SPEAKER_00: I uh after I was talking and we were praying for those who were uh have decided to serve the kids this uh this year, I sat down and my wife corrected me.
SPEAKER_00: It's guys, it's always a good thing to listen to your wife's correction.
SPEAKER_00: It's always a good thing.
SPEAKER_00: The reason I bring it up is I said there were 61 people who have chosen to serve.
SPEAKER_00: There's actually 71.
SPEAKER_00: And I just exalt God for the fact that in our little church there are 71 people who are choosing to serve Christ in this particular way.
SPEAKER_00: There's many more who are serving, but this particular way.
SPEAKER_00: So it's worth being corrected when we can only exalt the Lord better than the way we have been doing it.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: Well, today I'd like us to uh to pick up where we left off last week.
SPEAKER_00: We have begun a series of messages.
SPEAKER_00: There will be seven or eight of them.
SPEAKER_00: It depends on uh kind of uh what I feel like it takes for us to communicate the things that we need to.
SPEAKER_00: And they're on a topic.
SPEAKER_00: Normally we just take the Bible and work our way through a book of the Bible, but sometimes it's appropriate to look at a topic that is dealt with throughout Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: And the topic that we're looking at is something that God says a great deal about, actually.
SPEAKER_00: It's life, death, and life after death.
SPEAKER_00: Um there is hardly anything more important for us than to understand what God has to say about life and death and life after death.
SPEAKER_00: Mankind has always had both a fascination with death and an aversion to death.
SPEAKER_00: Every culture in the world, every place you go, there is a fascination, sometimes an unhealthy, morbid fascination.
SPEAKER_00: Just look at the media, look at movies, look at uh television, uh, look at books, um, a morbid, um, and maybe it's simple just murder mysteries, but if all you do is spend your time reading murder mysteries, you're missing something better by far.
SPEAKER_00: Um that's not inherently wrong, but but the problem is it's as though we don't quite know what to do about death and what to say about death.
SPEAKER_00: And I understand that out there, outside the walls of the church.
SPEAKER_00: I understand that in a culture that has basically thumbed its nose against God and says, I'm gonna go my way and do my thing.
SPEAKER_00: They generally have a hard time dealing with the issue of death, knowing what to say about it, knowing what to think about it.
SPEAKER_00: Um more puzzling to me is that we often have difficulties dealing with the reality of death.
SPEAKER_00: Not in an abstract way, but in a personal way.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I die.
SPEAKER_00: You die.
SPEAKER_00: Um we talked about this uh last week uh a good bit, but it's it's just uh the fact that God has said a great deal to us about life, death, and life after death.
SPEAKER_00: And what God has said is given to us not to satisfy our curiosity or to tickle our intellect.
SPEAKER_00: What God has said about life, death, and life after death is given that it might transform the way we live and the way we die.
SPEAKER_00: The reason God has revealed a great deal about this is because it is critically important for us, and his goal, his intent, as I read the scriptures, is that we will learn how to live well in light of the reality of death and to deal in our own thinking and personally with the matter of life and death in a way that puts this life in a much broader context that includes the life to come.
SPEAKER_00: Life did not begin, your life did not begin the day you were born, and it does not end the day you die.
SPEAKER_00: Yet that's generally the way we think about it.
SPEAKER_00: In the world of Scripture, there's a whole lot more to it than that.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's my goal, whether I'm able to accomplish it or not, I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_00: But that we will be able to understand this critically important subject in a fuller way, and that it would transform our thinking, it would transform our living, it would transform our dying.
SPEAKER_00: So, a series of messages, won't go over this.
SPEAKER_00: Last time we basically just looked at the elephant in the room.
SPEAKER_00: I think nobody really wants to talk about it.
SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking about matters of life and death.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, in our usage of words, when there's something really important, a real urgency to it, you say this is a matter of life and death.
SPEAKER_00: Well, life and death is a matter of life and death, and it's urgent for us that we talk about it.
SPEAKER_00: And then we'll be talking in the coming weeks about a whole number of things.
SPEAKER_00: I won't go over that.
SPEAKER_00: We saw an overview of it.
SPEAKER_00: But we're just in that process now.
SPEAKER_00: So I want to touch and just remind you briefly about what we said last time.
SPEAKER_00: We focused on the elephant in the room.
