Resurrection Power The reality of Easter!

Resurrection Power  The reality of Easter!                     Kelly Durant 

I Thess 4: 14For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. 15For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.16For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: 17Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. 18Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

When I was a kid about age 10 I loved being a scientist. I had a chemistry set and I did all sorts of experiments.  I use to catch bugs and put them in a jar and then freeze them and a day later I would go back and then unthaw them and time how long it took in seconds to see them come back to life. It is amazing to see flies, cockroaches, and all kids on bugs that would relive again!  But some stayed dead! I thought back then, wow, I want to be frozen! But that is a bad idea!

Actually, there is a company today that will freeze your body for a pricey payment. You can look up the names of people in storage at this web site. There are quite a few.  http://www.cryonics.org/patients.html   the hope of these people is that in the future there will be cures out of the miracles of science; substances that will make human bodies live forever.  I think these people have too much faith in science I!  With all the water in our bodies, the cells tear open as they ice up, so to come back to life after freezing really would really take a miracle!

Everyone would like to live forever if they could, right? Look at all the billions people spend trying to make their bodies look young! But to be able to be young forever we need faith in Jesus, not in science!  Amen?  Besides, wouldn’t you rather have a resurrected body better than this frail one redone by science?

Eternal life is possible, we all will live forever! The strange thing is Adam and Eve had bodies like hours and they could have lived forever if God had not taken away the tree of life from the garden! But the flesh we have is now considered to be unworthy of eternal life. We need a new type of body!

One of the purposes of Jesus resurrection was to show his disciples and all the world what a supernatural body is like!  It is a type of flesh you could touch, remember doubting Thomas touched him, and Jesus ate fish on the beach.

But what was amazing is he had a shape shifting body. Remember they thought he was a gardener until He revealed who he was. He could change His appearance and even disappear as it mentions in Luke 24: 31 And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. Now that is the kind of body I want! 

So haven’t you been curious? If you will inherent a heavenly body forever for your faith in Jesus and obedience to Him by Holy living, don’t you want to know how it will be for you after your death?  

We currently have bodies that require blood, which makes us dependent on air and food and other things, but the resurrected body of Jesus was one that did not need blood as it was flesh and bones, not flesh and blood. This is curious detail, a living material, yet heavenly body.  Luke 24:39

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.  And why could it not have been flesh and blood? Let’s look up …

1 Corinthians 15:50

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.

Think of our world and compare it to the ocean. We do not have gills as fish do and we cannot live under the sea, we would die after a few minutes. And it is the same in the heavenly realm, like the people who die for a few minutes and then come back to talk about the light at the end of the tunnel, if our current human body were to stay dead, then our spirit would not come back.  

So God will extract from the earth the souls of people from all history and implant their spirits into a better heavenly body like that of Jesus! This is comparable to the software in a computer, you don’t see the electronic memory, but the complexity is there. Your identity, just like with a computer, the software, will be transferred into a new system, a new incorruptible heavenly body, but God will wipe away all the viruses, or tears and memory of the pains of earth!

I can’t wait to have a new body that will not bleed or suffer aches and pains. It will be a body similar in looks to ours now but resistant, and invincible! I look forward to living in a new body like that, don’t you? It will be like changing from being a worm to a butterfly!

But Jesus made it clear to us that we have to believe on Him and be faithful unto death, obeying Him to get that reward of eternal life! Imagine how God made our earthly bodies, which are amazing with an estimated 50 trillion cells in hundreds of interacting systems. Jesus said that God knows even how many hairs we have. Now imagine, God will have reserved for us a heavenly body, a machine even more sophisticated and perfect than this one! But how are you treating this body you have right now?

1 Corinthians 6:19   What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

Think of your current body as your first car. Your dad gives it to you to see how you will treat it to see if you are worthy to get a better one in a few years. There are some young people that don’t appreciate their first 10 or 15 year old car they get. I recall many of my friends in school complaining about their piece of junk so they mistreated it and it they killed it within a year. But does the dad have the money to run and buy a new one? No!

The pinnacle of our Christian faith centers on believing that Jesus had the power to raise Himself up and that He will raise you up! If you do not accept this miracle, then you are not a Christian! In today’s world there are a lot of unexplained miraculous events. But the only way to explain this one is that He truly was God! This was something never done before! Nor done ever since!

Recall Matt. 28:  that Jesus said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth”.  That power implies controlling the life force and souls of all creation, Jesus has demonstrated that He has the keys to heaven and hell, and Jesus promised us, his followers, the same type of resurrection as He had.

The return of Jesus to earth to resurrect all of us will be a massively huge event of colliding cosmic forces of God’s spiritual realm with our material realm.

In the resurrection God will first cause the ones who are asleep, or the dead, to rise up. In other words, when you sleep, you do not perceive time, so when you die, whenever that is in the future, you will not feel the time that passes you by until Jesus takes you home with Him!

I think death is one of the most feared things there is in life by most cultures.  It is a mysterious journey you know you will have to take, to transport from this world to another realm, to the other side, and considering our bodies may feel pain, no one really looks forward to dying really, unless they have followed Jesus and know He will be there for them!

So today, Easter, is the best day in the world for Christians! It is the day in which we celebrate the resurrection and this gives us hope of a future life in heaven! What does it say in vs.18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words. What a great comfort!

 1 Corinthians 15:18-20 18Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. 20 But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

In other words, if there is no resurrection then having this faith just for now and not eternity would mean our lives are being wasted! But that is not the case!

We believe and we lose nothing by believing! We can feel Jesus when we pray, we see answered prayers, we see the testimony of changed lives, of our own and that of others!

What has anyone got to lose by having faith in Jesus? Like the atheist who challenged his Christian friend, He said, “If your faith is false and there is no Jesus and resurrection then you have wasted your 70 years of life when you could have partied, had all the women and drugs you ever wanted!” But the Christian’s wise reply was, “Well, it is false, you are right, but what if my faith is true? Then you will have wasted an eternity!”

Some people today want proof of a resurrection and the Lord even allows things like the Shroud of Turin to be a type of proof. It is a cloth with an image of an imprinted image of a face (of a crucified man who must be Jesus) and our science cannot explain it! It is a 3 dimensional imagine burned into the cloth by some unknown type of energy and no one can explain it! God is merciful to people like Thomas who doubted to provide evidence! But whether this cloth is real or not does not matter, the fact remains that you wither believe in the resurrection or you don’t!

Jesus coming out of the grave on Sunday morning around 2000 years ago was so amazing, so spectacular, so impacting that later when Peter preached in Jerusalem where they yelled to crucify him and thousands believed there and in all Israel and in the rest of the world! Today, Christians cover more than 2 billion believers in the world, and every Christian looks forward to coming out of their graves one day as Jesus did!

So let’s envision it! Our spirits, will be preserved after we die as asleep and then given supernatural bodies to enjoy heaven in!  Let’s spread the good news! If life has not been so fair to you, if sufferings seem like too many, if all the news of wars and death in this life has been too depressing for you, then recall, God is going to make all things new! And you will get a perfect body on that great and glorious day when the trumpet sounds!

If you have the doubt of whether you truly have Jesus in your heart, come pray and accept Him now!