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Ben Sasse is the former US Senator from Nebraska and most recently former president of the University of Florida. Earlier in his life, he had earned a PhD in history from Yale. Sasse is best known as a senator, but before his election in 2014, he was the executive director for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (which produced the Cambridge Declaration), served in multiple roles in the George W. Bush administration, and was an assistant professor at the University of Texas. He now has stage four pancreatic cancer, which had metastasized to his liver, lungs, lymph nodes, and vascular system. He was originally given three to four months to live. [Pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of approximately 13% — the highest mortality rate of all major cancers, according to the Stanford Cancer Institute.]

Before he was in the US Senate, he was president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska.  I knew him briefly during that time because we both served on the board of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Nebraska.  In those meetings I remember him as incredibly smart, insightful and very ambitious. He rescued Midland University from collapse. He was a respected, diligent US senator, who resigned the Senate in 2023 to serve as president at the University of Florida. Seventeen months later, he resigned from that job, too, after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.

Over the last several months, I have seen and read several interviews Sasse has had concerning his cancer and his deep, personal faith.  He has not hidden his faith in Jesus Christ.  In his various interviews he has also been brutally honest about himself and lessons he is learning because of his cancer.  He has even started his own podcast, “Not Dead Yet.”

Brent Beshore, who He leads a company called Permanent Equity in Columbia, Missouri has written an essay entitled “The Unmistakable Freedom of Ben Sasse.”  A friend recently emailed me a copy of Beshore’s essay.  I want to quote from Beshore’s essay to illustrate the profound testimony of Ben Sasse. In one sense, the various interviews Beshore cites and that I have seen or read are of a man dying in public.  The Bible stresses both the brevity of life and the certainty of death.  No one is immune to either.  But the Bible also declares that it is only through salvation in Jesus Christ that one finds the real purpose and meaning of life—and the eternal life that follows death. Sasse is a living testimony to a meaningful life and a living testimony of how to approach death. Maybe he being used by God not to teach us how to die in Christ, but how to really live in Christ, regardless of how long we live.  We can learn much from Ben Sasse.

Beshore begins his essay with the astounding statement: “[Ben Sasses i]s perhaps the freest man I’ve ever seen . . . What would make a man, staring at his own death, more whole than the people around him? What would it take for a terminal diagnosis to produce not despair but a kind of settled, joyful clarity that makes a room full of healthy people weep?”

Beshore elaborates on his thesis that Sasse is “the freest man I’ve ever seen.”

• “He said he was grateful that cancer is “a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.” A man with a death sentence called his disease a gift because it killed something in him that was worse than the cancer. That thing? The idol of self, the illusion that he was in control, the fantasy that he could rely on his own willpower and strength, that his accomplishments mattered the way he thought they did, that the life he’d built was the point of being. . . He talked about how fast everything rearranged. The things he’d cared too much about, the things he’d been too self-reliant about, suddenly seemed, in his words, ‘pointless.’ Career accolades. Political fights. The restless striving that successful men baptize as ambition. All of it burned off like fog in the morning, and what was left underneath was God. Just God.”
• “Sasse knew Tim Keller. They talked while Keller was dying of the same cancer. Keller had said something that Sasse admitted sounded strange at first. He said he hated the disease, but he would never want to go back to the prayer life he had before pancreatic cancer. Sasse didn’t understand it then. Now he does. Two men. Same cancer. Same strange, impossible gratitude. The suffering didn’t create their faith. It incinerated everything that was competing with it. The noise finally stopped, and in the silence they could hear God more clearly than they ever had.”
• “What strikes me most about Sasse is that he refuses to sanitize any of it. He calls death a wicked thief.’ He calls it evil. He won’t dress it up with platitudes or pretend that suffering is beautiful in itself. He grieves it. He told his interviewer that death is “not how things are meant to be.” And yet in the same breath he’ll say that he believes in the resurrection, that he believes there will come a day when there are no more tears, no more cancer, and no more funerals. He holds both truths at the same time and neither one cancels the other.”

In an interview on “60 Minutes,” Sasse said daraxonrasib, an oral drug he is taking as part of a clinical trial, has reduced the volume of tumors in his body. While Sasse was initially given three to four months to live when diagnosed in December, he said he may be able to “live a year instead of a handful of months.” The experimental drug has in fact shrunk his tumors by seventy-six percent. “He’s fighting. He said he felt obligated to fight because his youngest is fourteen and still at home. But the fighting isn’t frantic. It’s the fighting of a man who’s already settled the deeper question. He knows where this ends. He knows it ends well. The fight is for his family, not for himself. There’s a difference.”

Through a string of public appearances, he hasn’t only borne witness to the hope we have in Christ in the face of death and suffering but has also clearly and intentionally sought—despite obvious pain and the cloud of morphine—to share honest reflections on a life spent in the worlds of business, academia, and politics. As Alex Harris of the Gospel Coalition argues, “his reflections leave believers with a framework for engaging what matters most.”  What are some aspects of that “framework”?

