A Toolbox for Aging

Introduction

I almost entitled this “On Growing Old to the Glory of God,” but while that would represent something true and valuable, I decided that the elderly, or those who can now see the approach of being elderly, are in need of something more practical, something with handles. Of course, glorifying God is practical, but perhaps you know what I mean.

In modern American life, the elderly are often at sixes and sevens about what they are supposed to be doing. The only thing that seems obvious is the need to mess around in their married kids’ child-rearing philosophies, and that does not always have the sunny response that was expected. And so they retreat in bewilderment, scratching their heads.

The only people who do not need to be concerned about the challenges of growing old are those who die young. Everyone else is headed toward that particular death match with aging, and we are all headed there at the same rate of speed . . . hour after hour, one day at a time.

As we will see shortly, the best preparation for honoring God while you are aging is to have honored God in the strength of your youth (Ecc. 12:1). So much of what I want to say here is dedicated to helping individuals prepare for this reality ahead of time, but at the same time I don’t want to discourage those who feel that it is too late for them.

As I learned from my father, God takes you from where you are, not from where you should have been. So whether you feel prepared or not, it is never too late to turn to God in repentance. God knows how to restore the years that the locusts have eaten (Joel 2:25), and even someone as wicked as Manasseh was able to turn back in repentance (2 Chron. 33:1-20). And Solomon, who squandered many glorious opportunities, also turned back to God, as we can see through the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.

So what I want to do here is provide an introductory overview of some things drawn from Scripture that the elderly should make a point of remembering . . . and then implementing in their lives. What kind of practical instruction does the Bible provide us on this topic?

Make Sure to Testify for Your Grandchildren

Over the course of your life, God has been good to you in countless ways. Just as our lives are all different, so also are the blessings different. This means that all of us have a responsibility to be verbal in our gratitude for what we have been given. We find a good example of this in Psalm 37.

If we are struggling with a spirit of grumbling, we are not going to be able to see the blessings that we should be recounting to others. What blessings have you received that you know that you have received? Gratitude means that the people who know you best should know what has blessed you the most. They should know this because they have heard you talking about it at the dinner table. And check yourself . . . do they know your grumbles better than they do your gratitude?

In this instance, the psalmist, over the course of a long life, had never seen the righteous forsaken (by God) when it came to material blessings. Such a man had not been forsaken, and his children were not reduced to begging. On the contrary, they were in a position to show mercy, and to lend to others. God had not left them in need.

This is not the only possible blessing, of course not. But it is a blessing that the psalmist had seen, and because he had seen it, he talked about it in his old age. Our final years are our autumn years, and the fruit should be heavy and ripe, and the branches low. Over the course of your life, whatever blessings and answers to prayer you have seen should be regular topics of conversation with those you know and love.

What were your gifts and graces? What prayers were answered? How did God deliver you that one time? Does your family have stories from you about the goodness of God?

Manage Your Wealth to Bless Your Grandchildren

Some take the truth of the statement in Psalm 37 in a wooden sort of way, thinking that the blessings of Heaven can be obtained from some kind of Health and Wealth Vending Machine. And while we want to steer clear of any kind of mercenary faith like that, it remains the case that the blessings of God do frequently come in material ways. Taking one thing with another, this is the kind of blessing we should not be surprised by. I call them Deuteronomic blessings.

When this happens, we have a responsibility to pass those blessings on. Good and godly grandparents leave an inheritance to their grandchildren. We are given this standard, straight up. Recognizing this, we should never try to be wiser than God, or holier than Scripture. It is a good thing for grandparents to provide a material blessing to their grandchildren. This is something that good grandparents do. This is something to work for. It is something we should attempt.

Socialists and pietists both have a bad tendency to make wealth essentially problematical, wanting us to treat it like a disease. But if wealth is a cancer, then why would we want to give it to anyone else? Why shouldn’t we just take one for the team, and keep it all?

God does not mind His people having money, but He does mind money having His people. And it is true that the Bible teaches us that is awfully easy to kid ourselves on the point, thinking we are in the former category when we are deep in the latter. So yes, that should be guarded against. Paul tells Timothy how he was to instruct those who were rich in this present world (1 Tim 6:17-19). He had earlier given stern warnings about the lust for riches (1 Tim. 6:5-10), but he goes on to assume the propriety of a godly use of wealth. The rich are not to set their hope on their wealth (v. 17), and they must never be haughty. They are to trust in God, who gives us all things to enjoy (v. 17). If they are rich, they must also be rich in good works, generous and willing to share.

