My Young Life Has Been Physically Ruined — Now What?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:06.000 | Sean from Seattle writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, over the past year, my brother fought
00:00:11.240 | a cancerous tumor in his optic nerve.
00:00:14.380 | He is only 20 years old.
00:00:16.400 | By the grace of God, the cancer is gone now, but he is blind.
00:00:21.080 | When I talk to him, he tells me that he knows that he doesn't get to have a life anymore.
00:00:26.560 | What words of encouragement might you have for my dear brother or for any young man or
00:00:30.280 | woman who feels like a physical disability has taken their life away?"
00:00:34.800 | I have sometimes stood in the shower after running a few miles and experienced a strange
00:00:44.880 | bright yellow donut in my vision that sometimes seems like it's going to completely take over
00:00:54.320 | my sight and blot out everything else.
00:00:59.960 | It's been very scary at times, and I asked the doctor about it at one time, and he said,
00:01:05.240 | "Well, it's in your brain, not in your eyes."
00:01:08.460 | And I wasn't sure whether to be encouraged by that or not.
00:01:13.840 | At any rate, my point is this.
00:01:16.240 | In those times, I have had a very vivid thought about going blind, and I have wondered what
00:01:26.480 | life would be like and whether I would sink into a depression that I wouldn't be able
00:01:32.640 | to get out of.
00:01:34.200 | I don't have any romantic notions that it would be easy or that I would have a heroic
00:01:41.200 | attitude of making the best of it.
00:01:43.920 | My guess is, given the way I'm wired, it would be a long, hard struggle, first just to learn
00:01:51.800 | how to survive and to want to survive, and then even harder to feel like life is worth
00:02:01.360 | living and that my life might be useful again.
00:02:06.000 | So I don't want Sean or his brother to feel like my response is presumptuous, as if blindness
00:02:15.740 | would not be a great spiritual struggle for me.
00:02:21.520 | I feel the same way about the prospect of blindness, the way I feel about suffering
00:02:28.220 | at the end of my life or being persecuted or tortured.
00:02:31.240 | I sometimes wonder if today's grace will be there for that trial, and I know that's
00:02:38.920 | not the way it works, that if I'm going to be able to meet the trial of going blind or
00:02:44.840 | suffering or being tortured at the end of life, I'm going to need a special grace,
00:02:49.680 | a specific grace in the moment for that very specific trial that I face.
00:02:58.120 | And that's what I pray for Sean and his brother, that God would give a special grace,
00:03:03.920 | a specific, precise, tailor-made grace for this particular burden of blindness.
00:03:12.120 | I think when Jesus said, "Tomorrow will be anxious for itself, sufficient for the
00:03:19.960 | day is its own trouble," in Matthew 6, and then Jeremiah said in Lamentations 3, "God's
00:03:27.040 | mercies are new every morning," I think they meant that there is a new, special mercy
00:03:35.520 | from God for every new, special trouble that each day brings.
00:03:42.760 | Sean's brother's first 20 years was full of grace.
00:03:47.040 | It was.
00:03:48.040 | I don't even have to know him to know that.
00:03:51.320 | But now this is a new sorrow, a new trouble, a new affliction, and God's promises are
00:03:59.320 | that there will be new mercies, special mercies, specific, tailor-made mercies that were never
00:04:06.720 | there before that are perfectly suited for the burden of blindness.
00:04:13.440 | And I know that the temptation will be for Sean's brother to hear me or anybody else
00:04:17.680 | try to encourage him by saying, "Well, easy for you to say, you're not blind."
00:04:22.960 | I get that, and I would probably feel the same way.
00:04:26.640 | So I encourage him to read, perhaps, Johnny Erickson Tada.
00:04:33.640 | Her challenge was not blindness.
00:04:35.920 | She broke her back when she was 17, and she's been paralyzed with very little feeling from
00:04:42.640 | her shoulders down in a wheelchair for 40 years.
00:04:51.680 | And the life that God has given her in her weakness, turning it into Christ-exalting
00:04:58.400 | hope for others, has simply been breathtaking.
00:05:01.560 | Here's what she said, "I hope I can take my wheelchair to heaven with me."
00:05:06.200 | I know that's not biblically correct, but if it were, I would have my wheelchair up
00:05:11.360 | there in heaven right next to me when God gives me my brand-new glorified body, and
00:05:15.480 | I would then turn to Jesus and say, "Lord, do you see this wheelchair right here?"
