Valuing Life from Beginning to End

This episode contains portions from the following episode:

"Are You Truly Pro-Life."

"Five Myths about End-of-Life Care."

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Dannah Gresh: Whether young . . .

[crying baby]

Dannah: . . . or old . . .

[older person coughing]

Dannah: . . . human beings are made in the image of God. 

Man: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1:27).

Dannah: Because of that, we must honor and value life—from beginning . . . to end.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, here on Sanctity of Human Life Weekend. I’m Dannah Gresh. 

It was on January 22, 1973, that our Supreme Court handed down a horrific decision. Roe v. Wade made it legal for a woman to take the life of her child. Of course, that decision was overturned in the summer of 2022, but the political and legal battles continue in many places throughout this country and even around the world. 

I think it’s so important for us to slow down and observe Sanctity of Human Life Day. It’s usually the third Sunday of January. 

Now, let me tell you something if you’re feeling like turning this off. Because if you are one of those women who chose to end the life of a baby, you might be thinking you don't want to listen to this program. Maybe you think you can’t listen because it will trigger all the guilt and shame. Hold on! Slow down. I want you to hear this: there is forgiveness for you; there is healing for you. You can find it in the name and person of Jesus Christ.

One of my dearest friends—her name is Kim—aborted her baby. Kim herself was only a teenager. And from that point on my friend suffered from depression, terrible depression. 

But then, she met Jesus! She asked Him to help her face the decision she made, and she prayed for forgiveness. And she felt that—the forgiveness. 

She stopped taking her prescription anti-depressants with the help of her doctor. She started a different kind of medicine, she joined a recovery Bible study at our local  crisis pregnancy center. And if you meet Kim today, you’re going to meet one of the most joy-filled women you can ever know. Today she helps other women experience that same kind of forgiveness. You can know that, too!

It did start with pain. Pain—the pain of your memories and whatever pain may be in your body—is a messenger. That pain is inviting you to see your decision for what it is so you can experience healing and forgiveness. I encourage you today to be like my friend. Find someone in your church or local community that can guide you through the steps of healing in the name of Jesus. Oh, how God loves you and wants that for you!

Valuing human life goes beyond protecting the unborn, as crucial as that is. It also means valuing the lives of the elderly and the sick. Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth helping us see the urgency in our culture today. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The other night, Robert and I rented a movie that looked like a really sweet love story. It’s based on the true story of a couple struggling with the husband’s terminal illness. We were drawn into this story. It was intense; it was emotional; it was tender. And we found ourselves pulling with this couple as he struggled to stay alive and as his wife cared for him in an extraordinary, selfless way. We’re just totally cheering for this couple; we’re pulling for them!

Then it gets almost to the end of the movie and we were totally caught off-guard by what happened next. We looked at each other and said, “Did that just happen!?”—and it had. With the wife’s blessing, the man chose to end his life with the assistance of his physician.

It was all portrayed so lovingly, so “naturally,” and it left us just hardly able to breathe—kind of with a knot in the pit of our stomachs. But that movie—and how beautifully all this was portrayed—reflects what has been a distinct shift in our culture in our lifetime.

The late Dr. Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984 (so this was a number of decades ago), wrote the book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? And, almost as if he were a prophet, this is what he said:

Times of monstrous inhumanity do not come about all at once. They are slipped into gradually. Often those who use certain emotions and appeal to ‘rights’ do not even know what they have started. They see only some isolated condition they want to accomplish, but they have not considered soberly the overall direction in which things are moving. At some point they want to go backwards—but then it is too late.

Stephen Alexander is a pastor and a retired judge, and he’s written a piece called "The Biblical Argument Against Assisted Suicide." Here’s a part of that article. He says,

What happens to a society which increasingly turns to death as a resolution to its social problems? When will the right to die become the obligation to die? . . . Our culture, which was once known as western Christendom, is slowly, but surely becoming a culture which seeks to solve societal problems with a violent act of death. And it is especially in America that we are so obsessed with personal rights that we are willing to sever our traditional, biblical ties of duty, compassion, and love to the weak and the unwanted. We are becoming not just inhospitable, but even a dangerous place for those too weak to compete effectively in what has become a contest of rights—the very young, the unborn, the elderly, the dying, the handicapped [and so on.]

