A Patient Comes to Christ

I was on a teaching ward round with my firm when we came to a very pleasant lady in her 50’s who had been admitted for terminal care.  She had liver secondaries and was feeling very weak.  She asked if she could have a private talk with me later.  When I returned she said,

“I am finding this business of dying very difficult.  Could you speed it up for me?

She clearly wanted ‘euthanasia’.  I replied, “We can’t do that,”  but we went on to have a discussion about what she was finding difficult and the things we could do to help her.  I wondered if there was some spiritual problem underlying all this so I continued,

“I wonder if there is a reason that God is keeping you going like this.  Do you think you have got everything ready?”

“I think so,” she replied, “I have cleared all my cupboards at home.”

“Yes, but on a deeper level, are you sure you are ready to meet God or aren’t you sure about these things?”

“Oh!   I think I’m ready, I’ve never done anyone any harm.”

Here was this lady about to meet her maker and she wasn’t ready.  Fortunately our hospital has Gideon Bibles in the bedside lockers so I asked if I could show her a few things.

“I would like that,” she replied.

The first thing she needed to be clear about was that when we die we will face judgement.  I wondered about using the passage in 2 Thessalonians 1:8-10 but decided that the wording was too aggressive for this lady so we looked up Hebrews 9:27.

“. . . man is destined to die once and after that to face judgement.”

The great attraction of using this verse is that the adjoining verses both talk about Jesus died to “take away the sins of many people.”

I illustrated this by placing a book on my open hand, and explained that this represented my sin, which acts as a barrier between God and myself.  My religion, which was illustrated by my fingers actively moving under the book cannot help get rid of the barrier.  She seemed to understand this so we went on to talk about sin and to show that no-one is naturally good enough for God.  Her claim about ‘not doing anybody any harm’ was both untrue and certainly inadequate.  So we looked up Romans 3:11.

“There is no-one righteous, not even one; there is no-one who understands, no-one who seeks God.”

She then agreed that being right with God was never something she had bothered about at all.  We also looked up Isaiah 59:2,

“But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden your face from you, so that he will not hear.”

As we talked she began to understand her problem.

“How can I get right with God?” she asked.

Sitting on her bed we talked about the Lord Jesus.  We talked about his death on that cross and how he died to take away the consequences of our sin and to enable us to be right with God.  We then turned to 1 Peter 2:24.

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

As we talked it all seemed so clear to her, the Holy Spirit was convicting her of sin and righteousness and judgement in a non-aggressive way.  She then said,

“I need to be forgiven by Jesus.  Will you pray for me now?”

At this point the nurses sitting at the adjacent nurses station jumped up and pulled the screens round even though they give hardly any privacy. They must have been listening. I prayed thanking God for what he had done for us on the cross, and asking that, just as he had promised, he would put her name in the ‘Book of Life’, forgive her sin and give her his Spirit.  She was very grateful.  I left her with a list of the verses we had looked up as well as two more on assurance,

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”  John 1:12

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has passed over from death to life.”  John 5:24

The Lord gave her great joy that continued.  Her husband phoned me up the next morning.

“Are you the doctor who spoke to my wife yesterday?”

“Yes,” I replied rather hesitantly as I didn’t know what was coming.

“We are not a religious family in any way, but I would like to thank you for spending the time with her.  She has such peace.  Would you mind explaining to me what you said to her?” 

He phoned me at home a few days later at the weekend and came for tea.  I was interested to see that somehow he had obtained a large unused Gideon Bible, Authorised Version, which had the words, ‘Headmistress’ printed in bold type on the outside.  We went over the gospel in a very similar way.  He wasn’t ready to commit himself but I gave him a copy of ‘Cure for Life’ and said he could phone at any time.

His wife moved to the local hospice where I visited her on one occasion.  She was holding firmly onto her Saviour even though she was sleepier from the drugs.  We looked at Romans 8:1 which is another great verse on assurance.

“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because . . . ”

To make this simpler to understand, I wrote her name on a piece of paper and placed it inside the Bible.

“Let this Bible represent the Lord Jesus and this piece of paper represent you.  Because you are now ‘in Christ’ when you meet God he will not see your sins at all, he will see that you are in Christ and have ‘his righteousness’.   Furthermore Jesus is now in heaven and because you are in Christ he will take you to be with him there.”

The nurses told me that she later asked them to read her the whole chapter of Romans 8.  About two weeks later I had a phone call from her husband to say that she had just died.  Apparently one of the last things she said to her husband was to ask him to become a Christian and made him promise to “go to the doctor’s church”. He did faithfully come and he later attended a Basics course when he also committed himself to Christ.

BVP