SPEAKER_00: You know, when you walk into a room and there's something very obvious to everybody, but nobody's talking about it, it's as though there's this 16,000-pound elephant standing in the corner that nobody's talking about, but nobody can ignore, really.
SPEAKER_00: Well, the brevity of life, your life, my life, and the proximity of death, your death, my death, is like an elephant in the room.
SPEAKER_00: And we need to start dealing with it, talking about it.
SPEAKER_00: Um, I shared with you, gave you an illustration of two kings, the foolishness of one and the wisdom of the other.
SPEAKER_00: King Louis XIV of France could do anything he wanted as an absolute potentate, potentate, dictator, king, could do what he wanted.
SPEAKER_00: And what he wanted to do was ban the word death from his experience.
SPEAKER_00: So he forbade the word death being spoken in his presence.
SPEAKER_00: That worked for a while, but you know he died.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of foolish to pretend that that doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_00: Compare that with Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, three or four hundred years before Christ, could do anything he wanted in his realm.
SPEAKER_00: And he appointed a servant, a slave, with a task of coming into his presence every day and looking at him.
SPEAKER_00: This was his job, to look at Philip of Macedon and say, Philip, you will die.
SPEAKER_00: Now, who do you suppose was wiser?
SPEAKER_00: Well, when you look at the scriptures, clearly Philip.
SPEAKER_00: The question is, which one are we more like?
SPEAKER_00: We looked at a couple of passages to try to see life from God's perspective.
SPEAKER_00: Among other things, the the that section in Psalms helps us understand that you will not know how to live well unless you know how to deal properly and understand death.
SPEAKER_00: For the years of our lives are 60, 70, 80, modern medicine maybe 90 or 100, but they fly away.
SPEAKER_00: And he who is wise will take that to heart.
SPEAKER_00: The brevity of life and the proximity of death.
SPEAKER_00: The uh passage in uh Ecclesiastes, which says, it's better to spend your time at funerals than at parties.
SPEAKER_00: Modern paraphrase.
SPEAKER_00: A traditional translation of that is it's better to go to a house of mourning than to a festival.
SPEAKER_00: Why would the writer say it's better to spend time at a funeral than at a party?
SPEAKER_00: Well, obviously that's an extreme statement, it's making a point, but the reality is the wise person contemplates the matter of death while the fool insists on ignoring it.
SPEAKER_00: And when we go to a funeral, we would rather not see a corpse as it is, we would rather see the work of an undertaker that makes it look as living as possible.
SPEAKER_00: That's just that's just human nature.
SPEAKER_00: All right, uh, let's move then.
SPEAKER_00: I want to ask and try to answer on the basis of scripture two important questions today.
SPEAKER_00: What is death?
SPEAKER_00: How would we define it?
SPEAKER_00: How do we understand it?
SPEAKER_00: And how should we conceive of what happens when we die?
SPEAKER_00: And when I die, uh you will, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: I tried to be as gentle last week as possible.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure that was real successful.
SPEAKER_00: Um the death rate is 100%.
SPEAKER_00: And I encouraged us to have the honesty to conjugate the verb to die.
SPEAKER_00: I die, you die, he, she, and it dies, we die, y'all die, they die.
SPEAKER_00: Because that is the reality.
unknown: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: So when I die, dot dot dot.
SPEAKER_00: So let's just try to, with the time that we have, look at these and look and see some of what uh the scriptures tell us about this.
SPEAKER_00: Um, the whole matter of understanding death and uh trying to get a sense of what in the world death is all about is something that men have done from uh, I suppose, the time of Adam and Eve.
SPEAKER_00: Between the time that Adam died when he ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, died spiritually, until the time he died physically was 930 years, according to Genesis chapter 5.
SPEAKER_00: He had plenty of time, plenty of time to ponder the reality of death.
SPEAKER_00: And men and women have been doing that ever since, rightly so.
SPEAKER_00: Um for most people, there is an understandable shrug, like what's death like?
SPEAKER_00: How am I supposed to know?
SPEAKER_00: I've not died.
SPEAKER_00: That's understandable.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's a bit of bravado behind that, a bit of um kind of not honest um sense of security about it.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I was reminded of uh a few years ago, you know, the uh one of the great intellectual figures of our day, uh Stephen Hawking, is a cosmologist.
SPEAKER_00: Not a cosmetologist, ladies.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't deal with makeup, but a cosmologist.
