Resurrection Sunday: Resurrection Life with Christ

[0:00] To honor the reading of God's holy word, would you please rise with me.!

[0:30] Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

[0:45] When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. This is God's holy and authoritative word.

[0:56] You may be seated. Thank you. Brian Johnson is a tech business CEO who has poured everything into one project.

[1:12] Not dying. Following a hyper regimented body care system, he eats a precise 2,250 calories every day.

[1:23] He follows a particularly calibrated workout plan with 25 different exercises. He maintains a specific body fat composition, measuring himself every day, and he takes up to 100 pills of vitamins and minerals every day.

[1:42] That's like two fistful of pills. He even exposes himself to experimental medical procedures, like receiving blood plasma transfusions from his own 17-year-old son, and subjecting himself to rounds of experimental gene therapies that are only legal in a few countries in the world.

[2:04] The grand result? Based on some recent tests, nothing's working. He's aging just as fast as we are. Now, human beings can live for another million years on this planet before Christ returns.

[2:24] Make leaps and bounds in developing science and technology that I can't even fathom. But this I know for sure. We will always continue to die.

[2:40] Because death is not merely a scientific issue. It's ultimately a spiritual issue. We have a dying problem because we have a sin problem.

[2:53] For the wages of sin is death before a holy and righteous judge, and there is not a single one of us in this room that is righteous on our own standing before him.

[3:08] Sin is the deadly, heart-stopping, lung-clothed, brain-rotting condition that wipes every single one of us out. Sin is the only one of us in this room that is righteous on our own.

[3:46] We are already living immortal lives. In our passage this Easter morning, the Apostle Paul makes it clear that for all of you who have put your faith in Jesus Christ, you have been united to him by faith, and therefore you have already died.

[4:06] You have already resurrected with Jesus Christ. And because of that, out of that, we can now seek the things that are above.

[4:17] That's the main point of my sermon today. So in turn, I'm going to follow Paul's logic in this short passage and talk about the foundation, and then the focus, and finally the future of the resurrected lives that we now live with Christ.

[4:33] This Resurrection Sunday, we celebrate and we remember, along with billions of others in the universal church of Christ, the most significant event in all of human history.

[4:49] More important than any war, any stock market crash, any natural disaster, because this single event has single-handedly transformed and changed the course of human history forever, for all eternity.

[5:07] This one day in history is the very cornerstone of the Christian faith. It's the hinge on which all of Christianity turns and hangs upon. Without it, really, the rest of Christianity has no legs to stand upon.

[5:23] Paul makes that clear when he says in 1 Corinthians 15, if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

[5:35] We are even found to be misrepresenting God, for we testified about God that he raised Christ. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.

[5:48] If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. Here Paul gives the hypothetical, the if, if the resurrection weren't true.

[6:04] But let's turn that on the head. If the resurrection were true, what does that mean for us? If you are here today, and you are not a believer, I just want to personally thank you so much for coming to join with us in worship of our resurrected Jesus this Easter Sunday.

[6:26] It's our joy and privilege to have you come. And I encourage you to stick around after the service so that we get to talk to you more, we get to learn your names and your stories.

[6:38] But given the importance of the resurrection, and given the uncertainty of time, and the certainty of future judgment, I want to ask you a simple question now.

[6:53] What do you think of the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Do you think this actually happened? Do you think a man from the dead could be raised?

[7:04] As you think about it, I'm going to give you some food for thought as we know some things about the end of Jesus' life. Historians, both Christian and non-Christian alike, have testified to these three facts about the end of Jesus' life.

[7:23] Number one, we know that Jesus was crucified by the Romans. Number two, there was an empty tomb. Number three, there are multiple eyewitnesses testifying that Jesus has resurrected and risen.

[7:43] So there's a crucifixion, there's an empty tomb, and you have multiple eyewitnesses. So if we have these facts, what's the best way for us to reconstruct what happened here?

[7:56] How do we make sense? How do we put these different pieces of the puzzle together? Some hypothesize that some claimed to see and talk with Jesus after his crucifixion, not because he died and resurrected, but simply because he fainted, he swooned on the cross.

[8:16] So then later, when they laid him in the tomb, he simply got up on his own power and presented himself to others. But there are problems with this theory.

[8:28] One does not simply walk off being scourged and whipped with lashes that have these sharp pieces of metal and bone nettled into them.

[8:41] Just imagine how much Jesus' back would have been torn up into bits and pieces, the copious amounts of blood that he would have lost. That in and of itself could have killed Jesus.

