I start my day by taking these pills. By the end of the day, there are four more.

There’s a song made famous by the Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa that goes like this: “Time passes and we grow old, and love I no longer reflect as I did yesterday” (in a loose translation that fails to convey the idea of “nos vamos poniendo viejos”).

Aging is a universal experience. They say the only certainties in this world are death and taxes. Yet (as Spurgeon aptly put it) nothing is more uncertain than the hour of death. So, if you’re alive (and there’d be no other way for you to be reading this article), the surest thing is that you’re aging, and this process, unless interrupted by illness or accident, will stretch on for a few more years.

Old age doesn’t arrive all at once. It quietly settles in. Suddenly, we find we no longer remember names. That our bodies demand care. That our parents age and/or pass away. That some projects cease to be dreams and become memories.

The true shock isn’t losing youth; it’s discovering that time no longer seems infinite.

Youth Lives in the Illusion of Reversibility

When we’re young, we believe almost everything can be perfect. With strength, energy, and vitality, life’s horizon seems wide and distant. Worse yet, reversible.

We think there will always be time to ask for forgiveness, rebuild relationships, change careers, or correct decisions. Maturity reveals that some events are irreversible. The gospel doesn’t promise to return the past; it promises to redeem people who have a past. To redeem, simply put, is to buy a slave at a price. To free them and take them to a new plan which, in the case of Jesus and faith in Him, means the Kingdom. Here and now. Other similar words, though they don’t quite capture it, help explain what I’m getting at: Emancipation, Liberation. (In the emancipation/liberation we know, the necessary social conditions weren’t created for the emancipated to live a dignified life. Redemption addresses this more deeply, and that matters.)

The Bible Doesn’t Romanticize Old Age

In truth, the Bible doesn’t romanticize anything. It tells two stories in touching ways: the peripheral, which is the account of actions, decisions, observations, consequences of decisions—good and bad—and micro acts of redemption reaching people, families, nations. And then there’s the main account, which is the redemption accomplished by Jesus on the cross, pointing to a redemption even of creation. The important thing here: God doesn’t abandon His projects.

Texts like Ecclesiastes 12 realistically describe the body’s decay. Psalm 90 teaches us to number our days. John 21 shows Jesus announcing to Peter the gradual loss of autonomy.

Scripture honors gray hair, but never treats old age as an automatic reward or as synonymous with wisdom. Just look at the multitude of grumpy, angry, violent, bitter elderly people, resentful with God and the world, living in a nonconformity and resentment that fits well in adolescence, but not at life’s end.

Life’s changes can indeed be violent or instantaneous – a stroke, paralysis, betrayal, losing a job that changes everything, the list goes on – but the changes over which we have some kind of power are slow and painful. That’s why we often deny the need for help or the importance of seeing that doing things the same way we always have won’t yield different results.

These changes require not just a dreamed goal. They need to transform into a well-established plan. Not something like “From now on, everything will be different.” That refrain, repeated year after year on certain public TV — the year-end jingle of Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest network, promising that the new year will change everything — already shows, by February or March, that it’s not true.

Consequences Remain. Condemnation Does Not.

The Bible is full of people who sinned, obtained God’s forgiveness, and had to continue living with the consequences of their sin. Perhaps the clearest example is David.

There comes an age when we discover that we are no longer defined by our greatest successes or our greatest failures. We are defined by the grace with which God continues to write the story despite them.

David’s story shows that God forgives without erasing all consequences. Some losses remain until the end of life. David didn’t just lose the son he had with Bathsheba — her pregnancy was precisely what led David to send Uriah to the front lines — but also faced a fracture of integrity and prolonged repercussions in the royal house.

In the Bathsheba episode, after David sinned, the Bible says the LORD sent Nathan to David (2 Samuel 12). Nathan confronts David with a parable and then directly announces the consequences: that the sword would never depart from David’s house and that the child would die, and that this would happen “because” David acted that way (2 Samuel 12:1-14).

Even so, David didn’t lose the kingdom, and he wasn’t “disqualified” as king before God: he continued to be one of the leaders of the Jewish people and, despite the consequences, remained in the divine purpose.

I think few of us can understand David’s attitude when he got up from fasting as soon as the child died and went to celebrate a feast. To the casual observer, this sounds like psychopathy, or at least indifference. Generally, one expects mourning after death. Not him. Fortunately, we have the biblical explanation. That’s why I suggest reading the entire episode.

An elderly Christian can carry deep scars without continuing to live as condemned. And that is truly liberating. Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 4 show that the final word on our lives belongs to Christ, not to guilt or applause.

