Pastor John:
Five things you can do:
1. Submit yourselves to God
Submit yourselves to God. Draw near to him. Live by the power of his grace. Let him shape your desires rather than the world and the feisty, self-centered temperament of our culture. Let your life and your mouth bear witness to the real delights of knowing and trusting and obeying and being shaped and guided by the Creator of all things who loved us and gave himself for us. Be a Christian—and a visible and audible one. The world needs you so badly.
2. Pray earnestly and regularly
Pray earnestly and regularly for awakening in the churches that will spill over in city-wide and nation-wide and world-wide evangelization of the lost and reformation of life.
3. Use your imagination to see abortion for what it is
Use your imagination to see what abortion really is! Fight against the kind of social stupor that gripped Nazi Germany — the feeling that the problem is so huge and so horrendous and so out of our control that I just can't be wrong to let it be. Use your imagination to see and feel what is really happening behind those sterile clinic doors.
If you could see each little handiwork of God and what it looks like when it is being crushed or poisoned or starved, you would say, this can't be happening! Civilized people do not do this! The children will not be saved and God's work will not be reverenced without an act of sustained sympathetic imagination. Otherwise it is out of sight, out of mind — just like Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Auschwitz. It just couldn't be happening. And so we act as if it isn't.
If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, "Behold, we did not know this," does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your souls know it, and will he not requite man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:10–12)
4. Support alternatives to abortion
Support alternatives to abortion like crisis pregnancy centers with your money and time and prayers.
5. Press for legal protection for the unborn
Use your democratic privileges of free speech and representation and demonstration to press for legal protection for the unborn.
One of the strongest arguments against legal enactments to protect the unborn is the claim that legal constraints without widespread social consensus is tyranny. And there is no widespread social consensus regarding the personhood of the unborn.
The argument loses much of its force when applied to the historical situation of slaves in this country. On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Stanford, ruled that no act of Congress or territorial legislature could make laws banning slavery. The fundamental argument was that slaves are not free and equal persons but the property of their masters.
The ruling is analogous to Roe v. Wade because today no state may make a law banning abortion to protect the unborn. The argument is similar: basically because the unborn are at the sovereign disposal of their mothers and do not have personal standing in their own right [history repeats itself].There was no consensus in this country on the personhood and rights of salves. We were split down the middle. But the issue was so fundamental that the states went to war, and in the end the Lincoln administration overturned the Dred Scott decision. And today, 130 years later, we look back with amazing consensus and marvel at the blindness of our forefathers.
May we not dare to believe that by the grace of God and the perseverance of his people in prayer and piety and political pressure there could emerge in the coming decades a consensus for life, and that the 21st century could look back on our generation with the same dismay that we have looking back on the slave laws of this land and on the concentration camps of World War II. Nationwide reformation has happened before — with Wilberforce in England and Lincoln in America. It can happen again. May God help us!
Excerpted from Abortion: You Desire and Do Not Have, So You Kill (1987).
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Posts for the Sanctity of Human Life —
