I love everything about Christ-centered weddings. I love the love songs, the festive decorations, the contagious smiles, the time-honored traditions. I love the theology that marriage pictures and the miracle God performs by joining a man and a woman together as one. And I hate divorce. I hate all the damage it leaves in its wake. I hate how sin attacks what God has blessed and all that Satan does to undermine these vows.

So, when my wife and I start premarital counseling with a couple, I tell them that we will seem like good cop and bad cop. My wife openly expresses her joy to the engaged couple, while I keep a poker face over the six meetings, deliberately poking holes to see if their relationship is sufficiently built on the solid foundation of Christ.

Too often, couples stumble into marriage blinded to the problems in front of them because they look at their relationship through the distortion of rose-colored glasses. Then, shortly after the honeymoon (if it takes that long), the glasses fall off, and the couple becomes overwhelmed by what feel like painful, “irreconcilable” issues. Equally sad and tragic are the marriages that make it through earlier years only to yield to feelings of loneliness, resentment, or indifference, and then the couple gives up on the marriage in their later years.

I don’t know where you are relationally, but I’m writing to encourage couples married or about to be: if you and your spouse love Christ, your marriage can survive and thrive. So, for the purpose of thriving in your covenant, I’ll share three common challenges that all marriages between sinners face, holding up Christ as the only reliable solution for each.

1. Remember who the real enemy is.

If your marriage often feels more like a battleground than a bed of roses, you’re not crazy. In the Christian movie War Room, an elderly wise patron, Ms. Clara, tells a young wife struggling in her marriage, “You’re fighting the wrong enemy.” Oh, if every Christian couple took full heed of this danger! Satan studied Adam, and developed a specific and tailored plan — and what did he do? He went after Adam’s bride. He deceived Eve in his successful attack on their union (Genesis 3:1–6; Revelation 12:9). The Bible warns us that his war plan against marriage has not changed.

Before the apostle Paul tells Christian husbands and wives what he expects of them in Ephesians 5, he writes three whole chapters to ground us in the abundant grace that is ours in Christ. That grace is the means by which couples can make our marriages reflect Christ and his love for the church (Ephesians 5:22–31). Without regularly walking in the gospel of Ephesians 1–3 together, marriage easily becomes marred in fights centered around felt needs and grievances.

Then, in Ephesians 6, Paul tells believers why we need all the blessings from chapters 1–3: Satan and his horde of demons are still waging war against us (Ephesians 6:10–12), just as they did against Adam and Eve. You are at war with Satan, and your marriage is the battleground.

What’s the prescription? Remember that your spouse is not your enemy. How often do we turn our weapons against each other and unleash our anger there? That’s how Satan slowly builds a beachhead to launch his attacks against marriage (Ephesians 4:26–27). Our Lord taught us that a house divided against itself can’t stand. Satan’s strategy is to use friendly fire — spouses attacking each other — to defeat our marriages.

It’s imperative, then, for couples to learn how to engage in spiritual (not spousal) warfare. And spiritual wars can be won only with spiritual weapons. So, put on the whole armor of God, all the gracious gifts God has given you in Christ. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7).

2. Reject any voices who reject God.

Satan spoke through the serpent to confront Eve with a choice: believe what God had said, or accept what she was hearing now. She chose to believe the serpent’s lie. She believed that she could step out from God’s authority and decide for herself what was right and wrong. As Satan led, Eve followed, and as Eve led, Adam followed. The order of creation was turned upside down, with God at the bottom. And lest we think we would have fared better, this is always how sin works in a marriage — yes, even our sin.

God has not called the husband to lead because he is superior to his wife (he’s not). A husband must lead because God intentionally made the man to lead and his wife to help (Genesis 2:18). God looked at that kind of marriage, and he saw that “it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Satan saw the same dynamics, and he hated them, so he came to overturn them. He sought to make the wife the head; the head, the helper; and God, the enemy. And, again, he’s whispering the same lies today. He wants women to chafe under the idea of submission and for men to run from the calling of headship.

What’s the prescription? Again, notice how Paul weaves the marriage story in Ephesians. Wives are called to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22–24), and husbands are called to sacrificially love and serve their wives the way Christ loved the church (verses 25–30). This kind of marriage is possible only when wives and husbands are filled with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18). Elsewhere, Paul adds that believers are filled with the Holy Spirit when we are filled with God’s word (Colossians 3:16).

So, regularly read God’s word, on your own and as a couple, and follow what you read by faith. And know that when you hear a voice that contradicts God’s word — in society, in your circles of relationships, in your own sinful mind — you hear the enemy’s voice (1 Timothy 4:1). Satan stirs the zeitgeist of societies to rebel against God’s ways (Ephesians 2:2–3). When I counsel struggling couples, I make sure I ask questions like these: What has your time in God’s word been like? How consistently are you attending Bible study and adult Sunday school? Not surprisingly, couples struggling in their marriages usually aren’t consistently listening by faith to the word of God.

