christ, Paul is using the term asleep for a representation of dead. And why does he use asleep? Let's ask that. It's a good question. I didn't go into that.

Because he's not dead yet. Because there's a resurrection. There's the future hope of what is to come that we will be in these glorified bodies that Paul keeps talking about throughout the New Testament. And so this idea of being asleep, it's one of those things where I remember When I was a young boy, my dad's grandpa, my great-grandpa Jennison, passed away.

I was young enough that it was my first real exposure to death. I didn't know what to do with it. It was really weird. I think there may have been one or two other deaths around that time where my parents, grandparents had passed away. I was young enough that my chronology is a little rusty. I'll just put it that way. But I remember, this is not cool. I liked great-grandpa Jennison. He taught me how to whistle with his thumbs. Or my thumbs. I started by whistling with his thumbs, but we got there eventually.

And I remember that this was really tough and I didn't know how to cope with this. I didn't understand with Christ and is going to be resurrected. I was young and I think I got the gospel and Daniel in the lion's den and things like that, but I didn't really get the depth of theology. And it was when I got older and started to understand the idea of eternal life, that this idea of a sleep in Christ, which was like, okay, they're not functioning on the earth, but their spirit is still with Christ.

Their spirit is still We wake up, if you will, but we wake up in a glorified state. Is that roughly what you're referring to? He's been working on this all week. Well, the whole point, though, is that there's something being missed. When you die, you are instantly with the Lord as you have been in your salvation.

Yet, there is also the fact that it doesn't say it except in one place in scripture that our bodies are yearning to rejoin as glorified members I can't trace it, it's there. I'm not familiar with that particularly. I think we can say when we look at this doctrine of the resurrection that you would not go to sleep in Christ if there was no resurrection. You'd go to sleep, you'd die, and you'd be done.

Paul's pointing out how sad it is to have sent people to their grave hoping in the wrong thing, right? But that's not the case. They're not hoping in the wrong thing, they're hoping in Christ. And his resurrection was legitimate. The witnesses to it testified to it. Paul could testify to it.

So, hopefully we never face that error inside of Holly Hills. I hope and pray that nobody comes in here speaking such lies, but if they do, I believe that at least in my lifetime that will be swiftly dealt with and we will not tolerate that kind of shenanigans. Right? That's not where we live theologically. Any other thoughts or questions? Otherwise we'll close in prayer. Okay, let's pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the truth of your word. Thank you that the resurrection is not only real, but is something that we too get to look forward to. And that it leaves us with great hope for an eternity future. We just thank you for the chance that we have to come together and worship, and fellowship, and run together. And we just pray for a great time as well of fellowship during the Paheluch. In Jesus' name.