2 Corinthians chapter 4, and if you don't
have a Bible, there's one in the pew
rack in front of you, and it's on
page 1,375 of that Bible.
This morning, Pastor John will be preaching from
2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 16, through chapter
5, verse 10.
Therefore, we do not lose heart, but though
our outer man is decaying, yet our inner
man is being renewed day by day.
For momentary light affliction is producing for us
an eternal weight of glory, far beyond all
comparison.
While we look not at the things which
are seen, but at the things which are
not seen.
For the things which are seen are temporal,
but the things which are not seen are
eternal.
For we know that if the earthly tent
which is our house is torn down, we
have a building from God, a house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
For indeed, in this house we groan, longing
to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven,
inasmuch as we, having put it on, shall
not be found naked.
For indeed, while we are in this tent,
we groan, being burdened, because we do not
want to be unclothed, but to be clothed,
in order that what is mortal may be
swallowed up by life.
Now he who prepared us for this very
purpose is God, who gave to us the
Spirit as a pledge.
Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing
that while we are at home in the
body, we are absent from the Lord, for
we walk by faith, not by sight, we
are of good courage, I say, and prefer
rather to be absent from the body, and
to be at home with the Lord.
Therefore also we have as our ambition, whether
at home or absent, to be pleasing to
him.
For we must all appear before the judgment
seat of Christ, that each one may be
recompensed for his deeds in the body, according
to what he has done, whether good or
bad.
Today I want to begin a series of
five messages on the topic, what happens when
you die?
Today's message will try to answer the question,
what happens immediately when you die?
What's the next second after death?
Next week will be the question, what happens
at the coming of the Lord?
The next week will be, what happens to
believers at the judgment?
The next week will be, what happens in
the final state?
Is it an ethereal heaven, or is it
a new earth where lions and lambs lie
down together?
And the last message in the series will
be, what is the most essential bridge that
connects this life with the next one, namely
worship?
Now there are a lot of reasons for
this series, and I'll mention four.
They're not all, but they are four.
Number one, the possibilities of joy or misery
are trillions of times greater after death than
before.
The Bible describes this life as a vapor's
breath, James 4.15. It is like walking
outside on a winter morning, speaking a word,
and seeing your breath appear, and it's gone.
It's just gone.
That's the way the Bible views this life.
Most people don't view it that way.
They don't feel that way about their life.
We feel like this is substantial and lasting,
and this is it.
The Bible says it's just like a vapor,
like two seconds maybe.
And then the Bible describes what's on the
other side of the grave with this phrase,
ages of ages.
Not just two or three ages of thousands
of years, but ages of ages, thousands of
thousands of thousands of years.
That's the way of expressing eternity.
So my first reason is simply this message
is about reality.
Reality is if you're more interested in what
lasts a trillion years than what lasts two
seconds.
If you're only interested today in what lasts
two seconds and not what lasts a trillion
years, shut it down, because I'm not talking
your language.
Reason number two, this theme forces the question
about the authenticity of faith.
Is your faith real, substantial, biblical faith in
objective, external reality, God?
Or is your faith simply a subjective, internal
thing of emotions and thoughts that is conjured
up to soften the bumps of life and
to accumulate a network of friends and continue
a tradition from your parents?
I'll tell you, thinking about death and moving
right up to the brink of it and
facing eternity has a marvelous way of blowing
sham out of your life.
So it's a test, and I hope that
for five weeks you will stand before the
test and feel whether you're real or not
and get real.
Number three, this theme keeps God as the
center of our lives by asking us, do
we love Him more than we love the
world and everything in it?
Does the thought of dying give us more
pain at losing friends than it gives us
joy at gaining Christ?
I'll say that again.
Does the thought of dying give you more
pain at losing, you fill in the blank,
than it gives you joy at gaining Christ?
And if it does, you need some adjustments
in your spiritual priority, a pretty profound one.
Maybe you need to become a Christian.
And the fourth reason is that to know
as a Christian what is happening to you
when you die frees you to be radical,
frees you to be real, frees you to
lead a life of self-sacrifice rather than
accumulating.
If you can say with the Apostle Paul
authentically from your heart, to die is gain,
then you will be able to say with
the Apostle Paul, to live is Christ.
