ReFOCUS with Jim Daly

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Ben Sasse: I am finite, and that is good. That is how it should be. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite, and He creates us to be His children. We need to understand our place, and it is a glorious place to be Imago Dei, but we're not God.

Jim Daly: That’s former US Senator Ben Sasse reflecting on our human frailty and how we need to keep our lives in perspective, especially when considering the God of the universe. I’ll share my recent visit with him on today's ReFOCUS with Jim Daly, a podcast produced from Focus on the Family.

I met with Ben recently in Austin, Texas, for a powerful conversation about the brevity of life and the eternity that we all face. He shared so many poignant thoughts about life and death as he is courageously dealing with a recent diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, a virtual death sentence.

In our meaningful time together, he talked about the importance of living for Christ, loving your family, serving others, and even the proper role of government and how we need to treat people with dignity. ReFOCUS is here to strengthen your walk with the Lord and help you be stronger in your faith as you engage others in the culture. This conversation should help you prioritize some things in your life. It’ll be very inspirational.

I consider Ben Sasse a good friend. He was always my favorite senator to visit while I was in DC. Ben Sasse loves the Lord. He's a husband and father, former US Senator representing the state of Nebraska for nine years from 2015 to 2023. He's also served as the president of the University of Florida and was a professor. Let's join that discussion now with Ben Sasse on today's ReFOCUS with Jim Daly.

Senator, former Senator Sasse, it’s so good to have you with me.

Ben Sasse: Good to be with you.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you a question that Lee Strobel actually asked me when I was interviewing him. He said, with your teens and twenty-somethings, here's a good question to ask them: if you're with God and God had to answer one question right there in the moment, what question would you ask Him? I thought, that's a good question. So that night at dinner, I'm asking my boys. My science boy, Trent, he said, "Give me 20 minutes and I'll find an answer." My other son said, "Yeah, give me a couple of minutes." We're eating, and then Trent, my science guy, said, "I'd like to ask Him what is the element that we're missing in the creation of the universe? What do we not see that's plainly in front of us?" I went, "Oh, that's good." Then my English lit major, Troy, goes, "Why do we suffer?" That really shows the heart of humanity, doesn't it? Those that want to understand this material world, and that's a good thing, but then those who are asking the deeper question of why do You allow us to suffer? How would you answer that?

Ben Sasse: Wow. First, I want to try my hand at answering the question you threw out in your parlor game at dinner. I am just obsessed at present with the Trinity and the mystery of the Trinity and the relationality of God overflowing that He desires relationship with us. Why? We would gladly be slaves and servants in the Kingdom at the adoration feast to the Lamb, and He makes us His children who get to say Abba, Father, Daddy, and we get invited to sit at the table. Why would He do that? It’s amazing.

Suffering to your question, I obviously don't understand it, but Jesus took on incarnate flesh and came and didn't just fulfill the whole law for us, He also suffered all the punishment that Adam and we in Adam deserved. Though it’s terrible, there is something very special in being able to be united with Christ's suffering in route to this vale of tears, this last enemy, because it helps us cleave away from all the idolatries we've built as we fell in love with the creation instead of the Creator. We should love the creation, but because it’s overflow of the Creator, we have all these idol factories in our hearts and they need to be smashed to make us fit for heaven, not to earn our salvation, but because God has already declared us just, He’s now also sanctifying us.

Jim Daly: I want to follow up on that in a moment, but some people listening or watching may not know your situation. So again, I’m so grateful that you said yes because I thought when we first reached out, I thought people need to hear Ben Sasse's story because we're all going to meet this fate. Nobody gets away. We all have a fatal diagnosis, but we just don't know it. We live our lives as if mortality isn't going to come at some point. Isn't that true? And then boom, all of a sudden you get a diagnosis. What happened for you?

Ben Sasse: I’ll give you the speed history. Around Halloween, I started having a lot of very weird pains, both front and back, all through my abdomen. I do weird sports; I turn 54 since then, but at that point, I was 53 and I still did sprint triathlons a lot. When I train, I wear a weight vest a lot, and in retrospect, this was so stupid. It makes sense to wear a 45-pound weight vest for some of the running events; I should never have done that on my bike. Occasionally, I would just leave my vest on on the bike, and I thought I pulled a bunch of muscles in my abdomen and in my back.

We couldn't figure out what was wrong for six or seven weeks. Finally, we got some full-body scans, and the doctors called me back an hour later. This is on December 13th or 14th, and they’re beating around the bush. I’m like, "I’m not the toughest guy in the world, but I’m farm-kid tough. I can take it, Doc. Tell me the truth. Give me something real." He goes, "Really?" and I said, "Yeah, be blunt." He said, "Ben Sasse's torso is chock-full of tumors."

