How Should We Pray for Someone Who Is Dying?

The Answer

It is right to ask God for healing. Scripture tells suffering and sick believers to pray, and it presents healing as something God is able to give (James 5:13–16). A terminal diagnosis does not place someone beyond God’s power. We do not have to soften an honest request: “Lord, please heal them.”

At the same time, prayer is not a way of demanding a particular outcome from God. Jesus himself prayed about the suffering ahead of him, “Yet not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42). That is not weak or unbelieving prayer. It is honest desire joined to trust in the Father. Paul also asked repeatedly for his suffering to be removed, but God answered by promising sufficient grace rather than removal (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

So we do not need to decide in advance whether to pray for healing or for a peaceful passing. We can pray along both lines:

• For healing: that God would intervene, guide the medical team, make treatment effective, and restore the person if he is pleased to do so (James 5:14–16).
• For relief and comfort: that pain, fear, confusion, and loneliness would be eased, and that the person would know God’s presence even in the “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4).
• For faith and salvation: that the person would trust Christ—or, if already a believer, be strengthened to keep trusting him. Our deepest hope is not merely a less painful death but resurrection and eternal life in Christ (John 11:25–26).
• For unfinished things: opportunities for reconciliation, meaningful conversations, expressions of love, forgiveness, and practical preparations.
• For family and caregivers: strength, wisdom, tenderness, endurance, and permission to grieve (Romans 12:15).
• For a faithful end: if God does not heal, that the person would die cared for, surrounded by love where possible, and resting in God’s promises. For someone who belongs to Christ, death is sorrowful, but it brings the believer into the presence of Christ (Philippians 1:20–23).

We should not pretend that death is naturally good. The Bible calls death “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26), and Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb even though he was about to raise him (John 11:33–36). It is right to grieve and to ask God to hold death back. But death does not have the final word for someone united to Christ: Jesus has been raised, and his people will be raised with him (1 Corinthians 15:20–23, 54–57).

A “good and peaceful passing,” then, does not necessarily mean an absence of every fear, tear, or painful moment. It means that the person is not abandoned: they are loved and cared for, God is present with them, and—if they belong to Christ—they can face death with a hope stronger than death itself.