A Christian man who was dying of cancer writes in to ask, "Pastor John, two days ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I always felt that because I'm a follower of Christ, I would not struggle immensely with my mortality, but in all honesty, I feel an awful emptiness as the end is near.

I so want to not waste this. I want to be joyful, but I'm afraid that I will fail in this final test. And after reading your book, "Don't Waste Your Cancer," I just can't grasp how you would consider this a gift. Any counsel would be appreciated. Pastor John, what would you say to this man?

Well, there are sudden changes in life, like a phone call from a doctor that I remember and that he's now gotten. And when you walk into a new land, a new territory, a new neighborhood, it's not immediate that things come into focus. In other words, I'm trying to cut this man a lot of slack that the sheer newness of the land where he just landed is not yet in clear biblical focus for him.

It's strange. He's disoriented, and he's trying to get his bearings, and I regard his question as a tuning of his compass. And so if I could help him tune his compass, then I would be happy. But I don't think he should despair quickly that his spiritual bearings have been jolted, and he's off balance right now, and he needs to find his balance.

So that's what the Word of God is for. And I'll just share a few things that are huge in my orienting myself in this world, especially when the world becomes very, very fragile. The first thought is that the world is not my home as it is now, and therefore I want to cultivate a love for heaven.

As Paul said, our citizenship is in heaven. Set your mind on things that are above. When Christ appears, your life will appear with him. So we wait for a Savior who's coming to transform our lowly body into a body like his glorious body, and we should simply see that even though God's going to redeem this world, it's not as it is now our present home, and we should cultivate a kind of freedom from at-homeness here.

And threats of death are a great help in that regard. And the second thing I think of is that this body of his that is now threatened, and mine that is threatened and growing old, is going to be made radically new. That was in that same verse from Philippians that Christ is going to transform our lowly body to make it like his.

In fact, he's going to set the whole creation free from its bondage to corruption, so that the very things that we don't want to lose here, all the ones that God thinks are good for us, we're going to get back. We're going to get all the relationships back. We're going to get the pleasures of this world back, only beefed up a million times and stripped of all sin and imperfection, so that the sense of loss is only temporary in that God is going to restore us a thousandfold what we have laid down to go to be with him.

And then I think it helps a tremendous amount if we can realize that God works, because of Christ, everything together for our good. I know many people think Romans 8:28 is overworked, which is one of the reasons why I love to linger on Romans 8:32, that "He who did not spare his own son, will he not give us all things with him?" If he gave his son up, won't he give us all things graciously with him?

Which means that when Christ died for me, God did the hardest thing possible, and therefore it will be easy for God to give me everything that I need. "No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly." That gets—that's Psalm 84, and that gets right at the question he asked.

He said, "John, how can you see it as a gift? How can you see the loss of your physical life as a gift from God?" And it doesn't really matter how I see it until I see the Word, because I have to see everything with the eyes of God.

And God's eyes say, "No good thing does he withhold from John Piper in Jesus Christ. I bought you. You are my own. You are my child. I do nothing for you that's not good for you." So I only can believe that if I linger long over the Word of God.

And then, maybe lastly, would be to say that loving Christ and loving the glory of Christ and the grace of Christ has to be supreme. When Paul said in 2 Corinthians, "We would rather be away from the body," he said it because the next phrase was, "and at home with the Lord." And if we don't love the Lord supremely, that won't be a comfort to us.

And when he said, "To live is Christ and to die is gain," the reason to die is gain, he said, is because it's to be with Christ, which means that we've come to treasure Christ above all things. We've said with Paul, "I count everything as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." So when you get this thorn, and I think threats of death and cancer and every other kind of thing that comes at us to take our lives is like the thorn in 2 Corinthians 12.

If we love Christ supremely, we'll be able to say with Paul, "For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with," and then he lists off weaknesses and insults and hardships and persecutions and calamities, and this is a calamity for this man. Nobody's going to minimize it. It's huge.

It's painful. You cry about it. You ought to cry about it. Your wife is going to cry about it. If you're married, your kids will cry about it. All that crying is appropriate because it hurts. But if Christ is supremely valuable, then our affections are transformed, and we love his glory, his grace, and his presence more than we love this life.

So I think my answer, Tony, in a nutshell is we immerse ourselves in the Word of God because our Word and our perspective is always going to be worldly, but God's Word and God's perspective is going to be eternal, and if we can adapt to his perspective, then we can actually walk through these sufferings in a way that makes much of Christ.

Thank you, Pastor John. The book Don't Waste Your Cancer can be downloaded for free at DesiringGod.org. Also, in a previous Ask Pastor John podcast in episode 21 titled "What Does Christian Hedonism Offer the Depressed?" Pastor John shared the testimony of a woman who lost her battle with cancer at age 40 and her beautiful testimony in the last days of her very painful death.