3. Resist the urge to idolize marriage.

So far, I’ve only mentioned Eve’s failure in the fall, so let me shift to the principal one responsible for the fall: Adam. Where was he?

The indictment God raised against him was that he “listened to the voice of [his] wife” (Genesis 3:17). What could be sinful about Adam listening to his wife? We know that God gives a wife to help her husband, and he assumes the man will listen well to her counsel. The book of Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman whom a man should embrace and listen to. It climaxes with a man finding a wife whose wise words are immensely helpful to him (Proverbs 31:26). However, preferring anyone or anything to God (or against his will) is to make that person or thing an idol.

We don’t know much about the first woman, Eve, but Moses makes at least one thing about her clear: her husband delighted in her (Genesis 2:23). The serpent, then, seems to have used the man’s delight against him. Satan used her to get him to choose her over God. And if we let him, he’ll do the same in our marriages today. How often couples sin to try to get what they want from each other (James 4:1–2)! Anytime you are willing to sin to get something (or to sin because you don’t get something), you have an idol.

What’s the prescription? If you are sinning in your marriage, follow that pattern to the idol and repent of it. God blessed couples to enjoy each other in marriage, but we’re never to allow our delight in marriage to supplant our desire for God. Whether your spouse gives you much or little, true contentment will never come from him. It can’t. So, stop telling yourself that. If your spouse could satisfy your soul, why would we need the bread of life and the fountain of living water (John 6:35; 7:37–38)?

Embrace the secret to contentment (in marriage and in all of life): that you won’t find contentment in getting what your flesh wants, but in being satisfied in what God has given you in Christ (Philippians 4:12–13).

Greater Than Our Challenges

Sadly, because of sin and the consequences of sin, we’ll have to face more challenges than these in our marriages. The fall robbed us of shalom with God, with our spouse, and with the world. The hope for our marital challenges is the last and better Adam, Christ. God, who knows the end from the beginning, promised in Genesis 3:15 that he would send another man who would subdue the serpent and restore God’s righteous reign over our rebellious creation. Through his death and resurrection, that man is reconciling all things back to God. He is the hope for your marriage, and his name is Jesus.

No, he has not lifted the curse from creation yet. So, none of us has a struggle-free marriage. However, he has overcome sin and Satan for us. He is Immanuel — God with us — and he is all the grace we need to overcome the challenges common to our marriages.

What young men will be, in all probability, depends on what they are now. Young men seem to forget this.

I am a pastor, and my occupational duty requires me to read. So for the past 35 years, I have acquired literally tons of books. My office, my house, and even my bedroom are all inundated with books. Some I remember buying, and some I remember receiving as gifts. I don’t remember whether I received or bought J.C. Ryle’s Thoughts for Young Men, but I do know this: God used it to permanently change me.

I have read and reread this book over and over and over again. I have shared it over and over and over again. I love the whole book, but particularly a section titled “How Young Men Turn Out Depends Largely on What They are Now.” As a twentysomething who passionately desired to know and please God, what I read changed me.

Another reason I want to encourage you is this: what young men will be, in all probability, depends on what they are now. Young men seem to forget this. . . . Why do I say all this? I say it because habits are hard to break. . . . Habits have long roots. If sin is allowed to make its home in your heart, it will not be evicted at your command. Habit becomes second nature; and its chains are like “a threefold cord (which) is not quickly broken.” . . . Habits, like trees, are strengthened by age. A child can bend an oak when it is still a young sapling; but a hundred men cannot root it up when it is a full-grown tree. . . . Habits of good or habits of evil are growing stronger in your heart each day. Every day you are either getting nearer to God, or further away. Every year that you continue to be unrepentant, the wall of division between you and heaven becomes higher and thicker; the gulf to be crossed becomes deeper and broader. Be afraid of the hardening effect of lingering in sin day after day! Now is the time to do something about it. (Thoughts for Young Men, 15, 17–18)

Through Ryle’s pen, God inflamed two desires in me that grew into holy habits in my Christian walk — one desire was for a healthy fear of my sin, and the other was a longing to please God.

Flee Sinful Habits

Life is directional, and walking the wrong way leads to deeper and deeper entanglements into sin. Like a child fearful of getting lost, I feared yanking my hand away from my Father’s and drifting away from him into sin. God motivated me through Ryle’s admonition to develop the habits of shunning folly and seeking wisdom, which come from fearing God.

“Holy habits are means of grace that fan the flame of your love for God and keep his love for you before your eyes.”

By the grace of God, I developed real transparent relationships and friendships where accountability was expected and practiced. God stirred my heart to flee from my former sinful habits rather than to compromise with them. He led me to seek, find, and listen to counsel from older and wise believers.

If you are an older man or woman reading this, I encourage you to seek out young men and women and teach them this truth. The eternal well-being of our souls depends on fighting sin by God’s grace rather than yielding to it and assuming that with God there is sin-permitting grace (Romans 6:1–2; 1 Thessalonians 4:1–8). Satan hisses his lie in every young believer’s ear that God’s laws are too harsh and sin is too delightful to reject. Tell them the truth! Sin enslaves and leads to death, but knowing God through Christ will immeasurably satisfy us more than any worldly gain can (Philippians 3:8). Therefore, no one can be too radical in putting to death habits that lead to sin (Matthew 5:29–30; Colossians 3:5).

