Those who have a discouraging awareness of the sorrow of reaping or who are living in dread of it. Perhaps you came to Christ late in life after so much damage had already been done. Perhaps you came to Christ early but spent many years in apathy or disobedience. You need to know that God’s grace is sufficient to redeem your failures. Because of his grace, none of us experience all the reaping we could. Because of his grace, none of us have to fear even  a moment of this life or the life to come. Yes, there may still be consequences for your sin. But even this will not be purposeless. Even this will be found to have been used by God for his good purposes. Take heart. “Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” (Psalm 27:14).

Our only experience of aging is within this sinful world. We don’t know what aging would have looked like if this world had remained unsullied by sin. We do know, however, that aging would have still occurred. Before God created people, God created time. So God created people to exist within time and pass through it. Thus, babies would have grown to be children and children would have matured into adulthood. Perhaps the benefits that come with aging would have continued ad infinitum without any of the negative effects we see and experience. We just don’t know.
(Did you read part one of this series? You can find it here: Aging Gracefully.)
What we do know is that in a world like this one, aging has a strong association with pain and sorrow. Though aging is not without its benefits, it is known first for its sorrows. We experience this sorrow because greater age brings greater exposure to sin and its consequences. As we pass through time, we see more and more of the sin that lies within our hearts. As we accumulate years of experience, we also accumulate a deeper knowledge of the sin that inhabits other people’s hearts and comes out through their words and actions. With every day, with every year, we see and experience in greater measure the consequences of sin in the world around us—death, destruction, disaster. It adds up to a great weight of sorrow.
This sorrow is universal. Even Christians experience sorrow in aging. They, too, find that greater age brings greater sorrow. It comes in many forms. Here are five of them.
The Sorrow of Weakness
As we age, we experience the sorrow of weakness. Of course, as we first begin to age, we grow stronger. As we pass from infancy into childhood and from childhood into adulthood, our bodies grow and strengthen. From his vantage point in old age, Solomon says, “Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth” (Ecclesiastes 11:9a). He goes so far as to say, “The glory of young men is their strength” (Proverbs 20:29).
But that strength does not last long, does it? There are a few years of growth followed by many years of decline, a few years of strength followed by many years of weakness. For men and women alike, physical strength peaks in their 20s or 30s before settling into a long decline. Muscle mass, bone density, metabolism, and even the senses begin to deteriorate. Most athletes retire by 37 or 38 years old, when they still have more than half their lives to live. They simply can’t keep up anymore.
One of the most sorrowful passages in all of the Bible talks about the sorrow of weakness.
Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low—they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails… (Ecclesiastes 12:1-5a)
This is a poetic description of the body weakening and failing. Eyes dimming, hands shaking, feet shuffling, back bending, teeth missing, voice trembling. It is a pathetic contrast with the strength and vigor of youth. And the decline of our bodies only grows steeper with age. There is sorrow in seeing our bodies weaken and decay.
The Sorrow of Weariness
Added to the sorrow of weakness is the sorrow of weariness. Old Solomon knew this  sorrow as well, for in Ecclesiastes 1:8 he exclaims: “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” A long hike brings deep fatigue; a long life brings deep weariness. How could it do anything else in a world so stained by sin and its consequences? The longer we live, the more of this weariness we experience, and this weariness presses down on our bodies, our minds, our souls.
A pastor once visited our church and told of the trials he and his congregation had been enduring. Most recently and most painfully, his dear friends had lost their unborn child. They had just one opportunity to carry a child and for eight-and-a-half months, the pregnancy had progressed normally. The day was fast approaching! Then, only two weeks from full-term, the child had died and been stillborn. What tragedy. What sorrow. Standing before us that day he said, “I hate this world right now. All it has done is break my heart. None of us want to stay here. All this world does is fool you and fail you. It over-promises and under-delivers.”
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As society and the global church reaps in the coming decades the egalitarian fruit it has sown, the reality of its shortcomings will prove painful for many. Therefore, it is important that Christian parents teach their children, through godly instruction and through godly example, what Christian marriage is and what the ethos of the Christian home is to be. 

