Well, if you know me well, you know. If you don't know me well, but you just know me, you know that I love sports. And I know I use too many analogies in sports, but it's part of what I love in this life. And I try not to use it too often, but here's another one. And I think you'll get the point. Most illustrations fall short somewhere. Even when Jesus used illustrations and the apostles used illustrations, you can't push them to its limit. For example, the Bible tells us that God has wings and he shelters us like a mother shelters its young. Well, God doesn't have wings, but it certainly helps us to understand that compassion and care of our Heavenly Father. It tells us that He holds us in His hands. Well, we know that God is a spirit. He doesn't have hands, and yet it gives us an understanding that we can picture and grasp Him better. Not all illustrations can you push to their end, and they're going to fall apart somewhere when they're human illustrations. So understand that as I share some of these illustrations in my sermons, that we can't always push them to their utter end. But I hope you do get the main point. In sports, determining a champion at the end of the season is pretty easy, isn't it? And we just concluded not that long ago the tournament for college basketball. And the University of Connecticut beat Purdue. And they became the national champions. They cut down the nets. In the NBA, they don't have a tournament like that. They have a different tournament. They have seven game series. And whoever wins the best of seven moves on. And in the final championship series, the best of seven becomes the champion of the NBA. It's pretty easy to determine. But not all sports are that way. I'm old enough to remember the days of Muhammad Ali and the incredible box. I'm not much of a boxing fan, but I was back then because of him. But boxing is very different than these other sports. Typically, there's three judges. And each judge will count how many times a competitor strikes his opponent. And at the end, they reveal their score. And whichever gets the most judges wins the fight. Sometimes it's a two-to-one decision. They call it a split decision. which oftentimes can lead to doubt and even controversy. And there's been some historical controversial fights. But other times, it's a three to nothing declaration. And the announcer will declare, we have an undisputed or indisputable champion. And the arm will be raised. Well, where this illustration falls apart is, for example, here in Kansas City, we're hopeful that our Chiefs will be a three-peat champion. We hope they win again this year. Every year, it's a new opportunity to be challenged and to repeat, and the champion, everybody else wants to knock him off. Not so with our champion. We have an indisputable champion that can never be stripped of his title. 1 Corinthians 15, we read about our indisputable champion that can never be defeated, never be dethroned. The fight is over. He has attained a victory for his people that can never be disputed, it can never be defeated, it can never be denied. His throne will never be taken away. The great enemy that has been defeated, Paul says, is death itself. Jesus was crucified by his enemies. He willingly went to the grave. But as you know, after three days, he rose again from the dead and left an empty tomb for everyone to see. He is the indisputable champion. Death has finally been defeated and Christ reigns forevermore. Now for us, most of us at least, I'm sure this seems like old news. We've heard this since we were little children, many of us. And we considered the evidence every year about this time in the spring as we celebrate Easter or Resurrection Sunday and Maundy Thursday and the whole Holy Week. We rejoice and celebrate the resurrection every year. This is old news to many of us. But in the days of the apostles, this was new news. There were many people who did not know that Jesus rose from the dead. There's still others today that haven't heard, but there are many people in their day that did not know that Jesus rose from the dead. There were others who had heard the story but did not believe that it was true. Even in Paul's time, by the time he's writing to the Corinthians, there were those that were denying that Jesus rose from the dead, and he had to defend that. So much of chapter 15 is Paul's defense of Jesus' resurrection. He defended it and he proved that Jesus did indeed conquer death. Now I hope you can see why that's so important for us. Nearly every one of the apostles, Paul included, were murdered by those who rejected the resurrection. They became martyrs because they taught and believed these central truths about Jesus Christ. He was the Son of God. who became a man, flesh and blood, and willingly gave up his life as a sacrifice of atonement. He lived and breathed and walked upon this earth, healing every various type of disease you can imagine. But most importantly, he conquered death by rising from the grave. ascending to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father. The apostles believed that with every ounce of their being and were willing to be martyrs for the sake of it. He is the indisputable champion. He had enemies to overcome while he walked on this earth and throughout Galilee and the surrounding region. He had many enemies. But the ultimate enemy was death itself. And in the end he walked away as the indisputable champion. Throughout our lives, obviously, we all face challenges. We all face enemies or opponents of various sorts, and not all of the human kind. A wide variety of challenges and