Build Holy Habits

God also used Ryle to teach me the sanctifying power of holy habits. We experience this dynamic in all our relationships. We grow closer to someone or move further away from them depending on the habits we practice. Holy habits are means of grace that fan the flame of your love for God and keep his love for you before your eyes. Simply put, God gave me a passionate desire to experience him through his sanctifying means of grace.

I developed a habit of praying as soon as I woke up each morning. I committed to reading the Bible no matter how busy my schedule became. So when big school projects were due, midterms came around, and finals arrived, you’d still find me in the library at lunchtime, reading my Bible. As weeks turned into months, and months into years, and now years into decades, my commitments turned into lifelong habits. Those holy habits enabled me, through God’s grace, to grow in the knowledge of my God and his love for me.

“I marvel at how easily Christians neglect making fellowship a pillar habit in their lives.”

In addition to Sunday-morning worship, I also committed to attending Sunday school and a midweek Bible study. There I learned how to study my Bible. I learned theology. I learned key books of the Bible. I learned practical theologies, like how to share the gospel and how to disciple or lead a small group. I marvel at how easily Christians neglect making fellowship a pillar habit in their lives.

Consider 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace.” On the one hand, Paul commands Timothy as a young man to flee youthful passion and to pursue godly virtues. And then he encourages him not to do that alone, but to do so “along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.” You see the point. To fail to make fellowship with godly believers an uncompromising habit is to forfeit a powerful means of grace that will help you fight against sin and pursue godliness. Young readers, I pray that you will be wise and listen as I add my testimony to Ryle’s exhortation.

Learn from a Dead Man

What I am saying about these habits isn’t a profound insight. Why would we expect the means of grace that sanctify us to be too complicated for a babe in Christ to understand and apply? God deals with us as his children and feeds us accordingly so that we can grow. What Ryle encourages his young readers to do is what the Scripture says the earliest believers did, devoting “themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

When I first read his life-changing book, it had already been well over a hundred years since Ryle had gone to be with the Lord. That didn’t hinder God from using his keenly crafted words to disciple this newly saved urban kid sitting in secular classrooms at UCLA. If Christ tarries another hundred years, I’m sure there will be countless more young Bobby Scotts out there who, as young believers, need to be confronted and exhorted. I pray that you and I will be faithful to join him in calling young men to these holy habits.

We’ve all seen the tragic headlines. We’ve all been shocked by the news of yet another once-revered pastor tarnishing the name of Christ and disqualifying himself from the ministry. Not long ago, one such Christian leader famously preached, “Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay” — all while he was living in gross sin. How ironic that his own life proved his quote to be true.

I recently addressed a group of pastors regarding the theme of finishing strong, and I shared with them a quote from Donald Whitney’s now-classic sermon “The Almost Inevitable Ruin of Every Minister . . . and How to Avoid It.” Whitney preached,

Almost everyone knows someone who used to be in the ministry. Almost everyone knows someone who shouldn’t be in the ministry. And every minister knows another minister — if not several — he does not want to be like. . . . So I think it’s important to address the subject of the almost inevitable ruin of every minister . . . and how to avoid it.

Once, when a Southern Baptist denominational executive was on the Midwestern Seminary campus in the late 1990s, he asserted that statistics show that for every twenty men who enter the ministry, by the time those men reach age sixty-five, only one will still be in the ministry.

Paul rightly admonishes us, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

How the Mighty Have Fallen

We easily fail to take heed. Isn’t that why Samson, the strong man, fell? Before his infamous defeat at the hands of his enemies, he tested God’s grace by sleeping with three different women who were from his enemy, the Philistines (Judges 14:1–20; 15:11–20; 16:1–3).

And didn’t David, Israel’s greatest king, similarly sin? While the Lord multiplied David’s victories in battle (2 Samuel 5:10; 6:2), David ignored God’s admonition and multiplied wives to himself (Deuteronomy 17:17). And when kings and soldiers all went out to battle (2 Samuel 11:1), the emboldened king stayed home, saw another man’s wife bathing, and decided to take her (2 Samuel 11:2–5).

And what about Solomon, to whom God appeared not once, but twice (1 Kings 3:5; 9:2)? God gave him unmatched wisdom and wealth (1 Kings 3:1–15). How did Solomon respond? Instead of trusting God, he pursued political marriages to protect his kingdom and flagrantly married a thousand women. And what happened? When he was old, he yielded to his pagan wives and turned from God. He bowed in idolatry to worship their idols (1 Kings 11:3–10).

“The strongest man in the Bible and its greatest and wisest kings scandalously fell because of their pride.”

If the strongest of men and the greatest and wisest of kings scandalously fell because of their pride, what lesson does that teach us? We can all scandalously fall too. Rightly did John Owen say, “He who walketh humbly walketh safely.”

