Show Notes
2 Corinthians 5:1-5
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Let's pray.
[00:00:04] Our Lord God, it is because of you that our hearts can sing with joy.
[00:00:10] Even though there is sadness in us, because of the things that we experience in this life, even though there is much trouble in us and around us groaning that comes from this state of sin and misery into which we've plunged ourselves because of sin.
[00:00:31] We confess that you are at work and mightily. So you give us hope, you give us life. You give us community and joy, forgiveness of sins and a resurrection of the body that is to come.
[00:00:49] We are excited and looking forward to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we ask that until that day you would strengthen us and cause us to persevere.
[00:01:01] We are Your workmanship, and so we ask that you would bring us to completion, that you would be the author and perfecter of our faith. We ask that you would do that now as we hear Your word, read and preached that Your Spirit would be active in our hearts, causing us more and more to be conformed to the image of the resurrected Son.
[00:01:27] We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:01:33] Remain standing if you're able. And let's turn to two Corinthians, chapter five.
[00:01:39] Two.
[00:02:02] Much encouragement here. Let's give our attention to God's word.
[00:02:07] For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens.
[00:02:21] For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on, we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened, not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
[00:02:53] May God bless his word to us. Please be seated.
[00:02:59] You one, three.
[00:03:19] When I do hospital visits, I go into a hospital room. Instead of just walking in saying, Hi, I'm here. Usually what I'll do is I'll knock on the door, which is usually open a little bit. I'll knock on the door and I'll say hello. Pastor Chelka here. And then I'll say, Is all right if I come in now? Why do that?
[00:03:46] There's people going in and out all the time.
[00:03:49] I guess I learned the practice first from nurses and doctors who also do this, though. It's their hospital, right? It's their room. They are in there all the time, more than a particular patient is. Yet when that patient's in there, that room changes a little bit for that particular patient.
[00:04:06] And something important has to be preserved even in a time where there's a lot of work being done, a lot of suffering happening, a lot of urgent needs. And the thing that needs to be preserved is dignity.
[00:04:21] When we're in the hospital, when we're sick, we're not always fully clothed. We're not always fully together.
[00:04:29] We don't have the same presence of mind and control and all these things that we usually have. And this is true of life in general. When we are suffering, when we're weak, we find ourselves vulnerable and exposed. And so for this reason, when people are in these states it's right for us to do what we can to preserve that dignity to give them a chance to pull the bedsheet over a little bit or maybe straighten their hair or whatever it is that would help them to feel comfortable.
[00:05:05] But retaining dignity in suffering and in struggles is ultimately impossible in this life. We can do a measure of it. And these things, like this example I'm giving are good things to do. They're right to do. But ultimately achieving what we hope the dignifying of humanity, the ending of suffering these things are impossible.
[00:05:31] Why is that?
[00:05:33] Well, it's not because of how we were made.
[00:05:37] If we go to Genesis, chapter two, we'll read something really important.
[00:05:44] We read at the end of Genesis, chapter two that after God had made Adam and Eve and he does this by taking a rib out of Adam he makes the woman Eve. And then we read in verse 22 this Genesis 222 and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman. He brought her to the man. Then the man said, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
[00:06:30] Adam and Eve, in the state in which they were created lived freely, openly. They lived in a way that was exposed, but not when we say exposed, we immediately tense up a little bit. When we say open and exposed, we feel this sense of that's a bad thing. But they lived in a way in which they were naked and not ashamed. There was no vulnerability. There was no danger. There was no fear or there was no embarrassment.
[00:07:05] They lived with each other, before each other. They lived before God in glory with all their differences and similarities and in their union with one another.
[00:07:17] That's how God made us. But when Adam and Eve sinned, all that was lost.
[00:07:25] And we read that after their sin they hid themselves.
[00:07:30] They hid themselves from God in some ways. They hid themselves from each other in their words and other actions. And they tried to make clothes for themselves.
[00:07:42] Their bodies, instead of being this complete blessing and joy immediately, even before the formal curse was pronounced became something of a liability.
[00:07:54] It was prone to shame, ultimately, to disease and indignities and death, and it's been like that ever since.
[00:08:04] We rightly try to limit the effect of these things, but ultimately it's unavoidable.
[00:08:11] Many of us have the luxury of healthy, beautiful bodies, but if we're honest, that's not true for all of us.
