Abortion and the Bible

So if you open your Bible to Exodus 21, verse 22 and 23, we are going to go off of our plan that we've been on for a while now. But in a weird way, we're not going off the plan too much either. So we've been going through the Ten Commandments. We are in the middle of the Fourth Commandment. We are in the midst of the fourth commandment right now. I've preached four or five times on the Sabbath.

And I have a concern about the Sabbath that we don't want to belabor it too much and overwhelm people with too many weeks on the same topic. At the same time, I want to make sure we get a good look at it. but this week the Supreme Court made the news because there was a court case out of Mississippi that went to the Supreme Court that is considered to be a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, which is the famous, I think we call it landmark, Supreme Court case that effectively legalized abortion in the United States.

And it is the excuse of most people today for why we can't do much to stop it. I thought it would be pertinent to simply talk about abortion from the pulpit. We have not actually done that. So we've been together about 70 weeks now. and as far as I know we haven't ever actually just dedicated one week to that topic so we will do that. So if you're trying to keep track of a sermon series you could say that this sermon will fall under the sixth commandment and it's just coming several weeks early and even if you didn't I think it's a worthwhile topic for a church to be able to have some common understanding of.

Exodus 21, 22-23. When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined as the woman's husband shall impose on him. And he shall pay as the judges determine. Verse 23, but if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life. And it goes on, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

But what we have here is we have evidence at the very earliest time of the law of God being given that the unborn is protected by the same legal rights as anybody else. In God's eyes, it appears, even if you weren't intending to hurt an unborn child, if your actions caused the death of that unborn child, you would pay with your life. This is one of the passages of Scripture that gives us our basis for how we should understand the topic of abortion.

So let me define abortion for you. abortion, the intentional taking of the unborn life. It is, in our dictionary in the United States, very likely not defined with the word murder. It is undoubtedly murder to take an unborn life. That is what I'm going to prove to you today from the Scripture. A few things we want to consider. one, this is a hot button or potentially, I guess it could be a sensitive issue to people.

And the reason why it's sensitive to people is that they spent their entire life either supporting it, supporting other people who've done it, have done it themselves. And so to poke them and tell them that this is murderous and wrong, it hurts people. And I will tell you this, I feel as bad about making someone who's killing children or has killed a child, I feel as bad about making them feel bad as I would feel about making a pedophile feel bad by announcing that what he does is wicked.

My job, when I'm in the pulpit especially, is to tell you what God thinks of things, not to tell you what makes you feel better, not to tell you what you think would make your cousin or your neighbor or your friend or an even closer family member feel better. My job is to tell you that murder, abortion is murder, and murderers inherit a lake of fire. And people who care about other people will try to warn them not to do things that will cause them to inherit a lake of fire.

You'll try to keep people from doing evil that hurts others. And you'll want to point people to the one Savior who actually paid the penalty that murderers deserve. In Exodus 21, we read, If there is harm, you shall pay life for life. So let me tell you what John Calvin said on this passage of Scripture. He says this passage... Do you guys have to leave? they're just running back and forth and I don't want them to distract your sermon oh we're used to it you can stay we'd rather you be here and let them run or whatever you need to do but yep so we'd rather you guys be here and if you stuck around a long time they'll learn to sit more too all the kids do it's hard when they're used to going to a children's church and they can play the whole time Or if my older children would have come to help, that would have been bad.

Yeah, I understand. But it won't bother us, promise. You guys, the other ones can start screaming so she knows. Okay? I love those screams. I think I've said this before.

When I listen to sermons online, one of my favorite things is to hear the sound of babies in the room. All right, so here's Calvin. It's a little bit of a long quote. this passage at first sight is ambiguous. He says, for the word death only applies to the pregnant. He says, for if the word death only applies to the pregnant woman, it would not have been a capital crime to put an end to the fetus.

So he's saying, if it's only talking about whether the lady dies, he says, that would not have made it a capital crime to kill the baby. fetus being the Latin word for baby, and the general term we use for babies in the womb. He says this would be a great absurdity. He says for the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being.