We’re looking at this statement in the True Woman Manifesto that says,

Human life is precious to God and is to be valued and protected from the point of conception until rightful death.

God is the Creator of human life, and we are to affirm that, to value it, to protect it. But to the contrary, what we are experiencing in this nation and in our world is a culture of death—and you see this on so many fronts.

We talked about abortion, which is now legal in two-thirds of all countries of the world. It’s estimated that approximately fifty-six million babies are aborted world-wide every year, more than sixty million abortions in the United States since 1973, Roe v. Wade.

If you want to see this in a really graphic way, you can go online, and you can find websites that have a counter going on showing—as you’re sitting there looking at this website—each abortion that is taking place in this country. I had it on my screen last night as I was preparing for this session: one child, one child, one child . . . gone, gone, gone, gone! That number of abortions in the United States since ’73 is greater than the population of California.

It’s more than the combined populations of Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Based on the current rate of abortion, one out of every four pregnant women today will choose to terminate her baby’s life.

One writer said,

I lose track of how many millions have died. We can cope with such figures only by ignoring them. Once I heard someone observe that a memorial similar to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, listing the names of all these babies, would have to stretch for fifty miles. That was many years ago, and it would be many miles longer today. But such a wall cannot exist, because those babies never had a name.

In the area of euthanasia—taking the life of the elderly and the handicapped—who were considered by that Nazis as “useless eaters . . .” Useless eaters. As we heard, the hard-fought-for “right to die” is becoming now the “duty to die.”

Just a few examples of this. (I have someone on our team who sends me each week updates and alerts about things that are happening in various areas of culture, society, news—Christian and otherwise—and some recent ones have a lot to do with this whole life issue.)

In 2016, the Supreme Court of Canada issued an edict legalizing physician-assisted suicide. One report said since then, the College of Physicians of Ontario established a rule that doctors that oppose euthanasia must refer patients to doctors who will assist them with suicide.

Now, there are some physicians in Canada—brave ones—who have challenged this rule, but thus far the superior court of Ontario has ruled unanimously to uphold it. If you don’t believe in this, you are obligated legally to refer your patient to someone—to a doctor—who will [assist them with this].

Here are some other headlines recently:

• Records show an increasing number of people in Belgium are being euthanized without having agreed to it 
• Euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands up and rising
• Proponents of Childhood Euthanasia [this is sick children] Argue It Should Be Left Up to the Beneficence of Doctors [to decide to terminate the lives of these sick children.]
• Pro-family Group Files Lawsuit on Behalf of Man Whose Mother Was Euthanized without Him Knowing. 

It talks about how he had no chance to say goodbye to her. He’s a chemistry professor in Belgium who had been a mild supporter of Belgium’s ultra-liberal euthanasia law and is now among its most outspoken opponents. When it hit home, he said, “This is not right!” He had no absolute moral code to tell him that, but in his heart he knew it wasn’t right.

We see murders and shootings and violent deaths so often in the news—not just entertainment but in the news—that it’s become routine. We’ve become desensitized, immune. How many of these can you feel deeply about when you hear it again and again and again?

In a culture of death, that’s the bad news. The good news is that God has made Christians to be messengers of life. There is life available in Christ! God created and values life and Christians must be messengers of life. In a world that devalues life, we can show the infinite eternal value that God places on every single human soul.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. She was expounding on one of the statements in the True Woman Manifesto. That’s one of the guiding documents here at Revive Our Hearts. It’s basically a series of statements—declarations and affirmations—about what we believe. Every sentence is supported by Scripture. If you’d like to read the entire True Woman Manifesto, you’ll find a link to it when you go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s program.

Well, in that document is a sentence that Nancy has already mentioned. Let me read it again: “Human life is precious to God and is to be valued and protected from the point of conception until rightful death.”

The part about “rightful death” is really important. It implies that there is such a thing as “wrongful death.” But for family members of someone who’s terminally ill, it can actually be hard to know where to draw the line between wrong and rightful death.

Dr. Kathryn Butler is here to help us navigate those waters. She was an emergency room trauma surgeon in Boston for years. She’s walked alongside many patients and their families in some difficult circumstances. She captured her thoughts and what the Bible has to say about it in her book Between Life and Death: A Gospel-Centered Guide to End-of-Life Medical Care. 

