Rob Moll Interview - The Art of Dying

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is
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Mike Abendroth and I'm your host today for the typical week, as you know, Mondays. It's a sermon preached at Bethlehem Bible Church.
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We're in First Corinthians now. Tuesdays, I'm with my associate pastor, Steve Cooley, and we look at issues in the church.
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Thursdays, I usually try to teach something positively, that is to say, a certain doctrine.
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Maybe it's repentance, maybe it's lordship. And then Friday, we usually critique things. What does the
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Bible say about Mormonism? What does the Bible say about word -faith teachers, etc.?
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But on Wednesdays, we like to talk about books, either books that are really bad, horribly bad that I want to warn you about so you don't read them, or books that are good for you.
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Good books that you need to read and buy. And today's no different. On Wednesday, we have the author for The Art of Dying, Rob Moll, on the line.
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And it is a great book. Rob, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Thanks, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here.
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The subtitle to the book, Rob, is Living Fully into the Life to Come. Let's start big picture, and then we'll work to some of the details.
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Give us an overview of the book. Tell us why you wrote it, all that kind of jazz. Well, I think that subtitle, it captures what
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I was trying to get at in the book. And, you know, a lot of times we think of death as simply an ending.
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And it really is, you know, it's more like a transition, and not just in terms of spiritually moving from this world to that to come.
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But as we prepare for that world, there's a lot of things that we often neglect to do, to prepare ourselves, to prepare our families, to prepare our loved ones, even our doctors.
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There's a rich tradition of Christian preparation for dying that the church today has, in many cases, just forgotten about.
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And now is a great opportunity to try to relearn some of that, because a lot of people these days are facing long and extended, drawn -out illnesses at the end of their life, which makes it difficult for families and caregivers, pastors.
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And this is a great opportunity to relearn this wisdom that the church has given to us on dying well, and how to do that faithfully as a
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Christian. Well, we've got Rob Moll on the line. His book, Art of Dying Well, an excellent book by IVP Books.
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Rob, I think they can get in touch with you as well, or look at your information a little bit more, robmoll .com, is that correct?
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That's right. Okay, good. So often, Rob, as a pastor at least, and as a leader of a flock here in central
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Massachusetts, I try to shepherd my people through, what does it mean to live to the glory of God?
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What does it mean to die for the glory of God? How can we visit people who are slowly dying?
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How can we go to a funeral properly? And there are hardly any books that deal with some of these subjects on how you die well, and should we be put on life support?
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I so appreciated the book, and I want to try to encourage all the listeners to pick up a copy of the book,
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The Art of Dying. Tell me, why'd you come up with that title? I mean, I like it, but tell me your thoughts regarding the title,
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The Art of Dying. Well, yeah, it comes from—I didn't make it up myself, unfortunately.
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I think it's a great title as well. But it comes from the medieval tradition called the
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Ars Moriendi. And this was a tradition that was developed kind of during the plague, as the plague was making its way through Europe.
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People were dying left and right, and they were doing so alone, without family members, without any assistance, without anyone to care for them, because most people who were able to would just flee.
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And so they developed this book, basically, a series of woodcut pictures.
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And each picture was, you know, one of the temptations that you would face on your deathbed.
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And so without, say, a priest in the Middle Ages to visit with you, these books were meant to help people prepare and turn their hearts toward God at the end of their lives.
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It was a unique situation, but these woodcuts were published for centuries.
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They went into hundreds of editions, and the explanations underneath the pictures were translated into dozens of languages.
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So they were wildly popular. And it developed into a literary tradition of people writing on what it means to die well.
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And the poet John Donne, who many of your listeners may have heard of, was one of the exemplars in this tradition.
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He wrote a great deal on what it meant to die well. And then this tradition sort of continued into the 18th century.
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In the U .S., the Methodists had a tradition based off of this art of dying that they called the happy death or the beautiful death.
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So it was a very lively tradition. Starting from the early church, you know, it developed into this literary tradition and then carried over into what we often think of now as sort of the classic cinematic deathbed scene with last words and people gathered around a loved one.
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But, you know, that sort of stereotype is drawn from this happy death tradition, which had its roots in the
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Ars Moriensi. So I'm trying to really get—remind people of this tradition and how we can live up to that again.
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Well, I think that's a great goal. And so many people today, even Christians—you say in your book 95 percent of the people who call themselves
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Christian. Well, let me read the exact quote. Journal of the American Medical Association found that people of religious faith, 95 percent of whom were
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Christians, were three times more likely to choose aggressive medical treatment at the end of their lives, even though they knew that they were dying and that the treatments were unlikely to lengthen their lives.
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It seems to me, Rob, that most Christians, if they don't think through these issues, it's not the art of dying for them, it's the science of dying and the health treatments for dying and the medical research for dying.
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Don't you think that seems to be the case? It's unfortunately true. You know, a lot of—while we
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Christians have this hope in life eternal that the God who resurrected
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Jesus from the grave would give life to our mortal bodies, as Paul says in Romans, we have this hope, and yet, astoundingly,
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Christians, far more than the rest of our culture, rely on these medical interventions to lengthen our lives.