And it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. if it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light on these grounds I am led to conclude without hesitation that the words if death should follow must be applied to the fetus as well as to the mother. This sounds obvious to us. You go to a church that, for all of you who attend this church right now, at least since you got here, we've been regularly visiting abortion clinics and preaching this exact kind of message.

So for some of you, this may seem obvious. what I want you to think about as you go through your regular life after today's sermon is I want you to think about some of the things that you see in the world that will be called pro-life and I want you to begin to evaluate whether these things are truly doing things the way God has said in His Word because what God has said in His Word is that if you kill the unborn child, you shall pay life for life. And I'll just kind of spoil the end for you here. Most of what passes to our pro-life legislation in the United States is legislation that does not reflect this truth.

And we'll get into that in a little bit as well. in the second century there was a book written called the Didache that's a Greek word I think it just means teaching and this Didache had a section in it that I'm not going to read it but the section just said you shall not kill a baby by abortion or you shall not kill a pre-born child even in the second century, the church was well resolved on this matter. This book represents to us what early church leaders were teaching at the time. I'll caution you in your mind too.

If you think abortion is a 20th century issue, you're not understanding the history of the human race. Cultures for as long as we know have been concocting ways for women who realize they're pregnant to terminate their pregnancy. This is not a new thing. And so although we have updated technology in our 21st century and now we can do it at home and we can do it over an iPhone, that doesn't make it a 21st century problem. and the Bible has spoken on it and even the early church.

So first, let me prove to you that God hates abortion. Proverbs 6, verse 16 and 17. You can turn there. So we're going to briefly... There we go, I said briefly so you know what will happen now. We're going to briefly prove what abortion is.

I already explained that. We're going to briefly prove that it is something God hates. It's something he wants us to do something about. And then we're going to talk about what are the ways that we ought to go about it and remain faithful. I will remind you of something and that is that your obedience to God and your faithfulness to doing things the way he has said is how you are to be measured God never really commands us to get any kind of results.

God commands us to do what he has commanded us to do the way he has said and to trust that he will take care of the results. And so one of our temptations in the abortion battle, which thank the Lord, there are hundreds, thousands of people who are against abortion. I'm glad one of the temptations, though, when you are battling this evil is to fall into what is called pragmatism.

Pragmatism. Pragmatism is when you abandon principles that God has given for you to follow in order to try to achieve the desired effects. The most glaring example, if you can't think of one, is people that actually murder abortion doctors. That's pragmatism. They go and they commit crime themselves, and they commit a violation of God's sixth commandment, you shall not murder. and they take the law into their own hands instead of letting it be borne by the government as given by Romans 13 and they take someone else's life and then they become a murderer themselves.

And they think they're justified because well, now that person's not murdering children. And although that is true, they did really nothing to stop abortion in the long run and quite frankly they probably made the cause that we are fighting for worse because now we have to deal with people accusing us of being like this guy. And if you've never heard of this, it's happened.

You can find examples of it. And of course they make movies about these guys and they glorify them and then they paint us all just like them. So we don't want to be pragmatists. Okay, pragmatism is what causes us to, for example, compromise the words we use when we share the gospel with people to try to attract people, rather than giving them God's words.

It's compromise. So Proverbs 6, 16. There are six things that Yahweh hates, seven that are an abomination to Him. Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood. We've talked about this before in this church. So this isn't new to you, but yes, God hates.

It says right here, there are six things that Yahweh hates, seven that are an abomination to him. It doesn't say that God hates sin but loves the sinner. It says hands that shed innocent blood. the murder of a child who has never even seen the light of day is the most obvious example of hands to shit innocent blood there is no person alive who is truly innocent before God we know that And so when God talks about hands that shed innocent blood, he's making a distinction here.

That if you are acting in self-defense or if you're acting as a magistrate and you have to take blood that's guilty, God has allowed for that. He's allowed the state to have a death penalty. He's allowed you to defend your home, your castle. He's allowed you to defend your children in an emergency. but hands that shed innocent blood he hates. I would argue that this is also metaphorical, that if you found a way to commit the atrocity of abortion without shedding a lot of blood, which now they're doing that because they're giving out this pill earlier and earlier so that people just, you know, are just spontaneously aborting better.