So, I have a metastasized Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and now five other kinds of cancer, liver being the farthest along. Pancreatic cancer is a nasty one because the mortality and death rate is off the charts. It’s like 97%. So, I was given three or four months to live in mid-December, and it’s already been three months. I thank the Lord so much that even in the midst of that terrible diagnosis, and to your point we all have a death sentence, mine became a defined number of days instead of the fact that we have a death sentence and we don't know what it is.

I felt with Paul to live is Christ, to die is gain, at peace right away. I didn't want to die because death is terrible, and I love my wife, Melissa, of 31 years. My girls are awesome, 24 and 22, but we also have a boy who's only 14 and he still needs a dad knocking him upside the head and loving on him and disciplining him and repenting with him and to him. So, I’m grateful that we may get a bunch of extra months out of the clinical trial I’m on.

Jim Daly: You know, Ben, mentioning your children, that's kind of the heart of the reason with your wife, Melissa, too, that I want to talk to you, because not everybody faces something like this. The way that you're doing it is so honoring to the Lord. Let me ask you about your 14-year-old son. I mean, you must sit there and think, "Lord, this seems so wrong, so unfair. He needs a dad." I mean, I was 11 when my dad died and I was nine when my mother died. It goes deep. It lasts a lifetime, that loss, that hole in your heart. So, I can feel for your son because I know what he's going to experience, and your daughters too. But at the same time, I would say that all of us in the Daly clan, the five children, would all say that all have come to the Lord, that we would not have changed anything. But it seems contrary to comfort. So in that context, how do you wrestle with that to say, "Okay"?

Ben Sasse: R.C. Sproul used to say there is no maverick molecule. God is not uncertain about anything that has happened, is happening, or will happen, and He will weave together that mosaic for our own good. God loves His church, and those Christians that He has written into eternity, He will use this for good. Our son's name is actually Augustine; we call him Breck. Augustine’s theologically pretty heavy for a 14-year-old kid on a football field, so we call him Breck. But I trust the Lord through all of this. And yet, my deepest aches, I don't want to be separated from Melissa. I love this woman. I want to be with her. We're going to be together for eternity, all of us in God's church are. But the part that's most baffling is why will Breck not have a dad at 15 or 17 or 19? And yet God knows exactly what He's doing and He has a plan for Breck's life that covenant child, but it hurts.

Jim Daly: You know, on behalf of those that are going through some form of pain or suffering, I think the right question right here is for the person who's going, "No, it's wrong! It's wrong!" What would you say to help them reconcile the tear in their heart and to be at peace, which seems impossible when you're looking at what you're looking at? Knowing your daughters, your son, Melissa, that unless the Lord intervenes with a miracle, your days are numbered more finitely than others. What would you say to that person saying, "I can't get there. I don't have the faith to get there"?

Ben Sasse: I guess I come at it from two angles. I don't want to be aggressive with the intellectualist rationalist side, but God tells us in Scripture everything we need to know for faith and life, but He doesn't tell us everything we want to know or everything that we ultimately will know. He is God, and to whom else would we go? So, I trust Him because He is who He is and He has been faithful. So, I won't get every answer this side of eternity.

But then I think about in Galatians and Ephesians where so many times you think of the believing community in song, and then I go to things like "Amazing Grace." When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing His praise than when we first begun. Death is an enemy. Death is wicked, but it’s the final enemy. It’s our last battle, and after that, there will be no more tears. And so we will have these answers and we will know that God used it for His good.

Jim Daly: You mentioned the idolatry that we face in this life. It's so amazing. I think Augustine talked about this in terms of attraction to women. He fought that, he wrote about that, and he thought if I’m filled with the Holy Spirit, that appetite should be gone. But they're always present in our flesh in this world. Speak to the idea of idolatry and the idea that you have to be engaged to recognize that idolatry and to work with the Lord to overcome that idolatry.

Ben Sasse: Rightly ordered loves. Augustine spent a lot of time on this. C.S. Lewis has that quippy joke that the woman who falls so in love with her cat that she makes it her god can't actually even properly love a cat. You should love your cat or your dog. Being great at playing the guitar is glorious, but it can't be God.

