NorthStar Church Blog

On Monday night, I received the notes for Sunday’s sermon. I looked over them, read the Scripture verses, then put my phone down.

“Thursday,” I thought. “I won’t know by then.”

As I pondered the deadline, I thought back to April of 2025. That was when my brother was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He was scheduled for surgery, and they removed half of his colon. He refers to what remains lovingly as his semicolon.

But being stage four, cancer still remained on his liver. He consulted with doctors at Emory who rejected him as a candidate for surgery. Undeterred, he continued searching until he found someone willing to perform it: a group at Vanderbilt University. God bless nerds who are smarter than me.

That’s where he is right now as I type. The family group chat is full of well-wishes and prayers. There are memes of Dr. Nick, the spectacularly unqualified doctor from The Simpsons. Mr. Bean is somehow in the operating room, laughing with his mask pulled down while everyone else looks horrified. And someone posted the Monty Python hospital sketch where the doctors seem more concerned with the expensive machine that goes “Bing!” than the patient. My family has never been particularly good at being serious for very long. It’s one of the things I love about us.

What struck me Monday night was the irony of Luke 7. I had just come home from my parents’ house where we talked about my brother Connally. I asked my mom, a professional worrier, how she was doing leading up to the surgery.

And she didn’t talk about the doctors, the facilities, advances in modern medicine, or Vanderbilt. She talked about God. Although not a widow, it was a mother whose only hope in her son’s survival was in God. I felt that story told by Luke, in a totally different way.

The ingenuity of man is not stopping the end of the universe; it is certainly not bringing me back from the dead to a glorious body. We can fight death. We can delay it. Sometimes, through extraordinary people and extraordinary medicine, we can buy years from it. But we cannot defeat it.

The attorney was right that we end up in the ground. He was wrong that it’s the end. At Nain, Jesus told a grieving mother not to weep before He gave her son back (Luke 7:13). The surgeons at Vanderbilt are buying my brother time, and I’ve prayed for decades more of it. But time isn’t what any of us finally need. We need a last word, and God is the only one who has it. And when He speaks it, none will weep.

Ask Yourself:

• Who is on your heart right now that you can pray for today?
• When you’re afraid for someone you love, where do you go first?
• What would change in the way you live this week if you truly believed death is a period and not a question mark?
  
  

Where are we in the universe? If you look at other galaxies, they’re all moving away from us. As Edwin Hubble noticed when he looked through his telescope, the light from distant galaxies shifts toward the red end of the spectrum. That redshift tells us they’re moving away from us. And they’re doing it in every direction.

Imagine a balloon with buttons glued on the outside. The buttons represent our galaxies, and the surface of the balloon represents space itself. As you blow into the balloon, any single button would see all the others move away. And if you reversed the clock, they would all collide together into a single point.

Which is what physicists believe about the universe. It’s not simply that galaxies are moving through space. Space itself is expanding. When you rewind the clock, you eventually arrive at the beginning of the universe as we know it, a beginning to space, time, and matter. Which is, more or less, what a Hebrew shepherd wrote down three thousand years before anyone built a telescope: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1).

But what about the future? As the balloon fills, the galaxies grow more and more distant. Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics states that usable energy will always be in decline. Physicists have predictions about the end of our universe that are fairly well agreed upon. They even use a theological term to describe it: physical eschatology.

Our universe will grow colder and darker. It will disperse into a thin soup. Like each of the candles at our Christmas Eve service being blown out one by one, each star will die. There will be no light, no heat, only cold elementary particles drifting into oblivion.

This is not science fiction. This is the heat death of the universe. Absent God, everything is doomed to death, not just our bodies. Which means death puts a question mark at the end of everything we do. Every orphanage, every service project, every well dug, all end in the heat death.

Known as the absurdity of life without God, this argument isn’t really an attempt to show that God exists. It draws on 20th-century atheists like Camus and Sartre, who followed their own premises where they led and didn’t like the destination.

But the deeper problem was named centuries earlier. Writing in 17th-century France, Blaise Pascal noticed that people weren’t wrestling with the big questions at all. They were avoiding them. He called it diversion: we hunt, gamble, work, and chatter precisely so we never have to sit alone in a quiet room and think about dying. Pascal’s France had card games. We have phones.

If God does not exist, then not only do we die, everything dies. And along with it go meaning, value, and purpose. The story isn’t “life is good and then it’s bad.” It’s just bad.

But that’s not the promise our God made to us. Scripture doesn’t end with everything fading into darkness. It ends with God saying, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Our God promised a new heaven and a new earth. God restores the meaning, value, and purpose in our mission trips, Big Gives, and concession cookouts.

Without God, death puts a question mark at the end of everything: Did any of it ultimately matter? But death doesn’t get to write the ending of our story. God does.

Death is a period, not a question mark. And our resurrected bodies and time with Jesus are the next sentence.

Ask Yourself:

• • What do you reach for when a quiet moment shows up?
  • Name one ordinary thing you do for God’s kingdom. What does it mean if that work is not in vain?
    
    

It’s been said that passages like Luke 7 show Jesus’ resurrection was nothing unique. The widow’s son sat up in his bier. Lazarus walked out of his tomb four days dead. Jairus’s daughter got up and ate a meal. Depending on how you count, seven or eight people in Scripture died and lived again. So why is Jesus coming back to life any more significant than theirs?

