2 Corinthians 5:1. “Now we know that if the earthly tent we
live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, not made with hands. An eternal house in heaven. Meanwhile, we groan. Longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling
because when we're clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan under
burden because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling
so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now, it is God who has made us for this very
purpose and He has given us the Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come. Therefore, we are always confident and know
that as long as we are at home in the body, we are away from the lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer
to be away from the body and at home with the lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether
we are at home in the body or away from it for we must all appear before the judgment
seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in
the body, whether good or bad.” Thanks be to God for His Word. We pause and seek His help as we pray. Gracious God and Father, you know us, you
know our hearts, you know when we sit down and when we stand up, you know the words of
our mouths before we even speak them. And that you would take such an interest in
us when you have a whole world to care for is a great mystery to us. And so we pray that through the hours of this
day as we have listened and thought and pondered, that as we come now, easily tired and distracted,
we simply and humbly ask for your help both in speaking and in hearing that we might understand
and believe the Bible and that we might obey it and trust it. Conduct, Lord, we pray, that divine dialogue
that is so mysterious to us, whereby through the voice of a mere man, we hear from you,
the living God, as a result of your unerring word resonating by the ministry of your Spirit
deep in the core of our being. And for this we look and for nothing less
than this and nothing more. We humbly pray, in Jesus name, amen. Well, that was either an ice cream truck or
it was someone's phone. I'm going to assume it was a phone. It's a good reminder for us to turn them off
if we have them. I have mine on vibrate and I have it here,
not so that I can take phone calls, but because I have a quote on my phone that I need to
use later on. But if you want to, there we go. There we go. The idea, sir, was to turn them off, not on. Sorry. Yeah. It's quite a group, isn't it? It really is. It makes me very thankful for my church, I
must say. I miss them dreadfully. Well, I'm going to waggle a little bit on
the tee before I hit the ball. I want to warn you of that. Some of the golfers do a lot of waggling before
they actually hit the ball and it can be very tedious and I hope it won't be, but I'm going
to do so purposefully. Just waggle the club for a little bit before
we hit and then when we hit, we'll move fairly quickly so don't feel alarmed when I finally
say, "Now I have four points," and you go, "Oh, no. I thought this was the end! It's just the beginning!" But we'll move fairly quickly down the fairway
as of that point. But we begin now with these words. “For as much as it has pleased Almighty
God, of his great mercy, to receive unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed,
we now commit his body to the ground. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in the sure
and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our lord Jesus Christ, who shall
change our earthly body that it may be like unto his glorious body according to the mighty
working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.” With these words of committal, the gospel
minister routinely affirms the Christian belief, not simply as we've been saying, in the immortality
of the soul, but in the resurrection of the body. And for myself, having either pronounced them
all these many times or stood at the open grave of my mother when I was 20, she had
died at 47, or of my father, I was forced as you have been forced to try and wrestle
with the sight so tangible and obvious before me and the theology so clearly presented to
me. The believer's view of death and dying ought
surely to be one of the great apologetics at this point in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the view of a believer in the face
of death is one of the ways in which one's faith might be seen to be both real and, at
the same time, relevant. On account of this, it is a matter of some
concern to me and of sadness not to me alone, but to others of us, when I realized that
this matter of death and dying is simply another arena in which the Christian church has found
it all too easily to capitulate to the spirit of the age. When is the last time you saw a church building
being constructed and a graveyard being attached to it? I bet you haven't seen one. I'm not sure it's even allowed. It is seldom that a community will allow a
church, if it doesn't already have one, as it were, grandfathered in, to build a clock
tower. And even if they allow a clock tower, they
largely do not want to hear the bell ringing in their community. Why? When you realize all of the other sounds that
are present in the community, what's so bad that the bell might ring? Well, I think it has something to do with
Macbeth, that is Shakespeare's Macbeth. “Here it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
which summons thee to heaven or to hell.” There is a reason why graveyards were in the
precinct of the church. They should be, for it is only the believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ that has any knowledge of, any awareness of, any experience of the
reality of being made brand new and living in the anticipation, not simply of some kind