[8:53] But on top of that, he was crucified. And crucifixion was a particularly effective method of capital punishment that the Romans developed.

[9:07] The Romans were master killers, and it seems dubious that they would have bungled this execution. Others proposed that Jesus' body was merely stolen from the body, and mass hysteria spread like gangrene because of this simple lie.

[9:26] But if Jesus' body was stolen, which again is a dubious claim in the first place because it was heavily protected, what do you make of these hundreds of eyewitness testimonies claiming that they saw, they interacted, they ate with a resurrected Jesus?

[9:43] Well, someone might push back and say, well, they could have been in all on the same lie. They could have been all lying together.

[9:55] But keep in mind, so many of these men would leave their homes, their families, to go to distant foreign lands to share this testimony that Jesus has resurrected.

[10:06] and many of them would give up their very own lives as martyrs. You lie until a certain point, but you don't die for a lie.

[10:19] Still others believe that multiple people merely hallucinated their vision of Jesus. People nowadays still, they claim to have seen a recently deceased loved one in a ghost, in a dream, in a premonition, sure, but when have you heard of hundreds of people all testifying to seeing the same vision, the same dead person?

[10:43] It is a psychological impossibility for hundreds of people to all see the same thing. So maybe, just maybe, the best answer to make sense of these facts is the supernatural one.

[11:02] Maybe, just maybe, the most plausible explanation for this historical anomaly is that these testimonies are true and credible. Yes, we aren't able to prove the resurrection today based on any kind of empirical evidence, not in the same way that I can prove that gravity exists by dropping this pen, but we constantly believe, we constantly believe things based on only eyewitness testimony.

[11:32] testimony. We as a society wouldn't be able to function unless we believed someone else's word. After all, how do you know your date of birth? Do you remember it?

[11:45] No, you simply trust the testimony of your parents, of the doctors. faith. And while Hebrews 1.11 says, faith is the assurance of things hopeful, the conviction of things not seen, that does not mean that faith is like a blind leap into the dark.

[12:06] Faith isn't like a buffet line where you just go and pick and choose whatever seems appetizing to you. for the late, great theologian Augustine commented that if you try to have faith without reason, that is no faith at all, but that's credulity, that's gullibility, that's foolishness that leads people to believing all kinds of wacky things.

[12:34] Instead, faith and reason have a symbiotic relationship, a deep congruity between them. And if you need reason and faith, Christianity has strong, very strong, historical, concrete data to back up its claims.

[12:51] So I ask you again, what do you make of the resurrection? If it were true, what does it mean for you? I think that means you have to follow what the former atheist and cold case detective J. Warner Wallace has said and lived out.

[13:08] I am not a Christian because it works for me. I had a life prior to Christianity that seemed to be working just fine. And my life as a Christian hasn't always been easy.

[13:21] I am a Christian because it is true. I am a Christian because my high regard for the truth leaves me no alternative.

[13:32] if the resurrection is true, that means every word out of his mouth is true too. If someone accurately predicted the mega million lottery numbers every Tuesday and Friday for the past year, you best believe you're going to buy a ticket with whatever numbers he tells you to buy.

[13:57] And if Jesus accurately predicted that he would die and resurrect three days later a supernatural feat that defies all natural expectations, you best believe you better take his words seriously.

[14:14] That's why the resurrection is so important because it substantiates all of Jesus' claims. And similarly, Jesus exhorts his followers in John 5, 24 to believe his word.

[14:27] He says, truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.

[14:43] If we are taking all of Jesus' words very seriously and accepting them as true, what is he claiming here? He's claiming that he can offer to us the secret of immortality, eternal life with him.

[15:01] That's not just in the future, guys, but it's now. For did you notice something about the tenses of these verbs? For those who have believed in Jesus, he's saying that you have eternal life.

[15:15] It's the present tense. You have passed from death to life. It's referring to an action from the past. Christ. In the same spirit, the apostle Paul in our passage this morning says, if you have been raised with Christ, and later he says in verse 3, you have died.

[15:40] All these verbs are in the past tense. And Paul makes it very clear that over 200 times in his writings and in our passage today, that again, for those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ, we have been united with Christ in a mystical union.

[15:58] Just like a branch cannot produce fruit unless it's connected to the vine, just like the body cannot function and feel unless it's connected to the head, and just like how a husband and wife are so close that they become one flesh, just like that, Christ has loved us so intimately, so wonderfully, so powerfully, that he has inextricably and united, eternally united ourselves with him.

