Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on John 1:4-5. The main subject of the sermon is that life is valuable because it is first and foremost found in God.
Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on John 1:4-5. The main subject of the sermon is that life is valuable because it is first and foremost found in God.
So we live in historic times, and we live in perilous times, both physically and spiritually. Today is the Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, and in two days, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States in the Capitol Building, Washington DC. The first African American to be elected as president of United States. Now, I’m gonna come back to our current events later in the message, but I wanna focus our mind right now on the preciousness of the gift of life itself. And as you heard me pray, for me that means focusing on Jesus Christ. For the Scripture says, “in Him was life, and that life was a light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” I want to link the gift of life directly to the person of Jesus Christ. I want to speak of biological life as a gift of Christ. I want to speak of eternal life as a gift of Christ. I wanna speak to our current events, the context that we find ourselves in today, on the sanctity of human life, on the issue specifically of abortion, and where we may be headed soon on that crucial topic. And I want to center on the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is our only hope, our great hope, we don’t need another hope. It is a sustaining hope, and it brings me great joy, even as I stand here and preach today.
I. “In Christ” Is Biological Life
So, I want to begin with the simple assertion, “in him was life,” and by that I mean in him here at the beginning, I mean biological life. Now, let’s set this statement in its context, in John, chapter 1. I believe that the purpose of the entire gospel of John is to proclaim in clearest terms the deity of Jesus Christ. And that we as sinners, having received that testimony, and believing in it we might have eternal life, that’s why John wrote the gospel of John. And so right from the very beginning, we have a proclamation of the deity of Jesus Christ. Look at John 1:1, very familiar. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s a very plain statement. Now later in verse 14, we have the statement, “the Word became flesh.” That means He became human and made his dwelling among us. And then a couple of verses after that, in verse 17, lest there should be any doubt at all as to who John is talking about, he says, “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
So you put all that together right from the very beginning, we have the statement at the beginning of John’s gospel, Jesus Christ is God. And in verse 14, Jesus Christ is human, took on a human body. And very clearly in these first 18 verses of John’s gospel, really from the very first verse, we have the deity of Christ established. The climax of the Gospel, as I already alluded to, the great resurrection appearance of Jesus in John 20 to his 12 apostles. Thomas wasn’t there the first time, and so a week later, Jesus appears again for Thomas’ benefit. Now, in the intervening time, Thomas had made this pronouncement in John 20:25, “Unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hands in the side, I will not believe it.” Well, a week later, Jesus proved His resurrection directly to doubting Thomas for our benefit.
Thomas made, I think this statement for our benefit, because we don’t get to do that, do we? We don’t get to put our finger in the nail marks, our hand in the side, we don’t get to see him or touch his clothes or do any of that. And so for our benefit, I believe, Thomas stated his doubts. And so He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, see my hands, reach out your hand, put it in my side, stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Can I tell you that abortion really isn’t the ultimate point of my ministry? It’s not really the ultimate point of my sermon, but rather that you might be able to fall before Jesus by faith and say to him, “my Lord and my God!” That you could make Thomas’s confession from the heart, and that you would know the eternal joy that comes from doing that, that’s the purpose of each of my sermons, really the purpose of my whole ministry.
So yes, I think we need to talk about abortion and sanctity of human life, it’s right for us to do so, but that’s not the center, is it? You can reject abortion and still be lost. But rather that you can make Thomas’s confession, then Jesus told him, and through him and through John, really all of us. “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed [that means happy] blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Is there anybody like that here today? Those that have not seen and yet have believed? Well blessed are you, happy are you to not see Jesus, and yet you believe that he is God, that he died for you and that he’s raised from the dead and sits right now at the right hand of Almighty God and is interceding for you and some day you’re gonna see him. “Oh, blessed are you”. That’s the pronouncement. But then he declares why he wrote the Gospel. John 20:31, “Jesus said, ‘These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have,” Have what? Well, “have life in his name.” And so the point of the ministry, the point of the writing of the gospel, the point of what Jesus did is that we might have life. It’s all for life, friends. So we have to go back to John 1, and look at Christ and creation. John reveals that Christ, not only is God, but the creative instrument — it’s some mysterious way that I do not understand — but the creative instrument by which God made everything that exists. Everything in all creation was made through Christ.
