One of my favorite memories from when I worked at the Naperville Sun as a feature reporter and columnist in the ’90s is when I did a story on local senior citizens who’d lived past 100, asking them, “What do you credit your longevity to?”

Because many of the people I interviewed by phone, all of which I found by calling local nursing homes, were very hard of hearing, I would have to yell the question into the receiver, sometimes repeating it four or five times—real slow—before they fully got what I was saying.

Of course, everyone in the features department could overhear me doing this, and as I kept yelling colleagues began laughing—some of them so hard they actually had to leave the room. Finally, my editor came over to my desk and asked, “Why can’t you change the wording to something simple like, ‘How do you figure you’ve lived so long?’ ”

I remember the answers I received from the seniors mostly revolved around personal health regimens. One woman said she’d never smoked a cigarette, drank coffee, had an alcoholic beverage or ate from a fast-food restaurant.

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Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal carried a Science page article headlined, “Secrets of the ‘Wellderly’: Scientists Hope to Crack the Genetic Code of Those Who Live the Longest.”

The piece began by informing that the world’s onetime oldest person, Henrikje van Andel-Schipper of the Netherlands, attributed her longevity to a daily slice of pickled herring and tumbler of orange juice.

“When this Dutch dowager died in 2005 at 115, researchers discovered that she had almost none of the chronic physical or mental ailments associated with aging,” reported the Journal. “She supported herself until she was 105. Up to her death, she was more alert and engaged than people half her age, cognitive testing showed. Indeed, when the anatomists actually counted her neurons, they discovered she had a brain of a woman 50 years younger.”

Explaining that gerontologists believe longer lifespans may be found in a few “master genes that affect cellular responses to famine, drought and other survival stresses,” the article revealed that “a surprising number of supercentenarians smoked, ignored their cholesterol and avoided exercise.”

“There is little evidence of an abstemious lifestyle among the 450 people between the ages of 95 and 110 enrolled in the Longevity Genes Project at Albert Einstein College of Medicine,” reported the Journal. “There are no vegetarians. At least a third of them were obese in middle-age. A third has been smoking tobacco for 40 years or more, despite health warnings. ‘I have a woman who recently celebrated 91 years of cigarette smoking,’ says Dr. Barzilai. ‘She is 106 now.’ ”

*****

My roommate (who I will sadly be leaving this Monday after taking a position as a Resident Assistant for a neighborhood elderly home that requires I move into a two-bedroom apartment on Clark and Devon to be shared with three college students) introduced me last night to her dear friend, David, who is dying of AIDS and was just this week diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I think he is only in his early 50s.

David had a genuine interest in learning about my church and its unusual take on the Bible and I was able to give him the gospel at length. At one point, he asked, “What do you do when you sin?”

I explained to him, in part, that just because you’re a Believer doesn’t mean you stop sinning and sin is something every Christian deals with on a daily basis, but doesn’t need to “confess” or seek penitence for, etc. Instead, grace is applied. Dealing with sin and putting it away comes from knowing who we are in Christ and that sin just interferes with our true identity.

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On this same subject, here’s a great passage from a sermon by my preacher, Richard Jordan:

“I figured out that no matter what I did, and no matter how hard I worked at it, tomorrow I could look back and say, ‘Boy, I could’ve done better yesterday.’

“I told the Lord one day, ‘You know, Lord, if the success of the Body of Christ is dependent upon me serving you, we’re in trouble. You’re in trouble, Lord!’ and it was along in there that I began to realize that it isn’t really what’s done for Christ that’s the issue; it’s really that I’m in Christ and He’s in me and it isn’t what I’m doing for Him, it’s His life in me that’s the real issue.

“And, you know, that is a huge turning point in your Christian life—when you realize it’s really not what you do for the Lord, and your striving and being on the treadmill, thinking, ‘I gotta get there and I gotta accomplish that.’

“The Christian life is really Him in you, living out through you. Now that’s wonderful to understand in theory, but you’re like I am and we’re both like Paul was in Romans 7. He said, ‘To will is with me. I got all the will you want; my problem isn’t willpower, my problem is want power. Because the good I would do, I don’t, and the evil that I don’t want to do, I do. How to perform I can’t find.’