SPEAKER_00: Uh cosmology is an understanding of the nature of reality and of existence and of how the world works.
SPEAKER_00: And a man very far away from the revelation of scripture with a great deal of intellectual acumen, uh, at one point with great humility wrote a book that was entitled A Brief History of Time.
SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine having the audacity of writing a book, The Brief History of Time?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he wrote another book a few years ago that was called The Grand Design, in which he was dealing with design in nature and in the world.
SPEAKER_00: Christians who were advocating an intelligent design theory rushed to read his books.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, his books within three days of them being published in America and internationally, his book, The Grand Design, became a runaway worldwide bestseller within three days.
SPEAKER_00: And many Christians went looking for confirmation of their understanding of intelligent design, and they were very disappointed if they actually read the book.
SPEAKER_00: Because when asked about the life after death, in an interview Hawkins gave at the time this book came out, he came to the conclusion that it was unnecessary to deal with God to understand the origin of life or the design of the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And when probed by someone who was interviewing him, what should we understand about life after death?
SPEAKER_00: Is there consciousness after death?
SPEAKER_00: Here is the response that he made.
SPEAKER_00: The brain is essentially a computer, and consciousness is like a computer program.
SPEAKER_00: It ceases to run when the computer is turned off.
SPEAKER_00: Ceases to run when the computer is turned off.
SPEAKER_00: Now, that's just a sophisticated way.
SPEAKER_00: Um took many more hundreds of pages than my father's words on his deathbed, in which he said, Walt dead is dead.
SPEAKER_00: It's really the same thought.
SPEAKER_00: And I can respect that.
SPEAKER_00: I can understand how people would come to that conclusion unless they know something about what God says.
SPEAKER_00: Because that is not the way the scriptures present life after death or what the nature of death is.
SPEAKER_00: So if you look up in a dictionary the word death, I think I made reference to this next week, you don't get a whole lot of help.
SPEAKER_00: It almost makes you want to throw away your dead tree dictionary or your digital dictionary.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Typical dictionary definition of death is the state of being dead.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that helpful?
SPEAKER_00: Another common definition of death is no longer being alive.
SPEAKER_00: Thankfully, thankfully, God says a whole lot more about it than just that.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's incumbent upon us to understand and deal with what God says.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the word death is used in a variety of ways in the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: Many different ways, three primary ways, but virtually every time the word death is used, at its core, that which ties it all together is the idea of separation.
SPEAKER_00: So when you come across the word death in the scriptures, you ought to ask yourself what kind of separation is being spoken about?
SPEAKER_00: And I want to explain that.
SPEAKER_00: So it's a little bit like some of you who have been around for a long time will have heard the true statement that when you're reading your Bible and you see the word therefore, you better check and see what the word therefore is there for, because it's there for a reason.
SPEAKER_00: Words have meaning.
SPEAKER_00: And the word death has meaning, and at its core, it is separation.
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm going to suggest very simply, there's no rocket science, you don't have to have a PhD, you don't have to know Greek and Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: This is just the three primary ways that the scriptures talk about death and describe it.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, physical death.
SPEAKER_00: Physical death, as we read about it in Scripture, is a temporary separation of the body, the material parts of man, and the soul or spirit, or whatever term we want to give for the rest of man, the non-material parts.
SPEAKER_00: So sometimes we, you may hear people talk about, I believe in the bipartite nature of man.
SPEAKER_00: And what they mean typically is body and soul.
SPEAKER_00: Others will say, I'm a tripartist.
SPEAKER_00: That probably means they went to seminary.
SPEAKER_00: But what they're saying by that is I believe in body, soul, and spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The reality is scripture is much more broad and rich than that.
SPEAKER_00: This immaterial part of man is sometimes called soul, sometimes called spirit, but there's a wide variety of other words that are used to describe this part of us that is not fleshly.
SPEAKER_00: There is talk in the scriptures of conscience, motivations, longings, desires, an old nature, a new nature.
SPEAKER_00: A wide variety we tend to use the word heart to cover all of that.
SPEAKER_00: In our circles, heart is very used a great deal of time, rightfully so.
SPEAKER_00: That's one of the biblical categories.
SPEAKER_00: But it's only one.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a whole lot more to it than that.
SPEAKER_00: But what is clear is there is a physical part of us and there is another part of us.