Aging Dismantles the Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

The greatest loss may not be physical strength, but autonomy. The body stops obeying, memory fails, others begin to care for us, privacy and independence cease to be an extremely prized and cherished asset, becoming a bargaining chip with the maintenance of life.

We discover we were never truly independent; we just managed to hide our dependence. Not anymore. Old age becomes a kind of compulsory humility.

For example, the way Jesus describes Peter’s future shows that dependence isn’t always chosen: instead of Peter following the path he wanted, there would be a time when he would be taken “where you do not want to go.” The body—and, by extension, the will—ceases to be the center of governance, and life is led by a calling that surpasses it. Thus, frailty doesn’t just appear as a flaw; it becomes a place of communion with grace and mission, because the “self” no longer bears the weight of the journey alone.

The Local Church Should Be Where Frailty Finds Communion

As dependence grows, a community capable of welcoming confession, repentance, mourning, and limitations becomes even more necessary.

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Make no mistake, even the most lost of sinners needs confession. There’s a book recently published about Western snipers in Sarajevo in the 1990s. I’ll address this in another article.

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Returning to the subject of mourning, confessions, limitations.

Instead of welcoming confession, repentance, mourning, and limitations, many churches expect the elderly to demonstrate permanent stability. The communion of saints should be a balm precisely when there is no going back.

And in this sense, Mary, placed under John’s care (John 19:26-27), is a good illustration: she is received, sustained, and supported by someone designated not to let frailty be isolated. If even at that moment, when Jesus’ life was being taken, Mary wasn’t “left behind,” but entrusted to care, then the church must also learn to do the same with its elderly—not as a favor, but as an expression of love that doesn’t depend on the strength of the recipient.

Christ Gives Meaning to the Time That Remains

Christian hope doesn’t consist in regaining youth or escaping reality. It consists in discovering that time, even when it takes away strength, opportunities, and autonomy, still belongs to God. Christ doesn’t eliminate finitude; He prevents it from having the final word.

Now, without romanticizing or sugarcoating the pill of aging, let’s anchor the reflection in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” The body may “stop obeying,” but the inner life isn’t left without governance: it is being rearranged, day by day.

And the same pastoral tone appears in Isaiah 46:4: “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you.” God doesn’t withdraw when capacity diminishes; He sustains when dependence increases.

Finally, Psalm 71:9-18 puts words to a mourning that is real: it describes aging and decline, but doesn’t silence the testimony of support. Old age may hurt—yet the hand that sustains doesn’t change.

Aging, however, isn’t just “gradual” finitude; there are days when a kind of inner night arrives. In Alzheimer’s, memory breaks, words are lost, and sometimes the brain no longer seems to reach stimuli as before. In those moments, God’s promise isn’t that the mind will function again, but that He keeps in peace those who persevere.

There may come a day when our minds can no longer remain steadfast in Him. It’s no longer a cognitive ability the person controls; it’s something sustained by love: through prayer, presence, reading, music, patient care.

When the time comes when “not even the brain seems to respond,” yet communion can happen through paths that transcend conscious thought: a familiar song, the tone of voice, a gospel phrase spoken consistently, a whispered prayer. I’ve seen this in people who no longer spoke due to Alzheimer’s, but were moved—brought to tears—when the name of Jesus was announced. It wasn’t performance: it was life sustained by grace, even at the limit.

Conclusion

Aging is discovering that there are irreversible decisions, definitive losses, and limits that cannot be negotiated. It is also realizing that our dignity was never in strength, memory, or the ability to control our own lives.

There comes a time in life when we can no longer go back. But we can still move forward. Not because the past ceased to exist, nor because the losses stopped hurting.

We move forward because Christ entered our story, even the part we will never be able to rewrite. Time keeps passing. We will continue to age. But we no longer walk towards emptiness. We walk towards the One who promised: “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he… I will sustain you.” (Isaiah 46:4)

A curious scene unfolded at our workplace just a few days ago.

Much of our development process now relies on artificial intelligence. It suggests code, reviews sections, points out errors, and organizes ideas. Then, suddenly, the credits for the platform we were using ran out. The renewal would only happen the next day.

We found ourselves looking at each other.

Not because we had forgotten how to program (though there is evidence of a certain mental atrophy). But because, without realizing it, we had stopped seeing much of the path the code took before reaching our hands. The tool had become so ingrained that it was part of our very way of thinking.

I suspect this will happen to society as a whole.

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You might not be aware, but artificial intelligence has been fed with everything humanity has produced in written or graphic form or any other medium that can be digitized. Today, when it answers a question, it does so based on this knowledge. Moreover, it uses open sources on the internet to continue “learning” and thus respond in an updated manner.