“Now, you look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about but I know you do. You’re no better than I am. And the answer to that, in Paul’s case, isn’t in what you’re doing. He’s saying that, ‘What I’m going to do isn’t going to be the issue. The answer is in, Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. There’s the how to perform’ . . .

“People say, ‘Some times you guys are so doctrinal; it’s nothing ever practical.’ But there’s nothing where God’s more involved in your life than when you take the truths of His Word and apply them to the details—the nitty-gritty of your life. You apply them to the way you use your mouth and your conversation with one another.

“I’ve told people for years, in Romans 12, Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3—if you took the instructions in Romans 12 alone, and you wrote those things on a piece of paper and spent just one day with each one of them, trying to figure out, ‘How can I today have that live in me?’ . . . you know what? Mister, your wife would swear she had a new husband within a week and a half. And ladies, your fellow would think he had a new wife in about four days. I know what those first four things in Romans 12 are; that’s why I say that.

to “You see, it’s that application. We’re complete in Christ; there’s nothing that’s ever going to be added you. It’s now just an issue of a faith appropriation of that identity into the details of your life. And that’s the practical reality of Christ living in you; it’s not just words—it’s taking that truth and seeing that live in you.

“Grace isn’t just a theology to believe, it’s a life that LIVES. That’s what excites us, that’s what keeps us going; that’s what impels us along!

“There’s a great hue and cry today in the culture wars that says, ‘You need a Christian worldview.’ And what they mean by that, well, you believe in God; you’re not an atheist. That’s a good idea. It doesn’t make any difference whether you believe in God or not; He’s there. There is a God; He is a Creator.

“But if you got any hope of surviving, not just drowning out there in the middle of the stew, you need to understand how things operate. There is a Creator; that means there’s some absolute truths. But a Christian worldview goes far beyond that. A Christian worldview has the ability to understand God’s Word. . .

“You know, one of the great discussions today is the issue of, ‘Why do the righteous suffer?’ I was listening on the radio coming home from Alabama the other day and there’s a guy preaching about the Book of Job and that Job is the answer to ‘Why do the righteous suffer?’ And the great brains of the world—the hundred thousand greatest brains of the last three millenniums—have struggled with this issue of, ‘Why do people suffer?’

“Well, if you believe the Bible, that’s not a big question at all. If you’re a Bible-believing dispensationalist, you answered and dismissed that question years ago as almost irrelevant. Now you say, ‘Well, Brother Jordan, how in the world can you be so arrogant as to say . . .?’

“I’m not arrogant; I just got faith. Romans 8:22-23 answers that question for you just like that and you know what the answer is: ‘Next question.’ Now, the world stays bogged down in that. You know why the world suffers? Paul says, ‘We know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now.’

“The world’s suffering. Why? One word. Sin. That’s it. Now, is that hard to understand? In the Bible that’s not hard; you got that figured out before you finished three chapters in the Bible. But the world’s still struggling with it.

“So, the thing the world struggles with out there, sometimes the gospel gives you real good, quick, clear answers. But to have a Bible view is to understand how the Bible lays things out.

“Hebrews 9:27 says, ‘And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.’ Notice that the guy who said, ‘There’s nothing sure except death and taxes,’ was a plagiarist. He didn’t originate that idea; he stole that idea and there’s the verse.

“Now, death isn’t really the problem. The problem is, ‘after this the judgment.’ You see that makes death a problem; the sting of death, Paul said, is sin. And facing God with our sin; that’s the problem.

“In Romans 14:12, Paul says, ‘So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.’ Now, that’s important to understand. There’s a great verse back in Amos 4. Years ago I preached a message called Eternity’s Greatest Moment and used that text. It’s a great preaching text; every preacher ought to preach on it some time.

“God promises in Amos 4:12, ‘Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.’ God is describing to Israel the coming of the fifth course of judgment upon that nation and how He’s going to take them and send them out into captivity. And He says to them, ‘Because you’ve done this, and you’ve done that, and I did this, and you didn’t respond, therefore I’m coming. Judgment’s on the way.’

“And He says, ‘Therefore, prepare to meet thy God, o Israel.’ What a concept! And I suggest to you that’s the one moment in eternity where everything else will be irrelevant.”