of soulless existence, some non-physicality, but in anticipation of an entirely new heaven
and a new earth in which dwells righteousness and with a body all kitted out and ready to
enjoy that privilege. Perhaps I'm wrong, and these may be the initial
wagglings of an unenlightened Scotsman. You must judge for yourselves. But I have attended many funerals now in this
country that aren't even called "funerals." They're immediately called "memorials." Funeral is a bad word, you don't want to use
the word funeral. People might actually think the person has
died, for goodness' sake. And we wouldn't want them to think that, not
for a moment, would we? Solemnity has been replaced with superficiality. Solemnity, lament, sadness, tears, blackness,
darkness replaced with videos shown on screens of happy days and of a succession of people
who have very little sensible to say, but it doesn't stop them from intruding on the
proceedings and telling banal stories about old Joe and the time when such and such happened
when his tractor got stuck in a farmer's field or whatever it might be. And you sit there and you say to yourself,
"Am I really at a funeral? Did this person really die? Are we actually afraid of the fact of death
itself that we need to trivialize it in this fashion?" And don't, whatever you do, wear solemn clothes
because it isn't solemn. It isn't? If this isn't solemn, what's solemn? Ecclesiastes, the writer puts it very clearly. He gets it perfectly. This is what he says, "Sorrow is better than
laughter because a sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure." Now do we believe that? I don't know if we do. And so instead of grieving, we have viewing. Viewing! Oh that's just what I want to do, come and
see you when you're dead and eat cookies and spill the crumbs in on the top of you in the
nicest suit I've ever seen you wear. And for the first time, your glasses are actually
clean. And I've never seen you read a book, but you
have it under your arm. You look fantastic. This is Roman Catholicism. It's not Protestantism. It is Roman Catholics who gave us wakes and
viewing. Protestants never did, but we stand around
with superficial language and sighs and funny stuff. And as the minister, you have to stand there
and listen to this nonsense and you want to shout out, "Does anybody here want to cry? Does anybody here actually care?" And then there's no burial. No. You have a thing that's set up on the grass
and then you put the coffin on the top of it, but you buzz off before anything happens
to it so that you can live with the illusion that your mother was not placed six feet into
the ground and that you will never, in this lifetime, see her again. That you will never enjoy her humor, that
you will never feel her touch, that you will never be able to look into her eyes and tell
her that you love her because she has died. And this is Christian. This is the reality of Christianity, for it
is Christianity that is able to face the facts, and I say to you again, if the Christian church
cannot do it or refuses to do it, who then in our culture will address these issues? The verities not simply of life, but of death,
which are so essential to the message of the gospel. For the story that we tell of good news is
a good news that as we have been saying now for twenty-four hours is earthed in, is grounded
in the triumph of Jesus over death itself. Everything about it, and you say, "Well you
really have lost the place," and I'm prepared to accept that I may have, but everything
about it, unless militated against, unless really worked against, everything about it
turns people's gaze away from what Paul says here in our tenth verse, "We must all appear
before the judgment seat of Christ so that each one may receive what is due to him for
the things done while in the body, whether good or bad." The only place that I've really seen this
tackled is in the Mennonite community and the Amish community further down the road
from me in Ohio. And I will never forget going there in an
evening after one of the young men who had come to our church, who had been born in the
Amish and Mennonite community, he had wandered away, he had got himself in all kinds of a
mess. He was gloriously converted, he was a very
fine young fellow and I remember he was taken by cancer and we, myself and another of my
colleagues, went down on the night of his death and into this Amish community, where
we had never been, because he'd been with us in Cleveland. And went into his home. One of his brothers was a doctor, there was
a large family and they were all already seated in a circle. And as we went in, they greeted us and through
tears and hugs and handshakes and so on, we all just sat and looked at one another. And then eventually, one of the senior members
went away and came back and passed out hymn books and then they started in acapella, they
began to sing about Christ’s atoning death, about the victory of Christ over the grave. And it was horribly sad and wonderfully glorious
simultaneously. And when the body was laid in the ground,
the male members of the family took the shovels in their hands and shoveled the earth in on
top of the coffin as the family stood around the grave and sang, "Lo in the grave he lay,
Jesus, my Savior. And then death cannot keep its prey, Jesus
my, Savior, he tore the bars away, Jesus, my Lord. Up from the grave he arose with a mighty triumph
o'er his foes. He arose from the darkness and the decay to
triumph over it all." And I said to myself, "Well, maybe I don't
know if they'll let me come down here, but I fancy this for my funeral in direct opposition
to the classic work that is done." Some of you remember Paul Simon, not Paul