challengers that want to defeat us, that lead us to challenges and difficulties and painful trials. And that leads us to the first of three questions that I want us to ask and answer this morning from this passage. And the first is, why? Why do we need the victory? Paul wants his readers to reach heaven. He traveled from city to city to city proclaiming Jesus. He wanted them to know that they can inherit eternal life, that they can die in peace because of Jesus, the Son of God and Messiah. He gave up his life to make Jesus known. To the Corinthians, he uses the analogy of fighting in a contest. and gaining the victory. But he uses several contrasts here in this passage to show us that we are not capable of attaining this victory on our own. He says that we are perishable. That we are perishing. In verse 50 he says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. That the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. The mortal needs to put on immortality. We need to be given victory because we're flesh and blood that are perishing. We are mortal. I think by the time you're five years old you understand that to some degree. Every five-year-old at least knows that there are things they cannot do without getting hurt. They've learned the lesson. Not every lesson, no doubt, but they've learned that there are certain things that they cannot do without getting hurt. The little child learns quickly the hard lessons that come with pain and injury. One of our problems in life, however, is our own arrogance, thinking that we're invincible. And in reality, when we are perishing little by little every day. I know that's a depressing idea. But it's reality. These bodies of ours, this flesh and blood, are not going to last forever. We are perishing. Just ask anyone over 50. You can't do what you used to be able to do when you were 30, because your body is perishing. It's getting weaker. It's getting more unstable. It's prone to decay. It's a painful lesson to remember. It's depressing. It can be. It's a hard reality to face. More than likely, you're... I don't know why I even wrote this sentence in here, but here we go. More than likely, you're going to end up with kidney stones, or gallstones, or knee replacements, or hip replacements, or maybe even some form of cancer itself. Our bodies are perishing. And to deny that is to deny an obvious reality that we all know. And yet we ought to do, at the same time, whatever we can do to preserve life, and to protect life, and to enjoy the life that God has given to us. We ought to do everything that we can to take care of the body that God has given to us. And so to have this reality of a perishing body does not lead us to gloom and despair, but to fight on, to endure pain, to endure hardship, to take care of what God has given to us. We ought to strive to be healthy and to prevent the speed of perishing. But it becomes a fool's errand when we think that we can prevent the decay of our mortal flesh. In the end, we are merely flesh and blood. We are perishable. We need to be given victory if we're going to become imperishable. Inevitably, we are going to lose. C.S. Lewis once wrote, 100% of us die and the percentage cannot be increased. The only qualification I would add to that is if Jesus comes first. But even then, these perishable bodies will be done with. There's an end date. Death is the painful reality that no one wants to face and everyone wants to defeat. We are right in despising this enemy. Death is ugly. It is painful. It's brutal and monstrous. We should want to do everything that we can to defeat it while we have breath. But we are facing a foe that we cannot defeat. But Paul teaches that there's an option. There is hope. Death always wins. Or does it? Paul teaches us here that victory is possible. Death is swallowed up in victory, he says. And so that leads us to the second question. How do we get this victory? If we cannot attain it, how can we attain it? If we are merely flesh and blood that are perishing little by little every day, then how do we get the victory? How do we become champions over this ultimate enemy? Well, in verse 56, Paul says that the sting of death is sin. Because man sins, man dies. God determined from the very beginning that if and when man sinned, he would die. And you know, if you know Genesis, you know that Adam denied the law of God, and chose the pleasure of self. And on that day, just as God said, death came into humanity, into all of creation. And the process of perishing began. Death has reigned over all men, all creation, because all men sin. But everyone, has been stung by sin. Death, the consequence of sin, has a sting. Everyone is guilty to some degree. We know that. And so again, how do we get the victory that we cannot achieve? Well, Paul began this passage in verse 50 by saying that we cannot inherit eternal life. We are perishable beings attempting to acquire that which is imperishable. And we can never do it on our own. However, In verse 51, Paul says, behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. These perishable bodies are going to be changed into imperishable ones. Now, before we go any further, there's a wonderful word that Paul uses, and I want to make sure we all understand. He's telling us a mystery. Now, when we use the word mystery today, typically we use it differently. We usually mean a mystery is something that is difficult or even impossible to understand. It's a mystery to me. I can't understand it. But that's not how Paul's using it. It's not how the apostles used it. Instead, a mystery was something that was hidden that God has