So much of this podcast has been dedicated to chronic pain, aging, and living life amidst mounting sorrows. Dozens and dozens of episodes cover this, episodes I’ve done my best to catalogue and digest for you to fully appreciate — see the APJ book, if you have it close, on pages 365–394. A huge section. And we’re back to that theme today in this question from Austin.

“Hello, Pastor John. I thank God for your ministry, which has been a great encouragement to me over the years. I’m seeking advice from Scripture on how to trust God when it feels like my best years are behind me. Nine years ago, God blessed me with my dream job, and my wife and I had the incredible opportunity to go on a mission trip to Japan — a country we love dearly. Life was full of excitement, and I was eager to see what God would do next. However, that job ended several years ago, we haven’t returned to Japan, and my health has declined significantly. Now I’m wrestling with feelings of depression and apathy about where my life has landed. How can I find joy and satisfaction knowing that physically, vocationally, and ministerially, things may never be as good as they once were? How can I continue to trust God in the midst of this season of loss and uncertainty?”

The Word of Man

Here’s the short answer, and then I’ll give a longer one. And trust me, Austin, I’m preaching to myself. I’m 79 years old, and I have all these same questions. So, here’s the short answer: You continue — we continue, you and I continue — to trust God in the season of aging and loss and earthly uncertainty (and yes, it is earthly uncertainty, not heavenly uncertainty). Here’s how we do it: by fixing our attention steadfastly on the word of God and not the word of man. That’s how we do it.

The Bible says, “Faith/trust comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” not the word of man (see Romans 10:17). Which means, you continue to trust God in old age by continuing to hear the word of God and not the word of man. This is very, very crucial, because the Internet and every other source of media are the word of man, and they crowd us all the time.

“Our last, best chance at life is with Christ in glory beyond the grave.”

If you listen to your own anxieties talking to you, or if you listen to the advertisements for senior living, or if you listen to the beckoning of scenic cruises and how handicap-accessible they are, or if you listen to the latest way to scratch something off your bucket list in comfort, or if you listen even to a list of ministry jobs you can’t take, you will become increasingly hopeless and depressed with every loss of eyes, ears, memory, productivity, mobility, and friends and family that you outlive.

The only way to maintain Christ-honoring hope and joy in the wasting away of old age is to let God continually tell you what reality is really: the perspective of God on reality, not man’s perspective; the plan of God for reality, not man’s plan; the promise of God to an aging saint, not man’s promise. That’s how to continue to trust God in the midst of loss and earthly uncertainty.

Losses and Our Last Chance

Now, here’s the longer answer. What we have to get clear in our minds (and God’s word makes it crystal clear) is that this world is not our home. It’s not heaven. It’s not intended to be an endless playground, or even an endless ministry ground, that lasts until you drop. It’s not intended to be easy. It is the prelude to heaven and the world to come, and it is given to us as a test of whether we will trust God and treasure him above all things and display him as superior to the world, even at the end of our lives. If we think of our years from 65 to 95 as our last, best chance at life, we’re idiots. We’re unbelieving idiots to think like that, which is the way the world, the word of man, wants us to think.

Our last, best chance at life is with Christ in glory beyond the grave. That’s our last, best chance of life. Or if he comes first, before we die, that would be even better. And this world, whether at age thirty or ninety, is nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed to us (Romans 8:18). This is God’s word, not man’s word; we must believe it. The losses of old age are simply one kind of test for our faith, but this test is not unique.

Joni Eareckson Tada has been in a wheelchair since she was seventeen. That’s a big loss. Fanny Crosby was blind. That’s a big loss, and she produced eight thousand hymns. John Milton went blind in the middle of writing Paradise Lost, and he finished it. That’s a great loss and gain. Beethoven went deaf and continued to write great music. That was a huge loss. The losses we experience as we move toward death are just one species of loss that mark all of Christian life, and the Bible has lots to say about what those losses are meant to accomplish in our lives.

The Word of God

Here’s what the word of God, not the word of man, says: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” — like the trials of aging — “for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2–4). And that effect it produces when you endure trial, that effect is not physical fitness. Oh, Lord! It’s not physical fitness, but “endurance and patience with joy,” as Colossians 1:11 says.

Take Paul as an example. I love the apostle Paul. I have a picture of him — at least, of Rembrandt’s imagination of what he looked like — hanging on the wall in my attic. Here he is, in prison. He’s in prison as an old man, writing to Philemon for the sake of Onesimus. Here’s what he says in Philemon 9–10: “For love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you — I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus — I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus.” He’s old, his body is wracked with the effects of decades of suffering and his thorn in the flesh, and he’s in prison. And what does he do? He does what he can do. What can he do? He writes a letter to Philemon, out of love for Onesimus, to try to help them be reconciled. That’s a ministry — that’s a ministry! And it was glorious. It was beautiful. It makes me love the apostle Paul.

Jesus said, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10). In other words, we will only be held accountable for the little we can do. That’s what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 8:12: “If the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have.” God doesn’t expect from eighty-somethings what he expected from thirty-somethings. When you were thirty, you could store up a reward in heaven by traveling a hundred miles and staying up all night with a grieving saint — and not miss a beat in the next two days. When you’re ninety, you may store up that same reward by scratching out in your shaky handwriting a precious short note of encouragement to your great-grandchild. Same reward.

The word of God does not leave us guessing as to how aging or even disabled or imprisoned saints maintain hope and joy. Paul was very self-conscious about the fading away of his powers. Here’s what he said in 2 Corinthians 4:16–17: “We do not lose heart.” That’s what Austin is asking me about, and I ask myself: How do I not lose heart? “We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” How? “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

“None of your suffering is wasted if you bear it in faith.”

None of your suffering is wasted if you bear it in faith. With every loss, there is a thousandfold gain of glory in the age to come. And even more than that, while we are painfully approaching heaven, we have this promise according to God’s word, not man’s word, in Isaiah 46:3–4. Let this sink in, Austin. “[You] have been borne by me” — speaking to his people, and that would be Christians now — “[You] have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.” How sweet is that?

Promises and Our Great Hope

And finally, God promises — not man, but God — that for the Christian the best is always yet to come. We are not moving toward sunset; we’re moving toward high noon. Proverbs 4:18: “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.” And the “full day” is the presence of Christ, face-to-face.

How can Psalm 63:3 say, “Your steadfast love [O Lord] is better than life”? Better than life — how can it say that? The word of God — not the word of man, the word of God — gives the answer. In God’s presence there is fullness of joy, at his right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). This is not sunset. This is high noon.

So, dear Austin, my fellow aging Christian warrior, how can we find joy and satisfaction in the final season of loss and earthly uncertainty? Believe the word of God, not the word of man. To paraphrase John Bradford when he was being burned at the stake with young John Leaf, “Be of good comfort, brother, for we shall have a merry lunch with the Lord this high noon.”