This is a portion of a conversation my Grounded cohost, Erin Davis, had with Kathryn Butler. They were talking about some of the myths about end-of-life care. Let’s listen. 

Erin Davis: Myth number one is, there is no need to discuss end of life care until the need arises. Really, that's my, my hope for this episode is that we start this discussion before we are at the bedside of someone who's breathing their last breath. So, why do we need to think about these things when we are alive and well, even though it's uncomfortable?

Kathryn Butler: Nobody wants to talk about this. There's no quicker way to stop conversation at a dinner table than to bring up death. Even for a Monday morning topic, no one wants to think about it. Death is the wages of our sin. Paul calls it the last enemy, you know, that's for a reason. It causes grief and despair. It hurts, and it scares us. 

But when we avoid the topic, what we risk doing, because the landscape of death and dying is shifted over the last 50 years so dramatically from the home, where it's something familiar and we're surrounded by the things that have shaped our lives and the people we love and the spiritual realities of death transition to life with Christ to the hospital, where it's very heavily medicalized and far removed from the things that we know and the people we love. What that does is that if we don't talk about it ahead of time, we risk undergoing treatments and experiences at the end of life that are objectionable to us and also pitching our loved ones into some harrowing situations of having to make decisions on our behalf when we can't speak for ourselves. 

Because the truth of the matter is that about 75% percent of people can't vouch for themselves at the end of life, because they're on a ventilator, and can't speak, because their illness abandons them and interferes with their ability to think, because the illness itself takes away their voice. As a result, when that happens, the decisions fall to those we love. But only about 25% of people in America have an advanced directive to guide loved ones and what to do. And without any guidance, the burden is so heavy. It's been studied that loved ones struggle with high rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and complicated grief for up to a year after having to make these decisions for a loved one who dies in the intensive care unit.

Erin: Myth number two feels a bit like there might be some landmines here, but I'm glad we're talking about it. Myth number two is the Bible requires us to prolong life, at all costs, in your understanding, what does the Bible actually teach us?

Kathryn: Yeah, so this is a really tricky thing that I think a lot of us stumble into. We want to be God honoring, right. We see very clearly from the Bible that life is a sacred gift from the Lord, we see that in Genesis 1. We're called to steward it, and we're directed in the 10 Commandments not to murder and to protect life, right? 

On the other hand, death comes to all of us. Paul says, it's the wages of our sin from Romans 6, verse 23. And until Jesus returns, it will come to all of us. So, the sanctity of life doesn't refute the certainty that death is going to come to each of us. I think what a lot of people don't understand is the measures that we use that are called life support, at the end of life, can't cure you. They're meant to support your failing lungs, failing kidneys, whatever system it is that’s threatening your life, until we can reverse the underlying process. 

So, what I mean by that: a ventilator is meant to support your lungs when they're failing, while we treat the pneumonia, or give you medication to take the extra fluid off your lungs, etc. If we can't reverse that underlying process, that ventilator is not going to bring you home. It's not a cure. And so, the bigger question is, will a certain measure bring about recovery? Or is it going to prolong the dying process? I think that that's something that a lot of people struggle with. It's important to realize that doing everything at all costs doesn't translate all the time to recovery and going home. 

Yeah, and we can really rob people of the chance to commune with family and to pray and to reflect upon God's goodness, if we commit them in their final moments to a ventilator and an endotracheal tube in the hospital when it's not actually going to help.

Erin: Yeah, I've journeyed with some people through those last moments, some who were hooked out to lots of machines and things and couldn't communicate and some who were. It was a very different experience, really, practically. What would you say about a Christian having a DNR a Do Not Resuscitate?

Kathryn: I think it's helpful to have DNR forms. I think are especially helpful for someone who has a known terminal illness with a short life expectancy when the cures have run out. A DNR makes complete sense in that scenario, because if someone goes into a cardiac arrest, and they have a terminal illness, and we have no treatment for that terminal illness, and they're debilitated, they're very unlikely to survive that cardiac arrest. And so that makes complete sense. 