1. Redeem the Time. For Sasse, these conversations are an attempt to follow the old Puritan precept, based on the apostle Paul’s admonition in Ephesians 5:16, to “redeem the time.” As he put it in a conversation with Peter Robinson on the Uncommon Knowledge podcast, “‘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 tries to benefit your neighbor.” For Sasse, that includes “trying to figure out what the important things are, . . . the eternal questions you need to wrestle through,” like “the relationship between sin and death and a broken world.” Redeeming the time also includes “the chance to hug on my wife this morning and to love my kids and to reflect on some important questions with my friend Peter.” “‘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 tries to benefit your neighbor.”
2. Politics is important, but it’s not everything. As Christians, we should care about politics. I think this is part of what Sasse is getting at when he says, “Let’s have one or two cheers for politics, neither zero nor three.” To have zero cheers for politics means “pretending the world isn’t broken,” while three “pretends power and coercion could be the center of your worldview.” Either approach is an error for the believer. “We engage in politics to love our neighbor and advance the gospel, while recognizing that this world is not our home and that our hope is in Christ, not policies, politicians, or parties. In that sense, a believer’s posture toward politics is one expression of our posture toward the world in general. Sasse’s observation here is a simple diagnostic for our hearts: What elicits our enthusiasm, and to what degree? Have we turned our backs on politics, fed up with the current climate—a zero-cheers approach? Or have we allowed it to supplant our true source of hope and become all-consuming—a three-cheers approach?”
3. The digital landscape misrepresents reality. As Sasse puts it, “We don’t know how to have a conversation right now because we give all the voice to the loudest, angriest people.” People are “screaming all the time on the internet, and we pretend they’re representative.” But here’s the key thing to remember: “Most people aren’t that angry.” This is true on both sides of the aisle. The loudest and most extreme voices on the political left and the political right don’t reflect how the majority of people on the “other side” think. And most people are far more combative and unreasonable behind a digital screen, performing for their tribe, than they’d ever be in real life. These distortions lead us to assume the worst and sabotage real conversation.”
4. We need to jealously guard our affections.  To use Sasse’s words, “The places where you raise your kids and the places where you’re breaking bread every night and where you worship and where you work . . . [are] the most important places . . . Power isn’t the main thing; our loves are the main thing,” Sasse says. Those loves are best cultivated in thick community that grounds us in reality and helps bind us to our neighbors. Unhealthy forms of political engagement and media consumption can hijack that process. Over time, our habits in this area can shape and twist our souls.”
5. Politics is just a symptom.  As a historian, Sasse maintains : “50 or 75 or 100 years from now, when you look back at our moment, we’re mostly not going to talk about our politics. We’re going to believe we were living through a technological revolution that created economic and cultural revolutions that way downstream from that had political consequences.”

The extraordinary testimony of Ben Sasse has drawn me to the Apostle Paul’s reflections on life and death in Philippians 1:20-30.  In this paragraph, Paul detailed a reason for his joy:  His “deliverance” (soteria). [This term can mean salvation from sin, future glorification or physical deliverance, as from imprisonment.] The certainty of his “deliverance” caused Paul to launch into a brief discourse:

• v. 20, No matter what occurs, “now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.”  Release from prison would allow him to continue preaching Christ; martyrdom would also advance the cause of Christ.

• v. 21, “to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”  What a marvelous perspective about walking obediently with Jesus.  Sasse models that for us.
• Vv. 22-24 reflect the tension Paul felt as he contemplated what would happen to him.  He knew that to die was to be with Jesus. Yet, to live was to continue to serve Jesus and to serve the church. His selfless attitude placed his friend’s needs above his own desires.

Regardless of what happened to him, Paul wanted the Philippians to honor and glorify Christ.  The phrase “manner of life” is politeusthe, which is literally “live as citizens.”  Because of Philippi’s unique status as a “little Rome,” citizenship meant a great deal to them. They were, therefore, to represent Jesus as “worthy” citizens of His kingdom.  How were they to do this?

• V. 27, by “standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.”  They were to be steadfast with oneness of purpose unified in the content of their faith, their doctrine, which they were to preserve and to proclaim.
• V. 28, by not being afraid.  That there were opponents of the gospel was a sign of their destruction at the day of God’s judgment, but also a sign of the Philippians’ salvation, of their security in Christ.

Paul closed with a reminder, rooted in God’s sovereignty and His grace:  Both their believing in Christ and their suffering for Him were not accidental but part of God’s plan; it has been “granted’’ to you.  “Granted” is echaristhe, which is derived from the Greek word, charis, “grace.”  In other words, believing on Christ and suffering for Him were associated with his grace!

Ben Sasse is teaching us not how to die, but how to live as citizens of God’s kingdom now—and in eternity! I thank the Lord for him.

See Brent Beshore, “The Unmistakable Freedom of Ben Sasse” (unpublished essay); Anna Kleiber of the Lincoln Journal Star in the Omaha World Herald (29 April 2026); and Alex Harris, “Redeem the Time: What Ben Sasse  Teaches Us about Life, Death and Politics” in The Keller Center (29 April 2026).