‘We all have numbered days’: Former Senator Ben Sasse talks terminal illness, gospel truth, love of neighbor

Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, is “redeeming the time” to live for Christ and love his neighbors, proclaiming that he’s “not dead yet” after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis in December.

“Redeem the time, in my theology, means it is a great blessing to be able to live a life of gratitude to God by doing stuff that has to benefit your neighbor,” Sasse told Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson on the Uncommon Knowledge podcast, published last week.

“The chance to love your neighbor and serve is a blessing, and that’s what the Puritans meant by ‘redeem the time.’” 

Two days before Christmas, Sasse, 53, announced he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer – one of the most brutal cancers with a 3% survival rate – and given seven weeks to live. He said he and his wife, Melissa, were “immediately at peace,” but felt a duty to fight the cancer for the sake of their 14-year-old son, the youngest of their three children.

“It’s weird, because we all know we’re on the clock, and we have a death sentence,” Sasse said to two of his longtime friends, Michael Horton and Dan Bryant, on another podcast. “Once you know you’re going to die sooner, it feels kind of weird to spend tons of energy to go through different kinds of treatment stuff. But, when you got a kid living at the house, you feel like you got to fight, to try to give him some extra dad slaps upside the head and hugs.”

Sasse joined a clinical trial at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas, where he spends a few days a week receiving chemotherapy – what he says is the “maximum dose of poison you can try to put into the tumors without killing yourself.”

His illness reminds him of his friend, pastor Tim Keller, who died in 2023 after fighting pancreatic cancer for more than two years. Like Keller, Sasse says his death sentence has revolutionized his prayer life and removed trivial concerns that used to distract. 

“I’m with Paul when he says, ‘To live is Christ. To die is gain,’” Sasse told Robinson. “Obviously, death is a wicked thief. I don’t want it to happen. But we’re mortals … this is not news to me that I had numbered days. It just became a more precise number. We all have numbered days.”

One of the lessons Sasse says he’s learning is about Sabbath rest.

The Lord’s gift of the Sabbath facilitates the removal of distractions, Sasse said, expressing a regret he did not prioritize those weekly rests when he was younger. He told Robinson he wishes he had not traveled as much as he did in his 20s and 30s, saying “workaholism” pulled him away from the home and his family.

Before running for Senate, Sasse held various academic positions, including as a professor at the University of Texas and as president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska. He also served as an executive director and later editor at Christians United For Reformation, which became the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. He entered politics during President George W. Bush’s administration, serving in the U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. He then served two terms as U.S. Senator for Nebraska from 2015 to 2023.

Even his political outlook has been impacted by his diagnosis.

“A framework for ordered liberty is a duty to love your neighbor,” Sasse reflected with his friends. “To try to maintain and recognize the glories of the American constitutional system and its inheritance are really special. Yet we’re not going to need those kinds of laws for coercion and restraint of evil in heaven.

“So these are not eternal things. They’re temporal things. And it’s nice to believe that you could live a life of gratitude to God by trying to love your neighbor and serve in a public office but not want it to be an idol.”

Sasse told Robinson the political life should not be “the center of the world,” saying only “weirdos want to be in politics forever.”

“Washington is Hollywood for ugly people,” he said. “Do your work and get off the stage.”

In contrast, the center of the world is “where you raise your kids and where you worship,” Sasse said.

Although Sasse has lived abroad and in several states, as a fifth generation Nebraskan, he said the state has always been the gathering place for his family. He said he’s known “for a long time” where he will be buried: St. Paul’s Church in Arlington, Nebraska, where his family convenes for the holidays.

Sasse said he and his wife annually visit a cemetery in January to remember her own near-death experience and the Lord’s grace to grant her more days.

The pathway to a church through a graveyard has historically reminded Christians of their impending death, he said, which is a lost practice in modern culture. Christians shouldn’t mistake this life’s bridge as the ultimate destination, but instead as a path on the journey home to heaven.

“I think acknowledging mortality is just fundamental wisdom,” Sasse told Horton and Bryant. “Ecclesiastes and Job are right there telling us that these bodies are decaying. It’s not supposed to be this way, and we will have glorified bodies. But telling the truth about death is really important.”

While death is “terrible,” “death doesn’t win,” Sasse told Robinson, referencing Christ who wept at the death of Lazarus before raising him to life (John 11).

“The Christian phrase in Christian literature for years has been to call death ‘the last enemy,’” he said. “‘Jesus wept’: two words. Last enemy: two words. Death is a wicked thief. It’s an enemy, but it’s pretty great that it’s the last enemy.”

To fight this enemy, Sasse told Robinson he is launching a podcast with his friends that will air in March and they have named it, “Not Dead Yet.”

“Knowing that your death is impending sooner gives you an even greater ability to deny any of our righteous acts as righteous,” Sasse said, as he, Horton and Bryant discussed the meaning of the gospel. “The foolishness of our works is pretty apparent to you when you try to really look at the accounting of a life.”

Simply put, the gospel is: man is sinful and in need of redemption, he said, citing Genesis 3 and Romans 5.

“Imago dei: we were created glorious in God’s image and meant for fellowship with Him, and yet we’re a part of this rebel clan of everybody,” he explained. “And that’s not the end of the story. The end of the story is the new Adam came from heaven, laid down all of his prerogatives, and came and swept us.”

The second Adam, Jesus, is “the great physician” and will “heal every part of our body that is decaying and declining,” Sasse said, referring to heaven.

“We are going to be around the table with our Lord, and He’s going to be the center, and we’re going to be sinless, and we’re not going to be trying to put ourselves on the throne, because there’ll be so much more joy for us and Him being on the throne,” he said. “And us, who would have been willing to be servants or slaves at that feast, we’re going to be sons and daughters.”