I have things about my body I don’t really like very much—I think that’s pretty common. But that’s here on earth.

What will my body be like in heaven? Will I be recognizable as me?

Charles Stanley’s book, The Gift of Heaven, brings me to God’s word to find these answers.

After Jesus was crucified, Mary Magdalene was crying outside the empty tomb where they had put his broken body a day earlier. The angels had told her that he had risen, but she didn’t understand. The story continues in John 20:

She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. “Dear woman, why are you crying?” Jesus asked her. “Who are you looking for?”

She thought he was the gardener. “Sir,” she said, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him.”

“Mary!” Jesus said.

She turned to him and cried out, “Rabboni!” (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”).

At first when she looked at him, she didn’t recognize him—something was different about his body. She had helped lay him in the tomb, bloody and lifeless.

But she knew that voice; she would always know that voice. It was Jesus!

The disciples also struggled to believe that this person they saw was really Jesus, even when they saw the nail holes in his hands and saw that he could eat and digest food. (See: Luke 24:36-43.) He wasn’t a ghost, he had a real body—a glorified body.

We don’t know exactly what that means, but here’s what we do know:

• It will be made to perfection for its new environment in heaven.
• It will be absolutely perfect.

Do you want to know more?

For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.
~2 Corinthians 5:1-3 (NLT)