And so to properly order our loves is to understand how God sees the world. God created this world and called it good. This place is filled with a cornucopia of glorious things where we get to think God's thoughts after Him. You get to feel the joy, Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, feeling the joy of running. God has created the opportunity for us who are material beings who live in creation to enjoy sport. But Eric Liddell didn't want to defile the Sabbath by letting this thing become his idol and not be gathered, Hebrews 10:24 and 25, let us not forsake assembling with believers on the Lord's Day. Running is great, but running can't be God.

I’m the son of a football coach. Football is great, but football better not be my hope and dream; it will disappoint me. And so Calvin has that great line that the human brain, after Adam, is an idol factory. We're constantly running around the world and trying to say, "Why don't I put myself in God's place? Why don't I put myself on the throne? Why don't I try to assemble all of creation?"

I can't even grow skin on my face. We can't keep the planets in orbit. I say that as a joke because, Jim, you and I were talking before the show, with some of the radical clinical trial I’m on, the chemotherapy, the poison, makes it almost impossible for me to regrow skin on my face. So my face bleeds constantly. What a fool to think that I could be God. I am finite, and that is good. That is how it should be. God is omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite, and He creates us to be His children and we need to understand our place. And it is a glorious place to be Imago Dei, but we're not God.

Jim Daly: This is a good place to insert your work in the Senate when you're talking about idols. Even that city, I used to not like even landing there. It sounds horrible, but I thought, "Lord, do I have to be here?" But then I would go and have meetings with you and your colleagues, and we'd pray together, we'd talk about things. By the way, I would say the meetings that I had with you, you took notes on family issues. You're so studious about the issues and the topics. I think you're really the only one that actually sat and took the notes as we talked about policies that could help families. That says a lot about who you are. Also, you did complete your PhD in history. Was that at Harvard?

Ben Sasse: At Yale, sorry. More importantly, I grew up with a PhD in Focus on the Family studies because my mom had the radio running in every room of our house as a child.

Jim Daly: So good, though. But in that context, the city, how did literally with what you know and your faith in Christ, how did you get up every day in that role as a senator and say, "Okay, Lord, here we go"?

Ben Sasse: God is the God of everything, every domain, every institution. But isn't it wonderful that government, which is necessary now, will not be needed to restrain evil over Jordan? In eternity, we won't need government to restrain evil anymore because we will be in a city, as Revelation says, where Christ at the center is the light of the Kingdom and there will be no gates because all the old things will have passed away and the sin that was still in our members will all be gone.

What a glorious time that will be. Heaven is a place where there is no stealing; there is no cancer. Right now, we need biomedical researchers. We need oncology departments and chemotherapy departments. We need phlebotomists taking my blood all the time. We need government to restrain evil right now. So, government is a really important calling, but the way Christians around the American founding would have said it is it's a one-cheer-for-government kind of calling.

It's neither zero nor three. It's not that we don't need government; the world is broken, and there's somebody who wants to take your life, your liberty, and your stuff. But it's not a three-cheers-for-government because government is about restraining evil. It's not about the glory of what happens at worship. It's not about the warmth around your dinner table where you're telling your kids how much you love them and asking them about their day. Government is just about a framework for ordered liberty. So, we have to be able to hold moderately, not right-left moderate, but our passions hold moderately to certain institutions like government because they're important but they're passing away. That is glorious.

Jim Daly: That is so beautifully said. Let me ask you, though, in that context, where the world is at today in that political sphere. It feels like the enemy of our soul has opened up a can of hate and it just like an aroma, it just fills those chambers in DC. When you talk about the biblical mandate, God's mandate for government to restrain evil, that is the one mandate He gives government. What do we do as Christians when government cannot discern seemingly between good and evil and actually promotes evil?

Ben Sasse: Let’s maybe distinguish between two big thoughts here. So your culture mandate or your creation mandate, when we think about after Cain and Abel and we don't yet have Seth as the line that Jesus is going to come from, there's still a mark to protect Cain though he's a murderer from the consequences of what could happen. And so my friend Mike Horton, the theologian, often jokes that in the kingdom of the left hand, we have speedboat manufacturing and public policy. These are not salvific things. Speedboats are great, but they're not going to save you. Government is great, but it's not going to save you. It needs to restrain evil. It needs to do basic things to create a framework for ordered liberty so people can assemble for worship on Sunday morning. Also, we want our government to have a framework for worship for people who don't have the same theology as we do to also be able to assemble for their worship though we don't agree with them. We want to protect everybody under freedom of religion to be able to assemble so that we can then try to persuade people free from violence.