[16:31] So much so that wherever Christ is, we will go. And whatever Christ has done, we can say that we have done. So in our passage, Paul is highlighting the fact that yes, we will die and resurrect with Christ in the future, that'll be our bodily resurrection.

[16:51] But in our union with Christ, we have spiritually died and we have spiritually resurrected already with Christ. And what does that mean?

[17:04] For all those who are born in Adam were enslaved to sin. We were all born in sin, meaning that we are not sinners because we sin.

[17:18] No, it goes far deeper than that. We sin because we are sinners. It's not that we just did bad things here and there once in a while.

[17:32] No, we were under the dominance, the control of sin. Sin was part of us. I think we have a lot to learn from this story, from this strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the author, Robert Louis Stevenson, he writes about a Dr. Jekyll, a nice, kind man, but honest, and knows that he has some ugliness to him, some pride, some bitterness, and so he decides to take a potion, a potion that would amass, congeal all of this ugliness into a separate personality named Mr. Hyde.

[18:16] Unfortunately for him, Jekyll quickly realized that Mr. Hyde was way, way worse than he could ever have imagined. He's way more insidious and murderous and ugly than he could have ever imagined.

[18:33] And eventually, while he was first able to control that transformation, the power of the potion overcame him and Jekyll lost control of Mr. Hyde.

[18:45] He was unable to suppress the evil within him. And in the final scene of the novella, Jekyll has no solution but to end his own life to stop Mr. Hyde.

[18:58] And like Dr. Jekyll, we all have had that same potion inside of us. It's really a poison. It's flowing through our veins.

[19:09] It's giving control to sin to our Mr. Hyde's. For in so many words, it's like Stevenson's whole story is just taken from Romans 7 where Paul writes, for I do not understand my own actions.

[19:21] For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate. I do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. If I do what I don't want is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.

[19:41] That's all of our conditions before Christ. So how are we cured from this poison? How do we regain control over our sin?

[19:54] For one, Paul makes it clear that it's not by following a bunch of man-made legalistic rules. This church in Colossae was being tempted by false teaching.

[20:06] Andrew spoke about it that involved a toxic brew of legalistic Judaism and worldly paganism. These false teachers added a bunch of legalistic rules saying don't handle, don't touch, don't look, don't do this, don't do that under the guise of holiness to put death to sin.

[20:30] Expecting all this rule keeping to have power to conquer our fleshly impulses. We in the church, we are still tempted to do the same thing. Every time we sin, we hurt others, we do things that we don't want to do, what is often our first reaction?

[20:49] We just throw at it a bunch of legalistic rule following. I'm going to read my Bible like crazy. I'm going to pray twice as hard.

[21:00] I'm going to start fasting. Don't get me wrong, those things are good, but they're insufficient on their own because trying to fight sin, fight your Mr.

[21:13] Hines based on your own power, it's like bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. Paul says himself right before our passage, these man made rules have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

[21:39] You can try all you want, you can work your fingers down to the bone and you will have nothing to show for it. But praise be to God that the solution to kill our sin is not to kill ourselves like Dr.

[21:55] Jekyll. And it's not to kill our bodies by a bunch of legalistic rule following, but it is found in the killing of the Passover lamb, Jesus Christ.

[22:07] For Jesus Christ on Good Friday, though he never sinned, though he never had a Mr. Hyde in him, he was crucified as if he did, bearing the total weight of sin on behalf of us sinners.

[22:22] Not just dying, for us, but he allowed us to die with him. Not to die in sin, but to die to sin.

[22:36] By grace, we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin, just like the assurance of pardon that we read just earlier.

[22:51] God is so whenever we look at the cross, we ought to see Jesus hanging there, nailed there because of our sin. But whenever we look at the cross, we ought to see our old selves, our selves, the ones who are controlled and dominated by sin, crucified on that cross with him.

[23:13] church, are you aware that you are no longer controlled by sin anymore?

[23:24] But the same power that resurrected Jesus from the grave now flows through your veins. Resurrection power, not sin's deadly poison, flows now in your veins.

[23:38] This resurrection Sunday, we don't just remember Jesus' death and resurrection. resurrection. We remember our own death and resurrection, our own transformation, our freedom from sin and new life in him.

[23:52] We don't just commemorate the resurrection on Easter, we need to live it out. And how do we do that? In our passage today, Paul gives us one command, just one command, highlighting the focus of the resurrected life, which is my second point.

[24:11] signified by the connecting words if and for, Paul shows the foundation of this resurrected life is our resurrection with Christ.