In 2026, we crossed an important threshold: more than 50% of internet content was produced by artificial intelligence. Inevitably, this leads to the situation where artificial intelligence itself will be producing content from other content it has produced or helped to produce. As a result, human creativity is being sidelined by the ease of using accumulated knowledge… without producing any more relevant new content.

Let’s return to the text

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Today, no one stops to think about electricity before turning on a light. We don’t ponder the engineering of reservoirs, the altitude they must be at to use gravity, and other similar things when we turn on a faucet. Nor do we understand the entire chain that allows a plane to cross the ocean.

We simply use it.

The same will happen with artificial intelligence.

But there is an important difference.

Electricity doesn’t interpret for us. Just as running water doesn’t think for us.

Artificial intelligence, in a way (and without being intelligence, just very fast logic), interprets. It summarizes. It organizes. It prioritizes. It suggests. It touches precisely what we consider most human: our ability to understand, which in turn connects with our creative capacity.

Perhaps that’s why it forces us to return to a very old question.

When an expert in the law asked Jesus how he could inherit eternal life, Jesus responded with two questions:

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?” (Luke 10:26, NIV)

It has always impressed me that Jesus didn’t just ask what was written. He asked how that man read it.

The problem was never just the text. The problem is also the reader.

This applies to the Bible. It applies to history. It applies to politics. It applies to artificial intelligence itself.

We are not just forming answers. We are forming readers.

Perhaps it is precisely here that the church needs to recover something it has lost over time.

A friend recently asked me if I wasn’t afraid that an artificial intelligence project aimed at preachers would make Christians think less.

My answer was uncomfortable even for me.

Perhaps we gave up on critical thinking long before artificial intelligence. Long ago, we learned to read the Bible through commentaries. We choose authors who confirm our tradition, our theological school, our preferences. Often, we know the interpreters better than the text itself.

Calvinists and Arminians (not to mention Molinists and other currents), for example, often accuse each other of forcing the Scriptures. Perhaps both should start with the same question from Jesus:

“How do you read it?”

This doesn’t mean disregarding tradition.

Quite the opposite.

Peter writes that no prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20-21, NIV). Paul affirms that the spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets (1 Corinthians 14:32-33, NIV). Biblical interpretation was never an isolated, almost mystical experience between an individual and their text (indeed, sects arise this way). It always happened in the life of God’s people, where brothers correct brothers, generations dialogue with each other, and Scripture itself judges our conclusions.

The revelation was entrusted to the church, not the individual. Just consider how the church resolved the great disparity over the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s people. The apostles and elders gathered, heard different testimonies, examined the Scriptures, and reached a conclusion together (Acts 15:1-29, NIV). It wasn’t a political compromise but a common commitment before God’s action and His Word. Without that council, probably neither you nor I would have been reached by the gospel in the same way.

That makes all the difference.

Recently, I heard Luis Felipe Pondé advocate for the return of oral exams as a mitigating element against students’ use of artificial intelligence. I found the idea interesting. A written exam can reveal that someone organized information well. But a conversation reveals something deeper. It quickly discovers whether that knowledge has become flesh or remains mere repetition.

Perhaps that is exactly why Jesus asked so many questions.

He wasn’t collecting answers.

He was forming people.

And people don’t mature just by accumulating information. They mature when they need to respond before someone.

It’s curious to see that artificial intelligence itself pushes us back to this need. It can summarize entire libraries, compare translations, find parallels, organize arguments. All of this has enormous value. I use it daily myself.

But it is not part of the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12-27, NIV)

It doesn’t participate in the communion of saints.

It doesn’t visit the sick. It doesn’t accompany the grieving. It doesn’t break bread. It doesn’t celebrate Communion. It doesn’t walk alongside someone whose faith is crumbling.

These things continue to happen among people.

Perhaps this is the true challenge of our time.

Not deciding whether we will use artificial intelligence. Remember what has already happened with the steam engine, the typewriter, the computer, the word processor, etc.

We will use it. Consciously or not.

The question is different.

Will we continue to allow the Word of God to occupy the center (2 Timothy 3:16-17; Hebrews 4:12, NIV), or will it become just another voice among commentaries, algorithms, videos, summaries, and opinions?

In the end, technology was just the starting point.

The question remains the same as it was two thousand years ago.

How do you read it?

Some topics have become almost taboo within the church over the years. One of these is judgment. The moment someone quotes “Do not judge, or you too will be judged,” it seems the conversation ends there. As if Jesus had forbidden any form of discernment, correction, or discipline.

