Digital Bulletin
Sunday, May 10, 2026
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Sermon Notes
1 Corinthians 15:35-49 (NLT)
Notes by Rev. Beth L. Case
We continue our series in 1 Corinthians 15, When Death Died. This week we dive into verses 35-49, where Paul uses an analogy of a seed to illustrate how those in Christ die an earthly bodies but are raised in glory, imperishability, and power. Jesus gives to His people what He was given – a spiritual body. How might our assumptions of what happens after death need tweaked or affirmed by this passage of Scripture?
- If someone asked you what you believe about life-after-death, what would you say? Would your answer include anything about the body?
- Why might teaching about the body be particularly applicable to Corinth? How might similar teaching be important to us in our culture today?
- Read 1 Cor 15:36-38. Why is the seed imagery significant to Paul’s argument?
- How does 1 Cor 15:42-44 offer perspective regarding your current body and your resurrection body? How does the promise of a future glorified body affect the way you think about aging, illness, weakness? About war, injustice, tragedy?
- Following His resurrection, what was Jesus seen doing? (See Luke 24:15, 30, 36, 40, 51; John 20:15-16; Acts 1.) How is Christ’s bodily resurrection a promise and a hint toward believers’ resurrection?
- Leaning on 1 Cor 15, respond to these quotes by New Testament scholars
- “Our resurrection experience could not be anything other than an existence in which the Spirit has full sway and through which the Spirit is fully manifest in and through us as in Christ himself.” -Roy Ciampa
- “What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it… What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether… They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.” -T. Wright