But if you can't say that, if you
can't say, to die is gain, you will
probably say in one degree or another, let
us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow
we die.
That's the way a lot of people live
because they don't think death is gain and
therefore this is it, therefore live it up
because it's just nothingness at the end.
Four reasons for why this is an important
series in my, it gives daily courage, it
helps you not lose heart to know what's
going to happen to you.
When I say you, I'm talking believers now
for these five weeks.
If you're not a believer in Jesus, and
there are a lot of you in this
room right now who aren't believers, who do
not authentically trust Christ as your Lord and
your Savior and cast yourself on Him and
submit yourself to Him, there's a lot in
this room like that.
I want you here, okay?
I don't know who you are, but I
want you here and I want you here
because I believe that in setting out what
will happen to believers will always have the
other side kind of trailing along.
What happens if you're not a believer and
my prayer is that these messages will waken
you out of the slumber of indifference to
infinitely important things.
I walked through the block party in Henfin,
Friday night I just walked from one end
to the other with my son Barnet, looking
at this carpet of people and all I
could think about was, they're all going to
die.
They dress like they're not going to die.
They walk like they're not going to die.
They sing and dance like they're not going
to die, but they're going to die.
Every one of them is going to die.
That's one thing I know, and I think
they know, but don't want to think about.
Therefore, what we're going to talk about is
incredibly relevant to every human being you know,
whether they're church people or not.
The text, 2 Corinthians 4, 16, 10, I
believe is designed by the Apostle Paul to
explain to the Corinthians and to us why
he does not lose heart in spite of
all the troubles and afflictions of his life,
including the wearing out of his body and
the leading to death.
Let's read verse 16 of chapter 4.
Therefore, we do not lose heart.
Now that's the key point.
We don't lose heart.
We don't lose heart, but though our outer
man is decaying, yet our inner man is
being renewed day by day.
Now this is utterly crucial.
What this message is about this morning biblically
is not losing heart.
Some of you have been so beat up
and oppressed physically, financially, and relationally that this
week and in many weeks gone by, you
have been tempted to lose heart.
It isn't worth it.
It always goes wrong.
Nothing works out.
One thing starts to get right and another
thing goes wrong.
What difference does it make whether I believe
or not?
Do you think Paul never had those temptations?
You read verses 8 and 12, what he
went through, and you'll know that he had
to fight not to lose heart.
So what we're reading here is the apostolic
prescription for how you don't lose heart when
life is really, really, really hard.
It was for Paul most of the time.
Let me show you down in verses 6
and 8 that this is really his concern.
Verse 6 of chapter 5, therefore being always
of good courage.
There he is again.
Verse 8, same thing.
We are of good courage and say.
So right through the train of thought in
this passage, from 4.16 to 5.10,
Paul's burden is to explain to the Corinthians
why in the face of his own decay
he does not lose heart but rather has
good courage.
And that's my aim for you this morning.
I would like you to be able to
walk out this morning feeling good courage, not
losing heart, and have some real, solid, objective,
biblical truth underneath that good feeling so that
it doesn't get knocked over tomorrow morning when
another bad thing happens to you, which it
probably will.
That's life, especially if you're obedient.
Now what's the threat to his heart here?
What's causing him to maybe lose heart?
Verse 16 gives the answer to that.
It says, therefore we do not lose heart
but though our outer man is decaying.
Now here's the threat.
It applies in relative degree in this room.
Some of you really feel the decay and
some of you are so young and robust
you hardly even know what this is talking
about yet.
Just store it up.
It's coming.
See these bifocals?
Paul can't see as well as he once
could see.
His eyes are going.
He can't hear as well as he once
could hear.
He can't recover from beatings as fast as
he used to recover from beatings.
He doesn't have as much strength to walk
from Troas onto the boat over the water
to Philippi and Thessaloniki and Berea and Athens,
Corinth.
He doesn't have as much strength as he
used to have to walk.
He looks in the, what kind of mirrors
did they have, and he sees these wrinkles
around his eyes and he does like some
of us and goes, hmm, what if I
just got a little slit here and they
tacked this down and I could have been
ten years back there.
He doesn't have memory.
He can't remember Luke's name.
What was his name?
Oh, Luke, yes, my beloved physician.
Have mercy on pastors.
His joints get stiff.