Simon, but the man whose name I've just forgotten, Tom Paxton. Tom Paxton wrote "Last Thing on my Mind",
but he was a cynical little man. He's still alive and he was in the Greenwich
scene in the 1960s and he wrote a song called, "Forest Lawn," and I don't know if you ever
heard it, but he caught it perfectly, "Well, lay me down in forest lawn in a golden casket. Place plastic flowers over my head in a silver
basket. Let drum and bugle roar, look out while cannons
roar. And sixteen livery employees pass out souvenirs
from the funeral store. Oh I want to be, when I die and they'll paint
me a little mansion in the sky. My likeness, done in brass, will stand in
plastic grass and weights and hidden springs will tip it's hat to the mourner filing past. With piped in tapes of Billy Graham, I want
to go simply when I go. And they'll give me a simple funeral there
I know." Well, you say, "You better get on, you're
waggling a little bit." Yes, I am. The godly Richard Baxter was right I think,
when he said that it was the gospel minister's responsibility to prepare his people for death. That's why tragedies are always better than
comedies. Comedies, Shakespeare's comedies are fun,
you laugh a little bit, but they don't stay with you. His tragedies stay with you. That's why Mahler, although he's harder, is
always going to be of more lasting value than Mantovani. Mantovani will make you tap your toes and
click your fingers. Mahler will tear your heart out and maybe
put it back in again for you. Now, what Paul is doing is wonderfully clear. He's absolutely clear in all these matters,
although he tells us a mystery, it is no less a certainty. He has affirmed for us, as we've been noting
through our different talks, that the resurrection of the lord Jesus is the pledge of the believer's
resurrection. That just as we have borne the likeness of
Adam, the earthly man, so we're going to bear the likeness of Jesus, the man from heaven. And if we like to think of our lives as books
or, if you like, as two volumes. As a biography in two volumes, then volume
one would be our pre-converted existence and volume two when we had been placed in Christ. And if your Bible is open to Corinthians five,
you can see an illustration of this in the text that follows from 11 on because he describes
those who are alienated from God. And then he describes the difference that
being reconciled with God makes. So volume one alienated and the people who
are alienated from God, which is all of us by nature, and in our sin, take pride in what
is seen, live for themselves, and regard Christ from a worldly point on view. Those who have been reconciled to God have
an altogether different view of things. They have a different view of Jesus. "We no longer regard Jesus from a worldly
point of view," he says in verse 16, "We no longer live for ourselves," he says in verse
15. And we've got and entirely different perspective
on other people in verse 16. We regard no one from a worldly point of view,
we don't just look at them as if they were human beings, as they just had an earthly
existence where they blazed in and blazed out. We can no longer look at people just like
that, he says, "because we have been made new ourselves. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." And as a result of that, it changes our view
of things. It changes our perspective. So we should have a different view of death
and dying. We should have a view of our world that is
radically different as a result of what Jesus has accomplished in us and what he's doing
through us. And it is this hope which burns in the heart
of Paul and which actually spills over time and again. You see, if you look at 2 Corinthians five
and chapter headings are good and then they're not so good. There were no chapter headings and breaks
as we have them. That is a capitulation to help us work our
way through our Bibles. But it seems fairly clear that Paul didn't
get up one morning and say to his secretary, "You know, I think it would be quite good
if I wrote a few verses on the resurrection body of the believer." He could have done that, but I don't think
he did it and I'll tell you why I don't. Because if there's no gap between the end
of what we refer to as four and the beginning of five, then the opening verses of chapter
five are sparked off by the development of this thought in chapter four. And we can't go all the way through chapter
four, that's more waggling any of us could stand, but you'll notice what he says in verse
seven, he's talking about the glory of the ministry of the gospel that's entrusted to
us, he says, "We are not diluters of the gospel. We're not deceivers, we're not into any of
that nonsense," he says, "but God has placed this treasure," verse seven, "in old clay
pots or in old clay jars. We are being crushed." Verse 16, "We are wasting away. We don't lose heart, although outwardly we're
wasting away, but we're actually fixing our eyes on what it is unseen." This is verse 18 of chapter four, "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." In other words, it's reminiscent of what he
gives us in Romans eight, where he says, "I consider that the sufferings of this present
time are not worth being compared with the glory that will be revealed in us." You see, because, for Paul, to die is gain. Because, for Paul, to live is Christ. And we trot that out with relative ease, don't
we? "Oh, to me, to live is Christ, to die is gain." Let me tell you something, if living is not
Christ for us, if the first part of the sentence is not true of us, it calls in question the
second part of the sentence and that is why Paul's words are such an encouragement. And with that said, we now come to my four
points in 2 Corinthians chapter five. I have to summarize even the summary, I recognize
