Would I Gladly Be Made Nothing
April 27, 2025
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
1 Corinthians 15:12-19
12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
This week we sent an email and a video to let you know we have a town hall meeting on Tuesday night from 7–8 pm. The purpose is to get to know Jeff Clark and let you participate in the hiring process. Our leadership is considering him for the role of director of student ministries and communication. He’s been a member of our church for nine years and a volunteer in the student ministries with his wife for the last eight years. So far all the hiring steps have gone well, and there are only a few to go. If the process continues to go well, here’s how the changes will happen. David has about three weeks left. Then, Noah will take his role in worship and connections. And Jeff would take Noah’s current role. Jeff would be a light part-time in the summer and full-time in a few months. I hope that helps you know how to pray and participate.
I’m sure a few of you might be visiting us again, perhaps for the second time after coming last week on Easter. Thank you for visiting and coming back. To catch you up, as well as remind others, I’ll say that we’ve been teaching through the letter of 1 Corinthians, a letter written by the apostle Paul to a church he cared about deeply. He had planted the church when he stayed in the city for a year and a half and moved on to other cities to preach and plant more churches. Still, he longs for this church in Corinth to thrive. But like all churches, they had pressures from the outside and inside that caused division. It was a fractured flock.
In the first half of the letter, Paul responds to what he heard about them in a report from people who visited. In the next part of the letter, he responds to questions they had for him that they put in a letter. In our passage last week, however, it wasn’t exactly clear why Paul pivoted to the topic of the resurrection. Sure, he calls the resurrection a matter of first importance. But why? Why this topic of resurrection now?The answer comes in our passage. He’s heard some have a belief about the resurrection that could unravel everything. It’s like they’re driving toward a cliff and don’t see that the bridge is out. Let’s pray, asking for God’s help as we study this passage.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
The themes of the song “His Glory and My Good” overlap so well with the letter of 1 Corinthians that for the last year the song has become something of an anthem for us during this series. After the sermon we are going to sing this song, and fourth verse states, “Would I gladly be made nothing, that Christ would be made more?” Again, “Would I gladly be made nothing, that Christ would be made more?”
The assumption of the line is that we answer, Yes. Yes, I would gladly have my life be made nothing for Christ to be seen as valuable. The effect as we sing together is to encourage our hearts that whatever sacrifices we have made, whatever sacrifices we are making, and whatever sacrifices we will make in the path of obedience, it’s worth it. We gather and sing to remind each other that even if following Jesus means that, in the eyes of the world, we become nothing, it’s worth it.
But, of course, it’s only worth it if the good news of the resurrection is true. Those lines in the song hinge, as does all Christianity, upon the truth of the resurrection. By the phrase the resurrection, I mean that at the end of time, Christians will get out of our graves, stepping into new bodies to live forever in a recreated paradise with God on earth.
Apparently in Corinth some people had started to question this resurrection. Some of them had perhaps even moved from questioning the resurrection to outright denial. And they didn’t see how that questioning and that denial ruined the Christian faith. They were driving toward a cliff and didn’t see the signs that the bridge was out. They didn’t understand, as sometimes we don’t understand, that removing the bodily resurrection is not removing part of Christianity but all of Christianity.
Paul’s approach in this part of the letter is to go with the belief’s logical but disastrous conclusions. He does this by walking through several “if… then…” statements. If this is true, then this is also true. Another way to say this would be that as they drive toward a cliff, he stands on the side of the road with six or seven signs warning them of danger.
1. If… then… (The danger of no bridge to life)
Look with me at vv. 12–13 again.
12 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
You’ll notice the phrase “some of you.” How many people, Paul? We don’t know exactly the extent of the “some.” We can assume this influence could have come from either Greek thought or a strand of popular Jewish teaching—or both. I’ll explain.
In Greek thought, there was the idea that the afterlife involved getting rid of the material body. Greek thought said that the material world, including the body, is bad, and so the best afterlife will be free of the body and material stuff; we’ll just be perfected souls.
This is not the Christian belief. The Bible teaches that God made stuff, and he loves the stuff he made. The afterlife does not get rid of stuff but is the place where God remakes stuff to be without spot or blemish. The Bible teaches heaven is a place with stuff, including bodies. So, perhaps some were influenced by Greek thought that denied the physical bodily resurrection at the end of time because that’s what the Greeks did.
They might have also been influenced by Jewish religious teachers at the time. Jesus had many encounters with a group called the Sadducees. They did not believe in a final resurrection. In the Gospels, we read of the Sadducees trying to trap Jesus about this. They created a sad parable about a woman who became a widow seven times. She marries, and her first husband dies. And she marries again, and her second husband dies. This happens seven times, they say, and then she dies. The point of the Sadducees was to show how stupid the idea of the resurrection is because, well, who would she be married to at the resurrection if she had seven husbands?