00:05:20.840 | Well, you were right when you said that in the world we would have trouble, because that
00:05:25.520 | wheelchair has been a lot of trouble.
00:05:28.640 | But Jesus, the weaker I was in that thing, the harder I leaned on you, and the harder
00:05:36.560 | I leaned on you, the stronger I discovered you to be.
00:05:41.280 | So thank you for what you did in my life through that wheelchair.
00:05:47.240 | And now, I always say jokingly, you can send that wheelchair to hell if you want.
00:05:54.520 | Wow.
00:05:55.520 | That's Johnny.
00:05:56.520 | That's Johnny 40 years on after where Sean's brother is probably right now.
00:06:02.560 | Paraplegia, blindness, every pain, every disability, every tear will be wiped away from God's children,
00:06:09.680 | every disease and disability will be cast into hell, along with all who have turned
00:06:15.280 | away from his mercies.
00:06:18.840 | One of the keys to finding strength to live with disability here, even the extraordinary
00:06:25.960 | disability of blindness, is to experience the grace of God in the unshakable confidence
00:06:34.760 | that this life, as precious as it is, is only prelude to the life which is life indeed.
00:06:43.840 | This life, in fact, in reality, not pretending, not romanticizing, not dreaming, but being
00:06:51.760 | utterly realistic, this life is very, very short.
00:06:59.520 | Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, "These afflictions are light and momentary."
00:07:06.280 | And by momentary, he meant a lifetime.
00:07:10.040 | Peter says, "We may suffer various trials for a little while."
00:07:14.160 | And by a little while, he meant a lifetime.
00:07:17.320 | James says, "This life is like a vapor's breath on a winter's morning."
00:07:22.480 | Two seconds max, and that vapor's breath is a lifetime.
00:07:28.840 | And of course, it's a miracle, a wonderful God-given miracle to believe that and to live
00:07:37.080 | in the joyful confidence that in a vapor's breath, I will see again.
00:07:43.440 | In a vapor's breath, I will walk again.
00:07:47.960 | And I pray for that miracle for Sean's brother.
00:07:51.520 | It is a precious thing, I know.
00:07:54.280 | It is a precious thing to be able to see the beauties of the world and the people of this
00:08:01.880 | world with the eyes that are in our head.
00:08:05.920 | But it is, and I pray that there will be grace for Sean's brother to believe this, it is
00:08:13.800 | an infinitely more precious thing to see with the eyes of the heart, as Paul calls them
00:08:20.800 | in Ephesians 1.
00:08:22.320 | The greatest tragedy in the world is that people with good eyes cannot see.
00:08:31.720 | I would encourage Sean's brother to think about this.
00:08:35.680 | Millions of people use their good eyes and look at the natural world and do not see the
00:08:40.400 | glory of God.
00:08:42.720 | Thousands of people use their good eyes and looked at the very Son of God in the flesh
00:08:47.560 | and did not see the glory of the only begotten from the Father.
00:08:53.000 | Millions of people hear the gospel with their good ears and read the precious pages of the
00:08:58.240 | Bible with their good eyes and do not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.
00:09:05.120 | This is the greatest tragedy in the world.
00:09:08.680 | But Sean's brother has the opportunity now to see and to see and to see, to see the glory
00:09:16.320 | of God in everything he touches and tastes and smells and hears, to see the glory of
00:09:22.240 | Christ in every story from the Bible and every promise of grace, and to see the utter folly
00:09:32.480 | of the world in using their good eyes to commit idolatry instead of loving the unseen God
00:09:39.360 | supremely.
00:09:40.880 | Jesus lamented the blindness in Jerusalem.
00:09:46.720 | He said, "Seeing they do not see."
00:09:51.880 | And I pray that Jesus would say just the opposite over Sean's brother.
00:10:01.360 | Blessed are your eyes, because not seeing you see.
00:10:06.120 | Amen.
00:10:07.120 | Thank you, Pastor John, for that incredible word.
00:10:09.920 | We have a related question to suffering and God's sovereignty on the docket tomorrow,
00:10:14.760 | namely, "Will God hurt me physically and then call it good?"
00:10:20.320 | These are the kinds of tricky, real-life pastoral questions that we've been tackling on the
00:10:24.400 | podcast for over 830 episodes now.
00:10:27.680 | And all of those episodes are available online.
00:10:29.860 | For more information and to download our apps and to search our archive of all those past
00:10:34.200 | episodes, find us online at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:10:39.960 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:10:40.960 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with author and longtime pastor, John
00:10:45.720 | Piper.
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