You asked why is there so much hate oozing? I think a hundred years from now, if the Lord hasn't returned yet, when we look back on this moment, we're not going to talk very much about public policy. We're going to talk about the fact that social media created a completely different kind of information ecosystem and there's these grand temptations to steal our attention all the time. We know that only about 12% of Americans will read a book this year. There are benefits to the digital revolution, many benefits. There are some benefits to the communications revolution that flows from it. Focus is not just broadcast at a given moment, but you're also able to be streamed and so more people can download it at a convenient time. But we don't yet know how to digest information when it’s coming at us fire-hose style from every side, and it turns out the Ninth Commandment, bearing false witness, matters a lot. If everybody has a giant megaphone, there's a whole lot more Ninth Commandment violating going on, and so we're just spraying nonsense and lies and disrespect all the time. We haven't learned the habits of editing and self-control and restraint.

Jim Daly: Well, that is a good point because it feels like that's what we've lost as human beings, civility. How to be civil toward each other, like you go online, people say what they think. Or feel, or rage. There used to be a filter there that you would never say some of the things in public that we're now saying in social media. To your point, it makes that job of a Christian even harder to restrain from jumping into that cesspool to try to engage people.

Ben Sasse: That's exactly right. And given that one of our obligations in treating other people, other ensouled humans created in God's image, with dignity, we need to exercise self-restraint about what we say, not just vomiting out whatever we feel or the anger in any given moment. But we also have to maintain the opportunity for persuasion. Think about Paul at the Areopagus. We're trying to persuade other people to consider the claims of Christ. One of the things that happens in a social media world is a lot of confirmation bias and fan service where people just say to their audiences exactly what everybody already believed and you just preach to the choir in a secular sense of just say whatever somebody already thought, "Let me just tell them they're definitely right." Actually, lots of us are wrong about tons and tons of things and we need to learn the habits of daily repentance. That requires a different level of self-restraint and control and self-discipline in our communication.

Jim Daly: You know, the Lord's prescription for humanity, I’m so grateful He wrote it down. Right there in Galatians, when we accept Christ, what should we look like? What's our aroma? Somebody could say, "I don't see it clearly in the Bible," but Galatians 5:22, He tells you it’s going to be the fruit of the Spirit is what people should see: love, joy, peace, goodness, long-suffering, patience, all the things we seem to be coming up a little bit short with in this day and age as the church. How do you recommend the church become more aware of that fruit of the Spirit and lean into that as the antidote to culture's ills?

Ben Sasse: This feels like I’m going to do the kindergarten version of it, but being blessed with Melissa as my wife and our girls again in their early-to-mid 20s and our boy a decade younger, we lived on a campaign bus for about 16 months when they were 12, 10, and 2. Melissa would sing that song about putting on the armor and the fruits of the Spirit. They had these little kids' songs and I was like, "Man, we need to memorize more Scripture. We need to feel that, live that, dream that, sing that." In so many Pauline epistles, the fruits of living a Christian life are gratitude, regarding others more highly than yourself, and singing. Singing with other people and committing things like the fruit of the Spirit to our brains.

Jim Daly: Melissa, let's spend a little time there because in 2007, she suffered from a stroke. She was young. So when you look at again, you look at the circumstances of what you're facing physically as a family with Melissa having a stroke, first and foremost, how is she doing and what's happening for her?

Ben Sasse: We had a, you're right, she was so young. She's still looking young. I’m looking a little shabby in my mid-50s, but my wife's looking great in her mid-50s. But when we were 37, Melissa had a vertebral dissection, so you have four blood flows to your brain. One of her arteries in the back of her neck came apart, produced three strokes, and we had a year-and-a-half period where it wasn't clear if she was going to live and then if she was going to be coherent. She had just massive neural regeneration. One of the ways neurologists talk about brain injury in the young as opposed to the old, when you're really old and your brain breaks, it kind of breaks, it’s like glass. But when you're young, it's more like throwing a baseball through a cobweb; there's a little bit of cobweb on the baseball that rolled away, but mostly you just have these dangling things. We had neural regeneration where big chunks of her brain regrew.

So, we were incredibly blessed that our girls were three and five at the time. Our girls have had a very, very smart and engaged mom for their whole life and then God gave us another son, a providential surprise a decade after the girls. But over the course of the last seven or eight years now, we've suffered a lot of seizures. So you ask how she's doing. In 2024, she had nine seizures that year. In 2025, one. And so far in 2026, zero. The miracle is not the right word, but the glories of modern medicine, she's on massive anti-seizure sedative drugs, but then we have an ability to wake her up every morning and counteract that. 20 years ago, nobody would have been able to live the life she lives. She's incredibly able and competent. She's the smartest woman I know. So, we're incredibly blessed with her. You asked earlier about my son and the heaviness of a 14-year-old potentially losing his pops. His mom is going to gap-fill in lots and lots of important ways.