SPEAKER_00: And we could uh rightly go back to Genesis, and let me just read one verse from the creation account, Genesis chapter 2, verse 7, which we believe is not just somebody's or a group of people's imaginings, but this is describing true events.
SPEAKER_00: We really believe that in history, space, and time there was a physical Adam and a physical Eve on a place called Eden.
SPEAKER_00: It's a whole different discussion, but this is not just giving his thoughts.
SPEAKER_00: This is God's description of a number of things, including creation.
SPEAKER_00: So in Genesis chapter 2, verse 7, then it says, God formed the man, and it's a generic term, mankind, Adam, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, formed mankind.
SPEAKER_00: God formed the man of dust from the dust of the ground.
SPEAKER_00: So that's pointing to this material part.
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how to picture it.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe someday when we get to heaven, there'll be a videotape library or the equivalent, and we can hit the button, and maybe we'll see somehow or another God taking some dirt, some clay, some soil, and fashioning a human body.
SPEAKER_00: But that human body by itself was not man.
SPEAKER_00: That was one of the two essential components of what makes man man.
SPEAKER_00: So he formed the man of dust from the ground, and he breathed into it.
SPEAKER_00: He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man then became a living being.
SPEAKER_00: Two natures, a physical, that was fashioned, and then this other part that God added to that, and that totality is man, is man, humanity, all men.
SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing is both, for this it does help to know Greek or Hebrew, the New Testament word for spirit is pneuma, the Old Testament word for spirit is ruach, and that's exactly he breathed the ruach, the pneuma, into this potential man that he has formed.
SPEAKER_00: And when the material and immaterial parts were brought together, you have a living soul, a living being.
SPEAKER_00: You have a man.
SPEAKER_00: Physical death, then, in light of this understanding, and I've just cited this one verse, but there's many more we could look at, of the essential nature of man, two parts intended to be together.
SPEAKER_00: Physical death is a temporary separation of these two parts.
SPEAKER_00: A temporary separation.
SPEAKER_00: Um, and there is a time in which all men everywhere, all women, all children, all human beings everywhere will be raised from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus made it very clear in John chapter 5.
SPEAKER_00: We touched on that briefly.
SPEAKER_00: We'll be looking at this matter of resurrection in the coming weeks.
SPEAKER_00: But it's very clear Jesus said that all the tombs, a day will come that all of the tombs will open.
SPEAKER_00: The people who have physically died have been separated, body and the rest of them, and all will rise, some will rise to a resurrection of life, and some will rise to a resurrection of judgments.
SPEAKER_00: And that rising and resurrection is a reuniting of that which has been temporarily separated.
SPEAKER_00: All men everywhere will live forever somewhere.
SPEAKER_00: Touched on that last week.
SPEAKER_00: We'll see it virtually every time as we go along.
SPEAKER_00: All men everywhere live forever somewhere.
SPEAKER_00: There is life after death for all men.
SPEAKER_00: But what this is saying, the nature of resurrection and the temporary separation, both those who are raised to a resurrection of life and those who are raised to a resurrection of condemnation, no men anywhere will live anywhere forever without a body.
SPEAKER_00: All shall rise.
SPEAKER_00: All men everywhere will live somewhere forever.
SPEAKER_00: No men anywhere will live anywhere forever without a body.
SPEAKER_00: The resurrection of all humanity.
SPEAKER_00: We'll unpack that more as it comes, but it's just real simple.
SPEAKER_00: Physical death is the separation of the material and the immaterial part, and resurrection is the bringing of that back together.
SPEAKER_00: Second of all, another term that is used and referred to in numerous places in Scripture, what we would call spiritual death.
SPEAKER_00: You hear the word death, what kind of separation are we talking about?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the separation of spiritual death is the creature from his creator.
SPEAKER_00: Man was created with the capacity and the experience of intimate fellowship and interaction with God.
SPEAKER_00: Adam and Eve walked and talked with God in the garden in the cool of the day.
SPEAKER_00: What separates us from the rest of the animal world is that we have this capacity for relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: That's the way we are intended to exist as human beings.
SPEAKER_00: And what happened when Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which he was commanded not to eat, from which he was commanded not to eat.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it says very clearly, Genesis 2, verse 17, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but, but one, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.
SPEAKER_00: For on the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of death is he talking about?
SPEAKER_00: It's not physical death.
SPEAKER_00: Adam would live for another 930 years.