This still applies. So it's not literal. Blood has to be shed. There's a pill that they make. It was called RU486. It was from the name of the company that started making it.

It's the same company that made, I don't remember exactly how to say it, like the Zylon 8 or whatever, the gas that they put in the gas chambers at the Nazi concentration camps. The same company that made that gas invented what we call the abortion pill. So if you wonder where the spirit behind all these things comes from, I'll tell you there's a common spirit between the Holocaust of the Jews and the Holocaust of abortion, which has killed many, many more people.

And this company makes this pill now that they give to people that causes the death of your infant. We live in a country where if you were a young lady who had a drug problem and you got pregnant and you took drugs and hurt your child, they would prosecute you for that still. And yet if you go to a clinic and tell them, please give me something to hurt my child, now they will applaud you for it.

So I want you to remember another point. I'm sorry this isn't overly scriptural. There's a lot of scripture, but part of this is just a lecture on abortion. Something to consider is this. Nobody really wants women to have a choice. That's a made-up phrase.

The people who want abortion they want women to get abortions They don really want them to have a choice And they don want them to have a choice to do their own home abortion on their own dime They want to be paid for it You understand? Abortion is only legal as long as the people who are in charge are getting paid for it. That's the system that they've built.

It was built by people who are eugenicists. You know what a eugenicist is? People who believe that we can perfect our species by keeping certain groups from reproducing. They are racists. And they all hated women. The primary reason abortion was invented in the first place, or at least not invented, but the primary reason why it became such a big deal here in the United States and is that there were men in the United States that wanted consequence-free thrills with ladies, I'll say.

And men were getting tired of getting women pregnant and then being stuck with them. And they figured out, well, if we can make this thing available that ends the pregnancy, then we can have basically all the free sex we want. And the women will submit to it Because they'll think that they've been made free when in fact now they're enslaved. And I won't even go into, because I don't have any documents of it, the damage that abortion does to a woman's body and her own psyche, not including theological implications.

It is a well-known fact that women who've had abortion suffer forever in this life from that. They suffer greatly because of the anguish that it causes. And I would argue that a big part of it is that they suffer because it truly is something that should cause you great anguish because you've murdered someone. Romans 3. Paul's describing the human condition.

If I can find Romans. Romans. Romans 3. verse 15, describing us, he says, their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery. In 18, he says, there is no fear of God before their eyes. One of the things that people will tell you, especially some of your pro-life people, I don't know if you've caught on when I say pro-life I am not speaking fondly the pro-life movement is a movement that has a nice name and it is largely founded by Roman Catholics for Roman Catholics as an avenue for them to boost their own righteousness by saying they're fighting for life one of the arguments that you will hear from people who are non-Christian but pro-life is that there is, there are women who don't even know what they're doing.

They don't mean to kill a baby, they'll say. They just feel stuck. Turn to Mark 7 and we'll see what Jesus said about people who commit murder. In Mark 7, 21 and 22, Jesus said, For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery. And he says, Coveting wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, flight, for pride, foolishness.

He says, All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. So when somebody is planning to get an abortion and they say something like, well, God knows my heart, that should frighten them to no end. Because God knows that the only reason they would murder a child is that there's murder in their heart. I think that we do not want to think of our average neighbor and co-worker and in some cases even fellow churchgoer as somebody who is in fact a murderer.

But if one out of every four women in the United States has had an abortion, then that means that every four women you know, one of them statistically, is actually a murderer. And I think we've lulled ourselves into this belief that, well, people aren't that bad, or they don't really know. And I'm going to tell you that it is one of the most insulting things to the intelligence of women, in my opinion, for you to say that she does not know that that's a baby.

The littlest girls in the whole world who end up pregnant for some reason know they're having a baby. There isn't a person in any part of the world who does not know that there's a baby inside them. In fact, I kind of like the way I phrase this. They know they're having a little human. That is precisely why they are killing their child. The whole point of abortion is I'm keeping this human from living in my house one day that I have to pay for and feed and stuff. so when people try to make it's just a clump of cells argument it's like removing a mole or something like that they are lying to you and when you go along with it And when you go along and think, oh, well, maybe that girl over there, that sweet little Susie that was fornicating outside of marriage, and then decided to go to an abortion clinic and have her child vacuumed out of her, maybe she didn't really know.