Jim Daly: Well, that's very sweet and your love for Melissa is obvious. Let me play a clip in a moment. This is Dr. Tim Keller, a friend of yours, a friend of mine. He passed away from pancreatic cancer. I think we spent three or four times talking for Focus on the Family doing an interview. The last one was not long before he passed away. We had to do it right alongside the Hudson River. It was an amazing discussion that we had about where he was at in his life. But one of the things that he has said referring to suffering is that suffering is God's gymnasium and it’s something we go to work out to strengthen our holy body, our holiness. Let me play this clip and get your response.

Tim Keller: The core of suffering is to stay faithful. Don’t stop reading the Bible, don’t stop praying, don’t stop going to church, don’t stop obeying the Ten Commandments. Don’t get into the medicating behavior we were talking about before. Don’t rationalize. Do not get into bitterness and self-pity. Do everything you can in prayer to simply say, "Lord, I’m just going to take the next step. I don't know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to trust You. I’m going to take the next step and every day I’m just going to go through my paces. I’m going to go through the normal things that I always did as a Christian, but in suffering, I don't feel like doing. I’m going to do them anyway," which means means of grace, Bible study, prayer, fellowship, serving other people, worship. You just do it. That's the core. Because when it's over, and it will be over, you will find, oh my goodness, it’s just like bicep curls. It’s like all that stuff. I am in far better spiritual shape than I was before. Now, that's not to say that there aren't specifics around every kind of suffering, but I think that's the core is acting like you're in God's gymnasium.

Ben Sasse: Wow, that's special. It's fun to hear Tim's voice again. I still listen to a lot of his sermons as well. I’ve been to that high-rise with him and Kathy at that kitchen table you're talking about in the city. What a special way to say that faithfulness, God will use the word. It never comes back void by the Spirit, and so in the Old Testament, one of the most common hortatory verbs is remember, remember, remember, remember the faithfulness of the Lord. And we get to respond in gratitude by being faithful and doing things like attending to prayer and to the reading of the Word and to the assembly with believers and to worshipping God and to the sacraments and to be at the supper as that foretaste of the adoration feast to the Lamb.

One of the things that Tim said to me, and I think you've probably played this clip before too, he said, "I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish pancreatic cancer on anyone. And yet, I would never want to go back to the prayer life I had before I knew the prayer that flowed from pancreatic cancer." It's not unique to his and my specific disease, but the weakness, the feebleness, the dependency that you feel. We lie to ourselves all the time and pretend we're independent, we're self-sufficient. No, we're little babies and we're old people who are becoming incontinent and need somebody at our hospice bedside with us. Prayer of dependence is true prayer because you're saying to God, "You are the Almighty. You are God the Father Almighty. You have all this power, and yet You tell us to approach You as a daddy." And we get to attend to that in faithfulness, and God honors it.

Jim Daly: Yeah, I’m thinking in those low places in my life, when I can overcome that through the power of the Holy Spirit. When you're in that moment, I’ve had the impression that puts a smile on God's face because He has you. When your circumstances should not dictate joy, confidence in Him, you name it. When you can maintain that like what Tim was just saying, He smiles, I think, because He has your heart. It's not about your circumstances. What's so hard in this life and in modernity now is how much we rely on comfort and winning and all of that. It's like such a spiritual deficit for us as human beings. A word that we neglect is pilgrimage. We are on a pilgrimage. We are meant for home, we should yearn for home, we should be looking forward to that glorious city that has foundations.

And we should also cease our labors not just every Sunday but every evening and break bread with our families. But we should know that you don't build your dream house on a bridge. And we're on a bridge. We're not there yet. And the opportunity in that time of uncertainty to rely on the Lord, it’s a blessing. We don't know the outcome A versus B on a whole bunch of choices, and is my clinical trial going to last a few extra months? We're all going to die. We're all going to be pushing up daisies, but then we're going to get a glorified body and we're going to be at that adoration feast again, and it is going to make the sufferings of this present age seem infinitesimally small to even try to recall.