Now, John makes that very clear in verse 3, that nothing in creation exists apart from Jesus Christ’s direct involvement, and he stresses it really by repetition. Look at verse 3, “Through Him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.” We were singing earlier that beautiful hymn, This is My Father’s World, that happens to be Daphne’s favorite hymn. So we sing it, each of us gets a chance, in family devotions, to choose a hymn, and I think she chose that one 27 consecutive times, something like that. So we know it very well. She knows it well, and so we were singing, This is My Father’s World. What a sweet, sweet hymn that is. But we, as Christians, have permission from the Scripture to say, this is my Savior’s world too. This is Jesus’s world, for God made it through him. I don’t know what that preposition means through, but I just accept it that through Jesus everything exists. Colossians 11:6 uses the preposition by. It says, for “by Him all things were created, things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, where the thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things are created by Him and for Him.”
And speaking of Christ’s ongoing work in creation, Colossians 1:17 says, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” So Jesus is constantly exerting sovereign power to hold everything in the universe together. But then John gets specific about the issue of life, not just physical creation. We sang about this in This is My Father’s World, “the rocks and the trees, the skies and the seas,” those are the physical creation, but he focuses then on the issue of life. “In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.” Now, there’s a vast difference between non-living and living things in God’s universe. Life itself is a mystery, very difficult to define, but from the beginning of his gospel, the apostle John makes it clear that God has linked Jesus in life, in effect saying, there wouldn’t be any life, if there weren’t for Jesus. Now here, we’re speaking simply of physical, biological life at first, though I think it’s pretty plain across John’s gospel, he means far more than that, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But he is at least speaking of biological life, that Jesus is the original creator and the constant sustainer of it.
“Speaking of biological life, that Jesus is the original creator and the constant sustainer of it.”
So what constitutes life? Well, I told you it’s difficult to define. I went to biological textbooks, I went to websites, nobody could really give a good kind of suitable definition of life. Instead, they just tend to describe living things and how they’re different from non-living. For example, living things are made up of cells; living things adapt to their environment so as to promote their own survival; living things can reproduce organisms of the same type. Is this satisfying to you? Reading from a biological textbook? Oh, Pastor, give us the Scripture, I’ll get back to the Scripture in a moment, all right? But these are the descriptions biologically of life.
Living things are capable of growth and development at some point over their lifespan. Living organisms obtain energy from the environment and use it in unique ways, so plants do it through photosynthesis, hence my green tie today, do you like it? Okay, the picture of life. All right. And so they are able mystically, in some way, to turn light into food for them, and then of course, animals by eating. So that’s how they describe life, it’s really hard to do. But Genesis 1 speaks of God creating all living things in their various places, each of them assigned a certain place, plants of various kinds, sea creatures of various kinds, birds, land animals, insects, beasts of the field, all kinds of things, a wide array of living things. And God created all of them the Scripture says, by the word of his power. God said, “Let there be” and there was. And John 1:3 tells us, it’s by the word Jesus Christ that all of this came about. And in him was life. So therefore, Jesus creates and upholds every biological form of life, every species of plant life on Earth was created by Christ, every blade of grass waving in a tundra out there in Siberia, Jesus created it and sustains it. Every mass of plankton floating in the North Atlantic Sea, Jesus created it, sustains it. Wild flowers, cultivated plants, crops all of this created by Jesus, for he is the author of life. So also every species of fish, from those brightly colored tropical fish that school in the Caribbean, to a great sperm whale, 67 feet long, swim in pods off the continental shelf, Jesus created all things. So also every mammal, small and great, every insect, solitary or swarming. Jesus created all of these things and sustains every one of them. “In him was life.”