You're insulting Susie's intelligence. Everybody knows that that's a baby. And everybody knows from the very beginning it's a baby. This is why women who actually do want to get pregnant start taking prenatal vitamins. They realize the development of that child is so vital even at the beginning. People act like they don't know.

It's lying. Turn to Leviticus 21. I'm just going to jump around a little bit and just look at some passages. That's great. It makes me so happy seeing that. How happy they are together.

Leviticus 20. I'm sorry, Leviticus 20. I'm sorry, 20 verse 1. Leviticus 20 verse 1. The Lord spoke to Moses saying, Say to the people of Israel, any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. Okay, so this isn't referring to a surgical abortion of the unborn.

But it's referring to people who are sacrificing their little children to a false god named Molech. and it says the people of the land shall stone him with stones you may recall we saw a similar type of stuff in Leviticus 23 and 24 with blasphemy in the Sabbath it is the job of the congregation to put the evil out he says I will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people because he has given one of his children to Molech to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name. He says, and if the people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech and do not put him to death, then I will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech. if you do not stand up and put the evil out of your midst, God will treat you as if you had committed the same evil. Now this is referring to the nation of Israel.

So translate this to today. This is, I think, most commonly referring to the church. We should not tolerate this in church. But I think the principle could apply also to... Go ahead. I think the principle could also apply to what happens in our country.

We show that we care about people and care about our country when we're willing to stand up against evil. Now, notice one more thing. And you'll notice this if you do any kind of abortion kind of activity, like anti-abortion, I should say. Look in verse 6. if a person turns to mediums and necromancers whoring after them, I will set my face against that person and will cut him off from among his people.

One of the things that's really remarkable when you get around people who are into abortion, right, is you will notice that nearly all of them are witches. We may have more witches in the United States than Christians at this point, I don't know. they're sort of coy about it and they use different words there's very few witches that say hey by the way I'm a witch biblically speaking like most witches are people who are doing things that witches do and they use different words but they're talking to the dead they're trying to make contact with spirits through mediums they're using drugs and even a non-drug kind of substance to try to heighten some spiritual experience they're having and tap into the supernatural. And it's something that I've witnessed firsthand multiple times now.

And they are some of the most active people when it comes to abortion. One of the ways that you can tell that something's evil is you kind of look at who are the people that promote it. A lot of times, right? I mean, I hope you know abortion's evil anyway. But the mere fact that the very same people that promote witchcraft are the same people that are fighting for abortion rights is telling.

So why do people get abortions? Turn to James 4. I'm not going to say that there are a lot of people out there who wake up in the morning and they just have an appetite for the blood of humans. You can close those doors if you think that'll help for sure. That contains them a little then for you. I don't think there's a lot of people like that.

I think there's some very wicked people out there that probably just enjoy doing that job. They like the feeling of power they get. But what we want is to try to understand people enough to realize that there's usually a reason why people choose to do what they do. Look at verse 1 chapter 4, James 4. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?

Listen he says is it not this that your passions are at war within you You desire and do not have so you murder This is why when you watch testimonies of young ladies, if you can call them that, who proclaim their abortion, the testimony almost always includes, I didn't want a baby, And it's because of something else they wanted. They wanted a career. They wanted to be a successful actress.

They wanted a different boyfriend, a different husband. They didn't want their husband to find out they were pregnant with somebody else's baby. There is almost exclusively a covetousness going on where people want something and they're afraid that baby is going to stand in the way of it. Now I'm not going to say that every single woman that's ever been pregnant was happy about it.

There are women who have gotten pregnant as a result of sexual assault on them. And we need to think about this logically and biblically. We can hate sexual assault. We can work for the prosecution of evildoers who commit those kinds of crimes. In fact, I would argue that the penalty for a rapist should be the death penalty. In our culture, though, rather than the death penalty for the rapist, the argument being made constantly is that it is the baby who gets the death penalty when a rape is involved.