Jim Daly: That's so true. And I think I want to make sure I capture this out of the Tim Keller clip and your experience right now, but that illumination, if I could refer to it that way. You know, I feel like most of life is muted. We're going down the highway of life for the metaphor and, you know, things aren't popping all the time. You get married, you start your career, you have children, we go through the motions. So many of the families that write or call us for help, they've kind of fallen into that rut. So many marriages that are not thriving in Christ because they've just grown weary of loving each other. And I’m grateful that we have Hope Restored. We give these couples simple tools to reconnect emotionally, spiritually, physically, and it is amazing, 81% success rate and many of these people had divorce papers. But the point of that illustration, when you're facing what you're facing, that illumination of what is important in this life must be so much easier to see, like a clarity that comes to you in every aspect of your life, it would seem.

Ben Sasse: It does feel that way. I use the football example because I love football. If I could have done anything, I would have been the Nebraska football coach. My dad was a football coach for my whole childhood. And right now, I’m thinking back to January and the NFL playoff season. I still love football; it wasn't a temptation to be an idol like it has been in the past, because I know I have limited days. You can't take things that are tools or respites of this world and make them ultimate things when you're headed toward the vale of tears.

That's a blessing. The things of earth will grow strangely dim. That doesn't mean that creation isn't glorious. I want to know more about biology. I want to know more about the diversity of colors in God's created order and on that rainbow at sunset. But I want to know it because I want God to explain to me what were You building there? What did You create? What are You allowing us to co-create? Not because we would make it the center.

Jim Daly: You know, I interviewed John Burke who lives in Austin, and he wrote a great book called Imagine Heaven and then Imagine the God of Heaven. In there, he was an agnostic engineer, and he ended up taking over his father's work, which was near-death experiences. And he interviewed almost 2,000 people. As an engineer, he put those experiences into about 40 loose categories. Really well done. But you know, things that where people were outside of themselves on an operating table and can give you the numbers on the top of the fan or the tennis shoe location on the top of the hospital. So it doesn't explain a hormone rush at death because they were seeing things above themselves. But in that context, he paints such a picture of heaven, those people that have come and looked into that arena in this middle area and then come back into their body. And it’s a fascinating view of, he said even interviewing Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, paint similar pictures of what they're looking at when it talks about peering into heaven, just the light from a throne and things like this. It gives me such confidence of that next step for me. I’m going to leave you a copy of his book actually. But I just, it makes me want to leap into that experience with the Lord with joy in my heart, not with fear. Have you thought about it?

Ben Sasse: I have. You said a bit, I’m going to say some of the book of Revelation, but also Ecclesiastes. The chasing after the wind when we take things that are meant to be goods in instrumental ways and we try to make them ultimate things and it becomes so futile. It feels like there are three kinds of time: there's daily time, there's kind of a planning horizon, there's eternal souls. Every day, we should be good at the gratitude of saying give us this day our daily bread. We should be able to stop at the end of the day and look at the fruit of our labor and be grateful to God that we could live a life of gratitude to Him by serving our neighbor. And we know who He's making us for eternity.

Planning matters. Decisions and habits we build over the next 30 days that are going to pay off over the next 30 years. But man, that middle space can crowd out daily gratitude and thinking about eternity. When you're in pain on an operating table, it’s pretty tough to think, "I wonder if I’ve got my funds allocated properly in my 401k." What you think about, not that that's unimportant, but it’s instrumental work. It’s pretty glorious to think what does it mean in Revelation when we say all of the beasts, all of the scary things, will have been cast off into the sea, we will have no more opponents and no more threats? And the feast table that we get to break bread with our family will now be purified with no selfishness and Jesus will be there.

Jim Daly: How about all tears being wiped away? I want to feel that. You have talked about the family. Let me ask this question in terms of that illumination, that clarity that comes when you're in the circumstance you're in. Being the dad you want to be, how has that changed your relationship with your girls, with your son?

Ben Sasse: We are a family of Type A overachievers. And I have repented to my family, it started before this diagnosis, but we've talked about it a lot more intensely since then. I have repented to my family about not having been a good leader about the Lord's Day. We never missed Sunday morning worship, but often by 2:00, 3:00 in the afternoon, our hearts and affections and attentions were getting onto all the achievements we had to do starting Monday morning and all the work we needed to do. A lot of that work is important and meaningful, but man, the feast day of the soul is more important than I gave it attention to.

And I now want my kids to view the glory of not needing to strive from Saturday night to Sunday night as an unbelievable blessing that we get to rest. Martin Luther's great "A Mighty Fortress" is based on Psalm 46 and if you read Psalm 46, there's obviously three movements. There's a you don't have to fear anything, you're going to be fine, God's got this. And then this command, "Be still." It means stop trying to be self-sufficient. You get to be a child of the Eternal King and every Sunday we can live that. I didn't do that enough.

