Overview of Eternal Rewards - Part 2 (4 of 12)

Mike Connell

Our emotions will be enhanced. The ability to feel love, to feel peace, to feel joy, to feel all those things; our abilities to communicate will be enhanced, because you won't just be words. You know, communication of the spirit is - it's telepathy, pretty much. When God speaks, you don't hear the words, you just pick up the thought inside you. The nearest thing to that is telepathy, I suppose.

Strength, there'll be enhanced strength; you see glimpses of it in the Bible, with the ‘spirit of might’ coming on people, like Samson. He could do extraordinarily strong things; you see glimpses in the Bible, of these characteristics.

Endurance, your ability to do things without being fatigued or sick. Transportation will change. You'll be able to move from one place to another, without any problem. Material, you'll be able to pass through walls; there's nothing physical that will constrain you. Beauty, we'll be enhanced in our beauty; and incorruptible, unable to get sick, or die, or be damaged. Doesn't that sound great! You never get sick, no teeth go, no hair fallout. No back problems, nothing like that; no memory problems either.

It's like everything becomes immensely enhanced in that coming age; and then as you look at that, you realise: oh my, sin has really reduced us, and humbled us, and we're wearing a garment that's so corrupt! You see hints of this in the scripture...

1 Corinthians 15:40-44 - “There are celestial bodies and terrestrial. There's heaven and earth, and the glory of the heavenly is different to the glory of the earthly”.

It says that right now, you're in an earthly body; but there's a totally different dimension of glory in the heavenly body. Just look up at the sky and see how vast it is! That's how different it's going to be, in that coming day. He said: there's one glory of the sun, another of the moon. If you look at the glory of the sun... wow, brilliance! Look at the moon... it's like a cold light at night. It's quite different. He says: another glory of the stars, and one star differs another in glory; so he's saying: if you just look at creation, it's all yelling at you, that in the coming kingdom, we'll all be in different levels of glory.

God can do it. I mean look at the stars. Some are really bright and shine, some are quite faint, very faint. He said: it'll be the same in the coming kingdom - just extraordinary! He said: the resurrection of the dead is sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonour, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power. So notice then, these things, now in corruption, will be incorruptible - no sickness, no death, nothing going downhill, like it does now. Glory, he says; purity and honour; so in other words, there will be just a glory that's unchangeable. Power; instead of being vulnerable, and in pain. Spiritual body, with capacities that surpass everything; and immortality, unending life and love. It's just extraordinary - and you see little glimpses of it.

You see Samson, with all the strength; and you see Elijah, who ran ahead of a chariot. How do you run ahead of a chariot, for goodness sake? He just did that in his physical body, under the power of the Holy Ghost, and you see so many things like that. Our physical body will be completely transformed; our sight, we'll be able to see near and far; hearing, be able to hear with clarity at great distances. It's like everything changed: your taste, you'll enjoy things better; touch; everything will be enhanced to another level.

Then finally in that area, every believer will have a different level of glory in that resurrection. Jesus talked about it in Matthew 5:19 - we see there's ‘great’ and ‘least’ in the kingdom. There will be greatest, and there will be the least; so that means there's a range of ranks. We saw in 1 Corinthians 15 that there's different degrees of glory; so, in the resurrection, everyone will have a different degree of glory, and you won't be envious of someone else's, because you will see why they deserved it. I'll get onto that when we get to garments.

There's different degrees of glory; and the degrees of glory relate to three things: our intimacy with Jesus; what we overcame in life; and the degree of inner transformation. In other words, to those key things of sonship, that's why they're so important.

Let's then look at the first resurrection - I want to just do a section on the first resurrection. This is really quite an important area here now. We see what Jesus was capable of; what His body looked like; and how we're going to be conformed to that same image. Now I want to now touch on the reward aspect of this; and I want to talk about the Resurrection. In this section, we'll look at the First Resurrection, and I'm calling it: the Resurrection of Reward.