Transcript

When professional golfer Paul Azinger was 33 years old he had just won a PGA Championship and had ten tournament victories to his credit.

But he was also diagnosed with cancer. He wrote, “A genuine feeling of fear came over me. I could die from cancer. Then another reality hit me even harder. I’m going to die eventually anyway whether from cancer or something else. It’s just a question of when.

“Everything I had accomplished in golf suddenly became meaningless to me. All I wanted to do was live.” Then Larry Moody (who was teaching a Bible study on the tour and was aware of the anxiety Azinger was experiencing) said to him.

“Zinger, we’re not in the land of the living going to the land of the dying, we’re in the land of the dying going to the land of the living.”

That one comment changed “Zinger’s” attitude toward his cancer. He went through chemotherapy, recovered from his cancer and returned to the PGA tour. He’s done pretty well. But that bout with cancer changed him.

He once wrote, “I’ve made a lot of money since I’ve been on the tour and I’ve won a lot of tournaments, but that happiness is always temporary. The only way you will ever have true contentment is in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

“I’m not saying that nothing ever bothers me and I don’t have problems but I have found the answer TO THE SIX-FOOT HOLE.”

We can’t escape the reality of death. It is a power against which we are all helpless.

We can’t stop it. We can’t buy our way out of it. We may stave it off for a while through medicine, the best doctors, the best treatments, and even a healthy lifestyle, but sooner or later, death will come calling for each of us.

Knowing this is true, it begs the question: Are you ready to die? Do you know where you are going when you die?

Christ is the One we must turn to and trust, to have certainty of hope beyond the grave. He is the Answer to the 6-foot hole. Death is an enemy, and only Christ can give us the victory.

And the Bible says that just believing He died for our sins and rose again we have victory over sin and death through Christ, and the sure hope of heaven and eternal life.

2 Corinthians 5:5-8: “Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.

“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:). We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”

John Cook said, “Pillow my head on no guesses when I die.” Paul speaks of the believer’s future here in the strongest possible terms. He says “we know,” “we are always confident,” and “we are confident.”

He doesn’t say, “We think, we’re pretty sure, it looks likely and pretty good.” Guesses are no comfort. We need assurance about death, and God’s Word gives it to us.

Thomas Brooks, an English Puritan preacher and author in the 1600s wrote: “Death is another Moses: it delivers believers out of bondage, and from making bricks in Egypt.

Remember this, death does in a moment, which no graces, no duties could do for a man all his lifetime! Death frees a person from diseases, corruptions, temptations.

“Every prayer then shall have its answer; all hungering and thirsting shall be filled and satisfied; every sigh, groan, and tear that has fallen from the saints’ eyes shall then be recompensed. That is not death but life, which joins the dying man to Christ!”

Paul says in ver. 5, “Now He that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God.”

Or “Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God.” The context of this verse is that Paul has been talking about the believer’s eternal, glorified, resurrected body.

Glorification is all God’s doing. God “wrought” or prepared us for this very thing, this purpose: to spend eternity with Him in a glorified body. God has a higher purpose for us, an eternal one.

It is God’s purpose that we be glorified with Christ, with a body “fashioned like unto His glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). He has wrought us for eternal glory to come.

This will be the climax, the apex of His glorious purposes for us. All of us belongs to God, body, soul, and spirit. At the present time, our spirit and soul are redeemed, but then, at the Rapture, redemption will include the body as well.

God made us with this goal in view, the glorified state, residing in a resurrected, glorified body eternally in the heavens!

Here Paul looks at the ultimate purpose for which he exists. It transcends time. It’s from eternity to eternity. Planned in eternity past, fulfilled in eternity future, time is a blip in the middle. The next existence fulfills God’s purpose for our lives.

God’s purpose and plan was that believers in the Body of Christ dwell with Him eternally in a glorified state in the heavenlies.

And then Paul goes on to say in v. 5, “Who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.” The assurance of all this is “the earnest of the Spirit.” Earnest speaks of a down payment, a pledge, a guarantee.

The fact that every believer possesses the indwelling Spirit of God is “a pledge” that ALL God’s promises to the believer will be fulfilled.

The indwelling of the Spirit is the “down payment” of God’s future plans for us, a continual reminder of the certainty of the promises of God.

He is the “guarantee” that we will be glorified and receive a resurrected glorified body. The purpose of God is fixed and to guarantee it He gives us the Spirit as a pledge.

