A Sneaking Suspicion No.7 The Death Factor

Dick Gammage, our Church Administrator, is one of the people who, he won't mind me saying because I was with him on so many occasions, has actually looked into the jaws of death. Tell us just a little bit, will you? Yes, I had a condition three years ago, a cancer which should have been readily curable with nasty treatment. It unfortunately came back 15 months ago and I had to have some even more nasty treatment.

I had an operation which only one in two come out of the theatre alive. They told me that afterwards, by the way. Tony was with me the morning before and if I'd known that I would certainly have asked him to pray a lot harder than he did.

After that I got deep vein thrombosis in both legs which went as high as that before they caught it by going in through the neck and catching the clots. So that was nothing to do with the cancer that was out to get me in the end. Fortunately after some very nasty treatment it looks very good at the moment but there were certainly two occasions where the doctor said afterwards that was asterisk close.

What were your immediate reactions when first you heard you'd got cancer? Did it send you into a spin or what? Well it was complicated by the fact that I'd been going to my doctor for five years with the pain and I'd had penicillin every time. I had to get over that. I had to forgive him.

I did manage to forgive him. Because he should have gotten the diagnosis before? Yes, yes. After that, nurses were saying, how do you feel now? You're a Christian, how do you feel now? It never occurred to me in the slightest to be angry with God.

I don't know why. I was able to say to a nurse, he never promised I wouldn't go through this. He promised he'd never leave me.

If he told me I was cured I'd believe him but he hasn't. But he has told me he'll never leave me. And if he ever did that, which he wouldn't, I would be cross with him.

But he will never leave me. So that was an opportunity. I need to say that it was hanging on by fingernails some of the time.

Please, if ever you have to go through something like this, don't feel too ashamed if your spirituality has gone right down the drain. My faith never once wavered, but my spirituality. I was living off verses that I'd read weeks before.

And that is why Tony mentioning the creed, we need to get it into our heads because there may be a time when you're horizontal and you will not feel like picking up this book. I didn't pick this book up for weeks when I was on chemotherapy. I didn't want to know.

But I was plucking verses out of my memory that I had learned years before through Ted Davis' Navigator's Classes. Yeah, 1 Corinthians 10 verse 9. God will never lead us to take anything we can't take. The second time round, that must have hit you hardest.

I mean, you had been hoping, praying, and indeed the medics are giving you the indication you were clear. Yes. And then within a very short space of time, months or a year or? Yeah, a year, year and a half.

But I was one of the 2%, which recurs in that way. The second time was worse, wasn't it? Oh, yes, it was much worse. I remember on one occasion going to see you and you were lying on your bed.

This was at Brighton. I'm not talking about London, Marston Hospital. And when I left, you decided that you'd get up and go to the door and see me out.

And I really appreciated the courtesy, but the emotional shock in my system as I saw you, I mean, you were skeletal, weren't you? Yes, I was. Yes. Yes.

And how did you cope? Because you were really looking. I don't want to exaggerate this, but this is an outsider who saw you fairly frequently. It seemed to me that you were looking into the jaws of death.

I wasn't expecting, I wouldn't have expected to have been interviewing you this evening. That's the bottom line. No, that's right.

Praise the Lord. Nor would I. Yeah, I mean, it's not actually as bad for the one who's going through it, funnily enough. I mean, I felt awful on chemotherapy.

I was being ill for three months on and off. But I must have looked a lot worse than I was, to be fair. I never felt, except before the operation, I never felt in fear of imminent death.

I just wondered how it was all going to pan out in the end. If I can be sublantist to say this, some of us who know you well and have loved you dearly and followed you through the course of these traumatic years, say that you are a different man. Ah, yes.

Well, praise the Lord. Actually, this isn't a put-up job, but that leads me onto the scripture I want to read. This is very largely not planned, let me tell you.

People have asked me, what do I make of it? And I've had advice such as follows. It's Satan doing it. It's our fallen flesh.

It's God doing it. Now, I've had to make sense out of all that. And there is a clue in scripture which convinces me.

It may not convince you, let me share it with you. It's from Titus. It says, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all wickedness, and to purify for himself the people that are his very own.

I used to believe the gospel was the Lord Jesus dying, paying the price for our sins, so that we had a ticket for heaven. Well, I no longer believe that. But don't panic, I do believe it.

But I don't believe that's a fair, full picture of the gospel. You see, we all like being saved from our sins. But not many of us like being prepared for heaven.

