3 Sermon Illustrations on Resurrection Life

Did you ever see a farmer weep as he placed seed in the ground and covered it with the freshly turned earth? Of course not, for that sort of burial causes no grief. The farmer knows that the buried seed will spring up into luxuriant vegetation in due course. Human burial is quite a different matter. It arouses far deeper emotions because of our attachment to the precious form laid in the grave. But for Christians this grief is tempered by the knowledge that those who die in the Lord are safe with Him, and that one day we will be reunited with them, not only in our spirits but in new and glorious bodies that will spring from the grave at our Lord's coming. "So also is the resurrection of the dead," says Paul, referring again to his analogy of the seed. "It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption" (1 Corinthians 15:42) The Seed-Then the Plant You sow a seed by putting it into the ground. It must first die, and then it rewards you with a living plant. How does this take place? Can you or anyone else fully explain this philosophically, rationally? Do you refuse to eat the fruit of this seed until you know in minutest detail how it grows into a plant? Hardly. You accept the generating power of nature. When you sow wheat, you expect the same kind of plant to come up. But that plant does not contain every particle of matter that was in the seed. It contains the identity of the seed, but not the entire actual seed as it was put into the ground. Yet the plant resulting from that seed will produce seeds corresponding to that original seed, made of different and yet identical material particles. The plant in reality is that same seed which was placed in the ground, in different form. So will it be with your resurrection body. It will be the same body in the sense that it is your own body-yet no longer in the seed, so to speak, but the plant. When your soul leaves your body at death, that spiritless body is good for nothing but burial in the ground. There it can die and return to dust; and through death it will live again by God's power.

The famed evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, once remarked in a sermon: "Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody of East Northfield is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all-out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal; a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body fashioned like unto His glorious body. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the spirit will live forever." A Lesson from a Silver Cup A servant who had received a silver cup from his master accidentally dropped it into a vat of acid. The servant was dumbfounded when he saw the whole cup disappear. He immediately went to a fellow servant and told him that the silver cup was lost forever. "It can't be recovered. You can't even see it." The master, an educated man, came on the scene. He infused salt water into the acid, which precipitated the silver from the solution. Then by melting it and hammering the metal he restored the cup to its original shape. A skeptic who saw this was so struck by its analogy to the resurrection, which he had rejected as impossible, that he now believed it most credible. A Body Fit for Heaven What do we know about the germination of seeds? Keep a grain of wheat in your pocket all your life and it will never change. But place it in a congenial environment, a furrow of earth, and it will sprout into a living sheaf of grain. Every kind of life requires its particular corresponding environment in order to achieve its full and predestined potential. You would really be just as foolish to expect your body, as now constituted, to be able to live in the world to come, as a farmer would be if he expected to produce a harvest of wheat by keeping bare grains stored in his pocket. A Divine Display of Power "Thou foolish one, that which thou sowest..." (1 Corinthians 15:36). The Greek verb is speireis, "you sow all the time." This is a common everyday experience. You accept it because you see it happening all the time. How true it is that there are many wonders in the world that you would not have believed by report, if you had not come across them by experience and observation. Had you lived fifty years ago, would you have believed that a picture could be taken by Telstar, a photographic communication satellite in the sky, which would then send back a clear picture on your television screen? In fact, would you have believed television? In the air there are only video waves, but on the television screen you see a person, an actual scene. Everything is wonderful until you are used to it; the resurrection of the body owes the incredible portion of its marvel to the fact of your never having observed it. After the resurrection we shall regard it as a divine display of power as familiar to us as creation and providence are now. Are You Ready to Die? One day when Luther was a young man, he was walking with a friend named Alexis. Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck his friend and killed him instantly. From that moment on a radical change took place in Luther's life. Your life will also change if you think seriously that one day it will end, perhaps suddenly and soon. After that you will have to give an account of it to God. Are you ready for it?