How does Jesus respond? Jesus responds, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). Then he adds, “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?” Then he quotes the passage from Exodus about the burning bush. “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And then Jesus adds, “[God] is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt. 22:31–32). The idea is that those who have died are not dead. Their souls are alive right now. And one day their souls will be given a new body. Jesus is saying this is true for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And it’s true for everyone who dies while believing in Christ. Everyone you have loved, friends, family, classmates, teachers, co-workers, fellow church members, if they died in Christ, they are not dead. When you die, if you die believing in Jesus, you are not dead. Your soul is alive in an intermediate heaven awaiting the final resurrection at the end of time. At the final resurrection, you will receive your perfected body to live on a perfected earth, which is to say, heaven will come down to earth forever.
But again, back to our passage in 1 Corinthians 15. We don’t know the extent to which some of them were spreading heresy. Maybe they didn’t even understand that it was. Likely the belief in no physical resurrection came from either Greek thought or a strand of pseudo-Jewish thought. Either way, coming back to Paul’s words, we see his logic, his first road sign warning us. “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised” (1 Cor. 15:13). There’s no point, he says, one week after Easter in continuing to talk about the resurrection of Christ if there is no such thing as a resurrection. If there is no resurrection, then Christ was not the first resurrection.
Then Paul takes the implications of that statement that there is no resurrection and continues to press it to its disastrous implications. It’s like he says, Okay, let’s just continue this thought experiment for a bit and see where it goes. That’s what the rest of vv. 14–19 are. Look what happens, he says, when you remove the resurrection. If you remove the foundation, the bridge collapses. Look at vv. 14–15.
14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.
Paul holds up three warning signs. He says three things implode without the resurrection: Christian preaching, their faith, and apostolic truthfulness. For peaching to be in vain and for their faith to be in vain, is to say it’s all a waste. Every sacrifice, every hardship, every time they forgave someone because it’s what Jesus commands, every time they gave sacrificially to those in need and to their church, every time they had someone over to dinner for the sake of Jesus, every time they made themselves nothing, if there is no resurrection, then their making themselves nothing was actually for nothing because it’s all a waste. Devastating.
Notice the specific phrasing in v. 15. Paul says, “we are even found to be mispresenting God.” The idea of “we are even found” implies getting caught. We might say to a caught criminal, “The game is up.” Paul is saying if there is no resurrection, he has been caught—the game is up—and the apostles have been found to be misrepresenting God.
It reminds me of the story of Bernie Madoff and others who have led successful Ponzi schemes, that is, until the game was up. A Ponzi scheme is a way to scam people out of their money, apparently named after Charles Ponzi, who did this in notable ways a hundred years ago. I’ll try to explain it simply. So, kids, say you’re at school. And some really smart-sounding kid tells you he has a way to make you more money. All you must do is give him your money on Monday morning, and then, on Friday afternoon, he’ll give you more money. A few kids take him up on this, and on Friday, they don’t get all their money back, but they get some money back. And they are told that next week, if you let him keep it, he’ll give you more. So you give him $10 on Monday and get $2 on Friday. Seems great. Every Friday you’ll keep getting $2. In a few weeks you’ll have more than you started with.
So other kids start doing it too. All weekend, you and your friends go home and do extra chores around the house to earn money. You wash all the pollen off your parents’ car. You pick up pinecones and sticks and mow the grass. You wash windows. You make lemonade stands. You gladly work hard and gladly make your weekend nothing. And on Monday morning, you bring the money to school. “Here,” you say, “take this $20.” Another kid had a birthday, and she says, “Take my $100.”
And then on every Friday, he gives you a few dollars and promises to give you more.
This sounds great. Is there a catch? Yes. Where does the extra money come from? Well, the kid running this scheme just keeps getting more and more people to give him money. And he takes some of that new money and gives it to the first people. And, of course, he keeps a bunch of it for himself, giving just enough to keep everyone thinking their money is growing.
But what happens when new people stop giving him money? Or what happens when someone says, “I want to buy a bike, and I need my $50 back”? What happens when everyone says, “We want our money back.”
When that happens, the game is up. Paul would say, “We have been found.” And that’s what happened to Bernie Madoff. He did this for years. Various estimates have been made, but he scammed people out of something like $20–65 billion. Until it was all found to be false. He died in prison a few years ago, while he was serving his 150-year prison sentence. Think of the devastation to the people who worked so hard to give him their money. Maybe you’ve been fooled before, or had your identity stolen, or whatever, so the anger and devastation is not so hard to imagine. For you, it’s real.
My point is to say this is Paul’s point. If there is no resurrection, then Christians are like those running a Ponzi scheme—except worse because what is at stake are souls, not dollars. All the people serving Christ, all the sacrifice and all their labors, are all in vain if the game is up and there is no resurrection. Devastating.