But of course, the Scripture focuses especially on human life, and hence we have this idea of the sanctity or sacredness of human life. It’s as though there’s somewhat of a pause in Genesis 1. “Then God said, let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” And so there’s a set-apartness to human life. And again, Christ is the creator of it. Psalm 139:13, “You created my in most being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” And so, as we put John 1 together with Psalm 139, it’s Jesus who’s actively knitting the babies together in their mother’s womb. Jesus is all over that process. A magnificent thing, it is, it’s his handiwork. The marvelous steps of development, or a picture of Christ’s compassion and wisdom and crafting and creating every human being after his own image and likeness.
And so there are steps. Eighteen days after conception, the baby’s heart starts beating. Most mothers don’t even know that they’re pregnant at that early stage. Twenty-one days, this little baby pumps its own blood through a separate closed circulatory system with its own blood type. Twenty-eight days, the eye and the ear, and the respiratory systems began to form. By 42 days, brain waves are recorded, the skeleton is complete, the reflexes are present. At seven weeks you can have those magnificent photos of the baby sucking his or her thumb. I have one on my… the door of my office, been there for years. At eight weeks, all bodily systems are present. Nine weeks the baby squints, swallows, moves the tongue, makes a fist. At 11 weeks, there are spontaneous breathing movements, the baby has fingernails, all bodily systems are working. By 23 weeks, there’s a 15% chance of viability apart from the womb. At 24 weeks, that number goes up to 56%. Babies that survive premature birth at 25 weeks, the number goes up to 79%, and you know those numbers are changing all the time, just by even research done by physicians here in this city. We’ve even seen some amazing things in our congregation, haven’t we, concerning that?
How anyone, any politician, anybody can say, “I have no idea when human life begins, that’s above my pay grade. I have no idea.” They suppress the truth in unrighteousness, friends. Is it not clear from Scripture and from biology that life begins at conception? Listen to the statement by Paul Rockwell, who is an anesthesiologist. He wrote this 11 years ago, “While giving an anesthetic for a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, at eight weeks gestation, I was handed what I believe was the smallest living human ever seen. The embryonic sac was intact and transparent within the sack was a tiny human male swimming extremely vigorously in the amniotic fluid while attached to the wall by the umbilical cord. This tiny human was perfectly developed with long tapering fingers, feet and toes. It was almost transparent as regards the skin and the delicate arteries and veins were prominent to the ends of its fingers.” Baby looks like a human, has the genetic make-up of a human, has all the organs of a human in the proper place, all the bodily functions present by 12 weeks on. How can anyone say, rightly, it’s beyond my pay grade to determine when life begins?
II. “In Christ” Is Eternal Life
My point from John 1:4 is that the development of this baby is done by Jesus Christ, your Savior and mine. Secondly, I wanna say, in Christ is eternal life. Physical life, friends, is not enough. Clearly, John intends to bring his physically alive heirs to a higher level of life through faith in Jesus. This is a spiritual life. This is eternal life, that’s what he has in mind. That they would know God. As it says in John 17:3, “This is eternal life, that they may know God, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Jesus prayed that. Apart from Christ in our natural state, biologically alive, we are spiritually dead. The Bible reveals this in Ephesians 2, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature, objects of wrath.”
“Apart from Christ in our natural state, biologically alive, we are spiritually dead. “
That’s who we were. We were the living dead, biologically alive, but spiritually dead. I tell you, you spend much of your life surrounded by the living dead, and the issue goes far deeper than abortion. It has to do with their relationship with Almighty God. They don’t know him, they don’t love him. They don’t live for his glory, they don’t thank him for his blessings, they’re not aware of him. If they have any thoughts about God, their idolatrous and wrong thoughts, handed them by some satanic system. They do not know him, and God says that they’re dead while they live. And it was because of that that Jesus came, it’s because of that that John wrote his gospel, that we should no longer be dead but now alive through faith in Jesus Christ. And so John says, “In Him was life and that life was the light of men.” This radiant shining life of Jesus Christ, the word ‘life’ appears in John’s gospel fifty times, actually over fifty times, usually with the prefix eternal. Eternal life is in view, and that speaks of the duration of the life, that it will have no end, will go on forever and ever. There’ll be no end to the life that Christ gives, well beyond the ending of our physical lives, beyond our death, that we would live forever in the presence of God and have a relationship with him.
