You will never reach your potential
You will never reach your potential.
One of great lies of modern self-help and education is that there’s a glorious you that you can become if only you try hard enough or diet enough or learn enough.
You won’t reach your potential for two reasons.
Firstly, most of us have no clue what our potential is; and so when we aim for our potential we are aiming at the wrong thing. We see our potential as a physical ideal of beauty or muscularity or prosperity or celebrity. That’s our contemporary definition of glory or immortality – if only we find the one thing we want to do and persist at doing it, we’ll be able to stand on the mountain top of realised potential, to the applause of everybody else – or at least, they’ll follow us on Instagram and we’ll become an influencer.
Now, as we’ll see, that’s not what the purpose of human life is, not at all.
But the second reason you won’t reach your potential is that you are fatally flawed. You are tragic.
The thing about tragic heroes, people like Hamlet or Othello, is that they are noble, but that something in their character stops them from being what they ought to be.
And there’s something piercingly accurate about this as a diagnosis of what we are like as a race and as individuals. We get glimpses of human glory, but the glimpses are marred. If you look at yourself you can see the outline of someone extraordinary; but you can also see how faint and distorted that outline has become.
I feel that everyday. I imagine what the day will hold, and what I can be in it. And then I watch as fail to be that Michael I’ve imagined, in small and not so small ways.
And so, we are haunted by the parasitic presence of death, which will ultimately snuff out our potential. The philosopher Ernest Becker wrote in his book The Denial of Death:
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else…
And so we make ourselves frantically busy in order to mask this fear. But it won’t do any good. As 19th century poet Emily Dickinson once said:
Because I could not stop for death/ he kindly stopped for me…
In 1st Century Corinth, as we’ve seen, things were not much different. The Corinthians were as entranced as we are by the achievement of human glory and immortality. You just have to look at the glorious human form in the statues of Ancient Greece, with muscles ripping off muscles – and that’s the women. They were surrounded by supposed ideals of human perfection, as we are. And they were then enthralled by the various paths to get there. Would it be through a perfect body, through athletics and the gymnasium? Would it be through a perfect mind, through debating ideas in the schools of philosophy? Would it be through become more moral, or more religious? Would it be through the experience of pure pleasure?
And Paul says:
No! Have a look at 15:50:
What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
You can’t just evolve into your best self. The way we are now, although we see glimpses of immortality in us, is not able to ascend to heavens. As we are, we can’t achieve God’s kingdom – and there’s no there’s no training you can undertake that will get you there.
I love the expression ‘putting lipstick on a pig’. Putting lipstick on a pig is a way of saying that changing the outside doesn’t change the true nature of something or someone. Putting tablecloths in McDonalds wouldn’t change the reality that food was only average, for example.
Paul is saying: all our attempts to change are really just putting lipstick on a pig, ultimately – because we cannot as flesh and blood inherit the kingdom of God. Flesh and blood, however glorious it is, will die. Flesh and blood is redundant.
What we need is to be changed. The transformation must come from above.
And here’s thing says Paul:
That day of transformation will one day come. We know that it will come, because Jesus himself has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of the harvest that will one day be brought in. And you’ll remember that Paul outlines his belief in Jesus’ resurrection at the beginning of this chapter – through the witness of the Old Testament, the eyewitnesses who saw Jesus, and through his own experience.
But our change will one day come, he says, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet will sound, heralding the great day of the resurrection of dead. And on that day, your dead, decaying mortal body will put on immortality. You will be changed into a form that means you are now compatible with the Kingdom of God.
Will there be an actual trumpet? And who will play it?
I think the point here is that the last trumpet sounds the note of victory. It’s a triumphant blast, not the last post. It signals the complete victory of Christ in all things, over sin, and evil, and death. Whether an angel blasts a literal trumpet or not, it’s a moment of complete conquest.
And that’s what Paul goes on to say. When this moment of transformation happens; when the dead are released from the grave, then at that moment, as John Donne said,
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Paul quotes two Old Testament prophets, Isaiah and Hosea. There’s the saying from Isaiah:
Death has been swallowed up in victory.
It’s like death’s been eaten up – completely consumed and destroyed.
And then there’s the two taunting questions from Hosea:
Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?