What can we do to guard ourselves against falling? We can start by listening to our Lord Jesus and praying the prayer he taught us to pray. We can earnestly plead with the Father to “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13).

Indispensable Means of Grace

Prayer is not a convenient luxury that we can casually employ when we feel like it. We are at war, and war demands spiritual countermeasures to protect ourselves against spiritual attacks (Ephesians 6:10–12), the world’s enticements (1 John 2:15–17), and the corruptibility of our own flesh (Colossians 3:5). Prayer and praying correctly is, therefore, an indispensable means of grace in our daily war.

But to heed Jesus’s instructions, we first need to understand them and apply them correctly. In calling us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” Jesus is not suggesting that the Father never tests believers (Genesis 22:1), and neither is he suggesting that the Father himself tempts us to sin (James 1:13). Rather, Jesus’s instruction should be understood as a general appeal for the Father’s protection. In praying, “Lead us not into temptation,” we are asking the Father to guard our faith so we don’t fall before the deceitfulness of sin.

“I can connect the times when I have struggled and strayed to dry spiritual seasons of weak or absent prayer.”

I’ve followed Jesus now for almost forty years, and without fail, I can connect the times when I have struggled and strayed to dry spiritual seasons of weak or absent prayer. Dear saints, let’s regularly pray, “Father, protect us from temptation.”

Formidable Foe

Jesus makes it clear that we are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against a powerful and evil spiritual enemy. When Jesus teaches us to pray, “and deliver us from evil,” he is likely referring to Satan in particular. Most English translations either mark that in a footnote or translate Jesus’s words with the definite article: “and deliver us from the evil one.”

This title for Satan is fitting because he is, in the fullest sense, the personification of evil. He is our great enemy. He wants nothing less than to destroy us — our unity, our ministries, our testimonies. The Bible chronicles his schemes so that we will be aware of his temptations. To name but a few, he tempts us

to lie to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3),
to engage in sexual sin (1 Corinthians 7:5),
to give up on our ministry goals (1 Thessalonians 2:18),
to be prideful in ministry (1 Timothy 3:6),
to turn from God and curse him in suffering (Job 1–2),
to let wolves infiltrate our church leadership (2 Corinthians 11:13–15), and
to believe and teach false gospels that damn souls (2 Corinthians 11:3).

Satan’s sword is covered with the blood of our faithful martyred brothers and sisters. He parades a horde of others who, through their fear of man over God, have apostatized from Christ. They have become his henchmen (John 8:44), enemies of the cross. Theirs will be a just eternal judgment when Jesus returns and destroys all of his enemies (2 Thessalonians 1:4–10).

More Powerful Savior

When Israel cried out for help against the Egyptians, God sent Moses to deliver them. When they needed to defeat their enemies in the land, God gave them Joshua. When they cried out for help against their enemies in Canaan, God raised up judges to save them. When they needed to secure the land, God gave them David. But God has given us a greater deliverer than Moses, Joshua, the judges, or David. God has sent us his only begotten Son — Jesus. And Jesus came “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8; Acts 10:38).

However strong your temptations, Jesus can set you free if you abide in him (John 8:31–32). Praying connects us to our Lord, and he empowers us to overcome our besetting sins. With Christ, we can do everything that he wants us to do (Philippians 4:13). We can bear holy fruit in keeping with the Spirit (John 15:5).

Well did Martin Luther lead us to sing:

Did we in our own strength confide,     Our striving would be losing,Were not the right Man on our side,     The Man of God’s own choosing.You ask who that may be?     Christ Jesus, it is he;Lord Sabaoth his name,     From age to age the same;And he must win the battle.

God hears our cries for help. He answers our humble acknowledgments that we need him to win our battles, and he answers by giving us Jesus. He is our defense (1 John 2:1).

So before you turn to your own strength and resources, before you give up your fight, and before you yield to the weight of temptation and sin, pray. Pray more fervently. Pray more accurately. Pray with more faith. But by all means, pray, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” and trust that our God will answer you with favor.

The ancient Hebrew songwriter of Psalm 116 sings with joy,

I love the Lord, because he has heard         my voice and my pleas for mercy. . . .The snares of death encompassed me;         the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;         I suffered distress and anguish.Then I called on the name of the Lord:          “O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!”Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;         our God is merciful. . . .For you have delivered my soul from death,         my eyes from tears,         my feet from stumbling. (Psalm 116:1–8)

This is the collective testimony of God’s people — he loves us, and we love him. And because he loves us, our Savior has promised that when we pray for anything according to his will, he will answer us (John 14:13–14).

In two previous articles, I wrote about how I prayed for my daughter’s life when she was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer and how Jesus answered my prayer. In nothing short of a miracle, Jesus healed her and delivered me and my wife from inconsolable sorrows (Philippians 2:27). God is good, and he is merciful, and, yes, he hears our cries for help.

Then March of this year happened. My sister was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer. My family was still grieving her 40-year-old son who, just months earlier, died tragically and unexpectedly from a heart attack. The news of my sister’s cancer emotionally overwhelmed us. We prayed for a miracle.