that and I will do so as carefully as I can. Let me gather our thinking under four simple
headings. First of all, heading number one: we know. We know, verse one of chapter five, "Now we
know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an
eternal house in heaven not built by human hands." We know, we know. The Christian faith engages our minds, this
is something that we have to keep reminding ourselves of so that we don't allow our minds
to fossilize and that we continue to be sharpened and to make progress. I was at a church in California just a few
weeks ago, now, back in August I think it was. Time flies. And I went there, I had a Sunday free and
I was staying with friends and I went down to the church and I was excited because I
get to go now, and I don't have to do anything at all except do whatever they tell me to
do. And so, I sat there, and I waited for it to
begin and it was quite fascinating, actually. They had big screens and they had a clock
on the screens and when I got in, it said, "5:00" and I'd only been in about two seconds
and, you won't be surprised, it said "4:58". And then it counted down and eventually it
counted down, "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six," and just right on the moment of time, the
band began and I was waiting for David Letterman at that point. Anybody, I didn't know what was going to happen
next. And then eventually the band did what it did
and then the person who was to lead the praise, his opening gambit was this, "Hey, how'd y'all
feel this morning?" Well that was enough for me, I was ready,
we could have had the benediction right there. That was so good. I thought, "What kind of New Testament question
is that? 'How do y'all feel this morning?' If I told you how I feel, especially in light
of the last five minutes, you would question whether I was even a Christian at all, so
don't ask me that question. Ask me what I know. Ask me what I know. Don't ask me what I feel about myself, ask
me what I know about God. Ask me what I know about His Word. Ask me what I know to be a verity that can
deal with my soul. That's what I need. Don't make me sing songs about how I feel. Don't! It's silly repetitive songs again and again,
'I just want to praise you, lift my hands and say I love you. You are everything to me.' Goodness, at half past eight on a Sunday morning,
I'm barely ambulatory, I can't start there." And you want me to say that? I just kicked the dog and I don't even have
a dog. I could argue with someone because they took
my parking space. I never had spilled my coffee. I didn't read my bible. I'm a miserable wretch and now you want me
to start here. "How do you feel?" I feel rotten, that's how I feel. What have you got for me? The answer: nothing. I've got nothing for you. That's why you have to get yourself under
the control of the scriptures, that's why it is what we know, the verities of the Scriptures
which then fuel our hearts and our emotions and lead us on. "Hence, praise my soul, the king of heaven. To his feet, thy tribute bring. Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, who
like thee, his praise should sing?" Okay. Now, we've got something to sing about for
we've been reminded of truth. You've been ransomed, you've been healed,
you have been restored, you've been forgiven, you're looking away from yourself now. You're looking out and to Christ and it is
in this that we have something that fuels our praise. Now, I got to that simply because of this
heading, "Now we know." I wasn't planning on saying any of that, but
it's all said now, so we'll just leave it. Oh, and incidentally, you see, and I concur
with my brother here, Horton, when he's talking about this, to affirm the living presence
of Jesus by His Spirit in our hearts is not the same as affirming the resurrection. One is a continuous experience, the other
is a historical fact and when our experience ebbs and flows, it is to the facts we go. We are transformed by the renewing of our
minds." Now what do we know? First of all, that, like tents, our bodies
are impermanent. Like tents, our bodies are impermanent. I don't want to get in a fight with people
who love camping, but for me, camping is the Red Roof Inn or somewhere like that. That's as much camping as I want to do. I've tried it, I didn't the backyard thing
with my children and I lasted until about they had fallen asleep, and then I took off
and left them in the tent on their own and went in and slept with my wife. Why would you have a good bed in there and
sleep halfway like this out there? If someone steals them, we can go find them,
but right now I'm just going to bed. And even the people that love camping, I don't
think they're planning on camping for the rest of their lives. I'm so old that camping was under canvas. I don't think there's any such thing as canvas
anymore. We had ropes, we had tent pegs, we hammered
them in, we had our tents blow away up in the northeast of Scotland on at least one
or two occasions and came back and just found that our home had left before it was time
for us to leave. It doesn't take too long camping to long for
the security and permanence of home and that is exactly what he is using here as a description. If he was a tentmaker, it was just reaching
into analogy, which would be obvious to him. It's perfect and it would really have the
ring of authority to it. Now we know if the earthly tent, that is our
bodies, we live in. The picture of a tent that is wrinkled and
collapses is perhaps a little too close for comfort. And it's some time now since I have shaved
without wearing a t-shirt. And I just can't stand to look at myself is
the honest truth. I concur with one of my friends who told me,
he said he had a furniture problem, I said, "What is that?" He said that his chest had dropped down into
