Pastor's Note - Summer 2023

Ultimate Transformation
~ By Pastor David White

Sandy, my first wife, passed from this life rather suddenly. Diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer on September 3, 2009, she died just five weeks later (on October 9) from chemotherapy complications. After receiving her first dose, her immune system crashed but went undetected by her oncologist. She developed a colon infection – something that might have caused mild diarrhea in a healthy person – but with no immunity she became septic and died within three days.

Her death was horrific. Over the course of those three days, she was pumped with over 30L of fluid. Imagine your body filled with the volume of fifteen 2L bottles of soda. And she was not a big woman. In her final days, my wife of twelve years became unrecognizable to me. A ghastly transformation.

A constant flow of friends and family streamed through the hospital. At one point I sat at her bedside with two dear friends sharing the hope of 1 Corinthians 15. Sandy lay between us in a medically induced coma, the regular, metallic click and hiss of the respirator keeping time. In the face of her life dwindling away, we looked toward the hope of resurrection. The passage says our current body is like a seed that falls into the ground and dies, only to emerge radically transformed. This means right now you are like an acorn, compared to the soaring oak you will be in the life to come! Although Sandy’s body was horrifically changed, the Day is coming when she will be ultimately transformed to be like Jesus’s “glorious body.”

The full import of the gospel struck me profoundly as I watched my wife’s life slowly fade. Jesus hated what was happening in that hospital room! He became man and was made to be sin so we could become the righteousness of God, in order to overturn the curse, bring reconciliation, and conquer death. As we saw recently in our study of Philippians, we’re awaiting his return to heal and renew the cosmos. He “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (3:21). This is the correct end of the Christian story.

But it goes deeper. Because you’ve received the Spirit as a downpayment, the power that raised Jesus from the dead is already at work within you to empower and transform. Although your body awaits the final resurrection, your soul is transformed as the Spirit convicts of sin and reveals the beauty of our Savior. He desires to fully ripen the fruit of his Spirit in you so that “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16)!

Will you behold him this summer? Will you surrender to his Spirit working to conform you to the image of Jesus? Will you feast your imagination on the hope of the world to come?

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
2 Corinthians 3:18