Dementia Caregiving For God’s Glory: How To Reform Your Thinking
How can the core principles of the Reformation help you find strength and purpose in dementia caregiving?
In this episode, we reflect on how the Five Solas—the foundational beliefs emphasized during the Reformation—can guide caregivers through every challenge, creating a caregiving journey that honors God and brings peace.
The Five Solas: A Faith-Based Framework for Caregiving
This episode starts with the powerful history of the Reformation and its central teachings, known as the Five Solas.
Each principle offers unique insights into how caregivers can view their roles through a biblical lens:
1) Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone)
Scripture is the ultimate authority and offers wisdom, comfort, and direction during difficult moments.
2) Sola Fide (Faith Alone)
Caregiving does not define our worth or salvation. We’re reminded to find peace in knowing we are justified by faith, not by our works.
3) Sola Gratia (Grace Alone)
God’s grace sustains us through the trials of caregiving, enabling us to extend grace to ourselves and our loved ones.
4) Solus Christus (Christ Alone)
Christ’s sacrifice gives us the ultimate example of selfless love and humility, guiding our caregiving approach.
5) Soli Deo Gloria (For God’s Glory Alone)
All aspects of caregiving, from struggles to small acts of kindness, can be done for God’s glory, showing His love and light.
Practical Applications for Caregivers
Scripture as Our Guide:
By viewing caregiving through Scripture, we can reframe our challenges as part of God’s design, turning what may feel like a burden into an opportunity for spiritual growth and peace.
Finding Peace Through Faith:
Sola Fide reminds us that caregiving is an extension of our faith, not our identity. Letting go of perfection and leaning into faith frees us from feeling we must “do it all” perfectly.
Embracing Grace in Caregiving:
Caregivers often feel guilt when things don’t go as planned. Sola Gratia assures us that God’s grace covers our mistakes, allowing us to care with patience and compassion.
Following Christ’s Example:
Christ’s humility and selflessness provide a blueprint for caregiving. By emulating His love, we can approach caregiving as a true act of service and faith.
Glorifying God Through Caregiving:
Soli Deo Gloria invites us to see our caregiving as a way to reflect God’s love. Every small act, done with gratitude and grace, shines His light and goodness in the world.
These Reformation principles offer caregivers a meaningful foundation for their daily journey. By applying Sola Scriptura, caregivers can draw comfort and guidance from God’s Word.
Sola Fide reminds them that their worth is in faith, not caregiving perfection, and Sola Gratia assures them that God’s grace covers their challenges.
With Christ’s example of humility and Soli Deo Gloria, caregivers can see every act of caregiving as a way to reflect God’s love.
This episode provides the tools to approach caregiving with faith, purpose, and the peace that comes from knowing their work honors God.
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Transcript
[0:01] Hey, Christian caregiver, welcome to Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians, the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to make dementia care
Introduction to the Reformation Episode
[0:14] easier today while helping you imagine a brighter tomorrow. This episode today is going to be a little bit different than the normal episodes, and the reason for it is because tomorrow is October the 31st, which for a lot of people is Halloween, but where I come from and where we come from a church background, it is Reformation Day. And so I thought it would be fun to do an episode on the Reformation. And today’s episode is titled Dementia Caregiving for God’s Glory, How to Reform Your Thinking. And so as we come to this Reformation Day episode today, we’re going to do a quick journey through history, and we are going to apply the concepts of the Reformation to caregiving. Now, many people have forgotten, or a lot of people don’t know their history very well, but in 1517.
[1:15] Martin Luther started what is now known as the Reformation, when he nailed his 95 Thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg, where this started the church’s Reformation from a Catholic church, what we call Catholic with a capital C, Catholic church to the Roman Catholic church to the Protestant churches. And so the five central concepts or principles that came out of the Reformation are called the five solas. The first one is sola scriptura, which means that the Bible or scripture is the ultimate authority. The second one is sola fide, which is you are justified by faith alone and not by works. The third one is sola gratia, which is you are saved by grace alone.
[2:17] Salvation is a gift of God. The fourth sola is sola Christus, which is I’m saved through the work of Christ alone. And the last one is
Applying the Five Solas to Caregiving
[2:30] Soli Deo Gloria, which is all of these things are for God’s glory alone. So how do we apply these principles of the Reformation, the five solas of the Reformation, to dementia caregiver? So we are going to look at each one of those five solas under a separate heading, and I hope today to give you something applicable to let you think a little bit differently about your own dementia caregiving journey. So let’s start with Sola Scriptura. It is the principle that teaches that the Bible alone is the ultimate authority.