So if you paid any attention, that's like the most famous argument right now. What about if somebody's raped? Are you really going to make abortion illegal in that case? And my answer is yes. I also think that murdering your toddler should be illegal if you're raped. Murdering your three-year-old should be illegal.

In fact, I think murdering anyone should be illegal. And just because you're raped, you don't do that. In fact, it adds injury to the rape victim to then add to her burden the horrible sin of abortion or murder. And so we want to be able to compassionately talk to people. And we want to try to get people to understand that we are not thinking that women should like everything that happens to them in that situation. but we want people to understand that if you have a child in your body you have been blessed by God with that child but you're consequently obligated to care for that child your desires that are contrary to that or the difficulty that arises from your circumstance even if the circumstances of that baby's conception were undesirable do not change those facts that is God's baby that he made.

And we must fight for the rights of that baby. And at the same time, you could fight for the love of women too. Why are so many rapists getting out of jail, right? You know what I mean? Like there's some things that we could maybe do differently. The actual percentage of abortions that occur because a woman was raped and impregnated is so minuscule that it's almost the most meaningless statistic you could have.

In Psalm 82, we are warned against iniquitous decrees. in Psalm 82 God speaking to the rulers of the time this is the one where he calls them gods it's actually kind of neat, Jesus quotes it later in Psalm 82 God has taken his place in the divine council in the midst of the gods he holds judgment how long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked say law he says give justice to the weak and fatherless maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute rescue the weak and needy deliver them from the hand of the wicked when we advocate for a law that exonerates abortion-minded women from any guilt for the murder of their own child, we are judging unjustly and we're showing partiality to the wicked. Now I know what some of you may be thinking because it's what crosses my mind. Well, this is insurmountable, right?

How are we ever going to push for this kind of legislation? Well, I think we do it prayerfully. And I think we do it trusting that God has the power to move in the hearts of men, even those who are not his children. But the question is this. Are you going to have the blood of children on your hand because you promoted legislation that allowed for it? some of you have never done anything in relation to this, you've watched a movie you've read a book, you threw $50 at a crisis pregnancy center once so for some of us this is time to say, okay, what can I do if there a million evils in 2021 and there going to be a million in 2022 can the destruction of 3 unborn lives a day be one that you think is priority enough that you might move it up on your list Maybe spend 30 minutes a week writing different letters that you just write once and copy and send to senators and representatives and things like that? instead of 30 minutes of Facebook or TV or something?

We all have different roles to play in this, okay? And we all, I think, can do more. And I'm not going to do the thing where I say, well, you're all these horrible people because you don't do every possible thing. But I think we all can be exhorted to more. You know me, you know what I do. and the day that there's other men at the clinic preaching the gospel I won't go anymore if I don't have to but that's where I'm needed and I watched a thing a few weeks ago with these guys that really try to teach about abortion and one of the things they said is that it only takes like 10 minutes a week to reach your senators and representatives they said it's amazing how few correspondents they really get and people who will sit and every week remind them we elected you to represent us and this is what we believe.

Abortion should be abolished without exception. And for some of you especially your homeschool moms, what a great project. It doesn't have to be once a week. I don't care. Start with once. Do something.

And if you don't know what to do, ask people who do. Because I don't know what to do but I know people who know how to get a hold of the senators and the representatives. I know people who know this stuff. And I have the desire and I don't have the time or the energy to do everything. And so we should gather people together. We should try to coordinate with other churches if possible.

We have the cutest kids in our church, though, don't we? Amazing. Even the one that just walked in is just adorable. So we we have a responsibility okay God forms the baby in the womb okay and Psalm 139 it says he knitted you together in your mother's womb right and yet somehow people think they have reasons for murder but they won't call it murder okay that's the word we use to try to be honest but what's one of the main reasons people give that they can't have a baby?