Jim Daly: No, that's really, really good. And I’d want to ask on behalf of the fathers that maybe have not done many things well. Maybe go to church, but that's about it. How do we recover that when we're healthy, not being motivated by death in front of us? But I mean, you're seeing it more clearly than many of us. What advice would you give to a dad to live it better now? Don't wait for the diagnosis that you're not going to be here tomorrow.

Ben Sasse: Let’s be humble with our kids and say I’m not announcing a new policy for our family starting four days from now that we've never lived before, it becomes as law. But it is, boy, it’s glorious to get to reflect on the things of the Lord. What can we read together as a family this Sunday? How can we lock up our phones? How can we set aside time on the Lord's Day to just linger and reflect back on the sermon? Not have to get out of church the second it’s over, but go find the folks who are in need there or the visitors there. But I’d say two of the most practical operationalizable ones for us are we lock up our phones most of Sunday and we read aloud together a lot. If I had the skills, we'd make music together. One of my kids is a great pianist and one of my daughters is a great violinist, and so I’ve told them one of my deathbed asks is: can you guys write a few songs for Dad? Not about Dad, but just play your music more.

Jim Daly: You know, one of the things, and you're sharing very openly and Jean and I have this discussion about talking about death. She's very adverse to that. I’m more open with it, probably because I experienced it with my mom and dad and I understand that uncomfortableness. But even in that context, advice you might have for parents who are facing something similar or are hitting that moment where we got to talk about Grandma and Grandpa. And of course it’s always age-appropriate, but how open should we be? How open have you been with your kids with what's facing you?

Ben Sasse: We've been very, very open with our kids and we're incredibly grateful to the Lord that they have embraced even a little bit of the gallows humor about it. We should laugh at death. It’s terrible, but it’s not going to win. Death doesn't get the final word. I have a podcast that I had agreed to do in October and then I got this diagnosis in December and we were due to launch in January. We decided to still do it. We changed the name from "Quick Study" to "Not Dead Yet," which comes from Monty Python. We redeem the time. But we're blessed that the family trusts that God knows what He's going to do and eternity is long and we will be together again.

But two really concrete things we can do to make the reality of death more tangible and be more aware of it in our lives: go to nursing homes and go to cemeteries and go a lot. Our age has the best technology in the history of the world, but we don't have the most wisdom in the history of humanity. And one of the stupid things we do in our time and place is crazy age segregation where we act like the year you were born should define your peer group. If you're 17, everybody you know should be 17. That's ridiculous. 17-year-olds' frontal lobes aren't fully formed. When you're 17, you need to be around 2-year-olds and 82-year-olds, not a lot of 17-year-olds.

And so we go to nursing homes a lot and find people to serve and adopt there. We also walk cemeteries a lot. And we've done that for a long time. We embrace a little bit of gallows humor at our house. We have a day we call "Not Dead Day," which is January 25th, 2007, when Melissa had her aneurysm and didn't die and we thought she might. We have for 20 years now since then taken that day and tried to go spend a lot of time with long walks in cemeteries just praying out of gratitude to God that He preserved Melissa, but also to make us reflect on the reality. We bought our cemetery plots early in marriage on St. Paul Lutheran Church Road in Washington County, Arlington, Nebraska. And I think it’s important to go to the cemetery and particularly go to cemeteries who were built by people who had rich theology where when you walk in through the gates, it says things over the archway like "The dead shall be raised." These molecules are going to be knit back together.

Jim Daly: I love that. I love that embrace. And I think it really opens your children's minds to that moment. Like we began this discussion talking about we really don't realize our own mortality, but for your kids to experience that and to be able to navigate it, understand it, that they do have a set number of days that the Lord's going to give them. That's healthy.

Ben Sasse: Amen. Just basic wisdom of: you got cut from a baseball team or a cheerleading squad, guess what? It isn't the biggest deal in your life. When you're 17 or 13, it might seem like the biggest deal in your life. If you were helping some 85-year-old with dementia at a nursing home four days ago, it turns out you get a little more wisdom.

Jim Daly: I love that. And Ben, right here at the end, I think one of the amazing things. I’ll say it in a political context and then I’ll move it toward the spiritual. This question of a friend of mine who's a non-believer said, "If you guys are worried, I should be really worried because you guys are supposed to be fear-not people." Isn't that a good phrase? So he's looking at us and our panic and saying, "Wow, if those people are supposed to be people that do not fear and they're fearful, what am I missing?" That's interesting and a great observation. So we as Christians again, what are we projecting?