[3:17] So I want you to picture, I wear contact lenses, and then I have reading glasses, which I’m holding up. If you are watching the video, you’ll see me holding up my glasses. If you’re just listening, I want you to picture putting on a pair of glasses. And the glasses that we put on are like our worldview, how we perceive the world, what we believe to be true of the world. And the way we are as Christians supposed to interpret everything that we hear, see, or do is through the lens, like a pair of glasses, of scripture. Scripture is the ultimate authority that should be guiding our caregiving journey. Now, this takes wisdom.
[4:02] It takes encouragement. It takes prayer. But it is the foundation for everything that we do as a caregiver. This is how we’re supposed to look at our caregiving journey through the lens of Scripture. So how do we apply this to our world? Well, I’ll use this as an example. Out in the world, there is a common misbelief that dementia caregiving is going to be hard. Dementia caregiving is the worst or that dementia is the worst way a person can pass away, or that certain techniques that we have related to caregiving are called, for example.
[4:47] Therapeutic lying, right? So the world is telling us one thing. The other one that I often use is that the world tells us, according to the world, that dementia is confusing. Well, the reality is if you are looking at dementia and the world through a biblical worldview, how we can apply it are the following. Dementia isn’t confusing because we serve a God of creation who created a world of order, and there is order to dementia. Dementia caregiving isn’t the worst death ever because death is the worst death ever, specifically if it is a death separated from the love of God. And thirdly, my last example where we talk about therapeutic lying, I would recommend that you go listen to a previous episode, about 180 or episode 61, that shows you that God is a God of commands and we are commanded to tell the truth.
[5:54] Which is the ninth commandment, which means that we can come up with a way of helping somebody living with dementia without actually using the world’s technique called therapeutic lying. So the episode I have, I call it therapeutic truth telling. There is a way, and I thank a pastor in our church, Dr. Ryan McGraw, for helping me think through this because it is a very common technique that is used. And so if you really look at caregiving through the lens of scripture, we serve a God that doesn’t lie.
Sola Scriptura: The Bible as Authority
[6:32] So therefore, there has to be truth in how I respond to the person that I’m caring for. And so this is how we can apply Sola Scriptura to our dementia caregiving journey. The second Sola is Sola Fide, which is by faith among.
[6:52] So we are supposed to, the only way to God is by believing that Jesus Christ died for my sins. I have to believe, I have to trust and obey and assent to the fact that I can bring nothing to my own salvation. Salvation is by faith alone. And so when we have faith, and if we truly know and understand that we serve a loving and kind Father who does all things well. It helps us then, through our faith, to see the goodness of our circumstance despite the adversity or the difficulties or the struggles with dementia caregiving that can be inherent in it. And if we trust, if we truly trust that God is in control and that the circumstances that we are going through are for us, and that it is to help us become the person and the Christian we’re intended to be, that God intends us to be, it is easier for us to walk by faith alone in our particular journey as a dementia caregiver. So I want you to sit with that for a day or so and just really think through.
[8:18] Am I trusting my faith in loan and recognizing that the works that I’m doing as a caregiver is not for my salvation, it is for the glory of God, then it can help us reframe sometimes how we feel about our journey as a caregiver.
Sola Fide: Justification by Faith Alone
[8:39] The third sola is sola gratia, which means by grace alone. So what is grace? The definition of grace. Well, grace is unmerited favor.
Sola Gratia: Understanding Grace in Caregiving
[8:51] And how then can unmerited favor or grace be applied to our dementia caregiving journey? Well, if we believe, which is counter to biblical teaching, but if you as a person, or if you as a listener, or if a person believes that man is good after the fall. We are going to always struggle because then we will be thinking.
[9:17] But they lived a good life, so why is this happening to them? Or any of those kinds of things where we believe inherently that we are good, we are always going to struggle because we were created good. We absolutely were created good. God created man and then he said, you know, he created the world in six days, and then he said it was very good. The problem is that at the fall of Adam, we all fell from grace, every single one of us. And every single one of us are sinners who deserve God’s wrath and curse. So what we deserve is the reality of what we deserve is the curse. But we as believers can now live by grace through God’s unmerited favor of not giving us what we deserve. Because what we deserve are the wages of sin is death. That is what we deserve. And God has graciously, through unmerited favor, given us his son, Jesus Christ, who died for our specific sins, your specific sins, my specific sins, my particular sins, my sins of thought, word, and deed.
