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.

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 19^th century poet Emily Dickinson once said:

Because I could not stop for death/ he kindly stopped for me…

In 1^st 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.

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