The problem is that the church has absorbed much more from the surrounding culture than it realizes. We’ve begun to call love what Scripture never did. A love that never confronts, never corrects, never calls to repentance. A love that only embraces. But this is not biblical love. God’s love is never irresponsible. It is patient, merciful, and full of grace. But precisely because He loves, He also corrects.

Therefore, the question is not whether the church can judge. The question is: whom should the church judge?

Paul answers in a surprising way. “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” And before anyone jumps to conclusions, he explains himself. When he wrote not to associate with sexually immoral, greedy, idolaters, slanderers, drunkards, or swindlers, he wasn’t talking about those who belong to the world. Because if that were the case, he says, “you would have to leave this world.”

This observation completely changes the discussion.

The problem was never living among sinners. If that were the problem, Jesus would never have sat at the table with tax collectors and prostitutes. The church was not sent to flee the world but to proclaim Christ to the world.

So whom is Paul talking about?

The one who calls himself a brother.

The one who wishes to be recognized as a member of the body of Christ, participates in the church’s fellowship, but has decided to remain in rebellion against Christ without any repentance.

The difference is not in the gravity of the sin. It is in the truth of the fellowship.

Because the lost usually know they are lost.

The self-deceived believe they have found Christ while continuing to walk in the opposite direction.

It is precisely this self-deception that the church cannot confirm.

But to understand this, we need to go back a bit.

In Matthew 18, Jesus presents the path of discipline. If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault. Alone. If he listens, you have won your brother. If he does not listen, take witnesses. If he still refuses to listen, tell it to the church. Only after this entire process does Jesus say to treat him as a pagan or a tax collector.

Notice that from the beginning, the goal was never to expel someone.

The goal was always to win the brother.

Discipline is the last resort when all attempts at restoration have failed.

At first glance, it seems like a personal problem. One brother sinned against another brother. But only at first glance.

Because the New Testament reveals that no sin within the church is merely a problem between two people.

When Saul persecuted Christians, Jesus did not ask, “Why do you persecute my church?”

He asked, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

The attack against the body was treated as an attack against the head itself.

Later, Paul himself would develop this truth. The church is the body of Christ. If one member suffers, all suffer. If one member is sick, the whole body is sick. “Who is weak, and I do not feel weak?” And to the Corinthians, he writes as one who feels “the pains of childbirth” for those brothers.

So discipline ceases to be a conflict between two people.

It becomes a matter of the body of Christ itself.

When one member is sick, the rest of the body cannot pretend nothing happened. Nor can it amputate it for convenience. The body mobilizes everything it has to restore it.

This is exactly what happens in 1 Corinthians 5.

The church was proud of a tolerance that Paul considers incompatible with the gospel. A man was living publicly in sin, refusing to repent, and the church continued to treat it as if it were merely an expression of grace.

Paul reacts.

Not because that man was beyond grace.

But because the church was using grace to confirm a lie.

So he orders that the man be removed from fellowship.

This may be one of the harshest texts in the New Testament.

But only until we read the reason.

The goal is not to destroy him.

It is not to preserve the church’s image.

It is not to demonstrate moral superiority.

It is so that he may awaken.

It is so that he may stop living in the worst possible spiritual state: believing himself united to Christ while deliberately rejecting the lordship of Christ.

Discipline does not break fellowship.

It merely makes visible a rupture that has already occurred in the heart.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Years later, writing again to the Corinthians, Paul instructs them to do the opposite. Now is the time to comfort. It is time to reaffirm love. It is time to receive that brother again, so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.

Whether it was the same person or another case, the principle remains the same.

The same apostle who commanded separation now commands restoration.

Because the goal was never to lose someone.

It was always to recover them.

That is why Hebrews states that God disciplines those He loves.

He does not correct because He stopped loving.

He corrects precisely because He loves.

Perhaps the greatest mistake of the contemporary church is separating these two things.

There are churches that speak so much of grace that they have abandoned discipline.

There are churches that speak so much of discipline that they have forgotten grace.

The gospel allows for neither of these extremes.

The church does not discipline because it considers itself better.

It disciplines because it understands that a sick member compromises the whole body.

And it restores because it understands that the same member remains the target of Christ’s love.

In the end, the mark of a Christian has never been perfection.

Nor is it biblical knowledge, spiritual gifts, or reputation.

The mark of a Christian is repentance.

As long as there is repentance, there is fellowship.

When it disappears, the church loves enough to correct.

And when it reappears, it loves enough to restore.

This is how Christ treats His body. And this is how the body of Christ must learn to care for itself.