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And, of course, you know, there are plenty of instances.
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It's—we should be using medicine to keep us healthy.
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But when Christians are relying on it to avoid death and to fight off death, when in many cases, and in all the cases that this study looked at, where Christians are relying far more than the rest of the culture on medicine, technology, doctors to keep them alive,
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I think that it—first of all, it doesn't speak well of the hope that is within us.
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And secondly, it is often just leading to terrible suffering for people and for families as they have to go spend more time in the
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ICU, have more interventions, often go through more pain. For the
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Christian, not only does this not express—is not an expression of the hope that we have, but it also doesn't allow us an opportunity to prepare ourselves, to say goodbye to our loved ones, to prepare our hearts for eternity, to turn our thoughts from this world to the next, to meditate on what
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Christ has for us. Well, I want—go ahead, finish that thought. Well, I think that we can use technology to achieve these ends, and unfortunately we're not doing that.
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Well, so often I walk into a hospital, Rob, or some kind of assisted living home, and it seems like these days—and
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I think this is to the shame of many clergymen, clergy women, I guess, there are clergy women out there as well—the social workers seem to be the catalyst for, this is what we do, this is how we go about things.
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And you said in your book on page 32, The Art of Dying, one of the researchers told me patients who received outside clergy visits had worse quality of death scores in comparison to those who did not.
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To me, maybe those are people who are unregenerate clergy people, I don't know the survey, but I don't want to do that.
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I want to go in and be an undershepherd and to lead them and to guide them, and that's why
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I think it's important for laypeople and pastors to get this book, because we don't want to be, as the chapter title indicates, too pro -life.
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To live is Christ, and to die, we believe the Scriptures teach us, is gain. What do you think about those thoughts?
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Well, you know, that survey looked at people who relied on their spiritual advisors, whether that's a pastor or a priest or whoever it may be, who relied on spiritual advisors to help them make medical decisions.
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And so I think that there's, as the study shows, that people who did so actually had worse outcomes.
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I think that there's a tremendous room for clergy members, for pastors, for lay ministers to brush up on these end -of -life issues, just some of the technical and healthcare aspects of that.
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And also to learn this art of dying, that there is a tradition and an art to be learned, and that we can die in ways that are faithful to our beliefs.
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Absolutely. We believe the Scriptures to be true, and therefore, as the Cutbrook book excerpt says that I got from my
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VP, how now shall we die? And we want to die like there really is a risen
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Savior. And you say in your book, rightfully so, death requires preparation.
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And then you quoted the New England primer, some of the nursery rhymes in there. Ex Xerxes the great did die, and so must you and I.
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Why? Youth forward slips, death soonest nips. We are afraid of death even in local churches today, and I think this book is a good reminder that we should die well.
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How's the response been so far for the book, Rob? Well, it's been great. I'm just thrilled to be able to talk with people who—often people who are facing their own death because of a terminal illness—to talk with pastors and family members who—what
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I hear over and over is that there's nothing else out there that deals with this.
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There's plenty of stuff on, you know, the ethics, and there's plenty of people who will give you advice on—you know, experts who will give you advice on, you know, when to pull the plug.
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But what I'm trying to do in the book is to provide kind of an overview for this whole end -of -life process, and how we can apply our faith to it.
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You quoted some of those nursery rhymes that children would actually recite as they learned the alphabet.
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Their teachers were, you know, sure to give them a little taste of what life is like.
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And, you know, in New England at the time, it was important for people to—for children, actually—to realize that death was a possibility even for them.
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And in so many ways, today, we have pushed that sense of reality away.
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We just refuse to look at it. And there's a great opportunity here for Christians to relearn this art of dying.
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We're talking to Rob Mole, who's written the book, The Art of Dying, IVP Books. Rob, one of the things
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I noticed that you said in your book, that the dying process is a deeply spiritual event.
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And it's only by the grace of God that this happened, but I had been to seminary and been a pastor. My mother was dying in a hospital, and we were there for many days, and we would read the
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Scriptures to her, and then the morphine was taking effect, and she was close to dying, and we would grab a guitar and sing some songs.
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And I would tell her, okay, Mom, I'm the oldest son. We need to disconnect things. It's not going to work any longer to live as Christ, to die as Gain, absent from the body, present with the
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Lord. There's no reason to keep this going any longer. And my mother said the last words I've ever heard her say were, awesome.
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And the nurses afterwards, Rob said, and again, this is a testimony to just learning these things so we can die well.
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Someone has to teach us. The nurses came up and said, we've never seen anybody with a family like this.
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We've never seen a death like this at all. And I told her why it was, and I was a pastor, my brother's a pastor, and we believe the
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Scriptures are true. And so I think your book helps people try to die well, to die in a godly fashion, to plan things ahead of time.
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Why do you think people are afraid, even Christians, to plan out their life, their death, their funeral, their wills?
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Why are they afraid of that? Well, I think it's a difficult thing to overcome, to overcome our fear of death.
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You know, there's really nothing in our lives that, these days, that prepares us for that.
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We don't get to see, you know, you talked about your mother and what a wonderful story.