And yet, I believe this verse refers to the fact that the Lord will save us from hell, but prepare us for heaven. And I like to think, which of the three was it? I like to think it was the Lord taking me up on a prayer I prayed in May 89. And you need to know that in May 89, I had weeks and weeks of searching after a blessing from God, and in the end I said, Tony Swanson knows this, I said, Lord, anything, even cancer.

Now, be very careful what you pray to God. Do not mess with this God. Because I believe that was a prayer He said, Ah, I can use that prayer.

That is a prayer I cannot resist. He blessed me with a baptism in the Spirit, that I was three weeks, I was in heaven, and I could have gone home right there and then, with joy flooding every cell of my being. I'm not saying it has to be like that for everyone, but that was what it was like for me.

I was overwhelmed by joy. And when I read Joy Unspeakable later, I said, yes, that's it, that's what I had. So I hadn't read it and was waiting for it, I just had it and then read about it.

I've lost my drift. Yes, I prayed that prayer. Now, a long time later, I believe He took me up on it.

And I believe He's doing things. Well, we'll have to see. I won't know till heaven.

I'll tell you when I get to heaven what the reason was. But I like to think it was God saying, Satan's doing that, but I can use that, I'm going to have the last laugh in Dick's life on this one. And I believe He used it.

So out of this has come a peace and a greater ability to see things in perspective. Yes, I've never been concerned about death since I've been a Christian. But I tell you, things become supremely unimportant when you're on a cancer bed.

Now, there was a man just over a week away from death in the next bed to me. Do you know what he was doing? The lottery. Can you imagine anything so ridiculous with the last week of your life? And I had to think, am I doing the lottery? I don't mean, was I betting? I meant, where are my priorities? What matters? What doesn't matter? And there's a great sorting out that takes place when you think you've got a limited time left.

What, in conclusion then, is your conviction and what is your anchorage? Oh, my anchorage is, as it says in Hebrews, I am linked inextricably to the throne of grace. I mean, I might flap around from side to side on this anchor, but I won't go back. I'm linked.

I go so far and then it goes towards and I come springing back again. I'm linked to the Lord. And your conviction? My conviction is that I'm going to be in glory now or glory later, and it doesn't make a whole lot of difference, which it is.

Which is a tremendous cue for Howard to come and lead us in some place. Thank you. Richard, I'd like you to sit down.

Why, for those in peril on the sea, do we suddenly start that very old and well-known hymn? We commence with a couple of illustrations. Historic William Wallace, he was a fighting man from Scotland. And John Keats, a poetic man.

What I wanted to do was to bring a sort of up-to-date example of these two different characteristics. I'm not suggesting that Dick Gammage should really be called John Keats, but he represents a second example. Here's my friend Richard.

Just introduce yourself, Richard, to the congregation, will you? Well, good evening. My name's Richard Prendergast, and I've recently moved into this area again after a lapse of 30 years with my wife Marjorie. We live in Rustington.

And why do you think I picked that hymn? Well, because I'm a seafaring man and have been so since I joined the Navy 33 years ago. You're a captain? Yes. And you have not only been a captain in the Royal Navy, but also in higher service? Yes, in the King of Kings Navy.

Because you were captain of? I was captain of a Logos II and before that the Dulos. And you've come to Rustington for a little while, and at the moment you're engaged in ferry duties between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, is that right? That's right. I have a temporary job just to fill in.

We recently moved back from Australia, where we'd been living for 12 years, and after we came off the Logos II a year ago, I looked round for a job and Whitelink Ferries offered me a job, so there I am going back and forth to the Isle of Wight night and day. In fact, I finished at 2 o'clock this morning in my last shift. Sounds thrilling.

But you're a daredevil. 18, 19, 20, 21 you used to go almost white by risking your life? Yes, I think that was learning to drive around Worthing, actually. No, I when I joined the Navy, I actually joined to fly.

I joined a fleet air arm and I flew until I got thrown out of the fleet air arm for dangerous flying, so I then became a navigator and stayed at sea as a navigator ever since. And the years went by and you got involved in the Falkland War? Yes, I did, yes. I was actually working in the Ministry of Defence at the time about to leave and go down to Australia and the Falklands War broke out, so I had to stop and I found myself hanging off the end of a helicopter being dropped down onto the deck of a guided missile destroyer going just setting off for the Falklands.