now made known. And in fact, you would not understand it if God does not reveal it. That's a mystery in the New Testament. That which was hidden But God has made known that which you could not understand until God has revealed it to your heart. And so that's how we understand what's going on with natural man in our world today as well. They cannot grasp our salvation until God reveals himself to them in a salvific way. Until God makes us alive. We receive His Son, and His understanding of our salvation that we never grasped before. It was not unknown. It was hidden from us. And God has made it known. Paul is saying that there's a mystery here concerning death. But we shall be changed. We shall all be changed. These perishable bodies will be changed into bodies that cannot perish. Our ultimate enemy, death itself, will be swallowed up in victory. Its power will be erased. Its bite will lose its sting. How can Paul be so confident? How can we know for sure that this undefeatable enemy is conquered? Paul declares the victory in verse 57. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Sinful man who is perishing more and more every day can be absolutely confident, absolutely confident that we are victorious now because Christ has conquered death for us. He has given us victory by becoming flesh and blood, by giving himself up as our sacrifice, by conquering the grave. Now, I have to confess that for many, many years, I read this chapter in 1 Corinthians 15 in somewhat of an isolated way. Without question, it has always given me hope. It has always given me confidence that this life is not the end, that Jesus has made us victorious. I didn't doubt what it taught in one way at all, in any way at all. I truly believe in the resurrection, and I have always viewed that chapter as the evidence for my faith and the encouragement to my faith. However, I oftentimes saw this merely as the great resurrection chapter, as a standalone chapter in the Bible, much as we oftentimes do with chapters like Hebrews 11, the great hall of faith. And we miss the connections of these chapters within this holy word. But this week, as I was reading and meditating on it, I began to see several beautiful connections to Paul's instruction, for example, on the Lord's Supper and the conflicts within the church in Corinth. Now, without going into a lot of detail, let me just point out just a couple that stood out to me quickly this week. Paul says that we are flesh and blood. Now, obviously, Christ became flesh and blood. That's part of his point here, that he became flesh and he defeated death. And when we celebrate the Lord's Supper together, we are remembering His flesh broken for us and His blood that was shed for us. That He became flesh and blood and took on perishable flesh so that we can receive the imperishable. That's part of the great teaching and comfort in the Lord's Supper. That we celebrate the incarnation of Christ. He took on flesh and became our sacrifice and defeated death. And so this is all, I think, connected here, as he tells the Corinthians of their own flesh and blood, but their hope in the flesh and blood sacrifice of Christ. But I think that's probably the most obvious connection. But notice also in verse 51 that Paul refers to death as sleep. This was a common way for Paul and some of the apostles to, and a comforting way, to refer to death. I know sometimes we are critical of the way people will try to make death sound soft, but the scriptures do that as well, saying that it is sleep, that we have fallen asleep. It doesn't deny the reality of death, it simply makes it comforting. And this is one of the examples that Paul does here in chapter 15, that he also is connected, I think, beautifully to the rebukes and challenges in 1 Corinthians 11. When Paul reminded them that some of their friends were weak and sick and a number sleep. Some of them were sick and a few even died. 1 Corinthians 10 and 11, Paul was correcting a serious error in their worship and in their lack of love for one another. And God revealed to Paul that God was disciplining his children through physical trials so they would repent and that they would love one another better. They were causing division within their church, and God lovingly disciplined them to increase their love for one another. But this mention of sleep, I mean, this must have been incredibly painful truth for Paul to have to reveal to his beloved children in Corinth. that their father was disciplining them because of their sin. And for years, I have told you, for years, that whenever you go through physical trials, we must take that opportunity to examine our own hearts. Because there are occasions when it is the result of God's discipline. But not every painful trial is the result of God's discipline. God can still use these trials as a means to bring us to repentance. And there are many examples throughout the scriptures where he does so. However, here in chapter 15, Paul is encouraging these readers with the truth that we are all perishing. We are all perishing. We all will sleep. We all die. And we all will be changed. Death is inevitable. For all of us, we must not look at all pain and every death as a punishment for personal sin. Yes, there may be times when God will inflict us with pain because of our personal sin, but the larger reality is that all of us live with pain because we are all perishing. Now, how comforting that must have been to the believers in Corinth. In one moment, Paul is rebuking them and revealing to them that their suffering was because of their sin, but a moment later, he reveals that