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But, you know, how different it would have been if that were at home. And that's how, you know, death used to be.
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And so it used to be that we were often confronted with death, and we were often forced to, you know, respond to that.
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And that's just no longer true today. Rob, if you could give some advice to the
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Christians who are listening. This is a Christian radio station, and there are all kinds of preachers, John MacArthur and Chuck Swindoll and those kind of folks on the station.
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I thought you said something insightful on page 87. I've heard doctors say, do you want us to do everything possible for you if your heart were to stop or if you were to stop breathing?
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It's actually a quote from David Fisher. Well, of course, the family would say they want you to do everything possible.
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That's not the way to ask the question. So for our listeners today, when they have to think about loved ones and do not resuscitate and all these kind of issues, what's the best way to walk through those issues mentally now before they get there?
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What kind of advice would you give them? Yeah, the best way to begin those kinds of conversations is just to talk about, first of all, do it early.
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Do it before you're in the hospital and before you need to start making decisions.
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And then... Can I interrupt you? Could you say the ICU is a bad place to have the end of life care discussion?
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It's a horrible place. Usually, if you're in the ICU, it's because you're not able to make those kinds of decisions.
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So you're not really able to talk about them either. You know, I've had, you know,
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I'm younger. I'm in my 30s. I have little kids. And I've had this conversation with my wife.
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I've had the conversation with my parents. We know, and this is what we know, and this is what...
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These are the questions that you should ask. What are the values that you want to bring to the end of your life?
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Medicine is able to sort of help us achieve whichever goals we want.
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If that's, you know, extend your life as long as possible, no matter what, you know, they'll keep giving you the drugs and keep giving you the
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IVs. And they may be able to do that. But if that's not what you want, if your values are to spend as much time with your family as you can, if your values are to be able to spend some time in scripture, to be able to spend some time in prayer, to say goodbye to your loved ones, if those are your values, it's a very different...
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You're going to need to make very different kinds of medical choices. So first, you need to have these conversations with your family members.
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And then when it comes time to sort of apply those conversations into practice, to be talking with your doctors and with your medical providers about how...
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What are the best ways to make those values a reality? And if that means that you may have to forego more aggressive treatment to provide for more time where you're alert, where you're able to converse with family members, you know, then you're able to make those kinds of decisions, knowing exactly what it's going to mean.
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Well, I noticed, Rob, in your book, you said, when you're talking about goals of care, what do we really want to do?
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You quoted Fisher again, and he said, you know, people's goals are to live as long as possible.
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Okay, then you do everything in response to that. But if your goal is to, as you try to say, to live and die in a godly way, in a way that could spur other people on, in a way that would show your family that you do believe what you said you believed, then you do things a lot differently.
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So the goal isn't, I have to live as long as possible. The goal is, I'm going to die and face
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God, and so let's die well. Isn't that the right goal? That's right. And, you know, the medical choice there is not a choice between doing what the doctors can or just, you know, letting an illness take its course.
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It just means different kinds of care. Everybody, you know, all of my family members,
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I'm going to do everything I can to care for them. But that doesn't mean I'm going to do, you know, every single medical intervention possible to extend their lives.
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So we're not necessarily foregoing care. We're just asking for a different kind of care to allow us to express these values that we as Christians hold, that we need to prepare our hearts for eternity, that we need to perhaps ask for forgiveness and tell our loved ones that we love them to, you know, achieve some last goals, whether that's attend a wedding or finish jotting down a memoir or whatever it may be.
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We can ask our doctors and talk to our family members about how we go about achieving those goals.
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Well, I think you said in the book, Rob, on page 130, survivors have plenty to overcome as they mourn the loss of a loved one.
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A good death helps that process. So to me, even if I was going to be on my deathbed,
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Lord, help me to die well so that my family can grieve less and mourn in such a way that would be better because I died well versus, you know,
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Dad just freaked out and didn't believe what he preached all those years. That would hurt my loved ones.
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So you can't even be giving to other people as you die and give them a good mourning afterwards, correct?
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M -O -U -R. That's right. You know, death is never an easy thing, and often it's easy.
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And the terms from the Methodist tradition of beautiful death and happy death, when you only talk about it in those terms, it can sound like, you know, a bon voyage to eternity.
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And death is hard, and it's tough, and you have to make difficult choices, and it's incredibly sad.
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And we can alleviate that to an extent by dying well.
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There will be grief, and there will be mourning, but it doesn't need to be so terrible because we had to make a choice to remove someone from life support, or we had to watch as someone just wasn't prepared, and our loved one died that way.
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And by dying well, we essentially begin on a good step, the mourning and grieving process for our loved ones.
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Well, we've been talking to Rob Moll, who's a writer for IVP Books, The Art of Dying Well.
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Rob, thanks for being on today. In the last 90 days, I've walked into three rooms, one home, excuse me, two homes, and one assisted living care, and there was a dead body there.
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And I know of no other book to help pastors and lay people deal with death, dying, funerals, grief, and mourning.
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No better book than The Art of Dying. So great job. Thank you for being on No Compromise Radio. Well, thank you,
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Mike. It's great to hear that from a reader. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.
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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
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