And if they have grandchildren, they are commanded to be generous to them as well. Grandchildren should be a special focus for them. Passing an inheritance on to grandchildren is an assignment.

Teach Your Grandchildren

The Word of God is delivered to us in a generational way, and we are supposed to pass it on in that same way. Obedience is generational, and it cannot be generational without being covenantal. The terms of the covenant are to be passed to your children, and then also to your grandchildren. As you can see below, God gives His commands to us, our sons, and our grandsons (v. 2). This cannot be successfully done without some sort of covenantal understanding and structure.

We live in a time that is hostile to the close bonds of extended family. Grandparents are generally supposed to be people who detach themselves, make themselves scarce, buy a fifth wheel, and visit Arizona a lot.

But Scripture assumes more involvement than this. There are temptations associated with such involvement, as with everything, and I will get to that in a minute. But first we should establish a baseline for grandparents to be actively involved.

The writer here says that biblical teaching is to be part of a family lineage. The things he learned from his father, he made sure to pass on to his son. We see here the impact of a grandfather, mediated through the father. But we also have a direct connection between grandparent and grandchild.

And it is very clear that Lois and Eunice started in on Timothy early.

Timothy had been instructed in the Scriptures from the time he was a child. And the word used for child here is brephos, which means infant. A pious mother and a devout grandmother helped to shape this influential Christian leader of the first century. As it happens, we know their names, but how many names of how many devout grandparents are lost to history, but who through their faithfulness were a major force in history?

I mentioned a temptation that comes with this. You are teaching as a grandparent, not a parent, and you must take care not to be a usurper of godly parents. When the parents love Christ, your role is supplementary. You are the reinforcements, not the main battalion. You should be available wisdom, not intrusive wisdom.

Don’t Make Your Health Your Hobby

One of blessings that comes with aging is the arrival of all sorts of new and interesting aches and pains. I am not here speaking of the debilitating pains that land you in the ER, but rather the sort that have you rummaging in the medicine cabinet while muttering under your breath.

There are two major temptations to avoid here. The first is the temptation to self-medicate in ways that create unhealthy dependencies. When we reflect on the fact that growing old is no picnic, and that the New Testament was written before the development of Tylenol or Advil, perhaps Paul’s exhortation to the older women starts to make a bit more sense. One of the more obvious ways to take the edge off would be to drink a bit too much wine.

Paul clearly didn’t have a problem with using wine to help address an actual medical issue (1 Tim. 5:23). But pain relief can present a whole new set of problems. Older saints should take great care not to become pill-happy, particularly when it comes to issues like attitude adjustments, pain relief, or sleep aids. I would encourage everyone to try to keep such things at a minimum, even when in the process of dying. We should want to do as much as we can throughout our lives in as clear-headed a way as we can, including dying. Now of course this requires wisdom. There comes a point where the pain would fog up the mind as much as the morphine would, and where true pain relief would be grace from God. We want to walk a balance between ameliorating pain and bringing in unnecessary brain fog.

A second temptation to avoid is that of making your health the recurring topic in all your conversation. But it turns out that nobody at the party wants to talk about gut health, particularly your gut health. One of the temptations of aging is that of becoming crotchety, and the increasing number of ailments gives one something to be crotchety about. Jesus tells us that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45), and we should want to avoid having that be fistfuls of all our health grumbles.

Set An Example in Elder Care

As I write, approximately 25 million Americans are providing (unpaid) elder care for others, and in most cases, this would obviously be caring for their elderly parents. This is good and honorable and right.

Older boomers are moving into the time when they are more likely to need care, and younger boomers are in the trenches now, caring for their elderly parents. This is a pressing topic, and one that is going to need more focused attention.

For the moment here, the one principle to emphasize is that each generation should model for the next generation what would be good and right to receive. As Christians, we should never expect to receive what we are simply unwilling to give.

The fifth commandment goes up and down the ladder. Caring for your elderly parents is as solemn a responsibility as your children’s responsibility to care for you. If you are concerned that your kids might not be taking that responsibility seriously enough . . . you have parents. Show them how it’s done.