The answer is that theologians distinguish Jesus’ resurrection from revivification. Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter, and the widow’s son all came back to the same body they left. And all of them died again. Lazarus is in the ground somewhere.

Jesus isn’t. Moreover, the body He rose in was different. A glorious body, as Paul puts it (Phil. 3:21).

As you read the Gospels, do you notice that people tend not to recognize Jesus at first? Mary Magdalene takes Him for the gardener. The two on the road to Emmaus walk seven miles with Him and never place Him until He breaks the bread. The disciples fishing at daybreak don’t know who’s calling to them from the shore.

And yet it’s unmistakably Him. He tells Thomas to put a finger in the nail marks and a hand in His side. The wounds are still there. Whatever a resurrection body is, it carries a history—it isn’t a replacement.

And we’re promised the same sort of resurrected body. Paul says Christ will transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body. Different, glorious, and physical. Not angels on clouds. Not minds uploaded to the Matrix. New resurrected bodies.

Which raises some deep theological questions. What age will we be? Will amputees have their limbs? Or the deeper question: Will I have hair in heaven or remain bald?

I suppose you could ask whether being bald is an infirmity to be cured. My wife says it’s a feature, not a defect. She also laughed at me in the mirror this morning, so I’m not sure she’s a reliable witness. I say all this in jest, as I’ve come to terms with it. Although my barber hasn’t. He still insists on charging full price for what I see as half the work.

But beneath the silly questions is a remarkable promise. Whatever is broken in us now will not remain broken forever. If Christianity is true, then death is something to be excited for. Disabilities, disease, and aging do not have the final say. God does.

Ask Yourself:

• What would you like restored in the resurrection, and what would you want kept?
• Jesus kept His scars. What does that suggest God might do with your history?
  
  

As I walked past the mirror this morning, I stopped to look at myself.

“You are one handsome man,” I said out loud.

My wife laughed, crushing any confidence I previously had. I think it’s a guy thing to be overconfident in our looks.

But aside from aesthetic delusions, as you look into the mirror, there’s a thought experiment to consider. Think about the man or woman in the mirror you’re looking at. As I see my reflection, I’m now thinking about the man in the mirror. And I can think about the man thinking about the man in the mirror. In fact, I could keep going ad infinitum.

When you think of something, you’re thinking about something. The technical term is states of intentionality. Nothing else has this characteristic of aboutness other than our minds. In fact, our minds have all sorts of unique properties, such as free will, self-awareness, the ability to reason toward truth, and a sense of being the same you who was seven years old, even though not a single cell in your body from that year still exists.

From these phenomena, there are some philosophers who have concluded the same thing Christians have said for millennia: that the mind is distinct from the brain. What philosophers call the mind, theologians call the soul. And perhaps if the power shuts off to the brain, the soul continues to exist independently. Like a song that continues to be even if the record player stops.

If that is the case, then when your body is buried, something continues to exist beyond the funeral.

Which means the person in the mirror is more than the face looking back at you. The reflection will age. The body will weaken. One day, it will die. But the you who has been looking out through those eyes all these years may not die with it.

And if something survives the grave, the next question is what God intends to do with it.

Ask Yourself:

• What is it about you that has stayed the same since you were a child?
• When you think about you, do you think of your body, your mind, your soul—or something else?
  
  

The patio was muggy, and the air smelled bitter from cigarette smoke. A line formed around the coffee pot where people conversed. It was before cell phones, at least the kind you constantly checked, so conversation was normal, and big questions tended to come up at this place. The sort about God and life and meaning.

I distinctly remember one sitting under the awning in some recliners. An attorney much older than me struggled with the concept of finding a higher power. He was smart, as far as I could tell, but he had the strangest idea for his higher power.

“Mine is a light bulb,” he said when asked.

At the time, I didn’t have a personal relationship with God, but I knew what God was. But a light bulb? My roommate asked him a follow-up: Where do you think we go when we die? And even though it was close to thirty years ago, I still remember every word of his response.

He lowered his hardback book, looked over the rims of his thick glasses, and said:

“In the ground.”

While I admire his bravery, that thought did and does trouble me. There are so many thoughts about death that emerge from it. They’re the questions we’ll wrestle with this week.

• Where do we go when we die?
• Is there something about us that survives when our bodies don’t?
• If we’re raised again, what exactly are we raised as?
• If everything eventually dies, does anything we do now really matter?
• And what happens when these questions stop being philosophical and death comes for someone we love?

And finally, who has the correct answer? Is it the Buddhist who says there is no permanent self and seeks liberation from the cycle of rebirth? Is it the Muslim who expects resurrection and judgment before God? Or maybe the atheistic answer is the correct one: that all that happens is we end up in the ground.

I think for us as Christians, we do have something to feel a little more confident in. In Luke 7, Jesus walks up to a funeral procession, touches the bier, and tells a dead man to get up. And he does. Jesus didn’t just offer an opinion about death; He demonstrated authority over it.

And ultimately, we lean on the answer of someone who not only raised others from the dead but experienced death Himself and came back to tell us about it.

Ask Yourself:

• What do you believe happens after we die, and where did that belief come from?
• When death comes to mind, do you sit with it or change the subject?