Trusting in her Lord with whether she lived or died, my sister breathed her last breath on June 3rd. My heart is broken, and I’m still grieving. There have been days when I didn’t think I would be able to get out of bed. Everything is harder. Writing an article about death is harder.

“God hears the prayers of the righteous — and he is still righteous and good when he answers no.”

After praying with me for my sister’s life and then mourning with me over her death, Desiring God gave me an opportunity to share from our mourning. So I want to try to comfort others with the comfort of God that I am seeking. I want to help Christians see how enduring suffering rests on an important truth. Our comfort comes from embracing the truth that God hears the prayers of the righteous — and that he is still righteous and good when he answers no.

What We Don’t Understand Yet

The Bible teaches that when God’s children are in despair, he wants us to pray, knowing that he will answer (1 Peter 5:7). But the Bible doesn’t promise to limit the infinite answers of God to our finite understandings.

While God’s answers are always consistent with who he is (good, all-wise, righteous, and merciful), his thoughts and ways are incalculably higher than ours. So sometimes when we pray for God to keep us from the sorrows that fill this broken world, his perfect answer will be, “No, my grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Consider the agony of seeing your miraculously born, perfectly just, and sinless son hanging from a wickedly unjust, cruel Roman cross. Mary didn’t knowingly pray for that. Wasn’t the horror of the cross crushing to her?

Yet God ordained the cross, and for the joy set before him, Jesus willingly submitted to the Father and endured it. Before we see him on the cross, we see him alone in the garden. And there, we see him in agony, trembling and pleading with his Father three times to take his cup of wrath away (Matthew 26:39–44). Yes, God is good, and whenever he allows suffering, he has good purposes behind it, even when we don’t understand (Genesis 50:20). Jesus knew that and surrendered to his Father’s perfect will and drank the full cup of God’s wrath.

He endured the greatest suffering of all, and by doing so, brought about the greatest good of all, redemption — the overthrow of death, sin, and all that is evil.

The Real Problem with Death

When we pray for our dying loved ones, what are we really asking for?

Like Hezekiah, are we asking God to give them more years (2 Kings 20:1, 5–6)? God heard his prayers and saw his tears and extended his life by fifteen years. When we pray, and our loved ones are with us for another day, or month, or year, we should give thanks through tears. I treasured the three months that God gave us with my sister. She was able to say her final goodbyes, see her grandchildren, and express her unwavering faith in Jesus. She glorified God in her death (Philippians 1:20).

However, we should also remember eternity in our prayers. In our pleading with God, we should first pray for our loved one’s salvation — that whether they live or die, they make their calling and election sure. For even if God extends their lives, what are years in light of eternity? All our lives are just a vapor. The real problem with death isn’t when we die. The real problem is that we will die. The sage of Ecclesiastes bluntly writes, “No man has power to retain the spirit, or power over the day of death” (Ecclesiastes 8:8).

Jesus came for that reason. He came to abolish death and bring life and immortality to light (2 Timothy 1:10). Because the wages of sin is death, the Son of God became man, so that he could live a sinless life and then give that life as the payment for our sin (1 Peter 3:18).

Prayer for Your Mourning

Jesus’s resurrection validated his victory and authority over death. He is the resurrection and the life. Our loved ones who die in Christ go directly into his presence. We can comfort ourselves with that truth. No one has to mourn without hope when their loved ones die in Christ (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14). In the end, Christ will remove death from creation when he makes a new heaven and a new earth (1 Corinthians 15:26; Revelation 21:4). Until then, we do deeply mourn (Philippians 2:27), but because of Christ we have a balm to heal our broken hearts.

In a confession of desperation, when facing an insurmountable enemy, Judah’s King Jehoshaphat cried out to the Lord, “We are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you” (2 Chronicles 20:12). May I encourage you to make this your prayer as you mourn?

“You won’t always understand why you suffer, but you must believe that God does.”

Perhaps you have prayed and asked God to heal your loved one. Instead, you’ve been struck like Job by the cruelty of our mortal enemy — death (Job 1:4–5, 18–19). Your songs aren’t songs of joy. They are laments from a heart that is reeling from the jarring pain that comes with the death of a spouse, a child, a sibling, a best friend, or someone whom you’ve deeply loved. You won’t always understand why you suffer, but you must believe that God does. You can, therefore, pray and ask God to comfort you, knowing that he is good even when he ordains that you suffer.

How I Comfort My Soul

As you mourn, perhaps your prayer can sound like this:

Jesus, I believe that you love me. You went to the cross for me and saved me. Fill my heart with the light of your love when the darkness of sorrow encompasses me.

Jesus, you are the infinite, all-powerful Son of God, and you became man so that you could be my sympathetic High Priest, who feels all my weaknesses and pains (Hebrews 4:15). Help me to mourn. You know the pain of death. You wept over your friend Lazarus, and you mourned with his sisters. Remind me that you are bottling up every tear that falls from my eyes (Psalm 56:8).

