The Lutheran Hour
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"The Problem and Promise of Deathbed Conversion"
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Text: Ephesians 2
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This has probably happened to you before: you’re sitting in your car, tapping the steering wheel in a long lane of cars that go for a mile. And then you look over your shoulder and what do you see? Someone cruises past in that empty lane. And clearly they can see that the highway merges down into one lane, but they ignore the signs. They just keep zipping past everyone. And then when they get to the end of the lane, what do they do? Flip on their blinker. And they’re not asking, they’re telling, “I’m coming over. I’m coming over,” and they cut in ahead of everybody. That’s happened to you before, I’m guessing, and it’s a little infuriating. And sometimes that’s how a part of me feels about deathbed conversions into the Christian faith. Now, as a Bible-believing Christian, I admit that they happen, deathbed conversions, the thief on the cross to whom Jesus said today, “You’ll be with Me in paradise.” Classic example of a last-minute lane change into the kingdom of God.
Conversions to faith in Jesus after a lifetime of running away from Him, they happen. And part of me recognizes how they highlight God’s mercy for sinners, just like me. But another part of me feels like they just cut in line. And maybe there’s a part of you that feels that way, too. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the problem and promise of deathbed conversions.
The actor John Wayne, the poet Oscar Wilde, the Roman Emperor Constantine, what do they all have in common? They’re all said to have had last-minute, long-delayed deathbed conversions into the Christian faith. Deathbed conversions are celebrated in Christian circles. In 2016, Larry Taunton, a Christian author, savored the possibility that the outspoken atheist, Christopher Hitchens, the guy who authored the book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, this Christian author said that Hitchens, the atheist, on his deathbed was teetering on the edge of faith.
Now, these musings about this famous atheist supposed last-minute lane change were for many non-Christians, some of whom knew Hitchens personally, they were offensive. Not only offensive and unbelievable, but also a little puzzling. One friend of Christopher Hitchens, the atheist, expressed his puzzlement saying, “The saddest thing about these imagined deathbed conversions is that even if they were real, they could hardly be seen as victories for Christ.”
In other words, to win someone over when they’re at their weakest, at their lowest, after a lifetime of ignoring all the signs, when they’ve got nothing to show and nothing to give, how can that be a victory for the cause? Sometimes Christians can get so caught up in winning converts for Christ that we miss the problem of deathbed conversion. Billy Graham said it well. While granting that long-delayed conversions to Christ happen, Rev. Graham said, “It is unwise to plan for them.”
It is unwise to play games with God. It is unwise to think that you can run away from God and turn to Him only at the last minute. Even the author that I mentioned, the one who pondered the potential faith of Christopher Hitchens, the famous atheist, whom he knew personally, he wasn’t celebrating the choices of any last-minute convert. He wrote, “Most of us have someone like Christopher Hitchens in our lives—someone we love who is so hell-bent on self-destruction that we feel powerless to help them.”
Now, if you’re not a Christian, that’s probably offensive to hear us say every non-Christian is hell-bent on self-destruction. But try for a moment to see it from a Christian perspective—if only as a thought experiment. See, the Bible teaches us that hell, eternal suffering is self-inflicted suffering that results from a lost relationship with God. It’s not as though God decides that He hates some people and then sends them to hell to torture them forever. No. Jesus tells us that God loves the world. He loves everyone, and that’s why He sent His Son Jesus into the world to save everyone—John 3:16, to save everyone who trusts in Him. See, the Bible teaches that conversion to faith in Jesus isn’t simply a lane change. No, conversion is the beginning of an eternal life-giving relationship, a trusting relationship with God, a relationship that not even death can interrupt. It’s not getting to know a secret passcode into a private gated community. It’s getting to know a Person, Jesus, coming to trust Him and love Him.
This means that planning for a deathbed conversion would be like planning to ignore your best friend for your whole life. It would be like planning to shun your mother, to shun your father or your husband or your wife, to go out of your way to avoid the people who love you, to reject them as long as possible until just before the moment comes when you decide that you don’t need them anymore, and you find yourself alone on that single-lane road to eternal self-inflicted loneliness. Here’s part of the problem with deathbed conversions. Planning for them can be self-destructive.
When Rosaria Butterfield’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she told her daughter, “I’m dying my way, not yours. I’ve read your books. If anything was going to make me a Christian, it would have been them, but I am not weak like you.” Rosaria’s mother came to live with her and her family. She lived with them for 16 months, and she made them miserable. Rosaria writes in her book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, “If explosion and implosion were love languages, these were my mother’s only two. She was angry, controlling, shaming of my children, undermining of my husband, and condemning of our faith.”