[00:08:22] And what is true for all of us is that death does come in the end.
[00:08:29] There's no way to pretend this away. There's no way to get around it.
[00:08:35] Some of us, even in our own congregation, are fighting really, really tough stuff.
[00:08:41] Cancers in which our bodies are attacking ourselves, autoimmune diseases, similarly so.
[00:08:51] Pain that is sudden and unexplainable all over our bodies, nerves which are acting up, sleep that evades us, mysterious spots that itch and burn and ache limbs, and various parts of our body that are actively dying, breathing that is hard, and on and on and go. I'm just talking about our congregation.
[00:09:18] This is the things that we know about.
[00:09:22] This is life.
[00:09:24] And when it comes time for death, we become ultimately totally vulnerable.
[00:09:31] There's no even pulling the sheet over a little bit or touching our hair or trying to pull ourselves up to look someone in the eye.
[00:09:40] Just dead, totally vulnerable and open to those who are around us.
[00:09:47] And that's just what we have in a sort of passive way, the things that just happen to our bodies. On top of that, in our sin, we hit and push and shove other bodies. We maim and murder and slice each other.
[00:10:08] Our Lord himself was stripped naked, beaten. A crown of thorns was placed on his head, his side was stabbed. Nails were driven through his hand and his feet to shame him and bring him indignities. He was hung on a cross, not only to inflict pain, but so that he would be displayed for everybody to look at, to be mocked, until finally he suffocated and briefed his lasts.
[00:10:45] This is not how things were designed to be, but this is what happens because of sin.
[00:10:54] We have to be clear about this, this awful, awful thing that we experience in what Paul calls this tent of our bodies, these earthly, mortal bodies. This is the effect and consequences of sin.
[00:11:10] As Paul says in Romans, the wages of sin is death.
[00:11:16] Now, this general experience that we all feel, that we're all familiar with to various degrees, is felt by Paul as well. He knows what it means to groan, a word that's used here in our passage in Two Corinthians Five, to mean something like an involuntary sound that comes out of us because of pain.
[00:11:40] We've all groaned before, right? Something happens to your body or even your soul that is so painful, so inflicting that it hurts. And we make these sounds.
[00:11:59] Paul says in verse two in this tent, we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.
[00:12:08] He says later that we groan, being burdened in verse four. He uses this word twice. He says, we grown being burdened.
[00:12:19] What Paul understands and is experiencing himself personally is that the bodies that we live in now, these tents, as he calls them, an analogy he uses are hard.
[00:12:32] What are the ways that he describes them? He describes them as being mortal, earthly, and along with the mortality, destroyable that's our bodies, they're liable to death.
[00:12:48] Perhaps you are looking at the weather right now and thinking, I've got a few more weeks for camping left and you're looking at your tent and you're going, is that going to work?
[00:12:59] Let's think about what a tent is for a moment and how Paul is comparing that to our bodies.
[00:13:05] If you go to the store right now and buy the best tent, you can buy the best one, right? No.
[00:13:12] Spend all the money that you could possibly spend, you're still going to get something that is prone to tear, get holes liable to things like wind.
[00:13:25] And unless you get sleeping pads and air mattresses and things like that, you're going to feel rocks under your body when you walk and sleep.
[00:13:34] Flies are going to get inside. It's not going to cancel any noise.
[00:13:41] It's going to be a tent. And I hope you do it because camping is really fun. But that is a tent, right? It's not meant to be a permanent structure. It's not something that you would usually choose to say, I'm going to live in this place because it's so difficult.
[00:13:59] That's how Paul describes our bodies. They're flimsy, they're prone to rip and tear and get bad things inside. They're prone to experience difficult things from the outside, to fall apart, given a little bit of use and time that is our bodies. And Paul's experiencing that. Paul knows what it means to be beaten, what it means to be sick, what it means to sleep on the ground. Paul knows what it means to be outside for long periods of time, to be on the run, to be attacked and more.
[00:14:35] Paul understands this.
[00:14:37] And yet here is a man who has hope, doesn't he? Here is a man who understands all of these things that we've been saying about our tenty bodies. This flimsy existence, this mortality, this earthly life, the difficulty, the struggling, the groaning. And yet he has courage and hope.
[00:15:00] Why?
[00:15:02] What does he know?