I sit cross-legged like a guru sometimes
to pray when I get tired of kneeling
and I can't stand up like I used
to stand up.
It's harder to get up at 47 than
it used to be.
The outer man is your body, your body,
and it's decaying.
Everybody in this room, it's going downhill, some
faster, some slower, and it tempts you to
lose heart.
Therefore, we do not lose heart, though our
outer nature is decaying yet.
Now, here comes why.
Why doesn't he lose heart?
Verse 16 at the end.
Our inner man, our inner nature is being
renewed day by day.
So there are some things, namely the wearing
away of his body, that makes him want
to lose heart, and then something else gives
him heart, restores his heart day by day.
Notice, it's a battle.
It doesn't just happen once, either when you're
saved or when you have some stunning experience.
It's a daily battle to get new in
your heart.
Every day there's a new reason to lose
heart, and every day there are reasons to
have heart and to be renewed.
Now, what are they?
How does Paul renew heart in the face
of this attack of a wasting body?
Verse 18 gives a very strange strategy for
being of good courage.
It says, we look, mark that word because
it seems to contradict the word that's coming,
we look not at things which are seen,
but at things which are not seen.
Now, how do you do that?
You look.
That's not right, Paul.
You've got your words wrong.
You look at what you can see.
You don't look at what you can't see,
because if you can't see it, you can't
look at it.
Well, if I wrote the Bible, I would
write it all wrong, I'm sure.
We submit ourselves under the Bible.
You don't straighten out the words.
You just learn.
You say, this is strange.
This is an experience that maybe I need
to learn how to do.
Look at what is unseen.
You do that?
You've got to do that.
You can't keep heart if you don't look.
I'm pointing in the wrong place here.
Look, Ephesians 1.18, enlighten the eyes of
the, tell me, heart.
You've got to look on what's unseen, because
if you only look with this, you will
see something, but you won't see the essential
thing.
Now, you remember how Jesus dealt with this
in the religious leaders of His day?
He said to them, Matthew 13, seeing they
do not see and hearing they do not
hear.
So here was Jesus, the Son of God,
and here was His teaching like nobody ever
taught, and here were the religious leaders, and
they saw and they didn't see, and they
heard and they didn't hear.
Now, that's got to be reversed.
In this text, it's reversed, and Paul says,
unless you have this experience, you won't have
heart, namely, not seeing, you must see, and
not hearing, you must hear.
You've got to see what you can't see,
and you've got to hear what you can't
hear.
There is truth, massive, objective, real, external, eternal,
glorious, that you can't see with these eyes
now.
Drop down to verse 7 of chapter 5.
He says it a little differently.
He says, we walk by faith and not
by sight.
There it is again.
Now, that does not mean that faith is
a leap into the dark with no evidence
of what is there when you leap.
That would not honor God at all if
you leaped like that into Christianity or into
obedience.
Faith means that you embrace what you now
cannot see on the basis of reliable testimony
from those who have seen and have heard.
Without the Bible, we'd have no faith.
Without eyewitnesses who faithfully recorded their testimony of
what He was like and what they saw
and what He communicated to them, there would
be no faith at all.
But faith, right now, is in the invisible.
I haven't seen Christ.
Paul, even though he had seen something like
an apparition of Christ on the Damascus road,
now he says, I walk by faith and
not by sight.
The Apostle said that.
And if he said it, I've never seen
Him, I don't expect to see Him until
He breaks through those clouds with lightning that
flashes from one side to the other.
It's normative not to see Jesus.
Be suspicious of the contrary.
What do we look at?
The truth of what we look at is
summed up in verse 17 and spelled out
in chapter 5.
Verse 17, momentary light affliction is producing for
us an eternal weight of glory far beyond
all comparison.
Now what that means is, let's get this
now, this is real important.
Momentary light.
He said that even though His affliction was
unremitting, yearlong, and excruciating many times.
He called it momentary and He called it
light in comparison to what's coming.
And He says, this experience of mine, this
decay of my body and all of this
affliction is not in vain.
It's not slipping into a black hole of
meaningless suffering.
It is producing.
The word is making, producing something.
And what it's producing is an eternal weight
of glory beyond all comparison.
On the other side.
So when Paul wants to establish his heart
in the face of a decaying body, he
does not look at the scene, namely the
body, the cancer, the arthritis, the eyes failing,
the ears failing, the memory failing, the Alzheimer.