SPEAKER_00: He's talking about this separation because the reality is that, that's Genesis 2, 17, the reality is that it is our sins which separate us from God.
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah 59, verse 2.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, your iniquities have made a separation between you and God.
SPEAKER_00: Your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.
SPEAKER_00: Up until the time that Adam and Eve partook of the tree of which they were not permitted to partake, they instantaneously died spiritually, separated from the relationship and fellowship with the Father for which they were created.
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual death is this separation spiritually from God, the relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: Ephesians 2 makes it abundantly clear that we, before people, before they come to know Christ, are dead.
SPEAKER_00: They're alive physically, but dead spiritually.
SPEAKER_00: As sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, we enter this world with a broken relationship with God, with a God-shaped vacuum, as it has been called, with a capacity and a need to relate to God.
SPEAKER_00: And sin is that which separates us, but we were, let me get the right verse here.
SPEAKER_00: Ephesians chapter 2, you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked.
SPEAKER_00: Among which others once lived in the passions of flesh, carrying out the desires of the self.
SPEAKER_00: You were by nature children of wrath.
SPEAKER_00: You were by nature under condemnation.
SPEAKER_00: You were by nature separated from God.
SPEAKER_00: But thanks be to God, God being rich in his mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
SPEAKER_00: By grace you have been saved.
SPEAKER_00: God makes us alive through Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And what we really understand is that 1 Corinthians 5, 21, he who knew no sin became sin for us on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: That's what happened.
SPEAKER_00: He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
SPEAKER_00: Because that which separates us spiritually from God and the condemnation that we deserve is placed on him, so that we may have that which we don't deserve, and that is the righteousness of God.
SPEAKER_00: In Pauline terminology, it's talking about our relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: On the cross, when Jesus died, Matthew 27 46, as Jesus was dying, he said, among other things, Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.
SPEAKER_00: That's going back to what Genesis is talking about.
SPEAKER_00: He died both physically and spiritually on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: He was separated, and he said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
SPEAKER_00: Never once for a nanosecond, or whatever the smallest increment of time is, from eternity past, never once had the Son been separated from the Father, and he was at the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Because he bore our penalty and sin, and sin separates from the life of God.
SPEAKER_00: In that case, he died spiritually, and then an hour or two, whatever it was later, it is finished.
SPEAKER_00: He died, and the salvation of Christ was complete at that point.
SPEAKER_00: So this matter of spiritual death being different from physical death goes a long way for us to in our understanding of the cross and what it meant for Christ to die.
SPEAKER_00: Alright, so there's another kind of death, the third kind, and these are simple, folks.
SPEAKER_00: This is not rocket science.
SPEAKER_00: It's just what God has said.
SPEAKER_00: And God doesn't typically try to make it hard for us, especially with matters of life and death.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: So there is what the Bible calls and describes as eternal death or the second death.
SPEAKER_00: And this is separation.
SPEAKER_00: You come across the word death.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of separation are we talking about?
SPEAKER_00: And if you study the passages that talk about it, you will find that it is spiritual death made permanent.
SPEAKER_00: We're born spiritually dead.
SPEAKER_00: And unless something happens, we are raised to a resurrection of judgment where that spiritual state will continue forever.
SPEAKER_00: And that is a description of what we commonly call hell.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about that towards the end of the message series.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's the last thing I'm going to talk about, and then I'll run away.
SPEAKER_00: And we'll talk about hell.
SPEAKER_00: And the reality of hell is eternal separation from God.
SPEAKER_00: And what we understand, put it in the context of relationship.
SPEAKER_00: You were designed, you were designed by your Creator to have a relationship with God, a living, vital relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: There's this God-shaped vacuum that demands to be fulfilled, demands to be filled.
SPEAKER_00: And unless something changes with the sin that separates us from God, then that simply continues on forever.
SPEAKER_00: And in those passages it is clear that it is forever and ever, but it is not hallelujah.
SPEAKER_00: Just a preview of the nature of what I'm understanding hell to be is this isolation, this separation from God.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people joke and they say, Oh, I don't have a problem with hell, all my friends will be there.
SPEAKER_00: Well, they may all be there, but you will have no contact with them.
SPEAKER_00: It is utter, eternal, cosmic, existential, agonizing isolation.
SPEAKER_00: Why is solitary confinement such a penalty?