But Jesus also uses other analogies that speak of the nourishing and the sustaining of life. Maybe one of those is hinted at just here in verse 4, where it says “that life was the light of men,” and you know without light, the plants can’t live and without the plants and every animal dies, and so light is essential to life. And so Jesus is the source of life for everybody. But then he says to the Samaritan woman, he likens himself to a spring of water welling up to eternal life, that we drink from it and we are satisfied. He speaks later of Jesus being the bread of Heaven, come down so that a man may eat and not die. So Jesus is the living water, Jesus is the bread of life. He says in John 10:9, you heard Eric earlier, “I am the door of the sheep, and through me, they can come in and go out and find pasture.” In the very next verse, he says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill, end life and destroy, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Jesus came to give us abundant life.
And the ultimate definition of that is certainly life with God, and by repentance and faith friends, simple faith in Jesus Christ, his death on the cross, his blood shed for you. You can have that life. That’s not complicated. You don’t have to have an advanced degree in theology, you don’t have to understand all things, you just have to know that you’re a sinner and that Jesus’s blood is enough for you. And looking to him, find in him what Thomas said, “My Lord and my God”, and that he died for you. Just ask him to be your savior and he will its really that simple. So that’s the Gospel, that’s the life.
III. Understanding Our Present Times
What about our present times? Well, as I mentioned it, Barack Obama is going to be inaugurated as the first African-American President of the United States, 44th President. And I must tell you in this, I greatly rejoice in one aspect that racism has been so thoroughly kicked in the teeth, frankly, I rejoice in that. I look on it as a great wickedness and a great evil. Not everyone who’s against racism understands the origins of the concept that all men are created equal. I find it in the Bible, I find it in the creation account, I find it in the redemption of Jesus Christ, where the ground is level at the cross. And I find it in the promise that in Revelation 7:9, we’re gonna be surrounded by people from every tribe and language and people and nation, we’re gonna delight in the same Savior then. And that’s a delight to me. So I’m glad that… At least to some degree, I would not say that racism is gone from our country, but that we’ve been able to progress to that point is a good thing for me. So I celebrate that.
I do not, however, celebrate President-elect Barack Obama’s views on abortion, and I reluctantly want to tell you what they are, I actually had somebody this week connected with our church, send me an incredible paean of praise about Barack Obama and just how glad he is, writing as a Caucasian, as a white man that an African-American has become president, and he actually rearranged the words of our national anthem in a very artful way, I read it to the staff, we were quite astonished, but one thing I didn’t know is if he happened to know Barack Obama’s views on abortion. So I sent them to him and he was shocked. Had never heard them. So today, you’ll hear them, not because I’m trying to affect an election. I’m not, the elections over. I just want you to know where we may be heading.
This information comes from Robert P. George, who’s a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. He just went over Obama’s voting records. So just look up Robert P. George, Princeton University, you’ll get the whole article, but he basically takes us on a descent, like Dante’s Inferno, down lower and lower and lower into how bad the views really are. He says that he’s the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of president of the United States, or to hold the office of Senator. I think he’s right. For starters, of course, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects taxpayers from paying for needless abortions that are not necessary to save say the life of the mother and not the result of rape or incest. That’s what the Hyde Amendment says. So that would be repealed. So we’d be forced to pay for those, that’s just the start though, he has promised… He said this at a Planned Parenthood rally, “The first thing I’d do as President, is to sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” Now, this proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed fundamental right of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including a right to abort a fully developed child in the final days for undefined health reasons. In essence, the FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent to notification laws for minors, state and federal funding, restrictions on abortion, conscience protections for pro-life citizens who are working in the healthcare industry. They will be forced to participate or lose their jobs. Freedom of Choice Act, I don’t see choice there, do you? The pro-abortion National Organization of Women (N.O.W.) has proclaimed, with approval, that FOCA would sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws and policies. Now, he said, it’s the first thing he’d do, of course, he’s skipping the fact that it has to be passed by Congress first, the law has to get to his desk. Oh friends, may it never get to his desk!