Paul keeps going. There is another cluster of signs. It gets worse, he says. With these signs, it’s not like Paul stands on the edge of the road. To get our attention, he jumps into the middle of oncoming traffic. Look again at vv. 17–19.
17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
In these verses Paul gives more implications if there is no resurrection. I’ll explain a few of them. He says, “You are still in your sins.” There are consequences to our sins. Because our sins are against a holy and great God, the penalty for sins is great. This is why our savior must be great. But if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then his atonement for your sins didn’t happen. That means you must stand before a holy God without any protection, without any source of covering, without a savior who loves you and cares for you and took your sin away. Devastating.
And consider the phrases “those . . . who have fallen asleep” and “have perished.” We don’t typically talk like this, so I need to explain. In true Christianity, to die can be likened to simply falling asleep because Jesus, who resurrected first, will one day come to you in your grave and say, “Friend, it’s time to wake up.” And you’ll wake up bodily into the best forever you could ever imagine—indeed, even better than you could imagine. That’s what the language of sleep implies.
But Paul’s point here is that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then there is no one who can wake you up from death. And so death can’t merely be likened to a short nap. Instead, death is perishing. Perishing is often a technical word in the Bible that means more than death. We see this in the classic verse of John 3:16 where Jesus says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Perishing is set in contrast to eternal life. Perishing is eternal death.
That is how Paul is using it here. Perishing means to die a death that leads to forever death, a death of conscious torment as punishment for your sins, which we are still in. Jesus says that won’t happen if you believe in his Son. Wonderful, right? But, in this part of Paul’s letter, Paul points out that if there is no resurrection and Jesus didn’t rise, then your death won’t be like sleep, but your death will be perishing in forever death. Devastating.
And this is why v. 19 is there too. Look at what he writes. “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If there is no resurrection, we’re like all the people who gave their money to Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. We’re like those who sacrificially saved our money, sacrificially skipped a vacation to go on a mission trip (as ten people did this morning from our church, leaving to Kentucky to help with disaster relief ), only to have participated in a scam. And thus should be pitied. If it happened with just money, we would be pitied. If that happens with our eternal life, all of our being made nothing for Jesus makes us the most to be pitied.
2. If… then… (The safety of a sturdy bridge to life)
Of course, Paul’s point is that this is not the case. Paul, remember, is saying that if this is the road you want to drive, then you need to be aware there is no bridge across the cliff. But of course Paul believes there is a real road with a real bridge that can carry us through death and into the most blessed eternity. That road is Jesus. That bridge is Jesus. He promises he is the way, he is the truth, he is the life (John 14:6). The bridge of Jesus can hold all the weight you and I could place upon him. He’s really strong.
So, ending our sermon rightly means we have to take a peek into the passage from next week. We have to look at v. 20.
20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
We don’t typically talk about firstfruits. It’s an agricultural metaphor. Some of you are planting gardens right now. Some of you have fruit trees starting to flower. A few months from now, when you get that first batch of tomatoes or apples, and they are good tomatoes or apples or pears or whatever, that early harvest tells you the rest of the harvest is coming soon, and it’s going to be great. That’s what the Easter story is for us. Jesus is the first apple or tomato or nectarine or raspberry from the future paradise that we get to taste right now as a promise that a full harvest is coming.
I don’t have time to go back through the whole passage again in great detail and say the opposite of what Paul says. But that’s how Paul would want us to think. He wants you to know that, in Christ, your faith is not in vain. Your preaching and ministry and making yourself nothing is not in vain. If Jesus has died in your place and rose again triumphantly over death, if your faith is in him, you are not in our sins. You are forgiven.
There are church buildings very near our church, if church buildings are the right words, where they believe and teach exactly what Paul was warning against. They believe Jesus is alive in the hearts of his people as a nice, warm idea. And that’s all. He didn’t rise bodily and he’s not coming back bodily. They need the full force of Paul’s warning. But for most of us, it’s not that we don’t believe in the bodily resurrection; it’s just that this life is a whole lot more precious to us than it should be; being made nothing for Jesus doesn’t always seem like that great of a trade, one that we should do gladly. Paul reminds us that it is. Jesus once described his kingdom in this way: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt. 13:44).
If this is true, when you die and one of the pastors of this church presides over your funeral, just before they close the casket, just before we lower you into the earth, I could lean over your body and say, “I’ll see you again after a short nap.” Soon our Jesus will reach through six feet of dirt, reach through your casket, and gently tap your pile of shoulder bones and say, “Hey! Hey, it’s time to get up. The first day of forever is here.”
And on that day, the bridge that is Jesus will hold. As he told us, he is the way, the truth, and the life. And on that day, all the labor, all the being made nothing, will not have been in vain because King Jesus really is king. The gospel really is how the weak, wounded, and wayward find resurrected joy forever in the living Jesus. Let’s pray and invite our worship team to lead us in song.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