Anybody think of any? What's one of the main ones people bring up? Why it should be accessible and... Too young, that's one. Money is the big one that people use, which is interesting, because it shows where their love is, right? but how about this think about this for a moment there's a lot of poor people out there isn't there listen to this each one of them would deserve the death sentence if they murdered their child to save money and further their career if you met a woman let's say we go down to the Stowe Mission and we serve a meal and we meet some lady walks in and she's got a two year old baby and the lady's broke we give her a little plate with lasagna and bread and a little pat of butter thing and we sit and talk to her for a few minutes and at the end of it she says, you know what?

My life would be a lot easier if I wasn't paying to feed this two-year-old. I'm going to kill her. We would be rightfully aghast, but even like most liberals in our country would be aghast at that. And yet, subtract a couple years off that baby's life, move the baby's development down a little bit and move her location inside the womb of her mother and all of a sudden, hey, it's okay.

Just dump her in the toilet and flush it. I think that we need to kind of regrow our shocked face about all this, okay? The fact that everybody in here is younger than 50 years old means that all of you have grown up your entire life with abortion being a reality in the United States. And in fact, depending on how you argue the terminology, we'll say that it's been legal.

I think it's technically been illegal the whole time, but that's a different argument about the Constitution and Roe v. Wade. We are so used to the reality of it that we're desensitized to the horrors of it. So desensitize yourself, or resensitize yourself. Remind yourself to be horrified by the thought that somebody that you know is having trouble getting pregnant.

So rather than seeing that as the amazing clear sign from God it's time to adopt, they go to an IVF clinic and they have 15 embryos fertilized and then they destroy 9 or 10 of them. Then they implant 3 or 4 of them and then after those 3 or 4 start to grow they take 2 of them out and destroy those. and maybe take one more, donate it to research. Or how about the people that because they think that they're pro-life, they go to the IVF clinic and they sit there with a doctor.

You know what IVF is? In vitro fertilization. It's where they take the egg out of the lady and they do the sperm and egg thing in a little petri dish, okay? And it makes real people, people with dignity and value, people who we're supposed to love. And people go down there and they say, well, we can't get pregnant, but we want babies of our own. It has to look like us has to have our DNA has to have our nationality so make a bunch of them for us But you know what we pro so guess what you can destroy those little babies you created i want to feel righteous about this so how about this why don't you just freeze them and what we have is actually over a million humans that are locked right now in cryogenic freezers and there's people very wonderful people out there who are trying to do what's called snowflake adoption.

And just one or two at a time, Christians that love the gospel and love people go to these clinics and have somebody else's snowflake baby, they're called, put inside them and then they raise that baby. And that's how they adopt a baby. And you know what? We need a million Christian women to do that to even start to catch up. Okay? There's a lot we can be doing.

If I wasn't clear, freezing your kid is not a valid response to being anti-abortion. This is a spiritual battle. Like all spiritual battles, this battle will best be fought with the proclamation of the gospel of Christ. This is our ultimate weapon. Don't abandon it. Jeremy will tell you, Elijah will tell you, Alexandra I think can tell you, Wesley can tell you when we go to the abortion clinic in Columbus I probably talk about abortion less than I have today.

When we go to the abortion clinic in Columbus we announce to people that Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and that his shed blood on the cross is the only way anybody can be forgiven of their sins and that they are commanded to repent of their pride, their lust, their anger their murder they're lying, they're stealing, they're fornicating everything and yes we will talk about abortion with people because for the most part that's the topic du jour while you're there but our goal is not just to sweet talk people into leaving Planned Parenthood for the day or promise them enough financial gain that maybe they won't kill their baby I don't have to adopt anyone else's baby to tell them it's wrong to murder that child just like I don't have to adopt their child to tell them it'd be wrong to abuse their child I don't have to tell somebody that I'll adopt their child to tell them it'd be wrong to sexually assault their child right and wrong is right and wrong as God sees it and I don't have to have a solution for every perceived difficulty in your mind to tell you what you're thinking of doing is wrong but we use God's law and his gospel his law is good for restraining evil now I know non-believers will break God's law you guys are believers you're going to break God's law if I don't quit preaching you'll all start breaking it sooner or later probably right but the law is a tutor we're told The law is a tutor. It teaches us about what God says is true and false. And so when we teach people that murdering their child is okay, as long as the child's not 20 weeks old, they learn from that.

