In a USA Today interview last week with newspaper humor columnist Art Buchwald, who’s dying from kidney and vascular ailments, he speculated about the hereafter, “I have no idea where I'm going, but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?"

As Believers know from the Bible, the intended purpose of life on earth is to prepare us for heaven.

Just the other week, my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Rolling Meadows, Ill., gave a sermon on how we’re going to recognize our loved ones and others in heaven.

“When we get there, we don’t just recognize them, we know who they are,” says Jordan. “We’re not just conscious of being in someone else’s presence, we can put a name to them and a face.”

Jordan said not only would we know those we’ve personally met in our lifetime, but we’d be familiar with those we haven’t actually ever come face to face with.

By example, he pointed to Matthew 17, where Peter instinctively knows who Moses and Elijah are even though there were no introductions given. While Peter had studied about the two men, and was taught things about them, he couldn’t have known what they looked like since they lived centuries before he did.

From Luke 16:19, among other passages, we know our soul has a literal bodily shape inside of us. In essence, there’s a person inside of our body!

Paul himself makes this clear in II Cor.12: 2-3, in which he writes, “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)”

As Jordan explains, “If this guy’s caught up in the third heaven and Paul says, ‘I can’t tell if he’s still in his body or not,’ then when he wasn’t in his body he must have still looked like he was.

“He said, ‘By looking at this guy I can’t tell whether he’s dead or alive. He’s up in the third heaven, though.’ So what’s up in the third heaven is his soul. But what did he look like? Paul didn’t say, ‘Well, he died but I don’t know who he is up there.’ When out of the body he looked just like he looked in the body.”

Some people have the idea that when we get our glorified body in heaven, we’re all just going to be carbon copies of one another, but Paul, once again, makes clear in I Cor. 15: 35-38 that we’re going to receive our own body in the resurrection.

He writes, “But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.”

Jordan assures, “You’re going to get a body that bears your distinct identity. A body that you own, not that everybody else owns, but that you own out of which the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ will radiate. He’s going to be glorified in your body.”

Because we’ll have our own personal body with its own personal appearance, there will naturally be the capacity to recognize ourselves as distinct from everyone else.

In Phil. 3:20 we learn Jesus Christ will “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

The word “vile” in the verse means humiliating. Our current body is one of corruption, but in heaven we’re literally going to share in the physical glorification of Jesus Christ in a body that reflects His glory.

In other words, says Jordan, “You’re going to look the best you ever looked.”

In the resurrection, our inner man is removed from our outer man and it’s only our new man that goes into the new body.

“So all those ‘old man’ problems are left behind, and all the things that need to be judged and straightened out—the things that confront, confound and make you guilty—all that’s gone,” says Jordan. “I think one of the great security blankets for the Believer is the judgment seat of Christ where all those works that are you, and not Christ, burn up and are gone (I Cor. 3).

“Now that may leave a big blank on the page of your life—I hope you don’t have too many blank pages—but it doesn’t leave bitter memories. The point is the blood of Christ is going to take care of all that. Sin is done with.”

While Luke 16:25 reveals we’ll have memory in heaven, remembering incidents and things that happened on earth, we’re not going to have bad memories surrounding any of the people we encounter in heaven.

“You’ll say, ‘Hey, there’s Brother Rick,’ and you’ll remember Christ in Brother Rick and all that was I, and not Christ, will be gone,” says Jordan. “The blood of Jesus Christ is going to cover all the (bad memories) stuff for you, and it won’t come back. It’s just going to be gone, and what you’re going to remember is Christ and who you are in Him.”

In our relationships with one another today, the key is to have Christ living in us so that when we meet up there, we’ll have something to remember.

Paul urges in Rom. 6:11 to “yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead,” meaning that the resurrection life we’re going to have for eternity is the life we are to have live in us right now.

The key is to let our resurrection lives be in effect today so that when we get out there in our resurrection body, the life we then live will already be familiar to us.

“The verse is saying, ‘Don’t live in your old identity, live in your new one, because the new one’s the one you’re going to take out there,’ ” explains Jordan. “Go let everybody get to know you in your new identity today because that’s who they’re going to recognize out there.”