[00:15:04] He knows something that we also know as Christians, that we have something ahead of us, that this earthly tent that we have now in our bodies will not last forever, but will be changed and we will receive something else.
[00:15:21] He says in verse one, we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
[00:15:40] The first word he uses is building. And the Greek word is something like house building or house construction. The idea is that the emphasis is on it's something that has been constructed. And that's why there's a contrast here with the word tent, right? Instead of putting up a tent, this thing has been built. It is strong.
[00:16:03] We have something that is not like a tent. We have something that is strong, a house even. And how is it made? Not with hands. This is a way of saying that our future bodies in the Lord our future bodies in the Lord are kind of like a divine home made by God himself. They will not be clothed in bodies that will wear out. They will not rip and tear and get bad things inside and struggle to keep bad things out. They will be solid, secure.
[00:16:39] Or this word that he uses at the end of verse one eternal.
[00:16:45] Eternal means no death.
[00:16:47] Eternal means that the death that we experience is a temporary thing. It's an entrance to something else. As sad and as horrible as it is for the Christian, it is transformed into something that is eternal. A nondestroiable body, a heavenly body, not an earthly one.
[00:17:10] This is an amazing thing.
[00:17:13] Notice another way that he describes this body that we have hoped in because of what God has done, this God gift that God has given to us. The other description that we have is in verse four.
[00:17:26] He says, for while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened. Not that we would be unclothed or naked, he would say, at the resurrection, but that we would be further clothed so that what is mortal may be swallowed up in life.
[00:17:47] So what Paul is saying is the indignities that you have in sickness, in suffering, in death, ultimately, those things are not permanent.
[00:17:58] They're not permanent.
[00:18:01] Something else is going to happen. You could say, you will be further clothed, not naked, with what is coming. You will be further clothed. And he says something else. Then he says, what is mortal may be swallowed up in life.
[00:18:19] Let's sit with that image for just a minute.
[00:18:23] What does it mean to be swallowed up in life?
[00:18:28] What does it mean to swallow up something? What are things that swallow up other things? Well, we swallow food sometimes the earth is said to swallow up things, right? As holes open up and things are brought down inside.
[00:18:45] The sea is sometimes said to swallow things ships, people, maybe continents, space, black holes, right? Swallowing light, bringing it deep inside.
[00:19:01] In all of these instances, what we have is we have this really, really big or thing taking something really, really tiny and just making it disappear, right, with our food, right? We take a little nut or a piece of lettuce or whatever, and we swallow it and it's gone.
[00:19:25] It's gone. This great powerful thing that is our bodies, that is our life, takes this other thing that is small and insignificant and just gobbles. It swallows it. It's swallowed up in life.
[00:19:38] A similar thing when we say that a great ship is swallowed up by the sea, or some star is swallowed up by a black hole, these giant, immense things compared with these tiny, tiny other things. Even though those tiny things might be really big, that bigger thing is so much bigger that it just swallows it up. And what is Paul saying here? That mortality is swallowed up in life.
[00:20:12] Now, mortality is a pretty big thing, isn't it? It's something that is experienced across all of humanity every single day by every single person.
[00:20:25] And that experience, the suffering, the sorrow, the heartaches, the pain, all of the diseases that we feel, the things that so much shape and define our lives and our weeks, swallowed up, disappeared by what?
[00:20:44] Life.
[00:20:46] This life that the scriptures describe is so big, so immense, so powerful, so glorious, that this other big thing is just swallowed, swallowed up in life.
[00:21:04] As impressive as these earthly things are, we can say that not only mortality, but all the world, the heavens and the earth will be swallowed up by life. Not only our bodies, but all of creation itself. When the kingdom of God comes in glory, when the Lord Jesus comes for those who are his.
[00:21:28] That's why Paul says in verse six, we are of good courage.
[00:21:33] We are of good courage because of what is coming and because of who has done it. This building, this life, these bodies that are prepared for us, are prepared for us by God.
[00:21:49] As Paul says at the end in verse five, he who has prepared us for this very thing is God.
[00:21:58] Well, now it begins to make sense.
[00:22:01] How could you possibly have something that would swallow up life or death itself, something that typically overcomes life? How could it be overcome by an eternal life?
[00:22:14] Well, it happens through the eternal one, god Himself.
[00:22:21] This happens when the Son of God was sent into the world, when he added to his divine nature a body like ours, a body that was prone to sickness, tiredness, hunger and death.