Rosaria’s mother used the best years of her life to ignore all of God’s signs, to drive in the lane of her own choosing, and she made the people who loved her miserable. It’s easy for us Christians to celebrate the conversion of a celebrity atheist, whom we didn’t even know personally. But what about that person who lives with us and does everything in their power to make our lives a living hell?
If we do come around to celebrating a long-delayed conversion to faith in Christ, then we can’t forget the fact that people who ignore God’s signs hurt other people. This makes God angry, because God loves people. Remember God’s Law, the Ten Commandments that He gave to the people, Israel, the Jewish people. The whole second half of the Law is about loving people, loving your neighbor. The Jewish people knew the pain of being unloved by their neighbors.
For centuries, the centuries leading up to the birth of Christ, the Jewish people, God’s people, had suffered at the hands of non-Jews, from uncircumcised Gentile people who ignored God’s signs. The Gentiles mocked the Jews for their faith and their strange practices. Often they did everything in their power to make Jewish life a living hell. And then when some of the Jews believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, things got even worse for them. Now they’re being attacked on two sides by fellow Jews and by Gentiles. And then when some of the Gentiles come around to being converted to faith in Jesus, they feel the same hostility from the Jews as well as their Gentile neighbors. Here’s another part of the problem with deathbed conversion: the longer a person delays conversion to Christ, the less they care about Christ’s people, the people that Christ loves. And on top of all that, it just feels unfair that someone could ignore God’s signs for a lifetime, hurt other people, and then in a dead-end moment of fear and guilt, when they have nothing to show and nothing to give, except loneliness, neediness, and despair, then they turn to the God who’s always been there for them, and He accepts them. That’s the problem with deathbed conversion—and it’s also the promise.
Shortly after her mother died, Rosaria Butterfield said to a friend, “I think my mom died in the Lord, but maybe it was the morphine talking.” Her friend said to her, “It takes faith to believe that God saves sinners, doesn’t it?” This is essentially the whole message of a Jewish man named Paul. He was another one who long delayed his conversion to faith in Jesus the Christ. In some 2,000 years ago, Paul wrote in a letter, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst.” And Paul wasn’t just humble bragging on himself here. He really was that bad. He had attacked his fellow Jews. Even had some of them murdered because they followed Jesus the Christ. Paul brought all of that experience into another letter that he wrote. It’s called a letter to the Ephesians, and in it he’s mainly talking to Gentile converts to faith in Christ. Paul here in chapter 2 gently deals with the problem that we all have in believing that God really does save sinners and only sinners.
Listen to how Paul says it in Ephesians chapter 2.
And you, when you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you used to walk following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient, the disobedient among whom we all lived at one time gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature, following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature children of wrath.
But God who is rich in mercy, God according to His great love with which He loved us, God made us alive together with Christ Jesus even when we were dead in our trespasses. It is by grace that you have been saved and God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages, He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Because it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves. It’s God’s gift, not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared in advance or us so that we would walk in them.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and are called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, the one done in the body by the hands of men. Remember that at that time, you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, strangers to the covenants of the promise without hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus, you who once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two into one. He has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility between them by abolishing His flesh the Law of Commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in Himself one new human being out of the two, and so make peace. And in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which He put to death their hostility. Jesus came and He preached peace, peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. Because through Him, we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Consequently, you’re no longer strangers. You’re no longer foreigners, but fellow citizens with God’s people, fellow members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Christ Jesus as the chief cornerstone. In Him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. In Him, you also are being built up to become a dwelling place in which God lives by His Spirit. Ephesians 2.
Christians do celebrate deathbed conversions. We rejoice that a person finally got right with God, but we can’t forget how much God cares about getting human relationships right as well. He cared so much that He sent His Son to become human. See, that’s Paul’s point about Jesus abolishing the Law in His flesh. It’s not that God stopped caring about the values of the Law, of loving God, and loving neighbors. It’s that God cared so much about loving our neighbors that He took away any pride that we might feel that we’re better than someone else because we obey the Law. This is what happens when we deny the promise of a deathbed conversion.
See, there’s something about a deathbed conversion that is true of every conversion to faith in Jesus. We all come to Jesus with nothing to show and nothing to give save neediness, loneliness, and despair. And the minute we forget this, the minute we deny the promise that Jesus makes to everyone—even the most hardened sinner on their deathbed—is the minute we start to feel entitled, and we become boastful and resentful. Of all the forms of human pride, Christian pride is the worst. It’s the most sinister force that the devil uses to set up dividing walls of hostility and to cut people off from God. But Jesus went to the cross to put all that to death. The promise of deathbed conversion to Christ kills Christian pride.
