We live in a broken world. It's broken in the sense that things don’t work the way they were meant to. It's broken because of our sin. The infinitely good and glorious God of holy love who created this world had to unleash his just judgment on it because in response to sin. Had to. And that means that our lives in this world are necessarily filled with sorrows and sickness and for all of us, eventually, death.

But we also live in a redeemed world. Through the gospel, Christ has overcome sin, dealt with its curse in his body on the cross, and secured a bright and happy future for us where sin and its effects are gone forever. 

What’s so cool is that world that has, in a sense, invaded this one. And so we can say with Christ’s Apostle Paul: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed.”

That gospel truth informs how we think about and engage with sickness right now. 

We know that our bodies are mortal and susceptible to all kinds of illnesses. Nobody skates free of that. But when we do get sick we don’t despair. We pray of course, rightly, for healing. God can do that if he wants. And we embrace by faith all the common grace of modern medicine. But deeper than all that, we know that God is sovereign over every cell in our bodies and that He superintends sickness to humble us and grow us and prune us and change us and loosen our grip on the garbage of this world. 

That doesn’t make it easy to live with physical pain, but it does animate us with a hope that carries us through. 

For my dad, this reality came fast and furious when in his 70s he was diagnosed with Stage Four prostate cancer. In this episode, he talked about walking through the ups and downs of illness.