God has composed a melody for the Christian home—a sweet, pleasant, and satisfying tune, composed in such a way as to draw attention to its harmonies. God wrote the parts to this melody when he created humanity male and female, and through his Word he conducts his music in Christian homes today. God has graciously designed each household member with the desires, capacities, and opportunities needed to contribute to the choir. To join in the singing is fitting, right, and beautiful.
God’s melody for how the Christian home is to operate has in recent decades been called complementarianism. At the heart of complementarian theology has been the claim that men and women have equal and value dignity, but distinct roles in the church and home. Rooted in creation, however, the complementary vision of men and women also includes the claim that God has designed each gender with innate physical, psychological, and spiritual constitutions that are different from and yet complementary to one another. Like the various vocal parts in an acapella choir (bass, tenor, alto, etc.) coming together in one harmonious note, men and women have complementary parts to play in the melody of God’s design for the home. If one tries to imitate the sounds of the other, the harmony is ruined, and the song becomes discordant and jarring.
The complementary contributions of both men and women of the home are practically beneficial for everyone. And they create a harmony that non-complementary singing cannot replicate. Specifically, when men take godly initiative and when women are joyfully home-focused, the Christian home experiences practical benefits in ways that egalitarian home structures will never fully experience. Or, leaning again into the analogy, are men suited to sing soprano, or women bass? The musical discord resulting from egalitarianism role-swapping simply cannot practically compete with the beautifully sounding harmony of God’s complementary design.
The Deep Notes of Masculine Initiative
In the dissonant cultural imagination of modern Western society, masculine initiative-taking has seemingly hit an all-time low. From fewer men being the primary breadwinner than ever in American history to a successful dating platform where women make “the first move” to an outright rejection of men entirely by a growing movement in South Korea, today male initiative is neither widely celebrated nor expected. But God’s complementarian melody woos men to exercise masculine leadership for the benefit of the whole family. In this section, I want to highlight how the New Testament expects men to be the leaders of their families and show how this leadership may be expressed in two practical ways.
The New Testament expects men to lead their families. This is assumed when wives are called to follow their husbands’ leadership (Eph. 5:22–24, Col. 3:18; Titus 2:4–5; 1 Pet. 3:1–6), and it is also shown by the position of authority that husbands and fathers have in the household codes of Ephesians 5:22–6:9 and Colossians 3:18–4:1.[1] In Ephesians 5:22–33 particularly, the wife is called to submit to her husband’s leadership just as the church submits to Christ’s leadership. Those who would deny that men have a leadership role in their family must also deny that Christ exercises a leadership role in his relationship to the church.
But beyond the husband and wife relationship, men also have a unique responsibility in parenting. In Ephesians 6:1 children are to “obey their parents,” but just three verses later fathers specifically are commanded to discipline and instruct their children. Colossians 3:21 has the same interplay: children are commanded “obey your parents in everything,” and then in the next verse Paul particularly hones in and commands, “Fathers, do not provoke your children” (Col. 3:22). This is not to say that women will never discipline or instruct their children, but rather that fathers have a primary responsibility to do so, as Hebrews 12:7–10 also assumes (“For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?”). Now that we’ve established the biblical basis for male leadership in the home, let’s address the specifics of how this leadership is expressed in in taking initiative in the family’s spiritual life and in disciplinary matters.
First, a Christian man benefits his family by initiating in their spiritual lives in a variety of prudential ways. he considers how to be of greatest spiritual good to each of them. As leader, the husband keeps his pulse on each individual family member’s spiritual condition and needs. He initiates regular conversations about God’s Word and how it intersects with life (Deut. 6:4–8). He ensures that his family worships their God together regularly (Eph. 6:4; Psa. 78:5–7), and especially in the gathered congregation (Heb. 10:25). He guards his home from evil influences that would seek to turn his family away from Christ (Gen. 2:15). When there is no clear leader responsible for gathering the family, curating content, and leading conversation, a version of the Bystander Effect[2] occurs and family worship does not happen. Christian men see the tendency towards this reality and take action to preserve this important family rhythm.
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Scripture makes perfectly plain that even upright, sincere, religious individuals—a group to which Nicodemus would have belonged—are without hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12) if they are not born again. The religious and the irreligious are under the same indictment: devoid of spiritual life, born in transgression, and unable to rectify their predicament (Eph. 2:1–3). Such individuals need regeneration, not information; they require spiritual transformation, not renovation. The same was true for Nicodemus.

Commenting on Jesus’ ministry, Sinclair Ferguson says, “The pulse beat of God’s heart has an evangelistic rhythm.”1 Jesus even identified His mission in terms of evangelism: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).
Jesus had numerous extraordinary encounters throughout the Gospels. In Mark 2, He forgave a paralytic’s sins and restored his ability to walk. In John 4, He encountered a religious nobody who, in the middle of the day, asked for a drink and found living water. And a chapter earlier, in John 3, Jesus encountered a religious somebody named Nicodemus.
“A man of the Pharisees,” this high member of the religious establishment approached the Lord under cover of darkness (v. 1). In the conversation that followed, Jesus stressed the insufficiency of superficial belief and the necessity of the new birth. From this exchange that occurred over two millennia ago, we can learn a great deal about God’s relationship to man—and about what God requires of us.
The Opening Gambit
Nicodemus had presumably heard enough of Jesus to recognize that He was “a teacher come from God” (John 3:2). Yet while this opening statement was pretty good, it’s a far cry from proclaiming Jesus to be the Promised One. We might wonder: What led Nicodemus to Jesus by night on this occasion? Alfred Edersheim suggests one possibility:
It must have been a mighty power of conviction, to break down prejudice so far as to lead this old Sanhedrist to acknowledge a Galilean, untrained in the Schools, as a Teacher come from God, and to repair to Him for direction on, perhaps, the most delicate and important point in Jewish theology.2
If Edersheim is right, that it was “a mighty power of conviction” that guided Nicodemus to Christ, then we might say that the real darkness surrounding the events in John 3 was a moral darkness. Nicodemus’s own night was blacker than the cover of darkness under which he came. Unknown to him, he approached no ordinary Galilean carpenter. He was in the presence of “the true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9).
Scripture makes perfectly plain that even upright, sincere, religious individuals—a group to which Nicodemus would have belonged—are without hope and without God in the world (Eph. 2:12) if they are not born again. The religious and the irreligious are under the same indictment: devoid of spiritual life, born in transgression, and unable to rectify their predicament (Eph. 2:1–3). Such individuals need regeneration, not information; they require spiritual transformation, not renovation. The same was true for Nicodemus.
A Striking Response
As a good Jew, Nicodemus was no doubt acquainted with the kingdom of God. You can probably imagine, then, how much Jesus’ response would have startled the Pharisee: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3).
In Jewish thought, the kingdom of God was to be inaugurated at the end of the age. Entry into the kingdom was guaranteed, they believed, so long as one was a good Jew. But Jesus wasn’t talking here about the kingdom in its future dimension.
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