(upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime pastor and author, John Piper. Today's question comes from an anonymous man. Pastor John, I heard the episode about caring for aging parents. That was episode 1078, and we published that back on August 9th of this year.

It's titled Retirement Homes and Caring for Aging Parents. Back to the question. In that episode, you got me thinking about my job. I work in a nursing home and see our elders in a way many of us fear becoming. Could you speak to the dignity of people in nursing homes with diseases such as dementia?

This seems to me to be perhaps even more foundational under the answers about caring for aging parents. Would you say that's right? - Right, that's absolutely right. The God-given dignity of every human being is created in God's image and destined for final accountability before the living God, unlike all the other creatures, that dignity is foundational to our thinking about how families or caregivers care for aging parents or for that matter, for any person whose mental capacities are diminished for whatever reason.

So let me just share a few foundational and application thoughts about the dignity of those with diminished powers of thought and self-awareness. First, we can hardly be reminded too often or too deeply of the staggering truth of Genesis 1:27. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them. And then you add the additional truth that even after the fall into sin, this great reality of image bearing is still true about all of the people that we deal with and should affect our behavior. James 3:9, "With the tongue, we bless our Lord and Father, "and with it, we curse people." Who are made in the likeness of God.

So you can see how James thinks that that fact should alter the way we use our tongues and talk about people. Every human being, everywhere in the world, of every race, every ethnicity, class, male and female, rich and poor, sick and well, is utterly distinct from all the other kinds of creatures on earth.

So that 1 Peter 2:17 says, "Amazingly, honor all," meaning honor all human beings. And the honor clearly does not flow from moral worthiness. They're not, a lot of them are wicked, like Nero. And it goes on to say, "Honor the emperor." They're wicked. And so the honor is not flowing from their unique moral condition, but from their unique standing in the image of God, different from all other creatures.

And that applies to an 80 pound arthritic, diapered, drooling, glaze-eyed human being that we love lying in bed, praying for death in the nursery home or in the jungle hut. Now, a second observation needs to be remembered, namely that in God's way of dealing with the world, he has elevated weakness to a place of extraordinary importance.

The weakness of God is stronger than the power of man, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, meaning when Christ died in weakness and dishonor, he accomplished the greatest thing in the world. And then Paul refers to his own weakness in 2 Corinthians 12 as the best pathway for honoring the all-sufficiency of Christ in his life.

And then he brings this weakness into connection with the dying process and relates it to the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, 43 like this. The human body is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. In other words, Paul is telling us that the weak, inglorious, demented shadow of a once strong Christian person in front of us is on the brink of glory and power.

You need to go to nursing homes and think that way. These people are on the brink of glory and power. We must keep this continuity in mind between diminished powers of human being here and the spectacular powers they will have in the resurrection. If we lose, this is so important, if we lose a sense of that continuity, we will assume that we are becoming less human rather than being on the brink of being gloriously superhuman.

And if the question is raised, because I did mention the word Christian, if the question is raised, what about the unbeliever in the nursing home? The answer is we never give up. We never give up praying that they too might participate in that glorious destiny. This is what they could be.

We're not God. We do not determine anyone's destiny. We treat people, we speak to people on earth in the prayer, in the witness, in the hope of redemption and glory. Which leads to one more thing maybe, namely the mystery of personhood in the presence of dementia. Science cannot answer the question that relates to the soul that God himself created in connection to the body.

The relationship is profound beyond all human comprehension. No one, no one knows the precise connection between the demented mind and the real soul, the real human person within. My grandfather, just before he died, was curled up like a fetus in a diaper, looking like a corpse, uncommunicative for weeks, slow, belabored breathing.

But when my father bent over his head and prayed almost at the top of his voice and finished, my grandfather, almost with his whole body, gave a deep, guttural, unmistakable, "Amen." That was the last we heard of him. We hadn't heard anything for weeks. I will never, I will never assume that any human being that is still breathing cannot in some way be reached at his innermost being.

I don't know, I just won't assume it. And the last thing I would say is that the encroachment of dementia in the lives of those we love is a gift to us, testing our love as never before. One of the manifestations of dementia is that every moment is real to the failing person, but the connection of the moments is lost.

So as I was driving my father in his last days to his brother's funeral, whom he loved dearly, he asked me every two minutes in that 20-minute drive, he asked me every two minutes where we were going. In every single one of those questions, he really wanted to know.

He was really there. He was really curious in that moment about where we were going. And the real test, the real question for me was, would I patiently, graciously, as if for the first time, on the 10th time, answer him with grace and interest, engaging the person who was there in that moment?

Such challenges of love are no accident. They're no accident. God didn't bring that into my life for nothing. That was a painful gift to me and a test, and we all will have them. So let us be full of grace as we give ourselves to care for those who have become too weak, physically or mentally, to care for themselves.

God's priorities for efficiency in this world are not ours. - Moving. Thank you for this God-centered vision over such a challenging end of life issue. And thank you, as always, for taking us into some of your own personal experiences as well, Pastor John, I really appreciate your self-disclosure in these things.

And thank you for listening and making the podcast a part of your day and your commute. Three times a week we publish, and you can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our past episodes and find episode 1078 in our archive at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, entertainment is intended to be entertaining, of course, that's what it means to be entertaining, and we can love it too much.

So how do we know if we love time with God more than we love our entertainment, or whether we love our entertainment more than we love time with God? It's a very relevant, sobering, and important question on the docket for Monday. Until then, I'm your host Tony Reinke, and we'll see you on the other side of the weekend.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)