He doesn't look at that.
He looks at the glory that He is
producing.
And this is producing.
I'm sure I don't understand the full weight
of this, but there is more than an
after here.
There's more than, it's going to be okay
because after the suffering comes the glory.
It's more than that because He's saying the
suffering produces the glory.
There's a correlation between what you must pay
here and what you will get there.
That's why I want to say there's no
wasted suffering.
And notice here, we're not just talking about
persecution.
This is a deteriorating body here in this
text.
This is not suffering from outsiders.
There's a correlation.
The decaying of my body and all the
affliction that goes with it is producing for
me a weight of glory.
That's why He does not lose His heart.
He looks at that.
You can't see it now, but you know
it's coming because of all the foundations laid
by Jesus in His death and resurrection.
Now, in chapter 5, He begins to unpack
some of the weight of glory.
The next two messages are in these next
verses, so I'm going to pass over two
things.
Number one, the resurrection of the body is
here in verses 1 to 5.
And the judgment of believers is here in
verses 9 and 10.
My point this morning is in verses 6
to 8, but I'm going to pass quickly
through verses 1 to 5 because you really
need to see Paul's priorities of value as
to what, if he had his choice, he
would choose with regard to death and life
and eternity.
So let me read with you verses 1
to 5, and I'm going to pause and
explain as we go.
This is full of metaphors, full of images,
and you have to be able to see
what the image is referred to for this
to make any sense at all.
And I'm going to try to just unpack
it briefly as I read through it and
then conclude with verses 6 to 8.
Verse 1 of chapter 5, For we know
that if the earthly tent, which is our
house, is torn down, now that's His body.
He's back to the decaying body.
It's like a tent.
It's very temporary.
It's a house tent, and it is decaying,
and it is going to be torn down.
If it's torn down, we have a building,
something more permanent than a tent, a building
from God, namely the new resurrection body that
He wants very much to have.
A house not made with hands, eternal in
the heavens.
Verse 2, For indeed in this house, this
tent house, our present body, we groan, longing
to be clothed.
He's mixing metaphors now.
He's moving from living in a tent to
putting on clothing.
He does this a lot.
We groan, longing to be clothed with our
dwelling from heaven, that is our resurrection body.
Verse 3, Inasmuch as we, having put on
the resurrection body, shall not be found naked,
that means He does not want to lose
His body and be a naked soul.
He wants the resurrection body.
Verse 4, For indeed while we are in
this tent, this mortal body, we groan, being
burdened, because we do not want to be
unclothed.
He doesn't want to lose His body.
I wish the NASB got this better.
The NASB just says, but to be clothed,
and it ought to say overclothed, super clothed.
What He wants is instead of His soul
and body being torn apart, which is never
a complete humanity in the Bible, He wants
for the second coming to happen and while
He's still alive to be overclothed and this
mortality to put on immortality.
The resurrection body, that's what He really wants
to happen.
Verse 4, In order that what is mortal
may be swallowed up by life.
Now He who prepared us for this very
purpose is God who gave us His spirit
as a pledge.
Now I'm going to talk more about the
resurrection body next week.
The point this morning is this, if Paul
had a preference and he could choose, he
would not choose to die and to be
separated soul from body.
He would choose that the Lord return, that
immortality clothe mortality, that imperishable clothe the perishable
and that the new resurrection body swallow up
the old mortal body so that He's new,
never having passed through the nakedness of death.
He does not want to be a disembodied
soul.
Does that mean that the hope of dying
and going to be with Christ is not
a hope?
No.
Paul makes very clear now what his second
preference would be.
In verses 6 to 8, let's read.
Therefore, being always of good courage and knowing
that while we are at home in the
body, we are absent from the Lord, that
is the full intimacy we want with the
Lord we can't have here.
I think that's a powerful statement of realism
that you need to take into account in
measuring the joy that you can have in
this life.
It will not be full.
Absent is an oppressive word to me.
While we are at home in the body,
we are absent from the Lord.
Yes, we have the Holy Spirit.
Yes, we are united to Christ, but He
is absent.
I want Him.
I want to see Him.
I want to touch Him.
I want to talk to Him face to
face, and I'm denied that in this life.
