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A Fight For Life

Truth in Love 9

How should Christians respond following the horrors revealed about the operations of Planned Parenthood?

Aug 3, 2015

Today we are going to focus on a problem that affects our society as a whole, and that is the problem of abortion. Abortion affects society as well as individuals. We will be addressing how it affects individuals later this month. In fact, we are devoting the entire month of August to a discussion of various facets of the abortion issue. Today we are focusing on the problem of abortion as it impacts our entire culture.

I had planned on devoting the next several podcasts to something else, but that was before the Center for Medical Progress began releasing the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood. These videos reveal the abortion work of Planned Parenthood in all of its grisly horror. More than that, it demonstrates leaders in Planned Parenthood engaging in the sale of body parts of tiny, precious children for money. Christians have always been against abortion, but these videos have exposed the work of Planned Parenthood in a way that demands Christians prioritize this issue. In one sense, nothing has changed because Christians have always known that this was going on and have always thought it to be wrong, yet these videos have placed this reality before our national consciousness in a way that has never existed. The videos have made us aware of the trafficking of human beings in a way that was previously unknown. The lights have come on in a darkened room and so many of us have been shocked by what was going on right next to where we’re sitting. As a result, we have a very significant and clear challenge that we have to face as Christians. We are confronted again that we are living in a culture of death, which is abortion.

It is the great moral disaster of our time and the carnage is seen on so many levels. The obvious level is the unborn children that are being ruthlessly murdered and placed up for sale. In the United States of America alone, there are more than 1 million abortions every year. Since 1973, when abortion was legalized in Roe vs. Wade, there have been almost 60 million abortions. This is a holocaust of human lives like nothing that has ever taken place before in the history of planet earth. Every year something like 1/3 of those abortions are committed by Planned Parenthood. And so we see the carnage and the cost of human lives of unborn children.

However, that’s not the only place we see the carnage of abortion. We also see the human cost in the lives of women who submit to these abortions. Millions of women struggle with the grief of a decision they made to end a human life for their entire life. The pain in the lives of these women is unspeakable and often gets overlooked as we talk about a right to choose. We also need to talk about the carnage in the lives of men who have impregnated women, and then urged them to get an abortion out of convenience. Many men all across the country struggle with the guilt of these decisions and the pressure they applied to the women in their lives and the human beings whose lives were lost because of those decisions.

Perhaps least obvious of all, we need to talk about the human carnage to the proponents of abortion. We have to be honest about the difficulty and the pain brought into the lives of those who advocate for abortion. Of course these people don’t know it, but in advocating for such a vile practice they are destroying their very souls. In the language of Romans 2:5, they are storing up wrath for themselves on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

Consider some of the comments by abortion advocates as we consider the judgment they store up for themselves. Last year, Cecile Richards, the leader of Planned Parenthood was asked by a reporter when life begins and she said, “it’s not something that I feel like is really part of this conversation. I think every women needs to make her own decision.” The reporter followed up asking, “why is it controversial to say when life starts?” Cecile Richards responded, “I don’t know that it is controversial. I don’t know that it’s really relevant to the conversation. I’m the mother of three children. For me, life began when I delivered them.” She added that her children have “probably been the most important thing in my life ever since, but that was my own personal decision.” Hillary Clinton, a candidate for the President of the United States, characterized a vote pending in the United States Congress to block funding from Planned Parenthood like this, “it’s another effort by the Republicans to limit the health care options of women.”

Here we have women who are mothers and leaders saying that life is about a women’s personal decision, it’s about her healthcare, or it’s about playing politics. As heartbreaking as these statements are, as Christians we actually understand what drives someone to make them. We are given the reason in Ephesians 4:17-18. Paul says,

‘Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.’

People are ignorant and futile in their minds because their hearts are hard and that leads them into darkness. That is to say that what drives statements like the ones we read from abortion proponents, Cecil Richards and Hilary Clinton, is sinful insanity. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians 4: their minds are darkened, they are futile, and their hardened hearts make them that way. It takes sinful insanity to articulate this kind of defense of human self-destruction. It is only the maddening folly of sin that would lead some people to attack other people whose only offense is being as young and defenseless as we all once were. It is the lunacy of sin that would lead us to bring war and carnage to the place where every loving mother knows her child should be the most safe. It is the craziness of a hard and sinful heart that would believe the nearer a child is to a mother’s beating heart, the greater is her right to stop that child’s heart from beating. It takes hard-hearted sinful insanity to justify all of that under the wicked misnomer of women’s health. And so we know what’s going on here. It is an all out war of the kingdom of darkness against the kingdom of light and we must act. Christians all across the country, indeed all across the world are asking, ‘what must we do?’ I want to give a few suggestions:

First, you need to call your representative in Congress. You can call the capital switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to speak to your Senator or Congressmen and plead with them to vote in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood. There is a bill pending in the United States Congress even now – some suggest that it could be voted on as early as today, Monday (August 3, 2015) – that would restrict the funding of the United States government to go to Planned Parenthood; which last year was over $500 million. Many are predicting that the vote can’t pass, but the Lord knows about it and the Lord can help. I want to give the names of several Senators that are being reported by the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission as potential swing votes to turn the tide in favor of passage of this law. If you are a resident of Illinois, you need to call republican Senator, Mark Kirk today and ask him to support defunding Planned Parenthood. If you are a resident of Maine, you need to call republican Senator Susan Collins. If you are a resident of Alaska, you need to call republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. If you live in West Virginia, call Joe Manchin today. If you are a resident of Indiana, Joe Donnelly is one of your senators and you need to call today and appeal to him to support this effort. If you live in Pennsylvania, Bob Casey needs to hear from you today that you want him to defund Planned Parenthood.

So, you can call your senators and congressmen, another thing you can do is use social media. Tweet, go on Facebook, use instagram, use pinterest, if you have a blog then write a blog, if you use twitter use the hashtags #defundpp or #anotherboy or other popular hashtags. It sounds like a silly suggestion, but use social media. If it weren’t for social media, we wouldn’t have known about this crisis. It was Christians, people who are committed to saving unborn lives who put this information out to the public almost exclusively using social media. So don’t think that that’s an ineffective means.

The next thing that you can do is preach the Gospel. Don’t just call your representatives, or post a tweet, but preach the Gospel when you do those things. Romans 1:16 says, “the Gospel…is the power of God for salvation to everyone believes…” There must be no confusion that our commitment to life is inextricably linked to our commitment to Jesus Christ. We want to speak of Him into a culture of such desperate need of change because we have experienced His change, bringing us out of death and into life. The Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that all people, including unborn babies, are precious and the Gospel of Jesus Christ also teaches that all people, even abortionists, can change. The call to end abortion is an opportunity to speak the light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ into a world darkened and hardened by sin. Our call is to use this horrifying sin as the opportunity to call an entire culture to repentance. We want this because we were all once just as lost as any of the guilty people exposed in the Planned Parenthood videos. And so, our call as Christians is not merely to defund Planned Parenthood. Our call is to repent, to turn to Jesus Christ and then overflow with His love by taking away the funding of people bent on human destruction.

These are massive realities, huge things that we are called to today. They are things that are too big for us, and so the last things that I want to encourage you to do is fast and pray. All of us at the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors are going to be spending today, August 3, 2015, fasting and praying for the saving of human lives, for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and for the light of the Gospel to be spread to a culture encased in darkness. I want to ask that you would join us. If you can’t join us today, then join us some other day even if Planned Parenthood is defunded this week or next. There will be many battles yet to fight in a country where abortion remains legal, and so we all need to appear before the Throne of Grace together and beg our God to do what only He can do.