At a funeral, or in the hospital, it may appear as if death has had the final victory. I once was talking to a funeral director and I said ‘business has been slow lately’ and he said, ‘don’t worry, everyone’s a client’. But Paul says: no! The grave cannot contain Jesus, and so it won’t contain you either.
And that’s because its sting has been drawn. You can imagine death like an angry and vicious bee, inflicting on us its lethal sting. The sting of death, what makes death really hurt, is sin. Death came into the world as God’s judgement on human sin. Because of sin, death not only robs us of our potential, it exposes us to judgement.
But Jesus took away death’s sting by dying on the cross for sin and rising to new life. His death absorbed the full impact of everything that sin could throw at us. He broke the power of the law to condemn us. As Paul writes in Romans 8, the is no now condemnation for those in Jesus Christ, for in him the Spirit of life set me from the law of sin and death…
And here in 1 Corinthians 15:57, he cries out:
…thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
Christ our champion won a victory in which we share – a victory that is ours.
I recently read a great book by Greg Sheridan of the Australian called God is Good for You. In it, he interviews a number of Aussie politicians who say they are active Christians, from Kristina Kenneally to John Howard. There’s more than you’d think.
What was quite surprising and sad was how few of them said anything positive or clear about the life to come. Former treasurer Peter Costello said: ‘I do believe in the immortality of the soul, a part of us deep down than even death doesn’t extinguish.’
Former PM Kevin Rudd said ‘The actual nature of the world that comes after death I don’t know’.
John Howard said: ‘I have a general hope that there’s something after life, that in some general way you have contact with your parents’.
Senator Penny Wong said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t believe we just end’.
What Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 15 is a far richer hope than that. There is nothing vague here: when the trumpet sounds, the dead will be raised. Your mortal body will be transformed into immortal body, like a caterpillar into butterfly. You will share in the victory over the grave, and over sin its terrible ally. And you will be, yes, the person you were created to be, finally free of all disappointment and regret and sorrow and shame.
But this hope for a future transformation is also transformative of the present we live in.
Notice how Paul ends the chapter. What should the Corinthians be doing now, since the dead will be raised? What difference will that make. What does he tell them?
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.
Two things:
Be steadfast, and excel in the Lord’s work.
Why ‘be steadfast’? He’s saying: don’t give up on Jesus. Don’t be Christians made of jelly. Don’t lose your hope, because your hope in Christ is in something rock solid.
Christians can be jelly-like because of persecution or distraction. Both were true for the Corinthians. There are lots of things to divert us from Christ in the present - our pleasures, and our pains.
But you know the power and the hope of the resurrection of the dead. You know how the end of the story turns out. So: don’t let go of Jesus Christ. Be steadfast in him. Weather all storms. Keep your eyes on the future – a future which has already walked out of the tomb.
And excel in the Lord’s work.
What is ‘the work of the Lord’? Whenever Paul talks about the work of the Lord he particularly means the work that builds up the church – loving one another and sharing Christ.
This work of the Lord is resurrection work, so aim for top grades in that. You and I do have extraordinary potential to do the things of Jesus Christ. And we have an extraordinary hope in which to do it. Our mortal bodies will one day be immortal. So we can use them and risk them for the sake of others. We can exhaust them in expressing God’s love for the world. We can do things that look impossible, because we believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and we have in us that same life-giving Spirit today.
The resurrection era has started, so what shall we do to do the work of the Lord? Let’s excel in eating together and showing hospitality. Let’s excel in sharing Jesus with children and young people – there is no more important ministry we do than that. Let’s excel in growing in the knowledge of God. Let’s excel in kindness and generosity to one another and to our community. Let’s be the place that people find healing and hope, because we are a community of the resurrection.
Are you feeling defeated by a lack of personal change and the presence of sin in your life? Keep working at: it’s worth it. That’s work with a future.
Are you overwhelmed by the inexhaustible needs of your neighbours? Keep excelling in serving them, because the dead will be raised.
Can you see no way to reconciliation with your colleague or with your classmate? Don’t give up on it: that’s the stuff of heaven.
Do you despair that you will never reach your potential? You will be part of a much greater transformation, a transformation that has already been unleashed in you. You will be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, when that last trumpet of victory sounds.