If someone however is very healthy and doesn't have any medical issues. I think a DNR and DNI form can actually be dangerous. What I would recommend instead is, I think we should all have, a living will, that allows us a narrative form, to outline what our wishes are from a biblical standpoint. 

So if I am suffering from a condition for which the physicians think that I can recover, then I would like these treatments. If I'm at the end of life and I'm actively dying, and there's no hope for me returning to the things that I need to walk with the Lord and to live out my calling as a disciple of Christ, then no, I wouldn't want these measures. I think that kind of language can help.

Erin: Yeah, that speaks to the third myth, which I'll just mention, then we'll move to myth number four is that the Lord, if I pray fervently enough, the Lord is going to heal me. One thing that sometimes troubles me about prayer lists in my own church and other churches, is we pray that a physical healing is the ultimate hope, when really, these are saints who if the Lord chooses not to heal their physical body are going to be with the Lord in glory. 

And so, even the way we pray, even the way we think about death, should be reflected in these kinds of decisions. I want to move to myth number four, removing a loved one from life support is wrong. What does Scripture say about that?

Kathryn: So related to the second myth, if there is hope for recovery, it's fine to keep going, that's appropriate. But it's important to also know that as followers of Christ, we're called to love our neighbor. What's the second greatest commandment according to Jesus? We're called to from Micah to walk justly and love mercy and walk humbly with our God. And that means that we care about the suffering that we inflict with our treatments. And there are times when the treatments that we offer, offer suffering that is way out of proportion to the benefit, meaning that the chances of someone recovering are slim. People struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after a long spell in the ICU, at rates approximating that suffered by soldiers who fought in the Iraq war. 

These measures do cause tremendous suffering for people, robs them of the ability to speak. They will wake up and be delirious and be scared. CPR, while it's crucial to save life, also breaks ribs. And so, people who survive it have pain with every breath. These are not benign things. And so, if someone is on life support, they are actively dying. We have no way to reverse the underlying illness. It's okay to say, you know what, the loving thing right now is to say these treatments are not helping, and they're only hurting. And especially for someone who follows Jesus, we know that when the end comes, it's not the end. They'll be with the Lord. God can work even through death from Romans 8:28, for the good of those who love Him.

Erin: Man, there's someone in addition to me, Kathryn, that you just reached through the screen and held their hand when you said it's okay. We don't know how long to fight or should we take every measure available to us? And so, you are bearer of hope and perspective this morning. 

Myth number five, is another dose of hope and perspective, the myth is that there's no hope at the bedside of someone who's dying as a physician, as a follower of Christ. As someone who's probably walked this in your own life. What's God's truth about hope at that moment when somebody is crossing over from life to death?

Kathryn: I think when you see these horrible situations, and the grief is so heavy, you can turn though and say, this is why Jesus came. And then we cling to the hope that we see in Revelation 21, that when He returns, there will be no more death or suffering or pain. He will wipe away every tear from every eye. And when you look at the fact that Jesus has transformed death, He's triumphed over it. It's no longer something to fear at all costs. But we know that we have the hope, that when we pass from this life, we will be in the presence of the Lord. And that from Romans 8:38, through Jesus, nothing, neither life nor death, nor angels, nor rulers or anything else in all creation can separate us from God's love for us in Christ. And I think clinging to that, and realizing that not even what's happening at the bedside can take that away. That’s a hope that can buoy us through. 

Dannah: Dr. Kathryn Butler there, talking with Erin Davis about a difficult subject, but one we need to think through. There was more to their conversation in that episode of our weekly videocast and podcast Grounded. You’ll find a link to it at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend. 

That website is where you’ll also find lots more free resources. They’re all meant to help you grow in the freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness found in Christ. Again, just head to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend, or call 1-800-569-5959. 

So, what can you do today/this weekend to remind yourself or others of the high, high value of life, from conception to rightful death? You might participate in a peaceful march for life. You might make arrangements to volunteer at your local crisis pregnancy center. You might go visit an elderly shut-in, or pray with someone at the hospital. But please do something. Human life is precious. It’s valuable. 

Have you ever said something and wished you could take the words out of the air before anyone heard them? Next week we’ll talk about self-control when it comes to our tongues: our words. Mary Kassian, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, and I will be here for that.

Thanks for listening today! I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

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