Jesus, you are not indifferent to death nor to my struggle with it. You hate death (John 11:33; Ezekiel 18:32) and came to put death to death. When you rose from the dead, you conquered death, and you shared your victory over death with all who believe in you. Comfort me with the reality that you are the resurrection and the life, and because of this, my believing loved one has eternal life in your presence.

Lord, you appoint the day when everyone dies and stands before you in judgment (Hebrews 9:27). I can’t put people into heaven or hell. You are the judge of all the earth, and you always do what is right even when I can’t comprehend it (Genesis 18:25). You mourned over an unbelieving Israel (Matthew 23:37). Help me to know that you are good even when I mourn the death of unbelieving loved ones.

Father, all good gifts come from you. Through my tears, I thank you for giving me my loved one, and for the time that you gave me as I mourn the years that I won’t have.

This is how I am comforting my soul. I thank God for making my sister to be our family evangelist. She brought me to church when I was twenty. I heard the gospel, and God saved me. I thank God for giving her eternal life so that she never saw death (John 8:51). When she breathed her last breath here, she opened her eyes looking into the radiance of the glory that shines from his face.

And I thank God for his word that teaches all of us that Jesus is the ultimate gift, and God is enough to satisfy our souls (Psalms 73:25–26). Until Christ comes or brings us home, I pray that God will comfort our hearts with these precious truths so that we can comfort others who are mourning.

Death is our mortal enemy — an enemy that Jesus defanged (Hebrews 2:14–15), and one day will utterly destroy (Revelation 21:4). He revealed his omnipotent power over death by raising people from the dead (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:33–34). Through his own resurrection, he revealed that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28:16). D-Day over death for all who believe has arrived (2 Timothy 1:10), and V-Day’s future has been secured (1 Corinthians 15:25–26).

How then should we pray for God to heal our dying loved ones? On the one hand, until Jesus returns, death is an inescapable reality for everyone (Hebrews 9:27). So praying for healing isn’t always God’s will. In the case of a dying great-grandmother, for example, we may be more in line with God’s will not by praying for healing, but by praying for her to finish well (Philippians 1:23), trusting that because her Savior has conquered death for her, she will never see it, not even for a second (John 8:51).

On the other hand, because Jesus robbed death of its life-stealing power by bearing the full wrath of God for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), we sometimes should pray that he would snatch our loved ones from the grasp of death. We can pray for miracles, asking him to spare us the sorrow upon sorrow that comes from seemingly untimely deaths (Philippians 2:27), even as we trust him for his answer, whatever it might be.

‘She Can’t Breathe’

In a recent article, I shared how God humbled me and taught me to trust him through my daughter’s battle with cancer when she was 8 years old. Despite our prayers for God to spare her life, she drifted closer and closer to death’s door. The new “promising” experimental treatment we authorized further robbed us of hope when it gave her a life-threatening side effect called VOD of the liver.

The worst part was how she was laboring to breathe. That’s the final line to cross before death, isn’t it — no longer being able to breathe the breath of life (Genesis 2:7; 3:19)? Our doctor told us that if she continued to struggle, they would have to put her on a ventilator. They would sedate her and strap her down before intubation so that she could not pull out the ventilator. Taking that step could mean that my wife and I would never speak with our daughter again.

Then it happened. It was two o’clock in the morning when the pediatrics ICU doctor woke me up. “We have to put your daughter on a ventilator right now. She can’t breathe, and her carbon-dioxide level is past the emergency benchmark.” Everyone had been dreading this moment, but here it was. Desperate, I called my wife so she could rush to the hospital, perhaps in time to speak one last time with her baby, but she didn’t pick up the phone. My daughter was dying, and the person she loved more than anyone on earth wouldn’t be there to hold her and say goodbye. I was broken.

Waiting and Praying

Then, like the voice of an angel, the nurse whispered to me, “Dad, if you are not comfortable, they can’t make you do this.” And so, when our doctor returned with the ventilator, I told her I wanted to wait and pray. The doctor’s countenance morphed. Her voice steeled. She said that if they didn’t intubate my daughter right then, she could go into cardiac arrest. The doctor warned me repeatedly, but each time I firmly told her I wanted to pray and wait. I’m no doctor, and as a rule, I hear and receive doctors’ recommendations. But in this moment, I couldn’t shake the sense that God wanted me to pray and wait.

“God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him.”

Eventually, everyone left the room, and I dropped to my knees. “God, you said if we ask you for a fish, you won’t give us a serpent. If we ask you for bread, you won’t give us a stone. God, I am asking you to give me my daughter’s life.” I prayed through the night. Each hour I prayed, my daughter’s carbon-dioxide levels dramatically improved, and her breathing grew stronger. In the morning, her doctor came into the room and removed the order for the ventilator, and the following week, he let her come home for a weeklong visit before her second round of chemotherapy.

Our daughter, who had been at death’s door only a few days before, was home with no detectable cancer to be found in her body. God and God alone did that.

