Christopher Ash: how can we age well?

I am in my (very) early seventies. I have just written a book about following Jesus in your fifties and sixties. “A bit late,” you say. Sure. But it is the book I wish someone had given me 20 years ago.

In most of the world and much of human history, these decades are the close of life. But in rich western societies with good diet and healthcare, they are—for many—an “in between” stage, between the vigour of middle age and the frailty of our older years. I think of it as “the afternoon of life”.

Following Jesus in your fifties and sixties

It seems to me that there are two opposite dangers. One is to be in denial and try to live as if we were still in our thirties or forties. As well as being embarrassing to our families, this is unrealistic. Sooner or later, we come face to face with the decades we are actually in. The opposite danger is that we give up too easily. A pastor friend of mine mentioned a man who keeps telling him that he is 57 and on the last stretch of his life. The pastor wants to say to him, “Stop thinking about yourself so much; just get on and live!”

Another minister said to me that these decades can be a fork in the road of discipleship. Some ease off and begin to live for pleasure and self, knowing that health and strength will not last forever. “I need to go on that cruise before I get too old. I have earned it.” And so discipleship takes a back seat. Others look for the particular opportunities of this stage of life to serve the Lord Jesus and his gospel with fresh vigour and zeal. It is my hope that readers will take this second path.

In the book, I try to address some of the practical questions that tend to arise in these decades:

• caring for ageing parents
• loving younger family members as they grow (perhaps adult sons and daughters, and maybe grandchildren)
• guarding our marriages and helping them flourish
• living as a single person

The practicalities will vary widely depending on our circumstances. But I try also to speak to matters of the heart:

• deepening our lives of prayer
• learning and sharing wisdom
• growing in assurance that our identity is unchangeably in Christ
• nurturing a quiet heart of contentment

… And so on. I also write about:

• being gripped by the gospel
• serving in our churches
• developing our friendships

… And all sorts of things like that.

But let me focus now on something I grapple with early in the book: how to age well.

How do we age well?

I take as a theme verse these words: “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Romans 8v10).

What Paul writes here encapsulates in a short space two very great truths if “Christ is in you”. First, negatively, that “the body is dead because of sin”. Second, that “the Spirit is life because of righteousness”.

God the Holy Spirit is given to me in Christ, and He brings life even as I grow older. And therefore, as I walk through the afternoon of life, I live with this double existence. I live with an ageing body and mind and yet also at the same time with a spirit that is being renewed by the Holy Spirit. I am one of those who “with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3v18). We are being inwardly renewed even as our bodies and minds grow older. This has all sorts of implications for how we age well.

Let’s take the downside first. To say “the body is dead” is an extraordinarily concise shorthand. The body means here all our existence in this world. It includes our physical bodies, with our bones, sinews, muscles, ligaments, joints, lungs, kidneys, and so on. But it also encompasses our minds and indeed our embodied existence in all its dimensions. It means me as I am in this world, me in my entirety.

To say that “the body is dead” obviously cannot mean that it is literally dead, for it is clearly alive. My body moves, my heart beats, my blood flows, my mind thinks, and so on. To say it is nevertheless “dead” is a shorthand way of saying that it is like a man condemned to death—“as good as dead, as it were”. Every heartbeat is shadowed by death. I grow older. I am vulnerable to sickness and accident, to loss of memory, to mental illness. My body–I–live in a bright world over which a dark cloud hangs, a cloud whose shadow touches everything about me.

You and I need to accept this, rather than pretend it is not happening. As believers in Christ, we must accept it from the hand of God. And we ought also to recognise that this is “because of sin”.

I need to come to terms, not only with the fact that I walk in the shadow of death, but with the root cause. The sin of Adam is mine—imputed to me from Adam, the federal (covenant) head of humanity, and imparted to me by sin that goes back to my origins in Adam (“original sin”), the sinful nature with which I was born. “Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin” (Romans 5v12).

And so the second step, once we have come to terms with the mortality of our bodies, is to make the link between ageing and sin. Not one in a hundred, even amongst Christians, does this.

We think—and are coached by our cultures to think—in terms of physical causes of ageing. My knee hurts because of an old sporting injury, and that’s all there is to it. We look at the physical causes of cancers or heart disease, and at the factors that may contribute to our risk. But we need to look beyond the instrumental causes to the root cause.

For to say “the body is dead because of sin” is to acknowledge that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5v12). The word “death” means not only that moment when we breathe our last, but a dark power that casts its shadow over all of life. Every sickness, from the most trivial to the most life-threatening, every accident, every decade of gradual ageing—all these are the shadow of death. Every one is the result of sin. It is not necessarily, of course, that my individual and particular sin leads to this or that particular shadow of death; usually it does not, although from time to time it may. But all of it comes to us because together we are sinners living in a world under God’s righteous judgment.

It really goes against the grain to say, “my knee hurts because I am a sinner in a world under sin”; and yet it is true. I greatly used to enjoy playing tennis. But damage to my wrist has meant I have had to stop.

Why did I have to give up? Because of damage to my wrist? Yes, indeed. But ultimately, I had to give up tennis because of sin. It would be good if we began to weave this kind of talk into our Christian conversations.

And therefore, we will hate sin every day we grow older. We will fight sin in our hearts. We will grieve for the ugly fruits of sin in our lives and in a broken world.

We don't live as those without hope

But we will not stop there. For our realism is shot through with hope: “The Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Romans 8v10). This second half of the verse also compresses a great truth into a short space. God the Holy Spirit is given to me in Christ. He dwells within me. He brings with Him the Father and the Son to make my heart their home (John 14v23). He is life. He brings the promise of eternal life. His presence guarantees resurrection. As I wait for the final redemption of my body (Romans 8v23), I know I will not wait in vain.

And all this is “because of righteousness”. It’s not because of my merits, for I have no natural righteousness; all that has been lost in Adam. But “righteousness” means the flawless righteousness of Jesus Christ reckoned to me by pure grace and gladly grasped with the empty hands of faith.

Thankfulness is therefore a great mark of the ageing believer. Every year that passes, we feel—or ought to feel—more deeply our sinfulness, our frailty, and the corruption of our nature. And yet with each passing month, we may find thanksgiving welling up and overflowing in our hearts for the forgiveness of our sins and for all the wonders of the gospel. On the one hand, I grow more limited and—or so it seems to me—more deeply sinful; on the other hand, I overflow in thankfulness for Jesus and all He is to me. And so with joy through these “in between” years we “wait eagerly for … the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8v23).

And as we wait, we live in sure and certain hope. Perhaps the defining mark of ageing well is hope. Even as we come to terms with ageing; as we accept that this is because of sins; as we learn to hate sin and to wage war against it—we know that our bodies will one day be redeemed, made new in glorious resurrection. We are of Adam’s seed, and our bodies die in him. But there is a last Adam, and we belong to Him.

And so there is a brightness in the eyes of our hearts that can speak to a world in which hope is so hard to find. We never forget that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13v11).