we are all perishing, that we are all dying, that we are all suffering, but we will all be changed because Christ has defeated death. Don't be overcome by grief or fear because of our ultimate enemy. He's defeated. Even if the painful trial comes from the hand of God, death has no sting for the child of God. Jesus has taken away the power of sin, the power of death, which leads us into the last question, the third question today. What does this victory look like? And we know that the ultimate victory will not be realized until we are totally free from the very presence and pain of sin when we reach heaven, and we are totally and finally glorified. And we can be confident, like Paul, that a day is coming when we will all be changed. That those that have died will ascend first and those of us who are left will meet them in the clouds and we will all be changed. We can be confident of that truth, that we will be imperishable. However, the victory that He has obtained for us is not merely something that He will give us, but we have already received it as well. In other words, there are aspects of this ultimate victory that we already possess. One of my favorite verses in the Gospel of John is John 5, 24. When Jesus says, truly, truly, I tell you that, I better turn to it. I quoted from so many different translations. John 5, 24, look at that great promise in the Scriptures. Jesus said, 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. Now, there's a future hope. You will not go into judgment, but you've passed from death to life, eternal life with me. But you notice the tense of all this? We already have it. We already have it. He who hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has, has today eternal life. There are elements of our victory that we already possess, and yet there is a greatness to the victory that is still to come. I know this is another silly analogy in some ways, and yes, another sports analogy, but some of us, maybe many of us, have watched parts of the Super Bowl over and over and over, and it's so much more fun to watch it now. In the moment when it was live, man, our hearts were pounding, our blood pressure was up. Third and long, we got sacked. What's going to happen? We had no idea. Now you watch, you think, oh, no problem. He's going to make a great completion. Now he's going to make an incredible run, a fourth and short that nobody expects. And now, but at the moment, so also in much better, much greater ways. We know. We know that Christ has won. The ultimate victory is ours. So how does that change our life today? Why are we anxious? Why do we fear? We have victory. This world can't do anything to us to take away that victory. God has revealed a mystery. He's made it known. We win. We win. We are champions. We are indisputable champions through our Savior. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. We are champions. Victory is ours. We don't have to live with anxiety because of this messed up world. We don't have to. What keeps you up at night? Money, relationships, work, health concerns. Somewhere this past week, I read that most of our anxiety over such things is the result of our desire to win, and we don't have to win. I was shocked when I read this, one of my commentators, and he said, in fact, it's good, it's okay, he said, to lose. Man, I hate losing. That was a hard thing for me to try to wrap my mind around and my heart around. that it's okay to suffer. It's okay that you're perishing. It's okay that you're mortal, but only because victory is already secured. Not because evil is good, but because evil can't win. It cannot win. Through Christ, we are victorious. And so we're not calling evil good, but we're recognizing that it can't stop the victory. We're already winners. We're already champions. We're already victorious in Christ. Look again at how this passage concludes in verse 58. Therefore, my beloved brother, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord Your labor is not in vain. The word, therefore, always points back to what was before it. And obviously, Paul is connecting this to the victory that Christ has obtained. Because of our victory in Christ, because He has achieved our salvation and secured it for us, we are victorious. Therefore, we are immovable. We are steadfast. Our work for Him is not in vain. You know, there are so many days that we wake up and receive bad news, whether through the media or through our own personal lives. This world is constantly going to cause pain and trouble. Sadly, so many times, we're the source of our own pain and trouble. We lose every day in some way, shape, or form. But our labor, Our work for the kingdom is not in vain, because our Savior has granted us the ultimate victory. So even though we are weak, we will be strong. Even though we are sometimes foolish, we will be wise. Even though we are sometimes useless, we will be used as tools in the hands of the Creator. If we already know that life is one, that death is already defeated, that eternal life has already been secured, then we can walk forward with great joy, with peace and victory. We can look into eternity like Moses standing on that mountainside looking into the promised land. We can look with confidence that that is where we're going to be. This world is a horrible, messed up place. I struggle, I suffer, but that is where I'm going. That is my hope, and my security, and my victory, my peace, and my joy, my gratitude is all wrapped up in Christ, my victor. May we live steadfastly. immovably and always abounding in Christ Jesus, our champion, our indisputable champion.