“Let’s pray that.” Exhort later. We will. Should we pray right now? Well, let’s pray right now. Father, I pray that the Freedom of Choice Act would never get to Barack Obama’s desk, because he will sign it and the courts will probably uphold it, and so we pray it wouldn’t even reach, in Jesus’s name, I pray, amen.
But it gets worse. Obama, unlike even, many pro-abortion legislators, opposed the ban on partial birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice, which I will not describe to you, but it’s nothing short of infanticide. He opposed it. He said he didn’t want to condemn a young woman to the punishment of a baby. But it gets worse, Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party has not endorsed or supported the Pregnant Women Support Act, which is the signature bill of Democrats for life meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal, it would simply make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test in whether Obama is pro-choice or pro-abortion, and he flunked the test. Let’s get rid of the language of pro-choice, that’s not what it is, it’s pro-abortion.
But it gets worse still, in an act of breathtaking injustice as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed, listen to this, legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful attempt to kill them in the womb or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability, the legislation would not ban any abortions. Instead, it included a specific provision ensuring it did not affect existing abortion laws. Everybody supported that one. Edward Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, all of them. It was unanimous. You know why? Because these are viable babies outside the womb, living on their own now, they’re human. What’s left to say? He opposed that. I can’t understand that. I went to a website and there were 10 reasons that he gave or that someone gave defending it, and all of them inadequate. There is no defense, friends. This is a viable human being breathing air outside separate from his mother’s womb, and it would make it illegal to give it assistance because it was intended to be aborted. It goes even worse: concerning human embryos for stem cell research, in effect making it illegal to develop alternate sources of stem cells; they must come from aborted babies.
And we as a nation elected him president. This is where we’re heading. I see dark times ahead. The church of Jesus Christ in America has had a comfortable relationship with the surrounding culture and with the government for 200 plus years. That may be ending. Most of our brothers and sisters in the world, throughout the world, do not have that kind of comfortable relationship with their surrounding culture. For the most part, they know that they’re aliens and strangers on earth, and they are reminded about that every single day. We’ve had a comfortable relationship, God has used it for His glory, but it may be decaying, a decaying orbit, we may be seeing it end. Fight the Freedom of Choice Act. It’s wickedness, pure wickedness. It will make it very difficult for any pro-life grass movements to do anything. Do you understand that?
Let’s remind ourselves of the Scripture, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” Okay, so who wins? Light or darkness? Well, I tell you, the light wins, the light sovereignly wins, but we ought to know the darkness that’s surrounding us, we ought to be aware of it, we ought to be courageous in the midst of it, we ought to shine the light… No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl. He puts it on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. The people in this house, the world, need the light of Jesus Christ, amen? And they need us to speak up and they need us to fight with the weapons that we have, not the weapons of violence, or the weapons of blockade, or the weapons of physicality, which changes nothing.
But with these weapons, 2 Corinthians 10, “Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world. No, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of Christ, and we’re ready to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.” That’s a battle of the minds. It’s a battle of arguments, not arguing the way we understand, but I mean, filled with the Spirit of God, characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, you stand your ground and tell the truth, and you show how sweet it is to know Jesus, how sweet it is. And we make abortion obsolete. Can I tell you this? That even if he just changes his mind, that’s not going to be enough, and I think we ought to pray for it. There are precedents, friends. Well, let’s take Saul of Tarsus, for example, woke up that morning, breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples ended up that day, one of them. How do you explain that? The sovereign grace of almighty God.
Or take Nebuchadnezzar as an example, filled with arrogance and filled with violence, a man who could sweep away all of his closest counselors with one command, ’cause they couldn’t tell him what his dream was, kill them all. He had a friend, his name was Daniel, he confronted Nebuchadnezzar, told him the truth. Renounce your sins by doing what is right and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed, it may be that then your prosperity will continue. Oh, that someone would tell Barack Obama, the truth like that. Renounce your sins and your wickedness, turn away from this. It may be that then your success will continue. For in him Barack Obama and all of us live and move and have our being in his hand, we live as long as he wills. It may be that then your prosperity will continue.
