“The course of life is dependency and then a period of independence and then back to dependency,” said Sasse, noting how easy it is to “delude yourself and think at 23 years old the glories of your skin and your biceps are going to last.” People miss a great deal when they “don’t have the opportunity to be around 90-year-olds, maybe 70-year-olds who can explain it, but 90-year-olds who can model a little bit of dignity as they decline.”
Bryant asked Sasse how people can get their priorities straight before death or severe suffering forces them to. It was here that Sasse mentioned Tim Keller’s comment that suffering from cancer had revolutionized Keller’s prayer life.
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“I went through some pretty heavy stuff in the couple of weeks right before I was diagnosed…I was in a lot of pain because I have a bunch of tumors that have grown in and around my spinal column,” said Sasse. “And so I had some tough pain that was hard to make sense of.”
“And it definitely shattered idols really fast,” he said. “Lots of dumb stuff that I cared too much about and I was too self-reliant about seemed really pointless. This is before I had a terminal diagnosis.”
Even though at that point, Sasse did not know that he had pancreatic cancer, “I heard Tim’s words in my head a bunch of times that he wouldn’t want to go back to his prayer life before that.”
“And I felt then, what a blessing that I’m saying, ‘Lord, come quickly, Maranatha, thank you for all of the different things that I used to cling to that right now seem really really trivial,’” said Sasse, “because they’re actually really trivial.”
Sasse then shared something that he also emphasized in the other podcast interview, which was that he wished that earlier in his life he had done better at honoring God’s instruction to take a weekly day of rest. “In my handful of weeks before diagnosis and seven weeks since, one of the things that’s come clear to me that I tell my kids a lot,” he said, “is, man, I wish I’d taken the Lord’s Day more seriously more in my life because it’s a really good antidote to all those idolatries. That God smashing idols for us is a blessing.”
The three friends discussed 1 Corinthians 15 at different points, with Bryant noting that the passage shapes our theology of life and of death.
“We ought to go to cemeteries a lot more. And we ought to linger around the horror and the terrible brokenness of the consequences of Adam and our sins in Adam that corrupted this glorious creation that was good,” said Sasse. “And then we ought to also back up and look at the sign and hear the singing at those grave sites that say, ‘And the dead shall be raised.’”
“We know where we’re going because we know that Jesus is the first fruits, has already risen, and he’s preparing a place for us,” Sasse said, “and it’s going to be great for us, but even more it’ll be great to be able to free from sin, be around the adoration feast of the Lamb praising Christ, the one who speaks and saves.”