Rosaria Butterfield tells the story of her mother’s deathbed conversion in her book titled, The Gospel Comes with a House Key. Rosaria lets the reader feel the problems of life shared with sinners as a sinner, and the pain of waiting through years and years of broken relationships. More importantly though, she shows how God’s self-giving love in Jesus demolishes all pride, and lays a foundation in Jesus, and unlocks the house of God where sinners like you and me are built up together.
Rosaria stayed at her mother’s bedside for eight days of dying. She was at her mother’s side singing, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” the words of Psalm 23. Her mother stopped her halfway through. She said, “Maybe I am becoming weak like you. But if I’m getting to be soft, why don’t I understand?”
Rosaria said, “Mom, I think you understand the Gospel. But because you don’t know the Shepherd, it seems like nonsense to you.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “So tell me about Him.”
And as the lifelong barriers between them began to crumble, and their hearts merged into one lane, Rosaria kept singing Psalm 23. Afterward, her mom opened her eyes and said, “Well, that settles it. I’m now weak. I’m weak like you. I do need the Shepherd.” And with that, Rosaria wrote, “My mother, the former atheist, put her faith in Jesus, repented of her sin, and found peace with God two days before she died. God is merciful to me, a sinner.”
Please pray with me. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Amen.
Reflections for July 18, 2021
Title: The Problem and Promise of Deathbed Conversion
Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. The Rev. Dr. Jason Broge is director of Design and Development for Lutheran Hour Ministries. He joins us now for more conversation with our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Jason Broge: Thank you, Mark. As we continue to go through Ephesians, some of you may go to a church that uses a lectionary system, and you may recognize these as the readings you’re hearing right now at church every week. And I have to say, there’s something special to me about going through an entire book week after week. It feels in some ways like it’s maybe a chance to get a little closer to the way it was originally done.
Mike Zeigler: You can sense this with Ephesians 2. The first half is all about grace, by grace you’ve been saved. The second half is all about people coming together, different people, Jews and Gentiles in Paul’s case, but maybe just insiders, outsiders coming together. And maybe if you don’t hear them together, you’re wondering, “Well, how do those two connect?” and you focus on one or the other, but Paul, I hear him doing a stair-step argument here or a presentation. So, Jesus has taken away any reason we have for boasting about being a part of the family of God. Therefore, second half of the chapter, there’s no more dividing walls, there’s no more hostility, it’s not possible, because Jesus has put that to death on the cross. And so now you, who are once far away have been brought near with those who were close, so that’s the power. You don’t get that if you only hear the first half. And you don’t get the power of the grace move, if you only hear the second half.
Jason Broge: People today don’t realize, not only was the original text not broken up into verses or chapters, but it was usually not read alone. Reading Scripture was a team sport, so to speak.
Mike Zeigler: Absolutely. Yeah, you should think of less like reading a letter quietly to yourself and more like a concert. This is how it was done in the ancient Roman world. Ninety percent of the people were illiterate. It’s not like they didn’t appreciate language, just because they couldn’t read a printed text. Just like I can’t really read music on a printed musical score, but I love listening to music. Well, it was the same in Greco-Roman culture. They loved listening to the spoken word. They would sit for hours in amphitheaters and listen to an orator, and that’s what Paul has in mind here, that this letter carrier would deliver, would perform, this letter with all the drama and emotion and vocal expression. And the people would just soak it in with their ears, as a team sport, so to speak, like you said. And whether that’s in your house and in speaking God’s Word together around the dinner table or at your workplace, every Christian is a living letter from Christ to the world.
You could say, a choir, all singing in harmony, all singing their part of the letter. So he uses the image of “You are God’s building, built on the foundation of Christ Jesus and the apostles and prophets. You all together are being built up to become a dwelling place where God lives.” So it’s in the church where you see this wisdom of God unfolding for the world, as everyone is singing or playing their part.
Jason Broge: That’s an important image, because so often, especially in today’s world, especially even now as we’re coming out of COVID, I talk to so many people who feel isolated, who feel like they’re not a part of anything, who feel alone and feel worth less than others. And Paul’s message here is “No,” as you said, “You are so important that God’s Son died for you, and you are now,” he’s using all these metaphors; “You’re a child of God. You’re adopted, you’re …
Mike Zeigler: a fellow member of God’s household.
Jason Broge: A fellow member of God’s household. And you’re literally part, in this image, of the very structure itself. It’s built on Christ, but you’re a part of that structure. You play an important part of the whole, and you are valued and needed here, as a part of the body of Christ.
Mike Zeigler: Amen.
Jason Broge: Well, Mike, thank you very much for giving us the gift of these letters and sharing them with us. And I look forward to hearing the rest of this series.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“The Church’s One Foundation” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House)