So what happened to Nebuchadnezzar? God changed his mind. Now, it didn’t happen one day, like Saul of Tarsus. It happened over seven years of being an animal and eating grass, but at the end of the seven years, he was greatly humbled and gave one of the greatest testimonies to the sovereignty and the kingship of Almighty God you’ll find anywhere in the Bible, and I have good hopes that we’ll see him in heaven. And so we are commanded by the Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 2 this, “I urge then, first of all, that requests, prayers and intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone, for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good and pleases God, our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.”
So we should pray for kings, despite the fact that we might think the odds are against it. It seems surprising that we should pray for kings and those in authority, the ones that are least likely, it seems to turn and repent. But he says, do it. First of all, that we might live peaceable and godly lives, we ourselves as Christians, but also that we can stamp out heinous and corrupt and wicked laws like these abortion laws. We can live upright lives in this present world, but pray secondly, for their sake, that they won’t have to spend eternity in hell, that they can know the forgiveness and love that God gives, pray for them, because he desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. So pray for Barack Obama. Could it be that he might end up the number one greatest pro-life advocate this country has ever seen? Is that possible? Could God’s grace actually do that? I tell you, it is possible. As I said, there are precedents, so pray for that, but you know even there, that’s not enough. Our nation still elected him by the millions. So there’s still a lot of work to be done. America as a whole has embraced pro-abortion ideology. The genie’s out of the bottle, as some people speak. It’s going to be hard to get it back, and so you have to win it one mind at a time, one person at a time, one crisis pregnancy at a time.
“We should pray for kings, despite the fact that we might think the odds are against it.”
IV. A Word of Grace… and of Life
So let me give you some applications. First of all, be repentant, be repentant. Don’t excuse yourself, don’t say, “You know I’m against abortion, so I have nothing to confess in this area,” but just be repentant. Whenever I preach on the sin of abortion, I’m mindful that there may well be some here who have sinned specifically in this area. I never forget it, friends. I think much about people like that, and I want to speak to their hearts. I wanna speak tenderly to you about God’s grace and mercy of forgiveness, but you have to repent. If you don’t repent, rather than just be repentant, I would say be warned because you’ll make God, your enemy, but I just speak to you as though there is was some perhaps melting in your heart and that you’re willing to repent. Perhaps you’re young man who sinfully had relations with a young woman and she became pregnant and you actually advised her to get an abortion. Perhaps you’re a father whose daughter became pregnant, and you felt more about your own shame and embarrassment and inconvenience and expense than you did about what was right and urged her to get an abortion. Perhaps you’re a woman who chose some time ago to get an abortion, and now you have to live with the memories and the pain of that the rest of your life. Perhaps you’re a public official, a judge, an elected official, a legislator who used your position to establish and entrench the sin of abortion even more deeply in our nation. Perhaps you’re a medical professional who aided in the taking of innocent life in abortion. Or perhaps you’re just like me, been negligent of the opportunities God’s given you to fight abortion sufficiently. God calls us to repent.
Secondly, be assured. Be assured that the grace of God flowing through the cross of Jesus Christ is sufficient for your sin and mine, and an infinitude of sins beyond. The grace of Jesus Christ is an ocean, and where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. And the tenderness of God in receiving broken-hearted repentant sinners is displayed throughout Scripture. “All day long I’ve held out My hands to a disobedient, obstinate people,” he says in Romans where there’s the image of the father of the prodigal son, happily welcoming the son back, be assured.
“The grace of God flowing through the cross of Jesus Christ is sufficient for your sin and mine, and an infinitude of sins beyond.”
Thirdly, be prayerful. We’ve already stopped and prayed, and I challenge you to pray, not just today, but every day for President Obama that God would grant him repentance leading him to a knowledge of the truth. Pray not only for him, but for all the pro-abortion legislators that might join with him on the Hill for the Freedom of Choice Act or for other heinous things that God would grant each one of them repentance and show them the truth. Pray for the hearts of America, pray for people’s hearts to be changed, pray for abortion to become obsolete in this land, not just illegal, but actually obsolete. You say, Well, that’s perfection. Well we pray toward perfection things all the time, don’t we? Pray for it.