[24:22] And out of that resurrection power, he then calls the Colossians and us to seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

[24:34] Again, Paul repeats this command in a slightly different way, set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth. And so while it is true that we have already died to the power of sin, we have already resurrected by the power of the Spirit, we have not yet experienced the fullness of resurrection life with Christ in heaven.

[25:01] We know that by experience, don't we? Even as Christians, after our transformation, we know that we can't coast in this life. We're not out of the fight because while that poison that gives total control to our sin, that gave control to our Mr.

[25:18] Hines is out of our systems, we can still be discouraged and plagued by sin by our Mr. Hines, the remnants of him.

[25:31] And if we weren't, then Paul wouldn't have to give a command like this. But knowing that we are not yet in heaven, he gives this command to seek and to set our minds on the things that are above.

[25:44] And what are these things? Ultimately, they're summed up in the person of Jesus. Paul alludes to that when he says, seek the things that are above.

[25:56] Why? Because that's where Christ is. That's where he is seated at the right hand of God, the Father. Father, where he is now ruling and reigning as the supreme, preeminent Lord of the universe.

[26:11] And after all, if your life is indissolvably, inextricably, irreversibly united with Christ for all eternity, then why would you look to anything else other than Christ alone?

[26:24] Both the Colossians church and us today, we are tempted by this false teaching of syncretism, of claiming to have Christ, but then seeking to add things to him, seeking other things on top of Christ.

[26:45] Back then, their ancient culture tended to look up to the sky, and they would feel this pull to worship the sun god, to placate it. They would worship and make sacrifices to the rain god so that they would get good rain for their crops.

[27:02] And in the same way, we, while still teaching, hey, you need Christ. Christ is good, but they also sought to placate these other elemental forces, like the sun, moon, rain, and earth.

[27:16] They taught them to worship angels on top of their worship of Christ. They said, if you have Christ, plus these other things, plus these elemental forces, plus these other idols, you're going to be better off.

[27:32] You're going to be more spiritually fulfilled. After all, the more, the merrier, right? This is the faulty logic of syncretism. Is there value added to a juicy, fatty, medium-rare, A5 Wagyu steak if I squeeze a whole bottle of Heinz ketchup all over it?

[27:56] Is there value added to a sleek, elegant, 3.1 million dollar Ferrari F80 if I slap a hundred bumper stickers all over it? In other words, Paul needs nothing extra, nothing more than Christ.

[28:15] He knows that nothing could possibly add to his spiritual fulfillment, to his sense of safety and security than Christ alone. Because he knows that his life, as he says in verse 3, that his life is hidden with Christ in God.

[28:34] He knows, he knows that the safest place that we can be is sheltered. Sheltered in the arms of Christ. That he who began a good work in us will surely bring it to completion at the day of Christ.

[28:53] That he will never abandon, he will never forsake us. If you need to be reminded of the safety that we find in the refuge of God, just read the Psalms.

[29:05] And there you'll hear about how God calls us the apple of his eye, the pupil of his eye. And just like how we instinctively flinch to protect ourselves, God is saying that he doesn't need a moment to think and ponder, should I protect my children?

[29:28] No, his most natural, his instinctual reaction is to shield us, to protect us. And it is sovereignty to you to work all things for our good.

[29:44] And I have to admit that this simple phrase has been the greatest comfort for me in this season as I've been preparing the sermon. And some of you guys know, Friday was my last day of work as a full-time engineer in the biotech, pharma world.

[30:01] And tomorrow will be the start of really the great privilege of full-time ministry and working for this church. I mean this when I say I have no idea what the future holds for me and for my family, but this I know for sure.

[30:22] My life, my family's life, we are hidden. We are hidden in Christ.

[30:36] Sometimes I have to remind myself of that. But this Easter, I look to the resurrection as proof that Jesus hides me from every unforeseen obstacle.

[30:59] Every insidious enemy, every thorn in my side, he will hide me from and he will overcome them just as he overcame death. The resurrection for me is proof that God can and he will bring death or bring life from death.

[31:20] Strength out of weakness and hope out of despair. And I know that some of you are enduring through hard seasons. A dark battle against depression.

[31:33] A time of unwanted singleness. A season of financial insecurity. A loss of a loved one. All that stuff makes the path to heaven look dauntingly long.

[31:52] But take heart, friend. Hear this from God's word, which is true even if you don't feel like it is. Your lives even now are hidden, safe, protected, assured in Christ.

[32:15] Christ is not only the great source of security for our lives, but he is our life. As Paul writes in verse 4.