Amazing Providence

My daughter was cancer-free, but she was far from being out of danger. Because the first round of chemotherapy had almost killed her, her bone-marrow specialist wanted her to skip the final two rounds and go straight to receiving a bone-marrow transplant. Our oncologist disagreed and told us he believed bone-marrow transplants work best when even the imperceptible levels of cancer are reduced by the final rounds of chemotherapy.

Because they couldn’t agree, they left the decision with us, giving us the weekend to decide whether to continue with two more rounds of chemo or go straight to a transplant. So my wife and I went away for a night to pray and seek wisdom from a multitude of counselors. We called friends with medical backgrounds, although we hadn’t spoken to some of them in over twenty years. And how God providentially answered our prayers seemed even more amazing than how he miraculously strengthened my daughter’s breathing.

Oncology Expert

We called Judy, who used to attend a UCLA Bible study with me. I had heard that she worked as an oncology nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She told me that the doctor who trained our oncologist was actually at her hospital. Then she said, “You won’t believe this, but the doctor who wrote the national experimental protocol that your daughter is on just walked past me, and I’ll check with her!” Both doctors agreed that under our circumstances, we could go straight to the bone-marrow transplant and skip the final two rounds of chemotherapy.

Bone-Marrow Expert

Then my wife, who years ago had spent a year in medical school, called a former classmate, Larry, who suggested that we reach out to the UCLA bone-marrow transplant department. When we pulled up their webpage, my wife recognized a high-school classmate, LaVette, and I recognized one of the doctors, Ted Moore, with whom I had attended a UCLA Bible study. We called the number listed, and my wife’s high-school friend picked up. She said she had never answered that phone but had just so happened to be walking past it when it rang. Dr. Moore was in a meeting, but she would have him call us back as soon as he was free. Within the hour, I answered the phone to “Hey, Bobby. It’s Ted.” The unassuming UCLA student I knew from sixteen years ago had become Dr. Theodore Moore, a renowned expert in bone-marrow transplants. With complete confidence, he counseled us to go straight to the transplant.

VOD Expert

Finally, we called Dr. John Vierling, a liver specialist. My wife and I had met him years ago when her cousin asked my wife to sing at the funeral for Dr. Vierling’s son. Our concern was whether having a history of VOD would make the risk of undergoing a bone-marrow transplant too great for our daughter, because a major risk from these transplants is contracting VOD. As God would have it, Dr. Vierling was an expert on VOD, and he counseled us that we could safely proceed with the transplant.

Through the unveiling of his amazing providence, God had answered our prayer. We authorized our daughter to undergo a bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope eighteen years ago. Eighteen years later, she is a walking cancer-free miracle of God.

He Holds Every Breath

I know my daughter’s story is just one among many stories that end so differently. We journeyed through our trial with four other families — three children my daughter’s age and one adult, all of whom had similar types of cancer. We prayed for each of them, but none of them survived. God does not answer every prayer for healing. So, how might he have us pray when our loved ones need a miracle?

“Our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus.”

First, armed with the trust that God sovereignly ordains our prayers as a means to accomplish his ends, we freely pray for miracles, as Elijah did (James 5:17–18). Honestly, before God healed my daughter, I would pray for God to heal others, but I didn’t necessarily expect to see a miracle. For that, I repent. God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him, including healing our loved ones on their deathbeds.

At the same time, however, we pray with the kind of faith that does not rest on God saying yes to our prayers (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). By his grace, we can accept his answer when it’s no, as David did (2 Samuel 12:16–23), and we can submit to his will and worship him when we can’t understand his answer, as Job did (Job 1:21; 42:1–3).

Christians also embrace the reality that, until Jesus returns, everyone we love will die, and our lives are but a vapor in light of eternity, whether we die at age 10 or 100. So our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus, and that he would grant our unbelieving loved ones repentance and faith toward Jesus. Our first prayer for our daughter was for her soul’s salvation.

A wise friend reminded me, when we were enduring our trial, that God holds the pen that is writing our story. Everything God writes is good: in the end, we will see his story as good, and in the present, we believe it to be for our good. So yes, pray for a miracle, and trust that God holds your loved one’s next and last breaths.

Jesus saved me thirty-seven years ago. A janitor at my college used his breaks to preach the gospel. I eventually repented and believed, and Jesus rescued me from the tragedy of not knowing God.

God gave me a ravishing hunger to know him. So I read and reread my Bible, I prayed, and I prayed more, and I plunged headfirst into the church. As I grew, I was exposed to Reformed teaching about the sovereignty of God and learned that he works his purposes in my life and in all things for his glory and for the good of those who love him. Pursuing God became the passion of my life.

I spent most of my time in college in campus ministry, and then pursued training in seminary. When I finished, God blessed me with a wonderful wife. Then he called me to pastor a church one city block north of the epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. God was moving. And while he was rescuing sinners and maturing them as his followers, he also was growing my family with children, one every two years until we had six.

I could see God sovereignly working in me and through me. My life could not have been happier. But God wanted to deepen my relationship with him, so he brought suffering.