Our whole person is and will be redeemed, spirit, soul, and body. When God starts something, He brings it to its end and finishes it.

As Philippians 1:6 says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

The fact that you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that every believer possesses the Holy Spirit, He is the guarantee that you are glory bound.

The Holy Spirit is given to us to show that God is absolutely going to redeem His own possession and bring us to glory and glorify our bodies, and forever we will be testimonies to His amazing grace and His faithfulness.

2 Corinthians 5:6 says, “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.”

Paul says, “Therefore,” with all this background of truth for a foundation we are ALWAYS confident.” We can live with confidence always about our future, about our eternity, about our glorification. We are going to heaven. We are getting a glorified body.

We have eternal life. We are confident! We are confident because God promises it in His Word. Paul’s confidence wasn’t up and down, coming and going. It wasn’t a temporary feeling, or a passing emotion. It was a permanent state of mind. We have a settled confidence about our eternal hope, we confidently anticipate its fulfillment.

Life is a race to run. It’s a battle to fight. It’s a stewardship to honor God with. And when the race is finished and the battle is over and the stewardship is discharged, then the victory, then the triumph, then the glory, then eternity with the Lord.

Currently “we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.” This was not the ideal state for Paul, but he was willing that it should be so if he could serve Christ down here and be a help to others.

As Paul says in Philippians 1:23-25: “For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you, for your furtherance and joy of faith.”

Paul had a case of “heavenly homesickness.” He wanted to be with the Lord. While we’re in the physical, in the flesh, in the world, we’re away from the Lord.

We are “absent from the Lord.” Now Paul is not saying that we have no contact. We are in communion in our relationship with Him through prayer and by the Word. And He’s with us, He lives in us by His Spirit. We are in communion with Him.

But there is a sense obviously in which we are separated from the Lord, with Him in heaven and us in this world. One day that separation will end.

At this point Paul adds in verse 7 as a parenthesis, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” This explains how we can live and serve an invisible God.

This explains how we can hope for an invisible place, how we can know one day we will receive a new body, a body we cannot see.

We do it by faith. We believe and we walk and live by that belief. It’s not a belief in nothing, it’s a belief in the Word of God that tells us all of this. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith is not a leap in the dark. It’s based on the revelation on God. It’s based on the surest evidence in the universe: the Word of God.

We believe in the Word of God that tells us about heaven. We believe in the Word of God that tells us about our resurrection body. We live by faith, faith in the Word of God.

Faith is not wishing for something to be true, it is taking God at His Word and knowing it is true. “Seeing is believing” is not the motto we live by. We believe in what we do not see. We see these things only with the eye of faith.

We face our deaths and bank our eternal destiny on God’s Word by faith. But we do so with confidence because God is faithful.

There was a little girl who walked to her house through the cemetery every day after school. It never bothered her.

She would skip happily through it sometimes. Other times she’d stop and listen to the birds singing. There would be times she would kneel down and read the names and dates on the tombstones. One day her friends asked her, “Why do you walk through the cemetery every day?” She answered, “Because, it’s the way home.”

Death is the way home for the believer. This, or the Rapture.

In 2 Corinthians 5:8, Paul says “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”

In verse 6 the phrase “whilst we are at home” is the same Greek word “to be present” in verse 8. So verse 8 literally is “willing rather to be absent from the body and to be AT HOME with the Lord.” Being in heaven, in the presence of Christ, is to be at home.

Paul again says in Philippians 1:23 that “to be with Christ is far better.” Paul says that to be with Christ isn’t just better, but better by very far is the idea. To Paul going to heaven to be with Christ is better by far than staying on earth.

What makes heaven a far better place is that it is to be at home with the Lord. It is then that our faith will be sight forever, and we will see our Lord face to face.

Heaven is our true home. Home is a wonderful thing. I think our homes here on the earth give us a taste of what it means to be at home. Home is where we are most comfortable, where we are ourselves, where we rest, where we normally always want to be.

We like to go visit places. Or we have to go to work or school. But then there’s something really wonderful and special about going home.

Heaven is like that. It is our home, our place of rest and comfort, where we’ll be forever the Lord and our believing loved ones, never to be separated again. And for the believer we are heading for home. That feeling of excitement and comfort for going to our earthly homes can be the same in knowing we’re heading for our home in heaven.

It’s said that “Home is where the heart is.” And God wants our hearts focused on our home in heaven, and setting our affections on things above, so that we might live in light of eternal things.

