Choose Life

Mark Twain quipped that “the most striking difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.” You’re going to hear a lot of lies coming from the pro-abortion movement in the next few days. Don’t fall for them. Most are recycled nonsense …

“The Supreme Court is hiding in the shadows of silence.” No, the Supreme Court is doing what the Supreme Court does.

“Texas is un-American.” I’m not sure who gets to make that determination, but it’s hard to take this seriously when today’s headline from USA Today was “George Orwell, Meet Greg Abbott.”

“Pro-lifers are America’s Taliban.” That’s the one I find the most dishonest and despicable, but it’s making the rounds as we speak.

Here’s what’s happened in the Lone Star State: Governor Abbott has signed into law a measure that bans all abortions in the state after about six weeks of pregnancy – once a fetal heartbeat is detected. The law also permits private citizens to sue abortion providers. Said another way, Roe v. Wade has been functionally overturned in Texas, and that has caused national alarm among those who seek to prop up the abortion industry. The rancor surrounding the Texas law has grown especially loud because of a Mississippi abortion case which has already made its way to the nation’s high court. In that case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi law in question banned abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy.

What does all of this mean? In a nutshell, it means that the United States Supreme Court will soon hear what will no doubt become a landmark case, and the case has the bombshell potential to undo a key component of Roe, and that is its pre-viability rule. (The court in Roe held that states can ban abortions only after the point at which a fetus could survive outside the mother.) Simply put, Dobbs has the potential to decimate what is now the legally sanctioned killing of children who are still in their mother’s womb.

Now I don’t have to tell you why Texas has caused such a nationwide panic. Abortion has become perhaps the single most divisive issue in America. Birthed out of the eugenics movement and its desire to rid society of the “undesirables,” Planned Parenthood has roughly doubled both its net assets and government funding since 2006, and funding from private sources has tripled. The abortion giant brings in well over one billion dollars every year (yes, that’s “billion” with a “b”). Abortion is a dark curse on our land. I speak not to the political implications – those are for you to decide – but I speak to the moral implications surrounding the tragedy of elective abortion.

There are a lot of directions in which I could take this conversation today (don’t you like the way that I imagine that you’re in this with me?), but I’ll focus on the two starting points that really matter. When it comes to the rightness or wrongness of abortion, I think that there are two key questions which we must all answer: 1) Is a fetus human? And 2) Is it permissible to kill a human? Once you answer those questions honestly, the rest of the “abortion debate” tends to fall into place from the perspective of a moral framework. I ask each of you to take the time to answer those two questions for yourselves, in light of what God has revealed to us in Scripture. Then you’ll have a solid moral and theological framework from which to build. Without such a framework, I’m not sure how anyone can survive the relentless and heated onslaughts of our current information overload.

Friends, it does us little good to get angry or upset without the ability to reasonably articulate our understanding of right and wrong. Because there’s one thing I can tell you about raging secularism, which is all around us: it never ceases to create more than its share of public fallacies. It has to, in order to survive the light of reasonable inquiry. Lucky for the secularists, most people today don’t want to bother with digging deeply enough to discover the truth on any subject.

But here’s why I’m at least a little bit hopeful today: you and I have the opportunity to bless an unstable and angry culture with a steady and gracious influence. We can live out what we believe, and live it out with conviction, and pray that our Christ-centered convictions stand out like a sore thumb! Some will despise our convictions – no doubt – but others who feel like they’ve been drowning in a sea of slippery subjectivism just may see our gospel – the good news of Jesus – as a life raft.

Life matters. It always matters. A culture of life is worth giving our all to make it happen. The new Texas law may or may not prevail, but our hope should be that “we the people” are moving in the direction of the sanctity of human life. Justice and love demand that we do everything in our power to protect the most innocent and defenseless class of people among us, and that we advocate for public policy that saves lives. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Choose life.

Pastor Charles