[32:29] I'm sure you've heard and said something yourself like, watching this show, reading this book, playing this video game, it's giving me life. It is my life.

[32:42] I'm totally obsessed. In the same way, Paul is saying that Christ is our life. That a Christian is defined by a growing, a healthy obsession with him.

[33:01] Because the Christian recognizes that he is the source of unfathomable riches. That he is a well that will never run dry.

[33:14] He is a precious diamond that you can turn over and over and over again in your heart. And you will see new beauties and new angles. He is infinite God.

[33:29] No matter how much we grow and learn of Christ, that distance, that gap between an infinite God and finite creatures will never, ever be shortened.

[33:43] How could the finite ever approach the infinite? So don't ever think that heaven will be boring one day for 10,000, 100,000, a million years into heaven.

[33:54] We'll still say and feel, Christ is that good, that amazing. I've only scratched the surface of him. I'm totally obsessed with Christ.

[34:09] Pastor Tim Keller shared a perfect example of a growing, maturing Christian that he once counseled, who set her mind, her focus on the risen Christ.

[34:19] Her old self was constantly in and out of relationships with men. But as her new self, she spoke of an experience that she had and some advice that she received from a counselor.

[34:33] She says, I'm going to my counselor. And she said, I built my very significance and acceptability and identity on men. All of that is right and helpful.

[34:46] However, my counselor doesn't have a very good solution for me. My counselor says that what I should do instead is get myself a great education and a great career.

[34:58] Well, my counselor means well, and of course, I absolutely do need to get some training, get myself a job. But what she's saying is that I should do that so that I will feel better about myself.

[35:09] But that would mean I would be switching from one kind of idol to another. For many years, my heart has been looking at men and saying, unless I'm successful at love, I'm nothing.

[35:26] But the therapist wants me to look at my career and say, unless I'm a successful, independent businesswoman who is in control of my own life, I am nothing. I don't want to be enslaved to my work as I was to men.

[35:44] I don't want to be as enslaved to my independence as I was to my dependence. I'm actually being asked to exchange a typical female idol for a typical male idol.

[35:56] And I don't want either. when I go to church, when I'm in worship, when what Jesus did for me is so real and so wonderful, in my heart, I speak to the men that were in my life and say, I'm glad to know you.

[36:16] And I certainly wouldn't mind being married, but you are not my life. Christ is my life. I'm done.

[36:30] I'm done making anything else in my life. You're a good thing, but you're not an ultimate thing. I'd love to have a husband, but if I don't, I've got Jesus.

[36:45] And I set my mind on things above. You can't give me any of the things that Jesus has given me.

[36:56] this is a model example of what it looks like to seek the things that are above. This is the heart of Christianity over syncretism, saying, I'm done.

[37:11] I'm done. I'm done. I'm done making anything else my life. I'm done making money, marriage, man's approval, ministry even, my life.

[37:26] Above all, Christ is my life. So I'm gonna keep him the center of my attention, the focus of my life, the north star that I'm running towards.

[37:39] even when obstacles come my way, I'm not letting that stop me from relentlessly, persistently pursuing my first love.

[37:53] And when we do that, when we endure to the end, the rest of the world, they're in for a grand old surprise. because the fact that your life is hidden in Christ has another meaning to it.

[38:08] Because who you are truly isn't visible yet. It's hidden. It's concealed. Your life on earth looks like everyone else's.

[38:22] You ride the T, you go to work, sit in class, do your daily chores. But what they don't know and they can't see is that you are living a resurrected life in Christ.

[38:36] We see this literary contrast in verses three and four, right? Now we are hidden. Now we're disregarded. Now we're lowly. But that day, when he returns, we will appear with Christ in glory.

[38:53] and he's going to return soon. In other words, what is true of you on the inside will always eventually be true of you on the outside.

[39:06] If you are inside, dead, dead in sin, you will be dead on the outside. If you are inside, resurrected, in Christ, you will be resurrected to live with him forever in glory.

[39:24] This is the guaranteed future of the resurrected life. Many of you know and love Johnny Erickson Tata. Such a faithful model of how to live with keeping your eyes only on Christ.

[39:43] Quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down from a diving accident since the age of 17 in 1967. She is now 75 years old after almost six entire decades of persevering and keeping her eyes on Christ with this disability.

[40:02] Can you imagine that? Even after battling cancer, she is one of the longest living quadriplegics today. And she said, I, with shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed with righteousness, powerful and dazzling, now hidden in a frail, weak body.

[40:39] but one day revealed in total, stunning, ineffable glory, matchless, staggering beauty, that's going to be you.

