TRADING IN THIS OL’ BODY
What do you do when your car is in the shop more than it is on the road? When it doesn’t perform anywhere near expectations and needs continual maintenance for one thing or another? What you do is get a new car, right? But what do you do when it’s your body that is underperforming and requiring continual maintenance? We can’t just get a new body, can we? At least not in this life.
Despite a lifetime of healthy living and eating, along with daily exercise, I find I spend more and more time going to doctors, having tests down, taking medications and doing various physical therapy regimens. It’s a good thing I’m retired – my body is demanding more and more time to keep it going! And yet it seems I’m getting far less out of it than I used to in the past. I don’t know what I expected it to be like after 72 years of use, but it definitely showing signs of wear and tear. And I know that will just continue to get worse until one day it gives out completely. I’ll break down by the side of the road somewhere. My body will be put away like a broken-down car, but my soul/spirit will be in heaven with Jesus – and a new resurrection body designed to last forever with no maintenance!
God’s promises of a new resurrection eternal body are becoming more precious to me. The more this bodies wear out the more I look forward to my new body which will stay perfect forever. Bring it one!
2 Corinthians 5:1-5 For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.
Each time you see or feel an evidence of aging in your body, think of your new eternal body and thank God for it!
by Rev. Dr. Jerry Schmoyer, Christian Training Organization