SPEAKER_00: Because we desperately have a need to interact with other people, even if it's convicts tapping on the wall and talking with each other in various ways.
SPEAKER_00: But this is absolute, utter isolation, isolation from God, isolation from other people, and that will wrench the soul forever because there we don't, we're not in tune with it.
SPEAKER_00: But this need for connection with other people and with God goes to the core of who we are.
SPEAKER_00: And unless something happens, then that isolation is undescribably awful and forever.
SPEAKER_00: So just uh bringing a couple of things together here: physical death, temporary separation from the body and the soul or spirit or whatever, that has a remedy.
SPEAKER_00: The remedy to physical death is resurrection, bringing together that which has been torn asunder.
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual death, separation of man from his creator, has a remedy.
SPEAKER_00: That remedy is regeneration, being born again, a spiritual connection being re-established between you and God.
SPEAKER_00: And the difficulty is that eternal death there is no remedy for.
SPEAKER_00: And my friends, if you understood anything about life and life after death, that you want and need desperately a remedy, both for physical and for spiritual death.
SPEAKER_00: All right, let me try to uh to deal briefly with this question.
SPEAKER_00: And when I die, how am I supposed to uh envision that?
SPEAKER_00: Or what what am I to understand uh about that?
SPEAKER_00: Um a couple of things.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, you have not died, I have not died, we have not experienced this yet.
SPEAKER_00: But we have no reason to say I know nothing about it.
SPEAKER_00: I can suggest two or three things that I would encourage you to grasp a hold of, and it will begin to transform your understanding of death.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, uh Philippians 1, 20 to 23.
SPEAKER_00: Let me ask you to turn there if you have your Bible or open up your device and bring up uh Philippians chapter 1, verses 20 to 23.
SPEAKER_00: Um the uh the context is Paul, it's in his last days.
SPEAKER_00: He's anticipating in any case, he's anticipating death.
SPEAKER_00: And he he lets the curtain open up a little bit and lets you know what's going through his heart.
SPEAKER_00: And of all people, uh Paul had an understanding of what is to come.
SPEAKER_00: So he says in verse 20, um, it's my eager expectation, and he's gonna start talking about death.
SPEAKER_00: Just notice the way he says it.
SPEAKER_00: It's an eager expectation.
SPEAKER_00: He's something, it's something he's looking forward to, something he eagerly desires.
SPEAKER_00: Not just because his body was beginning to fall apart, or just because he was a cynical old man with a death wish.
SPEAKER_00: That's not it at all.
SPEAKER_00: If that's what you think Paul is talking about, you better read your Bible.
SPEAKER_00: That is not Paul.
SPEAKER_00: Paul had a grasp of what is to come.
SPEAKER_00: So he says in verse 20, it's my eager expectation and it's my hope.
SPEAKER_00: A hope, in a biblical term, is not a hope-so, maybe yes, maybe no.
SPEAKER_00: It's a no-so over something that's not here yet.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: So this biblical hope has a certainty about it because God has revealed some things.
SPEAKER_00: So he's saying, it is my eager expectation and my hope that I will not all be ashamed, but will have full courage.
SPEAKER_00: Now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.
SPEAKER_00: So he approached life with a confidence and an eager expectation, and he approached death with a confidence and eager expectation.
SPEAKER_00: Uh so that now as always, Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.
SPEAKER_00: For to me to live is Christ and dying, death, is gain.
SPEAKER_00: Gain something valuable being added.
SPEAKER_00: You see, we don't, we don't, we're not heavenly minded enough to grasp this.
SPEAKER_00: We look at death as the absolute utter loss, and we will avoid it at any costs.
SPEAKER_00: For a believer, that is absolutely the wrong way of seeing it.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says, gain, gain, gain.
SPEAKER_00: He goes on in verse 23, and he says, I'm hard pressed between the two.
SPEAKER_00: My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is better by far.
SPEAKER_00: Better by far.
SPEAKER_00: Literal Greek, more far, better.
SPEAKER_00: It's good Greek, lousy English.
SPEAKER_00: Better by far.
SPEAKER_00: To be there and to experience that is to experience the greatest reality there is in that for which I was created, and for which every joy and every sense of fulfillment and every desire is but in this life is but a preview, a foretaste of that which is to come.
SPEAKER_00: It is better by far, much more better, much more better.
SPEAKER_00: There are longings that we have, there are desires that we have.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, actually, I'm not convinced that any of our desires are fundamentally evil.