Know Your Increasing Limits

Of course, growing old involves losing a step or two. But at some point, it means losing a lot of steps. We are all of us heading toward no steps at all. And one of our natural temptations, especially for those who have been accomplished and hard-charging in life, is failing to recognize the reality of this. It is great wisdom to know when to give certain things up. A good example would be the car keys.

Here is the biblical principle first:

A time will come when you will not be able to do what you used to be able to do. There are a number of areas where we might grant the point easily . . . you can’t run the 400 the way you did in high school. Great. But the areas where the elderly will be tempted to hang on longer than they should would be in areas that pertain to maintaining a measure of independence. Driving, managing credit cards, keeping up with the house, and so on.

Barzillai provides us with an example worthy of imitation. When David fled from Absalom his son, he was met on the way with a load of provisions by a faithful man named Barzillai. After the rebellion was defeated, David returned to Jerusalem, and offered Barzillai a position in his palace as a reward.

When he said that he was not able to discern between good and evil, he did not mean that he was ethically bankrupt. The phrase meant that was not capable of helping David with the rule of the kingdom. Discerning between good and evil is something that rulers and judges need to be able to do . . . and Barzillai knew that he was no longer up to that challenge. Knowing that, he relinquished the challenge.

What this means is that each of us, as we approach the age where such things are going to be challenging for us, need to be resolved to be extraordinarily docile when our kids—you know, kids, now in their sixties—try to tell us that they are concerned about how many Amazon packages they see on our front porch. Every other day.

Remember that Old Age Is Vanity

The line of propaganda that is being fed to us all is that we can forestall the inevitable march of time. Time, in this sense, is a conveyor belt and there is no way to switch it off.

Some of the things we do to try to fend off this reality include too much skin cream, plastic surgery, unfortunate clothing choices, Viagra, Botox, and compensatory spending. But all of this is occurring under the sun, as the Preacher put it, and everything under the sun is vanity and shepherding wind. And that includes the grimmer aspects of aging. In Scripture, the whole thing is described for us under the figure of a great house, starting to fall apart.

The keepers of the house fail (v. 3). This would indicate the arms and hands trembling in their feebleness. The strong men, the legs, bend under the heaviness of age (v. 3). The grinders—meaning the teeth—are no longer able to do their work (v. 3). Seeing becomes more difficult (v. 3). The mouth is now closed, folded in because of a loss of teeth (v. 4). The sound of chewing is now very soft (v. 4). The elderly are notorious for sleeping lightly (v. 4). The daughters of music have all left (v. 4). As Barzillai noted earlier, an ability to enjoy music declines. An increased fear of heights comes in (v. 5). Falling is far more problematic now than it ever was before. The almond tree blossoms (v. 5), which is a figure of the hair turning gray or white. The legs are now bent because of age, like those of a grasshopper (v. 5). Desire shall fail, meaning sexual desire. The Hebrew here is the “caperberry [an aphrodesiac] fails.”

This is a journey that we shall all have to take, and preparing for it is not morbid. We should remember our Creator when we are young, and when the day of death arrives, and we all of us go to our long home, we should not be disheartened by the last few miles of road. It can be a very rough road . . . but it leads to a king’s palace (John 14:2).

Finish Strong

This last point is obliquely related to the previous one. It can be hard to finish strong while you are growing progressively more weak. But it is still possible to do.

Many a race is lost in the back stretch. We are sadly given multiple examples of kings in Judah who made a good start, but who then stumbled toward the end. Joash was one of them (835–796 BC). He did well so long as Jehoida the priest was alive, helping him—but then he faded. Amaziah was the same (796–767 BC). And Uzziah was doing well until pride overtook him and he decided to try to minister in the Temple himself (792–740 BC).

It is right at the end of the race that you might feel really exhausted, but it is there that the greatest effort needs to be made.

What needs to be done here in the final stretch is something that can be done . . . but only by the grace of God. And while the grace of God is available to anyone who seeks it, whenever they seek it, the final lap is not the time to begin learning how the grace of God operates. It is the kind of thing we really need to have been practicing earlier.

Godly old people are produced by godly middle-aged people.

Comments are open. Leave a comment if there is some aspect of aging that you would like to see me address in the future.