[00:22:36] But what happened to Jesus's body when he died?
[00:22:40] Well, he died and he was placed in a tomb, and he rested there for three days. But on the third day, he rose again from the dead.
[00:22:50] Because of his obedience, because of his perfect sacrifice, jesus, the God man, overcame death.
[00:23:01] This future promise about immortal bodies has firm footing. Because it is given by this promiser, it is given by God Himself.
[00:23:17] Death is swallowed up in victory because of who Jesus is and because of what he did.
[00:23:28] This is our hope.
[00:23:29] Our hope is in two things, therefore, in a promised future and in the promiser, the one who makes the promise, our God and Father, is life itself.
[00:23:40] John 526 says, the Son has been granted from the Father to have life in himself. And as we confessed in the nicene creed. The Spirit is the Lord and giver of life.
[00:23:52] Our promised future has a promiser behind it, and that's why we have hope. It's not an empty hope, it's a living hope.
[00:24:02] As we close, let's hear just a few scriptures. One timothy 410.
[00:24:08] For to this end, we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the savior of all people, especially those who believe.
[00:24:21] One peter. One. Three. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
[00:24:40] And as we read in Scripture, the love of God the Father, in addition to the love, the work of God the Father in the Son, we have this added assurance of the guarantee of the Holy Spirit.
[00:24:55] It's not only the guarantee that the Holy Spirit makes, but it's the guarantee that he is.
[00:25:03] Consider what Paul says in Romans 811.
[00:25:06] If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
[00:25:22] What more encouragement could we ask for when we remember this reason that we can trust the promise of the resurrection life? We can trust in the future, because the resurrector lives right now in you.
[00:25:41] The Holy Spirit dwells in you. The very One who resurrected Jesus from the dead is now at work in you, dwelling in you.
[00:25:57] So let me ask you, have you put your faith in Jesus?
[00:26:02] Are you trusting Him as the One who brings us life? Are you trusting the Father who sent Him and the Spirit who unites us to Him and promises us an eternal life?
[00:26:16] If you have, then when the wind blows against your tent, when water comes in through the holes, when you feel nothing but rocks under your body, do not lose hope.
[00:26:32] For you will soon have a body that is built by God, fit for an everlasting kingdom, a body that has been swallowed up by life itself.
[00:26:47] So, beloved, let your promised future give you hope for whatever present troubles you are experiencing.
[00:26:56] These troubles won't last forever.
[00:26:58] They can't.
[00:27:00] But the life that is in you now will be clothed forever in immortality. Trust your God, and do not lose heart.
[00:27:10] Let's pray.
[00:27:17] Our Heavenly Father, although we sinned so greatly against you, you have come into this world and saved us from our sin, saved us from our disobedience, saved us from our shame, saved us from our death and the consequences that we rightly deserve.
[00:27:35] When we look to you and to Your grace, we see something powerful and strong, something that is eternal and secure.
[00:27:44] Teach us to look to you, to trust you, to rely on you, the great promiser of our promised future.
[00:27:52] Let us turn away from the earthly things.
[00:27:56] These things don't last. Our bodies don't last. Our stuff doesn't last.
[00:28:02] They fall apart.
[00:28:05] They're hurt, destroyed, and liable to all sorts of difficulties.
[00:28:12] Why do we trust them, Lord? Why do we put our hope in them more than other things?
[00:28:18] Lord, teach us to look away from the things of this world, the things that are earthly, the things that are perishable and look to the things that are heavenly, imperishable and made by you.
[00:28:32] Let us learn to see Your work in us even now. Let us learn to see and to believe and notice the ways in which resurrection life has already begun. As Your Word says, you have caused us to be born again to a living hope. You have made us so that we are no longer walking in death and in trespasses, no longer children of wrath. But we are children of light, children of life in whom the Holy Spirit dwells.
[00:29:06] Lord, we ask that you would continue to strengthen us in these truths. And may any soul here that has not yet put his or her faith in the Holy One, in the Immortal One, in the Saving One jesus Christ, we ask that you would work in their hearts even now and cause them to be born again to a living hope so that they may no longer fear a death. And the one who wields that power over us and makes us slaves. But instead, Lord, we ask that you would give to all of us a bravery and a courage for this life that comes from the knowledge of the things that you have done and the things that you promised to do. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