SPEAKER_00: We do evil things with our desires.
SPEAKER_00: But the longings, there's things that are built into us, and we keep looking, it's like a trailer with a hitch.
SPEAKER_00: We keep looking for a hitch.
SPEAKER_00: We've got a tongue in the trailer, and it's designed to hitch onto something, so we hitch it on to something here, we hitch it on to marriage, or we hitch it on to kids, or we hitch it on to acceptance, or success, or joy, or a beautiful sunset, all kinds of good things.
SPEAKER_00: The problem is that hitch doesn't fit.
SPEAKER_00: That's but a pointer to the real thing which is to come.
SPEAKER_00: They never satisfy.
SPEAKER_00: The desires that are within us are meant to be fulfilled, but they will not find their ultimate and true fulfillment in this life.
SPEAKER_00: They are pointers to the life that is to come.
SPEAKER_00: While we do not long for the process of dying, we ought to long for that which death brings.
SPEAKER_00: Huge distinction there.
SPEAKER_00: I do not long for death.
SPEAKER_00: The process of dying.
SPEAKER_00: I've told you once, I came really close to it one time.
SPEAKER_00: No fun.
SPEAKER_00: I don't long for that.
SPEAKER_00: But I long for that which God has promised.
SPEAKER_00: That death will usher in.
SPEAKER_00: Better gain.
SPEAKER_00: It's like a pearl of great price.
SPEAKER_00: That if you find it out in a field, Jesus gave the illustration, if you find it out in the field, you'll sell everything because of the great value of that.
SPEAKER_00: Jim Elliott, martyred missionary, said he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
SPEAKER_00: And he was talking about this life and the life to come.
SPEAKER_00: He is no fool who loses everything in this life and gains the life to come.
SPEAKER_00: It's all a matter of perspective.
SPEAKER_00: And our perspective is about this big.
SPEAKER_00: And God wants it to be embracing not only what we see around us now as though this is the truest reality that is.
SPEAKER_00: No, this is but a shadow of the reality that comes.
SPEAKER_00: Write those down if you're interested.
SPEAKER_00: Key passages that will help us get a handle on what we should think about when I die.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell us exactly how it will feel, but it tells us, it gives us some clues about what it is.
SPEAKER_00: When we die, we are home, home at last, home, home.
SPEAKER_00: Thank God Almighty, we're home at last.
SPEAKER_00: It's the place that everything in this life has been pointing towards.
SPEAKER_00: It's the fulfillment of every satisfaction in this life as we see it.
SPEAKER_00: The Hebrews passage, well, the 2 Corinthians passage talks about this body and this life as being a tent.
SPEAKER_00: It's temporary and it will get taken away.
SPEAKER_00: And what we long for is the resurrection body and the resurrection life, because that's the real body and that's the real life, of which this is all but a monotone, and that will be in glorious.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even have words for it.
SPEAKER_00: Codachrome is too wimpy to even begin to describe it.
SPEAKER_00: Remember Alice in Wonder.
SPEAKER_00: No, um The Witch is Dead, The Witch Is Dead.
SPEAKER_00: Wizard of Oz.
SPEAKER_00: Dorothy on her way to the Wizard of Oz.
SPEAKER_00: The movie.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, dear.
SPEAKER_00: The movie starts out in black and white, and as she's going down the brick road, suddenly these colors appear.
SPEAKER_00: And that's but the poorest illustration of what we will experience.
SPEAKER_00: The best of this life.
SPEAKER_00: The best.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what your most phenomenal experience in life has been.
SPEAKER_00: Just meditate on that a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was the birth of a child.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe that was the worst moment of your life.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: But whatever is the best moment of your life, the best moment of your life is nothing to be compared to that which is to come.
SPEAKER_00: It is but a mere foretaste.
SPEAKER_00: The foretaste is not meant to be savored.
SPEAKER_00: It's meant to draw you to the full reality and realness.
SPEAKER_00: The best of life on earth is a glimpse of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: That's an interesting thought.
SPEAKER_00: One writer said it this way the best of life on earth is a glimpse of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: The worst of life on earth is a glimpse of hell.
SPEAKER_00: For Christians, the present life is the closest they will ever come to hell.
SPEAKER_00: For non Christians, the best of This life is the best they will ever experience.