Our Girl Has Cancer

One day my 8-year-old daughter came home from a friend’s sleepover with a stiff neck. The problem progressively grew worse over three weeks, and each week we took her to the doctor, but nothing took her pain away. Then one evening my wife came home without her.

Our daughter had said she wasn’t feeling well during a visit to Grandma’s house, so my wife let her stay there overnight. My concern grew. I had prayed earlier that day, “God, please show us what’s wrong with our daughter.” God answered my prayer. Our phone rang at two o’clock in the morning. It was Grandma. She said our daughter had tried to go to the bathroom but couldn’t stand up. So we rushed her to the emergency room, and I carried her in my arms into the hospital.

My wife and I waited for hours in a cold, dim room. Then our doctor came and told us that our daughter had cancer. After they ran more tests the next day, her oncologist told us that she had a potentially terminal form of cancer. He said our lives might not ever be the same. Because of our daughter’s age, my wife and I alternated days and nights living in the pediatric ICU and isolation rooms while my daughter underwent treatment.

ICU and Unanswered Prayer

Every day I saw children suffering excruciating pain, and at night I heard their unanswered cries for help. My wife and I bonded with and ministered to four other families who were hoping against hope that their loved ones would be healed. We prayed for each of them, and four times God said no. The harsh reality that death doesn’t spare beautiful bald-headed little girls crashed down upon us. I felt like I was living in a nightmare, and I was terrified of how it might end.

I cried every day, but not in front of anyone — not in front of my wife, not in front of my daughter. I didn’t want to discourage anyone from clinging to hope.

When our doctors told us they had done all that they could, but our daughter’s condition continued to get worse, I called my mom. My parents lived in Virginia. I told her that she and my dad should come soon because it didn’t appear that our little girl had much more time left. As I spoke with my mom, standing in a hospital overpass, I broke down and wept uncontrollably.

Then I had a conversation with my daughter that I pray you will never have to have with yours. I told her, “Honey, you might die soon and go to see Jesus, so make sure you are trusting in him.”

Not My Will

The excruciating pain I felt drove me closer and closer to God. I prayed more fervently than I have ever prayed. One day I was convicted that I didn’t pray like my Lord, who in his passion prayed three times in the garden of Gethsemane. And each time he surrendered to the Father, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:32–42).

“God pried my hand open so that I would release my daughter into his infinitely stronger and loving hands.”

As God convicted me, a massive struggle began in my heart. I found myself refusing to pray for anything but my will, which was for God to heal my daughter. So with his fatherly hand, God pried my hand open so that I would release my daughter into his infinitely stronger and loving hands. In seminary, I was taught that when you see two IV stands during hospital visits, it normally indicates that the person is very sick. My daughter had three and an additional direct line into her arm.

To remove the excessive fluids in her body, they had to perform a procedure that required me to hold my daughter down. As I did, she looked at me and screamed, “Daddy, help me! Daddy, help me!” I held on until the doctors were done. Then I staggered into the hallway and surrendered my daughter to God. I wrestled with God and he won.

With tears streaming down my face, I prayed, “Not my will, but your will, be done. She was always yours and never mine. You always loved her more and are her best protector.”

God Does All He Pleases

In the end, God taught me by experience what he had taught me theologically a long time before. God always does what he pleases, and what he pleases is best.

“God always does what he pleases, and what he pleases is best.”

Space won’t permit me to share how God miraculously healed my daughter. What God did was so amazing that if Hollywood made our story into a movie, viewers would call it cheesy and unrealistic. People prayed for us from all over the world and rejoiced with us when my daughter walked out of the hospital cancer free (2 Corinthians 1:10–11). My God-fearing wife says if she could, she would choose to go through this all over again because of what she learned about God. I learned the peace and joy that comes from knowing that God is good even when we suffer — that it is good that he always does as he pleases.

In April of this year, God gave me the pleasure of walking my now-grown miracle down the aisle to give her away a second time, this time in marriage.

God Shouts in Our Pain

C.S. Lewis once wrote of suffering in The Problem of Pain, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (91). God directed his megaphone at me seventeen years ago, and nothing I’ve experienced has so profoundly affected my life and ministry.

Through suffering, God teaches us to be persistent in prayer. He reveals to us that he is way too big for our finite minds to comprehend, and yet his mercies are far too great for him not to hear our cries for help. He invites us to wrestle with him because he wants us to know that the outcome he brings is best. We can rest then, knowing that he has heard, that he cares, and that he will use his answer for our ultimate good and his glory, even if he doesn’t remove the trial but answers instead, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

This article would be misleading if I didn’t confess that as a husband, a father, and a pastor, I still waver in the face of suffering. But I am so thankful that God reteaches me from his word, his past work in my life, and the testimonies of the saints, that what he ordains is best.

In fact, I can hear Mother Simmons now, a dear saint in our church who has suffered as much like Job as anyone I know. I can hear her say, “Pastor, where God puts a period, we can’t change it to a comma,” and then quote, “God is good all the time, and all the time, God is good.” Yes, all the time — even during our darkest trials.