They needed an operations manager for a group of ships and I was the only one available at the time, so I went down with HMS Bristol and we sat out on the screen of the two carriers as their air defence and my job was to run an operations room for all the ships in the fleet in case the Hermes got sunk and so I'd have to take over or my captain would have to take over as the admiral and I'd have to take over as his operations manager. So you have lived a life in which being an intelligent man you must from time to time have thought that you might not make old age, after all the fleet air arm had about the highest casualty rate of any group within his majesty's as it was in those days forces during the war were you a Christian during these two periods? No, I didn't become a Christian until we moved to Australia in 1984 in fact I became a Christian when I actually had a very Christian in a sense Church of England upbringing because I went to a Church of England school and I learnt a lot of scripture but I was by no means a Christian when I left school in fact I didn't go into a church for 22 years after I left school it had frightened me away I suppose and when I first went into the Navy I was like most young men I had absolutely no fear of anything I always believe that bad things happen to somebody else and not to you until I really frightened myself once flying I don't think I ever thought about death at all and even after that a few hours in a bar and a few strong brandies soon put it right again I can identify with most young people who really have no problem about death but then when you get a bit older and certainly going down to the Falklands I thought ah well I'm 37 now so I'd better think about I've got a wife, I've got a young son three I'd better think about what's going to happen if I died and I found that my father who had given me a Bible years and years before that little Bible which had pictures in it was still in my suitcase that I carried around with me and I took it out and started to read it and I looked in the Old Testament for God even though I knew all about Jesus and I knew all about the Gospel I'd heard the Gospel many times but I'd never made the connection and so I looked for God and salvation if you like in the Old Testament and I found it in Psalm 91 which I then learnt off by heart and I don't know if you have your Bibles with you but you will find that there's a verse in there which goes we shall not fear the terror by night nor the arrow that flies by day nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness and though a thousand shall fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand it shall not affect you and I thought well if this is true and if I believe this, this is God's word then it's not going to affect me now it's a funny sort of faith perhaps because I wasn't even a Christian really but it had a great effect on me and so subsequently two years later I became a Christian When you were down in the Falklands the Argentinians managed to get some exocet missiles from the French and they were directing those towards the Allied forces. They took out HMS Sheffield, they took out HMS Belfast HMS Coventry but that was by bombs HMS Coventry and you lost friends in that? Yes I lost one or two a particular friend who was when I was in the Fleet Air Army which I played rugby with his death was the most tragic of all because he took off in his Sea Harrier to go and bomb Port Stanley and as he took off his bombs fused and he blew up and you know it's not so bad if you get shot down or something but if you just blow up on the way it seems so pointless but then if you're in the military and you go and do that sort of thing well then those who live by the sword should expect to die by the sword and I suppose that was all the way we thought about it And you were reading the Psalms and learning this particular psalm at that point it became meaningful to you? Yes very It could have put some people off religion seeing ships blown up and their friends dying I suppose so yes but then death is with us all and we just accept it I think When did you come to a moment of commitment to yourself? I think it was out in when we'd moved to Australia an Englishman who'd gone out there a Church of England minister actually who came to our house and he was an evangelist and he led both my wife and I to the Lord although I don't think I made the commitment there and then it just sort of suddenly occurred to me that that was the truth and then I accepted Jesus There's an old hymn probably not as old as the one that we just heard on the organ and it says We have an anchor that keeps the soul What's your anchorage then? I mean if you were confronted with, and there are some people like this in our audience this evening who are not evangelical believers and you know the language that we take for granted that's understandable is incomprehensible to them Explain your anchorage Well it's interesting when you're young of course as I said you have no fear of death because it always happens to somebody else and it's not going to happen to you until you're 70 or 80 or whenever it's going to happen but then when you get older you start to think about it but in my case I always knew that salvation was to be found in the Bible but I didn't really bother about it or care about it When I accepted Christ as my Lord and Saviour I realised that I still didn't want to die particularly and certainly the act of dying is not something that I particularly wanted to go through but I had great peace about the fact that once I'd gone through it that I would be with him I would be in heaven and really there was nothing to fear and in my bravado I never feared death as a young man and then after becoming a Christian I don't fear death as an older man because I know that that's where I'm going so having said that nobody wants to die it's for song, everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die Just drawing our little time together to conclusion we are grateful that you and your wife whose name is Marjorie are here in Rustington we had your land with us in our home last week he is James is 16 just bringing this little interview to a conclusion there's a verse in one of the Psalms that says they that go down to the sea in ships they know, they see the wonders of the deep is a belief in God common amongst sea men naval men I'm not talking about necessarily a commitment to Jesus Christ in the way that you've just been explaining it but when you're exposed to the elements and the waves can get up 20, 40, 50 feet high and