his drawers. And I'm going to give you for homework, we
can turn to it now, but for homework you can go to Ecclesiastes 12, where you have the
apt description of the demise of the human frame and where you have this classic picture
of men rising up at the sound of birds, but then they can't hear when their phone rings. There, afraid of heights and of dangers in
the streets, they drag themselves along like grasshoppers. It's not a very nice picture, but it is an
honest picture. So what do we know? That our bodies are like tents. Secondly, we know that this body of ours is
destined for destruction. If the earthly tent we live in be destroyed,
if the Lord Jesus does not return during our lifetime, this dilapidated tent is going to
be folded up. It is unavoidable. Despite the fact that the twenty-first century
is offering, not least of all on Christian radio half the time, all kinds of potions
and things you can rub on and stick on and do all manner of things to you so you can
live forever. What is this? The new age? Or what is it? There is going to be a new age, in which dwelleth
righteousness, but it isn't going to be as a result of you rubbing that stuff on your
face, so please stop that and phone the radio station and tell them you don't like it. It's just absolute silliness. The fact that this is going to disintegrate,
of course, does not mean that we should hasten its demise. I'm and to suggesting you go out there and
just stuff your face with donuts. Don't misinterpret me. We are not able to hasten its demise. All the days of are life were written in his
book before one of them came to be. We certainly have no freedom to engage in
all of the spurious stuff that is related to assisted suicide. Nor do we have any leeway at all to treat
the human frame in the way that pagans do. Here, I must just have a small excursus, because
I promised you I would, on the subject of cremation. I fear, in doing this, lest it becomes a total
distraction because some of you will be horribly infuriated because you've already bought your
little urn. And as a result of this, you're going to get
that the cat is among the pigeons, to mix metaphors. But the fact of the matter is that the question
was asked, "What about the resurrection in relationship to the question of cremation?" I'm sure exactly whether it was, "If you're
cremated, can you be resurrected?" If that was the question, the answer is “Yes.” Yeah, without any doubt at all. You were made from dust the first time around,
so the Lord's not going to have any difficulty in doing it again. So, you can relax on that front, but if the
question was more general, then let me say some general things. Let me quote the Westminster Shorter Catechism
to begin with, "What benefits do believers receive from Christ at death? Answer: The souls of believers at their death
are made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into glory and their bodies, being still
united to Christ, do rest in their graves until the resurrection." Now, in one sense, the matter of the disposal
of our bodies, because that's what cremation confronts us with, the disposal of our bodies
after death isn't really of vital importance because we know that at the resurrection,
God will reconstitute the human frame. Whether that has been lost at sea, whether
it has been burned in a fire, or whether it is resurrected from a graveyard. However, there is certainly a sense that what
we determine to do with the human body says something about our convictions, our ideals,
and about our Christian perspective. It's one of the pieces of the puzzle, in terms
of Christian living and the decisions of our lives, that is not a plain thing or a main
thing and therefore, you must make your own decisions. The only arguments that I've been able to
find, people using for cremation from the Bible, have to do with the burning of the
body of Achan in Joshua 7 and the burning of the body of Saul in 1 Samuel 31. And as a result, some proponents have then
suggested that there was cremation in the Bible, and there was in these instances, and
therefore there is biblical basis for cremation. However, when you read these two passages,
they actually argue for the reverse. In the events that are described in the passages,
there is nothing reverent, nothing desirable about what takes place. In fact, the burning of the bodies reflects
judgment and is not at all the typical way that Hebrews dealt with the bodies in death. In looking for historical substantiation for
cremation, we find that cremation was virtually unknown in early America. The early proponents of cremation came out
of Unitarianism and Liberalism. They were skeptics, free thinkers, and utilitarian
pragmatists. In the vast majority of cases, they saw cremation
as an opportunity to shake their fists in the face of God and in the doctrine of the
resurrection of the body. Cremation was not so much about a way to dispose
of the body as it was an expression of a philosophical view. Burial clearly fits the biblical picture of
being sown in dishonor and raised in glory. That's why Paul employs it. And burial fits the biblical picture of falling
asleep. And burial shows respect for the physical
frame. I understand when people say that the end
result of what happens to the body is only a matter of timing, but actually it's not. It's more than that. I just came from New Delhi. I was in Varanasi on the Ganges. I saw there scenes that you have seen. I drove from there a distance of thirty or
forty miles and cars were coming in the opposite direction posthaste with bodies wrapped in
various bits and pieces, strapped to the top of their station wagons and their estate cars,