This chapter shows that Paul greatly preferred the hope of going directly from the mortal body to the glorified, eternal one at the Rapture.

But then we see in verse 8 that he was perfectly “willing” to go without a body to heaven, because this meant being “present with the Lord.”

When a believer’s soul departs from their “tabernacle” or tent, at the time of physical death, they immediately go to be with the Lord in heaven. We are “confident,” we “know,” there is no doubt, that believing loved ones are “with the Lord.”

The people of God can be found in one of two places: in heaven or on earth. None of them is in the grave or in any in between place between heaven and earth.

Believers are either “at home in the body and absent from the Lord” on the earth, or they are “absent from the body, and at home with the Lord” in heaven.

By this passage of 2 Corinthians 5:1-8, Paul teaches 3 possible states for the believer in those 2 places, on earth and in heaven. Only two apply right now. The third one is yet future.

1) There is the state of this present life on earth in this mortal body in which we are absent from the Lord.

2) There is the state of being absent from the body and between death and the coming of Christ, a disembodied state, but one in which the spirit and soul are consciously enjoying heaven in the presence of the Lord.

3) And finally, there is the consummation of our salvation and our glorification when we again joined to our bodies and receive immortal bodies at the Rapture of the Church, and dwell eternally in the heavens in our glorified state at home with the Lord.

And Paul teaches in this passage that the first state is good, the second is better, and the third is best of all. And all of this is guaranteed by the indwelling Spirit and by the faithfulness of God to His Word and His promises.

Are you absolutely sure that when you are absent from the body that you will be, as Paul says here, “present with the Lord”?

For eternity, the souls of people will either spend eternity present with the Lord in heaven, or they’ll spend eternity separated from the Lord’s presence in hell. To have the certain hope of heaven you simply need to trust the gospel of the grace of God.

The message of the gospel teaches that because of sin, death came. Romans 5:12 says, “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

Sin has brought physical death to all, which is the separation of the soul and spirit from the body. Sin also brings spiritual death, spiritual separation from the spiritual life of God. And sin can bring eternal death, eternal separation from God in hell.

Sin is the problem. And we’re all sinners. And God will not allow sin in His presence in heaven. So we need for our sins to be forgiven and paid for in order for us to have eternal life and be saved from eternal death.

God cannot just overlook or ignore sin and He will not compromise with it. This would be contrary to His own nature and Law.

Before God could forgive sin, His justice had to be satisfied, and just payment had to be made for sin. And Scripture is clear that the problem of sin cannot be solved by the efforts of man. Nothing man can do could ever cancel out the problem of sin.

Living a good life, doing good works, being religious, does absolutely nothing in taking away sin, making us right with God or ready for heaven.

The reason Christ came from heaven’s glory to die on the Cross was because we can’t save ourselves. He came to rescue us. He came to save us from our sins.

We all need a Savior. And God’s Word says Christ Jesus willing came into the world to save sinners. Sin demands the payment of death, and Christ came to die our death, to take our place, and die for our sins.

The Bible says of Christ that “He knew no sin.” He was perfect and sinless. He was born sinless and He lived a sinless life. But again, sin brings death. So why and how did Christ die on the cross? The gospel tells us that “Christ died for our sins.”

Out of infinite love at the Cross, Christ took our sins upon Himself and faced the fire of God’s justice and the full judgment against our sins for us. And His payment and sacrifice for sin was absolutely perfect.

And the Father was absolutely satisfied. And three days later Christ rose again having completely defeated our enemies of sin and death. And because of Christ’s victory over sin and death, we have hope, a living hope, hope of heaven and eternal life.

To have that hope, we must receive the free gift of God’s salvation by faith. God doesn’t tell us to shape up first or clean up our lives first before He’ll save us.

God does not ask us to behave and then believe. Just to believe. All who believe will be saved. He saves us just as we are, right where we’re at, by grace alone.

God offers salvation to all by grace as a free gift because Christ completely paid for it on the Cross, and all we need to do is to just trust it.

It is a simple thing to say Christ died for the sins of the world. It is quite another thing to say that Christ died for my sin! But that’s where salvation and heaven is at, faith in Christ dying for you.

The Bible says just believing that Christ died for my sins, that He died for me and rose again, God saves us by His grace thru our faith, and we have God’s free gift of salvation, and all our sins are gone and forgiven, and we are absolutely ready for heaven.

And then with Paul we can say with confidence that to be absent from the body at our death we will “be present with the Lord” in heaven forever.