the biggest ship seems to be so small in comparison do you find that that life causes people sea men, sea women to appreciate that there is some far greater force out there on whom they are reliant yes, I think that is absolutely true I found it to be true among seafarers and indeed among farmers that I've known when I first went to join the Dulos in 1986 for the first time I was serving in the Royal Australian Navy and all my colleagues there gave me a dinner so I could go out in style as is the way of things and I witnessed to them obviously because I was going to join this Christian ship and only one of 30 or 40 or so who were there made a derogatory comment and interestingly enough he wasn't really a seafarer anyway, he was I suppose more of a civil servant in uniform he wasn't a person who went to sea so he didn't really understand the elements but every seafarer there, although they weren't Christians they all understood and said yes I think that's good so yes, you're right You probably know because you've spent so many years in England that the British become religious at one pint in every year at Wembley I thought you said one pint in every year, I'm sorry point it's my Sheffield accent never forgiven the Argentinians for sinking the ship that bears the name of my city I thought that was a bit off at Wembley 100,000 people abide with me, fast falls the even side you look around and I'm very moved at hearing this particular hymn sung but I often wonder when it gets to the last verse and indeed the fourth and the fifth verses just how much people really appreciate the theology and the potential that there is in committing their lives to the Lord and we're going to be looking at that a little bit more now Richard we're going to be led in the singing of that song in that hymn abide with me but thank you for showing us and your sincerity has come out that you're a man who does have an anchorage and you do have convictions and you have faced the challenge of death may God bless you here and your boy too and I hope you enjoy your time on the south coast until the Lord takes you elsewhere thank you, let's acknowledge Richard just two more readings one which takes us to the scene of a man who dies in old testament times whose name was Abraham and the other a man who lived within the ministry of our Lord Jesus and after his death and resurrection and he died a man who didn't always think the way in which he does at the point of the reading which we hear right now Jo Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac but while he was still living he gave gifts to the son of his concubines and sent them away from his son Isaac to the land of the east altogether Abraham lived a hundred and seventy five years then Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age an old man and full of years and he was gathered to his people and now the best reading of the evening I think when the perishable has been clothed with imperishable and mortal with immortality then the saying that is written will come true death has been swallowed up in victory where oh death is your victory where oh death is your sting the sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law but thanks be to God he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ the hardest service in my earliest years here at the tab I ever took was when a little mite just six weeks of age died it was a little girl and she was born very deformed with a diseased body which would never have in any way matured she had down syndrome problem and the nature of it was so grievous one was glad that the Lord did take her you can imagine the challenge of trying to speak to a situation like that with tearful parents and relatives crammed into a little chapel we didn't use this main sanctuary here I can see now the little coffin it was just made out of white wood and instead of two, four men carrying it down the aisle just one man with the coffin in his arms and he laid it on a table just alongside where I was to speak I got up early and I asked the Lord to give me something to say fortunately I'm an emotional man and it was not an easy situation and as I was going through my Bible in the Old Testament I came across a little verse from the Psalms and it says the sparrow has found a nest in the temple in Jerusalem the walls were high and the superstructure at the top of the building became a refuge for many of the variety of bird life that you get to this day in Palestine in Israel and those cheeky little sparrows they'd fly through the gaps in the roof and they would make their nests and when the great liturgical services took place down in the center of the temple and when the Hebrew Philharmonic orchestra for there was much music and rejoicing in the services in those days when all that was happening the little birds too were twittering away and singing their songs and the Psalmist who's very much like John Keats in his imagination sees those little sparrows and he says the birds, the fledglings they have found a nest in the house of God and it seemed to me that that was the word to bring on this particular occasion to these people that what had happened there darling little child had in God's grace been allowed just to pass almost from the experience of birth into an eternity of bliss and wasn't to know the ups and downs and the turmoils the sunshine and I the darkness of this present world I suppose being here in Worthing for so long I have conducted services by the hundred in terms of memorial or funeral services I prefer the first description and if you were to ask me which service gives the greatest opportunity in the whole program of preaching Sunday through to the following Sunday my answer would be a funeral service the reason being that people who come to a funeral service very often have not been to church with any degree of regularity at all funerals are very levelling occasions you do have to be a moron not to ask questions and the fact of the matter is that when you are confronted with death there is nowhere where you can go to give you a more satisfactory answer and to create hope in your heart than the Bible there's a politician by the name of Michael Foote I often listen to him, I respect him as an intellectual, he being the intellectual Richard Crossman was also a politician in the Labour Party they were both socialists and on one occasion they attended a service Crossman gave up his Christianity, though he was born into a brethren family and he knew therefore something of the Gospel as many of you understand it on this particular occasion the funeral was