Facing Death Faithfully
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:07.000 | A Christian man who was dying of cancer writes in to ask, "Pastor John, two days ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
00:00:13.000 | I always felt that because I'm a follower of Christ, I would not struggle immensely with my mortality,
00:00:17.000 | but in all honesty, I feel an awful emptiness as the end is near.
00:00:22.000 | I so want to not waste this. I want to be joyful, but I'm afraid that I will fail in this final test.
00:00:27.000 | And after reading your book, "Don't Waste Your Cancer," I just can't grasp how you would consider this a gift.
00:00:33.000 | Any counsel would be appreciated.
00:00:35.000 | Pastor John, what would you say to this man?
00:00:37.000 | Well, there are sudden changes in life, like a phone call from a doctor that I remember and that he's now gotten.
00:00:46.000 | And when you walk into a new land, a new territory, a new neighborhood,
00:00:52.000 | it's not immediate that things come into focus.
00:00:58.000 | 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
00:01:10.000 | is not yet in clear biblical focus for him.
00:01:15.000 | 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.
00:01:27.000 | And so if I could help him tune his compass, then I would be happy.
00:01:32.000 | But I don't think he should despair quickly that his spiritual bearings have been jolted,
00:01:41.000 | and he's off balance right now, and he needs to find his balance.
00:01:45.000 | So that's what the Word of God is for.
00:01:47.000 | And I'll just share a few things that are huge in my orienting myself in this world,
00:01:53.000 | especially when the world becomes very, very fragile.
00:01:57.000 | 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.
00:02:10.000 | As Paul said, our citizenship is in heaven.
00:02:13.000 | Set your mind on things that are above.
00:02:16.000 | When Christ appears, your life will appear with him.
00:02:20.000 | So we wait for a Savior who's coming to transform our lowly body into a body like his glorious body,
00:02:27.000 | and we should simply see that even though God's going to redeem this world,
00:02:32.000 | it's not as it is now our present home, and we should cultivate a kind of freedom from at-homeness here.
00:02:41.000 | And threats of death are a great help in that regard.
00:02:45.000 | And the second thing I think of is that this body of his that is now threatened,
00:02:53.000 | and mine that is threatened and growing old, is going to be made radically new.
00:03:00.000 | That was in that same verse from Philippians that Christ is going to transform our lowly body to make it like his.
00:03:07.000 | In fact, he's going to set the whole creation free from its bondage to corruption,
00:03:14.000 | so that the very things that we don't want to lose here, all the ones that God thinks are good for us,
00:03:21.000 | we're going to get back.
00:03:23.000 | We're going to get all the relationships back.
00:03:25.000 | We're going to get the pleasures of this world back, only beefed up a million times and stripped of all sin and imperfection,
00:03:35.000 | 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.
00:03:48.000 | And then I think it helps a tremendous amount if we can realize that God works, because of Christ, everything together for our good.
00:04:04.000 | 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,
00:04:14.000 | that "He who did not spare his own son, will he not give us all things with him?"
00:04:23.000 | If he gave his son up, won't he give us all things graciously with him?
00:04:28.000 | Which means that when Christ died for me, God did the hardest thing possible,
00:04:34.000 | and therefore it will be easy for God to give me everything that I need.
00:04:40.000 | "No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly."
00:04:44.000 | That gets—that's Psalm 84, and that gets right at the question he asked.
00:04:49.000 | 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?"
00:04:56.000 | 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.
00:05:05.000 | And God's eyes say, "No good thing does he withhold from John Piper in Jesus Christ.
00:05:13.000 | I bought you. You are my own. You are my child. I do nothing for you that's not good for you."
00:05:21.000 | So I only can believe that if I linger long over the Word of God.
00:05:29.000 | 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.
00:05:43.000 | When Paul said in 2 Corinthians, "We would rather be away from the body,"
00:05:50.000 | he said it because the next phrase was, "and at home with the Lord."
00:05:56.000 | And if we don't love the Lord supremely, that won't be a comfort to us.
00:06:01.000 | 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,
00:06:10.000 | which means that we've come to treasure Christ above all things.
00:06:14.000 | We've said with Paul, "I count everything as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."
00:06:24.000 | 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.
00:06:37.000 | If we love Christ supremely, we'll be able to say with Paul, "For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with,"
00:06:46.000 | and then he lists off weaknesses and insults and hardships and persecutions and calamities,
00:06:53.000 | and this is a calamity for this man. Nobody's going to minimize it. It's huge. It's painful.
00:06:58.000 | You cry about it. You ought to cry about it. Your wife is going to cry about it.
00:07:02.000 | If you're married, your kids will cry about it. All that crying is appropriate because it hurts.
00:07:06.000 | 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.
00:07:20.000 | So I think my answer, Tony, in a nutshell is we immerse ourselves in the Word of God
00:07:28.000 | 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,
00:07:38.000 | and if we can adapt to his perspective, then we can actually walk through these sufferings in a way that makes much of Christ.
00:07:48.000 | Thank you, Pastor John. The book Don't Waste Your Cancer can be downloaded for free at DesiringGod.org.
00:07:53.000 | Also, in a previous Ask Pastor John podcast in episode 21 titled "What Does Christian Hedonism Offer the Depressed?"
00:08:00.000 | Pastor John shared the testimony of a woman who lost her battle with cancer at age 40
00:08:04.000 | and her beautiful testimony in the last days of her very painful death.
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