And in that context on the spiritual side, I’m so glad every year we do survey work at Focus over the last 12 years or so. Anywhere from 170,000 to 290,000 last year people said Focus was the organization that led them to the Lord. Praise the Lord. I don't think Dr. Dobson nor I years ago saw this as that kind of organization. We're here to help your family, but amazingly, how many people come to Christ because of pain in their family. In that context, speaking to I’m assuming we're going to have a number of non-believers listening to you. You were a senator, the president of a university, a football fan. In that context, what would you say to the person right now who’s going, "Wow, this guy's his days are numbered, but he still smiles, he still has joy"? What would you say to them?

Ben Sasse: The calling to be a human created in the image of God is big and grand, but we're a part of an idol-making rebellious tribe. We are all united with Adam, Genesis 3 tells us, in rebellion against the Good Father who created this world and created us for fellowship with Him. And yet Romans 5 says the bigger story is that there is a second Adam, there is a new Adam. Jesus came to fulfill all that Adam failed on, and to justify us, to declare us righteous in a court of law, but also intrinsically to begin that process of sanctification.

And I am both in Adam and in Christ, but the real Ben, the future Ben, is the one in Christ where the old Adam's sin and members are being crowded out. And so death, judgment is terrible, but also what a mitigating blessing for there to be a truth among us that says all the brokenness of this world, all the pain that you feel, all the suffering that you've known, this is not how it was supposed to be. This is what came from Adam's fall, and what's going to become true and more true in the future is going to be the end of that age and the arrival of the new age that Jesus ushered in and that His resurrection was the first fruits of. And so I will never shy away from saying death is wicked. I don't want this wicked thief to come. I don't want to be broken away from my partner and friend Melissa. I don't want my daughters and my son to not have a dad there to walk them down the aisle or to celebrate with my kid when he hits a home run or to give him a big hug and noogie and maybe slap him upside the head if he thinks the strikeout was too big of a deal. Let it go, man. I don't want those things to happen. And yet, passing through this final vale of tears, it need not scare us who are in Christ because it will be the last enemy and then there will be no more tears.

Jim Daly: I love it. Ben Sasse, you're a good friend. I wish I could have spent more time with you.

Ben Sasse: You as well, Jim. And we will again, whether this side or the other side of Jordan.

Jim Daly: So appreciate everything you've done for the country and the way you're modeling how a Christian behaves with a lot of headwind and your faith in Christ is a great example. I hope literally thousands of people of the 100 or 200,000 will say it was that show with Ben Sasse that brought me to Christ. Thank you.

Ben Sasse: Thank you, brother.

Jim Daly: Ben Sasse has so many profound things to say as he is reflecting on his life and what matters most. I hope you were leaning in like I was to really take it all in and consider how you're living your life, hopefully honoring God in all that you do. You heard him talking about worshipping God and loving his family as both a husband and a father. He also talked about ordering our loves properly.

In the New Testament, Jesus said to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die." That time is coming for each of us to finish this life at some point. We all have that death sentence. We don't know when it'll happen, but God does, and then comes eternity. What happens in eternity depends on our relationship with Jesus in this life.

If you know Him, you'll spend eternity in heaven. If you don't know Him, I want to invite you right now to put your trust in Him. You can become a Christian. You can decide to follow the things that Jesus taught and ask Him to save you. We have a free online booklet called "Coming Home" that will tell you the process to be saved in Christ. We also have a special free audio collection, "Remembering the Hope of Heaven," featuring Lee Strobel, Pastor John Burke, Randy Alcorn, and so many others with inspiring thoughts about what heaven will be like.

Share it with a friend and let others know about the interesting discussion we're having here on ReFOCUS. Thanks for listening to ReFOCUS with Jim Daly. Like, listen, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Next time on ReFOCUS, a dramatic testimony from Seeton Lee of escaping from the Killing Fields of Cambodia, coming to Christ, and sharing the Gospel with his former persecutors and family killers.

Seeton Lee: So I walk toward her, trembling, kneel down and she was, she's a dead meat. She, she knew who I was and nobody the rest of them, they don't know what's going on. So I say, "My dear sister, God has forgiven me. Therefore He asks me to forgive you."

John Fuller: This is John Fuller, and Father's Day is a time to honor those men who lead their families with courage. On the new seasonal podcast from Focus on the Family, Legacy of Courage, we uplift dads with real stories sharing humor, tender moments, and lessons that'll stay with you. Hearing from first-time dads to adoptive dads to seasoned pros, you'll be reminded about the power of a father rooted in God's strength and why showing up matters. You'll find it at celebratingfathers.com.