[10:33] And so the thought, word, and deed part of the sin is something I want you to consider in your caregiving journey, because frequently we will believe, but this person was always so good. We never saw them always cussing, or we never saw them acting out on sexual immorality, or we never saw them doing these particular sinful behaviors, because with our cognitive abilities being intact, we’re able to frequently suppress our inhibition switch is able to keep those thoughts inside. So what I’m proposing to you is that, number one, we are not good anymore. We are all sinful preachers and therefore we sin. And those sins now become evident sometimes in the responsive behaviors that you may see your loved one doing, right? Things like, you know, lying or saying, you know, hoarding or any different types of behaviors could be related to the fact that the person may have always been thinking or feeling those ways, but they were able to suppress it, right? So by grace alone, unmerited favor, we do not get what we deserve.
Sola Christus: Salvation Through Christ Alone
[11:51] Which is the wages of sin, which is death. So that is the third way that we can look at dementia and dementia caregiving through the lens of the five solas of the Reformation. Now, the fourth Sola is sola Christus, which is we are saved through Christ alone, through Christ’s work on the cross. When we remember the cross that Christ bore for us, the true suffering that the only righteous good man experienced for our sins, for the burden of our sins, the sinless man becoming sin for us, then we are able to endure and remember through perseverance of the faith that our caregiving journey is a part of our pathway that we are to become more like Christ. Christ is patient. He is long-suffering. He gives his life for others. Christ is a servant. And so when you remember Jesus Christ suffering for your sins, your particular sins.
[13:07] Then in the light of the solas of the Reformation, we can be grateful that our experience as a family caregiver, as a Christian, helping somebody living with dementia is for our sanctification and is to help
Soli Deo Gloria: For God’s Glory Alone
[13:26] us be more light. Christ. The last of the solas is soli deo gloria, which means for God’s glory alone.
[13:36] So the thing I want you to consider related to dementia caregiving for God’s glory is that we are in our caregiving journey where the world is watching us. The world is watching you and me in how we are going to respond to the adversity of being a caregiver, how we are going to respond to the circumstances that a good and holy God has placed in our lives for our good and for his glory. The world is watching you and me, dear Christian caregiver, in what we say about dementia.
[14:20] What we believe about dementia, what we do as a caregiver, how we do dementia caregiving to God’s glory is that we reflect His glory back to Him, the Creator God, the God of the heavens and the earth, the God who created you and me, the God who holds us in His hands, and a watching world is watching to see how we respond to the circumstances of our caregiving and the circumstances of our life. Are we responding in gratitude? Are we responding in murmuring? Are we responding in anger? Are we responding in a peaceful submission to His will? The Lord is in control, and dementia caregiving can be good for you. And I know that sounds like it’s a very difficult thing for people to wrap their head around.
[15:20] But we can control our thinking, you can reform your thinking,
Reflecting on Our Caregiving Journey
[15:25] and you can be a dementia caregiver for God’s glory. So on this Reformation Day week’s episode, which tomorrow is Reformation Day, on this episode today, I really wanted to just talk a little bit about the theology about what it is that we as believers should believe as we put on our biblical worldview lens and not the lens of the society at large telling us things that are not true. So as a refresher, we looked at sola scriptura, that the Bible is the ultimate authority guiding our caregiving. There are lots of examples of caregiving in the Bible. Each person’s situation is unique and different, and so I’m not being proscriptive in saying that a person should always be the physical caregiver of someone. There are circumstances, there are mitigating circumstances, but still using the biblical scriptural worldview.
[16:33] But I also want to encourage you that you can use the Bible as your own. Ultimate guide and resource in how to be an effective dementia caregiver. That’s part of what I’m teaching here on this podcast. The second sola is sola fide, which is we are saved by faith alone.
[16:53] Then it is sola gratia, which is we are saved by grace alone. And grace is unmerited favor. And then the fourth is we are saved in Christ alone. We are saved by Christ, not by our works. And then the last one is, we are saved, sola Deo Gloria, for God’s glory alone. And so I hope this was an episode that would encourage you in your faith, encourage you as a dementia caregiver, and encourage you in this season of the year where all the emphasis is on Halloween and the negative side of this equation. I wanted to bring you God’s light into your life. And if you need help, if you are really struggling, if you’re struggling with your faith, reach out, hop on my calendar.
Closing Thoughts and Support for Caregivers
[17:48] We can spend 20 minutes talking. I pray for you as dementia caregivers every single day. And I am doing this podcast in order to help edify and lift you up in front of the world and in front of as an offering to God that he help undergird and support you through this period in your life. And as I end all of my episodes, may the Lord bless you and keep you, and I hope to see you in our next episode.
