Rush Limbaugh Friend ‘He Gave His Life Completely to the Lord Jesus Christ in 2019’
Following the famed radio hosts death, Christian Author Joel C. Rosenberg, a friend of Limbaugh’s, wrote an article declaring that “Rather late in his life, in his final few years, Rush gave his life fully and completely to Jesus Christ. Though he had been raised in a Christian family, this was different. Something specific had happened in his life. He had made a very personal and profound decision. And it changed everything.”
Explaining that he had spoken to Limbaugh about his faith over the years, sharing stories and beliefs, and that he was concerned that he was a false convert and that his faith wasn’t genuine. This was compounded by some of the bad fruit from Rush he observed over the years. “I believed he was struggling spiritually…I worried that Rush was resisting a personal relationship with Jesus Christ…Or perhaps too busy and too successful to focus on such a relationship.”
Rosenberg recounts:
That’s why I worried about him – and a specific Bible verse kept echoing in my heart.
Jesus once said, “What profits a man to gain the whole world, but to lose his soul?” That’s what I feared for Rush. Maybe that seems presumptuous. Maybe it was. But it came out of my love for him. No other reason.
So, I would talk with him about the Lord when I could. We would email about lots of things, and occasionally I’d share a Bible verse with him. But mostly I prayed for him – for the past 28 years, I asked the Lord to bless him and draw Rush into the kingdom of heaven.
Though the two hadn’t seen each other in a long time, Rush invited him to visit him in February 2020, right after the initial cancer diagnosis. But the week he went down to visit, he stayed in a hotel because Rush was physically broken and too weak to host him. Rosenberg never was able to see him again in person and eventually had to abort the visit.
I worried that he was going to pass away without knowing for absolute certain that he was going to heaven. That grieved me. But something happened on that trip that changed everything.
I learned the greatest possible news – that just the year before, in 2019, Rush had given his life wholly and completely to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Maybe he had made a decision to receive Christ by faith when he was much younger and had, like many of us, struggled to walk closely with Christ after that decision. That, I cannot say.
But I now knew that he was studying the Bible like he had never done before. He was praying like he’d never done before. He was growing spiritually and it was transforming him. And it wasn’t out of desperation. It wasn’t simply because he was contemplating his own death.It was because he had truly wrestled through the claims of Jesus for himself, and come to the conclusion that Jesus really did die on the cross, rise again, and was the Messiah, the Savior and the King of the universe.
And having placed his faith in Christ’s love and forgiveness, he now had a certain, definitive hope that he was going to heaven when he died, and peace for every day before that.
I was overjoyed!
Joel joyfully references some comments Rush made after diagnosis of cancer, where things shifted and Rush began speaking of his faith in more personal, more specific terms, specifically:
I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It is of immense value, strength, confidence, and that’s why I’m able to remain fully committed to the idea of what is supposed to happen will happen when it’s meant to. There’s some comfort in knowing that some things are not in our hands. There’s a lot of fear associated with that too, but there is some comfort. It’s helpful to be able to trust and to believe in a higher plan.
Rosenberg closes with this:
I didn’t feel at liberty to say any of this publicly, so I didn’t.
I told my wife, Lynn, and my sons and we rejoiced, because we had been praying for him and his family for decades.
But then another wonderful thing happened.
I began to hear him share about his faith in Christ and newfound hope with the radio audience he loved so dearly, and who so loved him.
For such a public person, Rush was also intensely private.
But he began talking about his faith in Christ, and I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt it was real.
We pray that it was so.
Impending death has a way of clarifying our existence and God’s all-importance.