to commemorate the life of a colleague, also a parliamentarian but it was to be a-religious or non-religious Crossman went home and he wrote in his diary, for it was his habit to write his diary every day and eventually it gave birth to several volumes known as the Crossman Diaries he said, I wish Michael had shut up I wish he could have handed over the position in the pulpit to somebody who knew what they were talking about Crossman when faced with this particular watershed in his life, a colleague having died the only solace, the only thing that made sense of the occasion was when he went back in his memory to the days when he was a lad in the Brethren Assembly and they sang some of the old Gospel hymns that you and I have to sing there have been smart Aleks in history who have declaimed against religion there have been great intellectuals men whose calibre I will never get anywhere near and yet when you read the last years or months or weeks of their lives you discover that the philosophy that they preached or the play acting in which they engaged the film stars and the pop stars at that tremendous hour of death did not hold them at all so you get a man like Burton Russell who made that comment, when I die I rot at the end of his life he was in incredible difficulty HG Wells is a man who lived some years before Russell he wrote many books and the slant was anti-Christianity the last book that he ever wrote was Mind at the End of its Tether here is old Abraham the Bible says his life was full of years a long life and they take him back to a cave that he bought in which were at one time the remains of Sarah but by the time Abraham's body enters that cave the remains of Sarah would have been a mouldering in the grave for so long there would hardly be any dust recognisable left but Abraham gives instructions and the historian says that at the death of Abraham he was gathered unto his fathers that's in the beginning of the Bible an acknowledgement that at death life is not snuffed up like you blow a candle flame what is you lives on that Indian who was propped against his bed by the ribbon his wife had tied around his neck what one saw there was the remains his earthly remains but what made him an individual had gone on to where it had gone on into the presence of the Lord who gave life and the fact is that you know that I have yet to come across anyone who has convinced me of their atheism I've come across professed atheists but never convincing atheists Abraham believed that at death he was taken into the company of his forefathers and when you read his life you are told that he had in mind the goal that he was looking for a city whose maker and whose builder was God in other words though he was a successful man in his earthly pilgrimage he realised that this life was not all and here's Paul once known as Saul of Tarsus he stares into an open grave maybe he's thinking of his loved ones who have gone on ahead of him and he were it not for what Jesus had done in his life might at that point be filled with hopelessness but he instead cries oh death where is your sting oh grave where is your victory and he acknowledges as did Abraham using different language but the substantial meaning is common that at the point of earthly decay absolute sickness death the body goes on the soul goes on into the presence of the Lord but that is not just conviction without an anchorage you see William Wallace he had conviction but there was no anchorage and the anchorage that Keats tried to get was really the anchorage of poetry it wasn't the anchorage of reality what is the anchorage of the Christian faith my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blunder and righteousness in the film extract which we would have shown you Wallace right at the end cries out freedom he wanted Scotland to be free do you know what Jesus Christ cried out at the end of his earthly pilgrimage it is finished what was finished blessed Lord Jesus the work that I came on earth to do to take the consequences of human wrong doing and to pay the penalty so that men and women who believe in me shall never die their bodies die I've known some great men become initiated in the last days of their life I had a little secretary who was a dynamo and she became very skeletal an apology for what she was and she never was very robust but you know she went on as in the story told of a little boy who loved the eggs that were in the bottom of his garden and those new laid eggs he watched every day and the weeks passed and the day came when those beautiful eggshells were broken and it seemed as though what had attracted him was really just a wreck eggshell wreckage and his mother said to him what you've got to understand is this that the shell had to be broken in order for the life that was inherent in it to leave to find wings to fly away and don't you realize that's exactly what our Lord Jesus taught his disciples from what Paul says in Corinthians when a corn of wheat falls in the ground and dies it abides alone but when the germination process comes it springs to newness of life and when the human frame which encases the spirit that has embraced the Lord Jesus and committed himself herself to him when the human frame becomes like a broken eggshell it's then that you know the spirit has returned to God who gave it that's why Jesus was able to say I am the resurrection and the life he that believes in me in this sense shall never die their body fades and decays but they are taken to be with him in glory and await his return to a renewed heaven and earth have you responded to that yourself? Have you reacted to the challenge of death whether it should come to you tomorrow, next week, next month, next year or in a few decades time you look at it in the face and you say Lord I'm not here forever so I offer you my life control it control the direction that it takes and use me for your honour and for your glory and cleanse me from my sins because of what Jesus achieved for me on the cross if you have done that if you will do that then you can join Paul and say oh death where is your sting then you can combine a conviction with an anchorage you will not die eternally because your anchorage is in Christ Jesus you will go on into God's future and enjoy him forever so let's come back in our final song to the person of our Lord Jesus and to his mighty death and even more spectacular resurrection and realize that because he lives because he has been brought back from the dead we too can live not only now but throughout our mortal life and on into the eternity yet to be Howard Oh