hastening towards the Ganges so that they could be burned and so that they could finally
have their ashes scattered out there. That is what paganism has always done. That is why when Christianity has gone into
those pagan areas, historically by way of missionaries, they have said to them, "Guys,
this is not what we do with a body because the body is precious." It's precious when it comes as a gift as a
tiny child, it's precious in all the stages of life, and it is precious in the demise. It is precious in death. “Do you not know that your body is the temple
of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God. You're not your own, you were bought a price,
therefore honor God with your body." Well, you say, "Well that only matters when
you're alive." Why only when you're alive? Why should Christians not honor the body in
death? Because it's still the body. It's still God's creative handiwork and though
my father is absent from the body and present with the Lord, it hasn't rendered him irrelevant. And I keep his Bible on my shelf and a number
of his handkerchiefs in my drawer. And I keep them because of my love and affection
for him and the association these things have with him. Why then would I treat his body in a way that
I wouldn't treat his handkerchiefs? We know that this body is a tent, that unless
Christ returns in our lifetime, this body will be destroyed. And we know that we have a building from God,
a replacement that is not made by hands. Presumably, Paul here has an allusion to the
charge, you will remember, that was brought against Jesus. He says that he's going to destroy the temple
and he's going to raise it again in three days and it's going to be a temple that is
not built by human hands. That's exactly the promise. We're going to have a whole new place to live,
a whole new body, divine in its origin and beyond the reach of transience and uncertainty. And it is this which changes things. I just spoke at a conference in Santa Cruz
and a lady came up to me afterwards and she had written on a napkin or something, she
said, "I think you'll like this story." And she told me that she had been visiting
one of her friends who was dying of brain cancer. She'd been a vibrant lady and a wonderful
Christian, but the cancer was just shutting her down. And the nurse who was caring for her had come
to speak with her and she asked her, "How are you?" And she said, "I'm fine." And the nurse was perplexed and not particularly
happy about it and she wrote in her notes the blood pressure, whatever it was, and in
the comment. And she left it on the thing and then she
walked out. And the friend of the friend stood up and
looked at what she wrote and what she'd written in the comment thing was, "Inappropriately
joyful." Inappropriately joyful. It was as if she was annoyed. Now why would this lady with her life ebbing
away be so inappropriately joyful? Because she knows that if this cancer takes
her out, she has a building from God, not made with hands. This is the Christian faith. We know, secondly, we groan. Some of you have been doing that already,
but that's okay. It's good to get a head start on things. We groan. Now, notice it doesn't say we moan. Moaning is something that can be done by believer
and unbelievers alike, but the groaning that is referenced here, the groaning that is equally
referenced in Romans chapter eight, is actually a spiritual exercise. The groaning here is an expression of the
truth that God has said eternity in the hearts of men, that we know something about our unbelieving
friends that they're unprepared to accept about themselves. And within that, there is a longing. You remember C.S. Lewis in a purple passage
talks about, what is it, of the dream of a journey never taken, of a fragrance never
smelled, of a melody line that is unheard. That somehow or another, the human spirit
is reaching out for all of this. And that is actually heightened in Christ
because, remember, “earth around is sweeter green and heaven above is softer blue and
earth around is sweeter green and something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have
never seen. And birds with gladder songs overflow and
earth with deeper beauties shine since I know that I am His and He is mine.” So, nobody should enjoy literature like a
Christian. Nobody should enjoy science like a Christian. No one should enjoy anything like a Christian. So that whatever we do, eating and drinking,
we do to the glory of God. And so we groan, both in frustration at the
limitations and in anticipation because of all that awaits us. You can cross-reference for yourself Romans
8, where you are reminded that this is something we share with the rest of creation. So we are the groaners. You see, this is tremendously helpful to me
and I hope it may be to you. We do the first part, what do we know? Well, we know that our body is like a tent,
it's going to get folded up. It will eventually be destroyed unless Christ
doesn't come, but we know that we have a building already made for us in heaven, both a place
we're going to be and a body, and the whole shooting match, God has got it all under control. We can relax because incidentally, and I often
worry about this, about, "Well, how am I going to get there and how will it work and what
will it be like?" And everything else. And will it be claustrophobic, because I'm
kind of claustrophobic, and I don't like that feeling? But then I said, "But if someone had told
me how you arrive, I could never have done that either." You know, how does it work? Do you want to be born? Well how do you do it? Well you live in a bag of water for a long
time and then you come down a really narrow channel and then somebody slaps you on the
butt. I said, "No. No, I'll just ... No, I don't know where I
