In late December of 2025, Ben Sasse, a former Nebraska state senator, announced that he had been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence,” Sasse said in his public announcement. “But I already had a death sentence before last week too—we all do.”
On February 7, 2026, he joined Mike Horton and Dan Bryant to talk about his diagnosis, his life, and his hope in death. The full interview can be found here on Sola Media’s YouTube channel. Below are excerpts from his rich, gospel-filled observations as a man facing his final days.
Death, Dependency, and the Antidote to Idolatry
“I think acknowledging mortality is just fundamental wisdom. You can go through a lot of wisdom literature, you can read a lot of the Psalter, but 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 … We're unbelievably blessed to live at a time in human history with some of the most interesting technology ever, but we're also just incredibly stupid people in that most kids are not raised around great-grandparents, and they don't see death, and they don't have to change diapers.
“The course of life is dependency and then a period of independence and then back to dependency. And if you delude yourself and think at 23-years-old that the glories of your skin and your biceps are gonna last, it's a real shame for you that you don't have the opportunity to be around 90-year-olds—maybe 70-year-olds who could explain it, but 90-year-olds who can model a little bit of dignity as they decline. And the stiffer stuff in my mind is not Hallmark sentimentality, but honesty about the fact that I'm needy…
“I'm only seven weeks into this, since my, you know, kind of dated death sentence. But I knew Tim Keller relatively well and talked with him a handful of times as he was dying, ironically of pancreatic cancer as well. And one of the weird lines Tim would use is he said, ‘I hate this, but I would never want to go back to the prayer life I had before pancreatic cancer,’ which I thought sounded pretty weird. And then I went through some pretty heavy stuff in the couple of weeks right before I was diagnosed—we don't need to get into any of these details, but I was in a lot of pain because I have a bunch of tumors that have grown in and around my spinal column. And so I had some tough pain that was hard to make sense of, and it definitely shattered idols really fast. Lots of dumb stuff that I cared too much about and I was too self-reliant about seemed really pointless. This was before I had a terminal diagnosis … I didn't know I had pancreatic cancer, but I heard Tim's words in my head a bunch of times that he wouldn't want to go back to his prayer life before that. And I felt then what a blessing that I'm saying, Lord, come quickly, Maranatha. Thank you for all of the different things that I used to cling to that right now seem really, really trivial because they're actually really trivial. And they could be important ways to love your neighbor, but if you make them an idol, it's not a ‘mixed good.’ It was unadulterated bad. And so I think in my handful of weeks before [my] diagnosis and seven weeks since, one of the things that's come clear to me that I tell my kids a lot is, man, I wish I'd taken the Lord's Day more seriously more of my life because it's a really good antidote to all those idolatries.”
Bringing Our Theology into All of Life
“I don't mean to use the term moderate about policy questions here. We don't care to talk on this radio show about anybody's policy preferences, but it's useful to be moderate in terms of how we think about this worldly calling to try to preserve institutions. God created the world and called it good, and we are embodied creatures, and the culture mandate to be fruitful and multiply obviously means make babies and build families—but it also means to set up a really nice dinner, as you did last night for your daughter's wedding, and to have people be able to come together and celebrate and to do good work in snow removal.
“I remember one time when Mike was doing a kind of speed read in a sermon through a bunch of Old Testament texts as he went, he just dropped in there that some of the lines of Cain and Esau were speedboat manufacturers, which I always thought was very funny. But there's all sorts of things we need to do to live a human embodied life and to love our neighbor that are important, but they're obviously not ultimate. And it's super useful to think of framework for ordered liberty is a duty to do to love your neighbor, or to try to maintain it, and to recognize the glories of the American constitutional system and the inheritance are really special. And 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 really nice to believe that you could live a life of gratitude to God by trying to love your neighbor and do stuff and serve in a public office, but not want it to be an idol. And right now we have a weird … kind of split where most people are just completely disengaged from public life, and the people who are engaged in public life pretend that whatever they're doing in the institutions and the sectors they're working in are ultimate and transcendent. It's a bunch of hooey. Like the United States Senate is a really important deliberative body. It doesn't deliver very much right now, but in theory, it's a really important deliberative body. But it's not going to be there in heaven.”
Death Puts Perspective on the “Foolishness of Our Works”
“We'll definitely get back to how we're all on the clock, but knowing that your death is impending sooner gives you an even greater ability to deny any of our righteous acts as righteous. The foolishness of our works are pretty apparent to you when you try to really look at the accounting of a life. We'll get back to that, but your God for us in Christ is great shorthand … It's fun to talk to your kids and your nephews and nieces about how Jesus did everything on the cross to fulfill the whole law. I fulfilled none of it. He fulfilled all of it, and he took away all of my sins.
“And I'm not just justified, I'm actually being made intrinsically righteous, though you can't see it, like so little fruit and buds, but it will be accomplished. And so the gospel is all of those ordo salutis stuff. And we get to talk about what Jesus did for us positively and took away negatively … We were saved on a cross tree outside Jerusalem, and we are being saved, and we will be saved completely (Gen. 3 and Rom. 5). I am, in Adam, a member of this rebellious race—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. 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 up.”
