Dale Robbins resides in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia with his wife Joann and children Jonathon and Sarah. Dale was employed by the Government of Nova Scotia for 28 years and for the last ten years of his career he served the Province as the Director of Administration, with the Office of the Speaker. Dale loves the outdoors and enjoyed his hobby farm over the years. Dale and Joann are active and loved members of a local fellowship of believers in Halifax, NS. On the very day of his retirement celebration from Government two years ago, he was advised he had inoperable cancer. In light of that news, the last paragraph of his personal testimony below is particularly poignant.
In Dale’s own words, he relates his personal story like this:
I was born in 1942, the fifth of six children , to parents living in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. When I was about six or seven years of age my mother related a personal experience about God, one which I never forgot.
Having grown up in another country, she told me how she had attended Sunday School with an Aunt when she was young. She related how her Sunday School teacher taught the class that God loved each and every one of them. In Sunday School she heard that God sent His Son from Heaven to die upon a cross that He might pay for their sins so they could be reconciled back to God. Now, several years later, she told me that while sweeping the kitchen floor a few days earlier she had accepted what Jesus had done for her and that her sins were now forgiven.
As the years passed, I heard more of God and how that anyone could be sure of a place in Heaven if they trusted in Jesus. I began to yearn for this security and peace of mind. However I struggled within myself, thinking that because I had been living a “good moral life” that God should be pleased to accept me in Heaven as I was.
Over time I began to realize that I could not negotiate with God on my own terms. God had already established by His Word that there was only one way to get to Heaven and that was through His Son who had already paid for my entrance to Heaven when He bore my sin debt upon the cross at Calvary.
At the age of twenty two, I realized that there was nothing I could do to merit salvation. The required payment had already been made on my behalf by the Lord Jesus and that I only had to accept a finished work. I gave up trying to merit salvation on my own and accepted what had been done for me by Another. From that time onward God has been a real person in my life, one who has brought me continuous joy, peace, and satisfaction.
While my personal relationship with the Lord Jesus has been sweet and rewarding over the years it has become even more precious to me over the past number of months. At the time of my retirement in March of 2003 I was advised that I had metastic renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer) and statistically fifty percent of patients normally die prior the end of the first year while the remaining fifty percent do not make it past two years.
However, as with any trial, God has promised to be our refuge and strength, a real help in time of trouble. I can truthfully attest to the fact that during these months God’s presence has been very real. I have come to appreciate more and more what His Son, the Lord Jesus, endured on my behalf when He paid for my transgressions upon Calvary’s cross. Most important of all, I am thankful that when this life on earth is over that I will ascend to be with Him, to share in the promised joys of Heaven throughout the endless ages of eternity.
Dale Robbins