am, but I'm not going. No thank you." So in the prospect of death, I figure, "Look,
I did the front end, I can do the back end. With God's help, I came, with God's help,
I'll go because Psalm 121 is in the Bible, ‘He watches over your coming and going,
both this time forth and even forever more.'" So, I lift my eyes to Mt. Rainier and I say,
"Where does my help come from?" And I say, "My help comes from the Lord. He made heaven and earth. He won't let my foot be moved. He who watches over Israel doesn't slumber
or sleep." But we groan. Alas, the absence of honest groans in many
of our congregations. We've fallen foul of the notion that it is
by our sense of triumph and victory that we will encourage others to join in our songs. When so many of our friends are sad and alone
and fearful and aware of their mortality. And some of them, I sense, are actually afraid
to come clean about how they really feel about stuff because apparently we're just playing
jigs all the time. Now, Scottish music is good and bagpipes not
so good. They came from the Irish to the Scots as a
joke and the Scots never got the joke and so we just used them to drive the English
back down to England. But it's a bit like tragedy and comedy. Jigs are good, you know, but there's something
about a lament. There's something about a lament. A lament allows someone else to cry, open
up, groan. So if we're honest in relationship to what
the Scriptures say, we know this. We know, we groan. And there's no dissonance. It's not that the knowledge deals with the
groaning, but actually the groaning is an account of the knowledge and in Romans 8,
he says, "Here is the great mystery of it all." Because Paul is not interested in some kind
of bodiless existence, he's looking forward to the mortal being swallowed up. It's a great picture there of what is mortal
being swallowed up by life, verse four. This isn't Shakespeare shuffling off our mortal
coil. This is a divine dramatic transformation. New bodies certainly put together, invested
with new powers, marked by continuity and discontinuity, much like the illustration
of the seed and the flower, much like the resurrection body of Jesus himself. A body that could be touched, a body that
ate, a body, however, at the same time that could pass through grave clothes and pass
through closed doors and a body that at times was not immediately recognizable and then
a body that was obviously recognizable. "And all of this," says Paul, "comes with
a guarantee." That's verse five, "Now it is God that made
us for this very purpose and has given us his spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what
is to come." Cross-reference again in Romans 8, "You've
received the Spirit of son-ship and by him we cry, 'Abba! Father!'" Now, when I used to read that as a boy, as
a younger person, I thought, "Well, you know, that's kind of like getting a Ph.D. in being
a Christian. You know, when you finally are able to cry,
'Abba! Father!' Then, you know, you've probably pretty well
arrived at that point, you know?" And then I was twenty and a theological student. And then my mother died of a massive heart
attack one night before I could get home to eat her chocolate cakes and baking. And then that morning, I cried, "Abba," because
that's all I could cry. "Abba! Father! Father!" It is the Spirit of God which enables someone
to do that. The unbeliever calls him God. "Oh, God!" It is by the Holy Spirit that we're enabled
to say, "Father." And sometimes in our prayers and in our tears
and in our groanings, that is all that we able to say. And we would do a whole lot better if we might
admit it to ourselves and be prepared to be honest with others concerning it because they
have got the wrong end of the stick. They think that because we know, we don't
groan. We don't moan, but we groan. Penultimately, we live. We know, we groan, we live. Verse seven, how do we live? We live by faith. How do you live by faith? Taking God at His Word, trusting His promises,
heeding His warnings. How is faith enabled and strengthened? Well, it's like a muscle. You use it, it grows. You don't use it, it atrophies. God has given us means of grace. People have got long lists and short lists,
but at least in the means of grace we know we have the Scriptures. We know we have the sacraments. We know we have the benefit and privilege
of prayer. We know we have the fellowship of God's people. And we know we have the experience of trials. And it is as we live by faith and not by sight,
that we are confident. You'll notice that it is knowledge that builds
confidence. Cluelessness is no badge for a Christian. No, it is knowledge that breeds confidence. And Paul actually says that he would prefer,
speaking on behalf of others, verse eight, he would prefer to be away from the body and
at home with the Lord. At home with the Lord is a wonderful picture,
isn't it? What is it going to be like to be in heaven? Frankly, I don't know, but I'm going be at
home with the Lord. You think of somebody you really, really like
or admire and you think, “You know what would be just fantastic? I'd just love to go to her house, I'd just
love to go to his house. I mean, if I could just go there, we could
get a hot chocolate and even if I got half-an-hour, that would be fantastic.” Well, that's not going to be hot chocolate
and half-an-hour. It's going to be an unbelievable feast. It's going to be great. But I wonder, do you also share with me this
dreadful tension. Because even in the saying of certain things,
there's a little bell goes off in the back of my mind that says, "Well I hope it's not
like this, and I hope it's not like that, and I hope it's not like that." I mean, I'm like the boy who, when the teacher
said to the class, "How many of you would like to go to heaven?" Every hand in the class went up, except little