[40:56] All your permanent scars, all your physical weaknesses, all the body image insecurities that you have will all be put to rest. You need not look in the mirror and sigh anymore because the mirror can't capture who you truly are.

[41:14] Soon and very soon, you will be shown in glory with Christ. So knowing that, Paul exhorts the Colossians and us that because we have been united with him, seek, keep your eyes on the things above and keep your eyes on the things ahead.

[41:32] cultivate a heavenly perspective and an eternal attitude that should color and permeate all of our lives, every single facet of it.

[41:44] Instead of focusing on next week, next month, next year, we ought to focus about the next million, billion, trillion of years that we have with Christ.

[41:58] Knowing that you are now living the resurrected life. What would it look like for you to adopt a heavenly mindset right here and right now as a stay-at-home mother doing another load of laundry, cleaning another dirty diaper, cooking another family dinner, as someone who is overlooked or overworked at your job right now, as a spouse experiencing marital troubles, as someone dealing with chronic sickness and disability, what would it look like for you now to cultivate an eternal perspective?

[42:43] You see, setting your eyes on the heavenly future is not an optional aspect of the Christian faith. For the gospel is more, it's more than, and it's so important, but it's more than just penal substitutionary atonement.

[43:00] It's more than just God's courtroom. As important as it is because it doesn't capture the entire story. And frankly, I'm convinced that much of the American church today, me included, we don't think enough about heaven.

[43:19] A professor from Southern Seminary, Matthew Westerholm, studied the difference between songs used in American churches from 2000 to 2015 compared to those that are used in 1737 to 1960.

[43:35] Can anyone guess what the main difference was? He writes, among many similarities, the one difference was striking, the topic of heaven, which was once frequently and richly sung about has all but now disappeared.

[43:54] But the gospel stays for us, becomes real for us with this lost discipline of Christian daydreaming, Christian imagination.

[44:09] I'm not talking about daydreaming what we're going to eat for potluck or what you're going to do over the weekend. We're to imagine what it's like to see Jesus, to reign with the rest of the saints, to see his face for the first time.

[44:29] That's what seeking the things above is about. And it's not about this Christian discipline of imagination, daydreaming. It's not about just wasting your time speculating about questions that we don't really know about heaven, that scripture doesn't make clear.

[44:45] For what scripture does make clear in heaven is enough fodder to fuel our daydreams and to give us bright hope for the darkest of days, for this next week, this next month, for whatever time period that you deem appropriate, I want to encourage you, I challenge you to think and imagine and daydream about heaven and do it until it makes you happy because it will.

[45:21] Although many Christian songs in our modern era have lost the wonder about heaven, there's still one classic that models this well that I can't get over. I can only imagine by mercy me, I'm sure most of you guys know it, and as I read this chorus, imagine with me that surrounded by your glory, what will my heart feel?

[45:52] will I dance for you, Jesus? Or in awe of you, be still?

[46:07] Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall? Will I sing hallelujah?

[46:19] Will I be able to speak at all? I can only imagine. It's this kind of imagination that can empower us with bright hope to persevere, to persevere through this hard life to make it to the celestial city.

[46:42] So let's seek the things that are above and seek the things that are ahead. God. Because as another song goes, one day the sun will set in the west for the last time.

[46:56] One day we're gonna earn a dollar that we spend for the last time. One day we'll say goodbye to our loved ones for the last time.

[47:08] One day Satan will tempt us in sin for the last time. and that last time will be the first time of an entirely new life.

[47:20] That one day we will walk on streets of gold for the first time. And that one day we will wake up feeling no pain for the first time.

[47:32] And that one day we will see Jesus' face for the first time. So with our focus our foundation our focus and our future set in Jesus Christ for the rest of our spiritually resurrected lives until our bodily resurrection with him let it all be said of us as it was said of Puritan Richard Sibbes in his obituary of that good man let this high praise be given heaven was in him before he was in heaven.

[48:08] Of that good woman let this be said let this high praise be given of heaven heaven was in her before she was in heaven.

[48:20] Come Lord Jesus come in glory. Pray with me. This resurrection Sunday again Lord Jesus we give all the glory to you and see that you have done the heavy lifting that you have saved us from our sin and you have conquered death so that there is no victory to hell no victory to death and sin anymore and so we want to keep our eyes on you empower us by your Holy Spirit to keep you the center of our attention the focus of our lives and wait for that glorious future that we will share with you Lord Jesus.

[48:58] In Jesus name we pray amen.