But, verse 7, we walk by faith and
not by sight.
We are of good courage, and here it
comes now, and prefer rather to be absent
from the body and to be at home
with the Lord.
Now, get this.
Verse 4, He said He does not want
to be unclothed.
He says, I don't want to be absent
from the body.
I don't want to be naked.
I don't want to leave my body in
the grave and have my soul cut free.
That's not my number one choice.
My number one choice is to be overclothed
at the resurrection, but my number two choice
is to go to be with Jesus, because
it is absent from the body at home
with the Lord, and He loves the Lord
more than He loves everything in this life.
So, let me try to summarize it now.
Paul has three stages in his longing.
Isn't this good to see that Paul had
stairs of longing?
His number one longing was for the second
coming, the trumpet blast, the Lord descent, and
a new body without having passed through death,
and the rending of soul and body.
He did not want to have to go
through that, and if he had his first
choice, he would say, clothe me over, God.
Clothe me over.
I don't look forward to dying.
I don't look forward to being rent apart
as my first choice.
And then, having said that, he says, I
prefer to be absent from the body and
at home with the Lord.
So, choice number two is not to stay
here and keep decaying.
Choice number two, if he could choose, which
he can't, is to go and be with
Jesus, because that, Paul says in Philippians 1
.23, is far and away better than anything
he could experience here.
So, we're talking levels of intimacy with Jesus.
And there's an intimacy we're going to enjoy
with Him when we have our resurrection bodies
that is greater than the intimacy we will
enjoy when our souls are split from our
bodies.
All the dead, my mother, your relatives who
are in heaven now, are not perfect, except
spiritually.
There is something wonderful yet coming.
They are under the altar crying out, how
long, O Lord, until you return and work
vindication for your cause and show that we
were right.
You don't cry out, how long, O Lord,
when everything's over and perfect.
And his third choice is, if you will,
Father, I will walk by faith and not
by sight, and I will be sustained, and
I will be strong and not lose heart.
So, I just want you to test yourself
now as we close.
Test yourself.
Do you this morning have these three biblical
priorities?
Now, I know this really hits hard because
if you're just coming off of 30 hours
of television, you don't.
You know, sometimes we wonder, is this service
real?
Is this experience real?
Is this hour and hour and hour real?
Isn't this just kind of an unrealistic interlude
in real life?
I mean, real life is at work and
with the kids at home and watching television
and doing your stuff.
That's real life.
And the things that I feel here, the
things that go on here, the singing and
the worship and listening to a sermon, is
that just kind of a little bubble of
unreality?
You know what it is?
It's a bubble of reality.
It's a bubble of reality in a sea
of unreality in large measure.
And if you're feeling right now that maybe
you could love the second coming more than
you love anything else, that's real.
That's real.
And what you might feel tonight when this
is gone and you haven't cherished it and
cultivated it and fanned the flame, that's unreal.
And it will drive you to delusion and
destruction.
So I just plead with you now as
we close.
Love the second coming of Jesus and all
that it will mean for your resurrection as
a believer.
Secondly, long to be with Jesus even if
it means you will have to be unclothed
from your body.
And third, while He waits, walk by faith
and not by sight and let your heart
be renewed and be of good courage because
you set your mind and your heart on
things, these things that are unseen.
As we close and move into the bridge
now, let me just remind those of you
who may not know what we're doing, how
we do it.
The bridge is about 15 minutes of worship.
It's a free time in which those of
you who need to go may go and
in which those who need to do something
outside and then come back, you can do
that.
It's a time with prayer teams on either
side of the sanctuary here when you can
come and just pray with somebody about a
burden in your life.
And it's a time for sitting in quietness
and processing what you've heard.
And after about 15 minutes, we're into praying
the vision until about 11.45 and then
the reception.
So that's the plan.
Let me pray with you as we move
on to the bridge.
Oh, Father in heaven, I bow now and
acknowledge that it is a battle day by
day to have my heart fixed and to
be of good courage in things that are
unseen because I am as vulnerable to the
scene as anybody.
And I pray for help for myself and
I pray for help for these thousand people,
Lord.
Would you be pleased, oh God, to open
the eyes of our hearts that we might
see you and know you.
Oh, Redeemer, come.
Make yourself known on the bridge.
In Jesus' name.