Jimmy's. Jimmy's hand stayed down. She said, "Jimmy, what's wrong? Do you not want to go to heaven?" He said, "Yeah. I do, but I thought you were getting a group
to go right now." And part of that has to do with Christian
art. Doesn't it? You know, the way that it is described, "Alabaster
portals." What is one of those? You know? Harps, not my favorite instrument by any standards. So I got really excited when I started reading
Revelation and I realized that this new heaven and the new earth was actually coming down
to meet us rather than I was going up to meet it. And sometimes when I come out on the west
coast and I look at the beauty of the place and I see what God has done the first time,
I say, "Well, I'll trust him for the second time as well. If it can be this good while it's this bad,
what is it going to be like?" And I have a sneaking suspicion that many
of the Christian artists had been reading a little bit too much Plato and not enough
Bible. Well, one final phrase. There's a five-dollar prize for the person
who can get the next, "We." Verse ten, “We must.” We must. We know, we groan, we live, we must. When I was at school and the teacher came
in, a new teacher, a new class, they said, "Now, this is what we're going to do. We're going to read this book and so on. Everything." I put my hand up immediately and said, "Excuse
me. Is there a test in this class? In other words, is there an exam at the end?" Because that's very important to me because
if there is an exam, it changes the way I'm going to go through the class. If there's no exam, hey, let the good times
roll, you know? I could read it, I could not read it. Who cares? There's no test at the end. I'm good to go. That's fine, I have bright kids all around
me, they can handle it, it's not a difficulty. There's a lot of ways to handle this. But if there's a test at the end, if there's
an exam at the end, whew. Changes everything. And what Paul says is there is an exam at
the end. Everybody's going to take their finals. There is no way of avoiding this divine must. A divine must, which applies to all men. Samuel Johnson, in an earlier era, said, "We
must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ and he then will separate the sheep
from the goats and this is a solemn truth, which this frivolous age needs to hear." I think that was the eighteenth century. Which this frivolous age needs to hear. What about this frivolous age? And who else will tell people about this? Where else in the entire contemporary American
culture will anybody find this out apart from the Bible? That every single person has an appointment
with God. And the same principle, which seals the doom
of the wicked, will be used to determine the rewards of the righteous to receive what is
due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. And you will notice that it is in light of
the must, that verse nine says, "We make it our goal to please him." We make it our goal to please Him. That's what we're doing. If we take this seriously, if we know, if
we groan, if we live, if we must, then we make it our goal to please Him. That's what we are doing. That's the story of our earthly pilgrimage
and what is God doing? God is fulfilling the purposes that He's had
from all of eternity. And what is His purpose from all of eternity? To conform us to the image of His Son, that
is his eternal purpose, isn't it? In Romans 8. "Those he predestined, he also foreknew in
order that they might be conformed to the likeness of his son." God's eternal purpose. 2 Corinthians 3:18, our existential experience,
“we are being transformed into his likeness." And 1 John 3:2, God's eschatological fulfillment,
"And we know that when we see him, we shall be like him for we will see him as he is." And it is that, you see, which marks us ultimately
out as believers because we were at one time without hope and without God in the world,
but we have been born again to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the
dead. And this hope doesn't make us ashamed. Now my final quote, which is from a contemporary
hymn written by Stuart Townend and Mark Edwards and this is the lyric, "There is a hope that
burns within my heart, that gives me strength for every passing day, a glimpse of glory
now revealed in meager part, yet drives all doubt away. I stand in Christ with sins forgiven and Christ
in me, the hope of heaven. My highest calling and my deepest joy, to
make his will my home. There is a hope that lifts my weary head,
a consolation strong against despair, that when the world has plunged me in its deepest
pit, I find the Savior there. Through present sufferings, future's fear,
he whispers courage in my ear. For I am safe in everlasting arms and they
will lead me home. There is a hope that stands the test of time,
that lifts my eyes beyond the beckoning grave to see the matchless beauty of a day divine,
when I behold his face. When sufferings cease and sorrows die and
every longing satisfied. Then joy unspeakable will flood my soul, for
I am truly home." Father, help us to forget everything that
which is extraneous and a nuisance, but seal to our hearts your Word so that we might know
that as we groan, we might live by faith and not by sight. And that we will not seek to avoid the reality
that we must appear before you. And how we thank you that on that day, we
may stand unashamed, dressed not in a beauty of our own, not with a self-manufactured code
of ethics or attempt at righteousness, but clothed in the white garments provided by
the blood of Jesus Christ, who cleanses us from all our sins. We bless you and commend the remaining hours
of this day to you and our loved ones and our friends. In Christ's name, amen.
