When we get to heaven we'll be able to recognize people who are there.

Certainly their outward appearances will have changed.

And we're accustomed to recognizing people strictly on the basis of outward appearances and that whole idea of cognition, of being able to identify certain traits of people,

is an incredibly strange thing.

I've rejuvenated an interest in oil painting.

I like to play around with oil paints.

I'm a rookie, I'm a novice at it.

But I undertook a project recently to paint a portrait of Luther and I had to do it in stages where in the first

stage is a very rough outline where you just try to get the proportion of the

head right and get the ear lined up with the nose and so on and before you work it down to the detail

dimension.

And I had spent this one night working on the easel and just roughing in the basic proportions of the portrait of Luther.

And when I was finished and cleaned up my paints and walked away, I stood back and I looked at

the painting from about 30 feet away and I said that my wife I said

Vista look at that she said what I said you know if I just came in here and somebody else was painting that portrait and I saw it from here in its raw and unfinished state, I would instantly know that that was a portrait of Martin Luther. Now that's not a testimony to my

artistic ability. What I'm saying was there was something already there on the canvas even though it was so incomplete and so unlike an exact

replica of the face of Martin Luther, there was something I could recognize in that and say, that's Luther.

Now Jesus' body was different when he came out of the tomb.

It was so different that people did not immediately recognize him. But there were times with the second

glance they could see that it was Jesus. Your departed friends and relatives when you see them in heaven will appear different from how they appear now,

but what I'm going to say to you is this, when you see them, you will know them, and they will know you. So don't worry about that at all.

You've been listening to ultimately with R.C. Sproll, a podcast from Ligonier Ministries.

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