SPEAKER_00: And we're made for so much more than that.
SPEAKER_00: I want to finally close with this an analogy that might help us get a handle on this.
SPEAKER_00: I was drawn to this thinking of Romans chapter 8, where Paul talks about the frustration and suffering of this present age, and he says the sufferings of the present age is not worthy to be compared, to be balanced out with the glory that is to come.
SPEAKER_00: And he talks about we, together with all creation, groan with longings, with groanings for the full revelation of the Son of Christ, Sons of God, of us in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: We are groaning for that which is to come by God's grace.
SPEAKER_00: And then he says it's like a mother in the pains of childbirth, the pains of childbirth for the joy set before her.
SPEAKER_00: Now, taking that imagery of a birth, I just want to plant a picture, a thought, and again we'll come back to it in coming weeks.
SPEAKER_00: This life is not when your life began.
SPEAKER_00: Your life began sometime in the womb.
SPEAKER_00: This life does not end when you die.
SPEAKER_00: It will go on.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you think about the comparison, over here you have a period of time in the womb where there's all kinds of development that goes on, and a certain consciousness of the world around.
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, infants at a certain age before they're born will respond to music and voice and various things.
SPEAKER_00: There's some awareness of this phase of life, but it's mostly life there in the womb.
SPEAKER_00: But the life in the womb, valid, has dignity, has worth in and of itself, is not for itself.
SPEAKER_00: That life in the womb is all about this life now, which is to come.
SPEAKER_00: But how do you get from here to here?
SPEAKER_00: You go through a dark passage, no doubt painful, frightening, probably for the unborn child, a very difficult passage.
SPEAKER_00: We know it often is.
SPEAKER_00: For the mother as well.
SPEAKER_00: And there are forces at work that are absolutely unstoppable.
SPEAKER_00: That child will be born.
SPEAKER_00: But there's a long, often painful, dark passage that enters into a new phase of life.
SPEAKER_00: Connect the dots.
SPEAKER_00: This life now is not the totality of life.
SPEAKER_00: There is an utter reality of life to come.
SPEAKER_00: This life, for all of its joys and all of its blessings, is not just about this life.
SPEAKER_00: We have some awareness of life to come, just as that fetus in the womb had some awareness of this life, but had not yet entered into it.
SPEAKER_00: But to get from this life to that which this life is preparing us for, you go through the valley of the shadow of death, and there's an anxiety that comes, there's a fear that comes of the process of dying in any case.
SPEAKER_00: And yet there are forces at work you cannot hold back the reality of death.
SPEAKER_00: That's the foolishness.
SPEAKER_00: But through a no doubt often painful, brief, temporary process, you are thrust forth into life and life eternal, glorious, beautiful, fulfilling.
SPEAKER_00: The best thing about it is that Christ is there.
SPEAKER_00: But there's a whole lot of other things there as well that will be deeply fulfilling.
SPEAKER_00: And my picture of our first moment in heaven is we'll look around and there'll be a bunch of people with a mark on their forehead, and I don't mean the mark of the beast.
SPEAKER_00: I mean a mark, a red spot on their forehead because they've gone.
SPEAKER_00: What?
SPEAKER_00: You mean that's what this was all about?
SPEAKER_00: Someday we will awaken and we will get it.
SPEAKER_00: That which we but in a very feeble and imperfect way get now.
SPEAKER_00: The best is truly yet to come.
SPEAKER_00: And when you die, it is better by far.
SPEAKER_00: It is home.
SPEAKER_00: It is the fulfillment of every desire you have ever had.
SPEAKER_00: There is a passage to go through before we get there.
SPEAKER_00: But that is what happens when we die.
SPEAKER_00: Lots more to say.
SPEAKER_00: I have more to say than you have patience to sit in the pew.
SPEAKER_00: So it will take another five or six weeks.
SPEAKER_00: Would you pray with me?
SPEAKER_00: Actually, would you stand for the benediction?
SPEAKER_00: Let me just finish with a benediction.
SPEAKER_00: So now my friends, my friends, go into the world in peace.
SPEAKER_00: Go into the world in peace.
SPEAKER_00: Have courage.
SPEAKER_00: Hold on to that which is good and honor all men.
SPEAKER_00: Strengthen the faint-hearted, support the weak, help the suffering, restore the wandering, comfort the grieving, and share the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us always.
SPEAKER_00: God bless and amen.