When a couple months ago in Texas, they passed a bill. This is after the pro-life leaders in Texas squashed a bill of total abolition of abortion because it made too many women mad in Texas because they didn't want to be held accountable or have even their women counterparts held accountable if they got abortions. But when somebody just passed a heartbeat bill in Texas recently, a joke of a bill, where the only people who could actually do anything would be someone who wants to sue an abortion doctor for having done an abortion after a heartbeat, which no one who's going to do that. and if there's a few people who will, God bless them for it, but it's not their job.

It's the state's job to bear the sword against evil, not individuals. But the day after that bill passed, somewhere that week, one of my friends that does clinic evangelism down there was standing outside, and somebody showed up and said they were going to get an abortion. And they said, well, you shouldn't do that. and he goes, no, it's before the heartbeat, it's okay.

The law teaches people. So when you make an iniquitous law, you teach people to do things iniquitously. A couple more verses for you, and then we'll sing some songs. Proverbs 24, 11 and 12. This is for you, Christians. Rescue those who are being taken away to death.

Hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. Now verse 12, this is the one that really hits me. 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 soul know it? And will he not repay man according to his work? Finally, in your strategy against abortion, you can turn to 2 Corinthians 6 if you want I want you to be careful you're not unequally yoked this is a spiritual battle it's a battle of the Lord Jesus Christ and this is not a battle where you link arms with idolaters namely Roman Catholics in order to try to win this battle it is idolatry that ultimately causes people to start to move away from God and eventually leads to the sacrifice of children and say you don't partner with those very people.

Do not be unable to yoke with unbelievers, 2 Corinthians 6.14. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? Light with darkness. What agreement has the temple of God with idols? I'm very thankful that there are some kind Roman Catholics in my life.

And Jeremy and the other guys, Elijah, we've met them down at the clinic. We like a lot of them. The one that didn't want to attack me. And we're glad that there's some people there that are willing to help people. But we are not partners with them. This is a gospel endeavor.

And they are not our partners. A few practical tips when you're dealing with somebody about abortion. Let's say you're talking to somebody. Don't tell people God loves them, so therefore they shouldn't abort. If they murder their child, they're going to have to stand before God for that murder. And God's not going to treat them very lovingly. what you do is you exhort people to God law and his gospel and you try to tell them to avoid evil Well another mistake we make is we act like abortion is one of many options people have Okay?

Like, oh, you can have green beans, or you can have corn, or you can have carrots, right? Those are options. Keep your baby, give your baby up for adoption, or have it torn limb from limb out of your womb. Those aren't options. Okay? and finally, remember the real victim. The real victim is the baby.

Okay? Murderers will lie to you. They will tell you that they're there for a different reason at the clinic. Murderers will break laws. So making more laws to make abortion harder does not help anyone. there's a law they pass in Indiana where after an abortion you have to give the baby a proper human burial thus signifying that they know that they killed a human right There abortion clinics that just offer that service which is pathetic to think anybody who knows that goes there.

But I'll leave you with one final thought for those of you who are still Republican in your heart. The number of abortions that we have in the United States is too many to be accounted for only by the people that we call liberals, okay? I made a snide joke the other day on the internet that most Republican politicians are against abortion until their mistress needs one.

And so we need to remember that there are people everywhere who are happy that abortion is legal, particularly wicked men. And this is an uphill battle that only the Lord can win for us, but he will win, and if he chooses, in the way that he chooses, and our goal is to be faithful the entire time to what he has called us to do So I hope I exhorted you today to love and good works I hope that you are I guess what I want I want you to be moved that you can do something you haven't already been doing. And the same with me.

We all can do something. And maybe just add one more thing once in a while that we do to try to be helpful in this battle. Father please bless our hearts Lord with repentance from wrong thinking help us to be people who are able to do what is commanded of us but not that we would be overwhelmed by it or by the difficulty of it or even try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps but that we would rely on your strength, Lord.

Help us to do what only you can accomplish through faithful people. Amen.