Fourthly, be encouraged. I was reading World magazine yesterday. There are many, many reasons for great encouragement; one is that the number of abortions has been consistently dropping over the years. It just keeps going down and down and down, not every single year, and there’s still definitely way too many, in the 800,000 range, but down. Even the Democratic Party, after values voters, re-elected George Bush in the last presidential election, started to reassess their, at least their verbiage on abortion, and they started actually funding at lower levels pro-life Democrats, which would have been really party heresy some time ago. Pray that that would continue. Could come a day that the Democratic Party would be the number one pro-life advocacy party that there is. God can do great things. Pray for that. I’m not rooting for this party or that, I’m just saying, just pray.
One World magazine article, spoke of a victory like in Texas, the panhandle of Texas getting all 19 Planned Parenthood clinics shut down after a 12-year battle. They took them on one at a time and hit them in the pocketbook, in the purse, at their fundraising efforts. They handed out leaflets, they went to their neighbors, they talked to them about Planned Parenthood, they talked to them about abortion and Planned Parenthoods in Amarillo, Texas. Their funding went from $3.1 million in 1997 or 1998 to $230,000 last year, and then they shut their doors. They just couldn’t keep going, where they severed their ties with Planned Parenthood. Twelve-year battle won, by the way, Freedom of Choice Act would reverse all that, and it’d be against the law to do that kind of work. You see what I’m saying? So friends, that’s a battle we must not lose. It must never get to his desk. So be encouraged secondly, or fourthly, I guess.
Fifthly. Be vigilant and educated. Learn these pro-life things, read books like Randy Alcorn’s book on pro-life answers to pro-abortion physicians or questions, get facile and easily conversant in dealing with various things that people tend to say. Train yourself. Teach yourself, educate yourself.
Sixthly, be active. Pregnancy Support Services in Durham, you have a bulletin insert, Life Care Pregnancy Center in Raleigh, among the Crisis Pregnancy Centers that counsel women against abortion. I have some men in a men’s Bible study I teach on Thursdays that are actively involved in that and give counseling as they can, and they have incredible witnessing opportunities to non-Christians all the time. It’s a great ministry. Seventh, be generous. Give financially to pro-life causes, give to these causes. Pregnancy support services. Be generous.
Eighth, be courageous. Speak up. Talk about it. Bring it up. Blessed are you when people persecute you because of righteousness, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven. I’m not saying go out and… go get some persecution. That should not be your goal. Go speak the truth in love. Tell them the truth.
Ninth, be proactive. Are you the parent of some growing children? Oh, that they would not add to this problem. Tell them the truth, not only of the sanctity of human life, show them pictures of developing babies when they’re ready for it. Show it to them, teach them the humanity of the pre-born, but also the sanctity of marriage and of marital relations. Teach them the truth and teach them many times so that they are not part of the problem when the time comes.
And then finally, be hopeful. Be hopeful. We’re gonna win, friends. Jesus is gonna win. We’re gonna live in a world where there will be no abortion. Let’s go beyond that. We’re gonna live in a world where there will be no sin! We are going to go into a place that is called the New Heavens, the New Earth, the home of righteousness. So any effort we make will be ultimately victorious, so be hopeful. And close with me now in prayer.
Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on John 1:4-5. The main subject of the sermon is that life is valuable because it is first and foremost found in God.
So we live in historic times, and we live in perilous times, both physically and spiritually. Today is the Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, and in two days, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States in the Capitol Building, Washington DC. The first African American to be elected as president of United States. Now, I’m gonna come back to our current events later in the message, but I wanna focus our mind right now on the preciousness of the gift of life itself. And as you heard me pray, for me that means focusing on Jesus Christ. For the Scripture says, “in Him was life, and that life was a light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” I want to link the gift of life directly to the person of Jesus Christ. I want to speak of biological life as a gift of Christ. I want to speak of eternal life as a gift of Christ. I wanna speak to our current events, the context that we find ourselves in today, on the sanctity of human life, on the issue specifically of abortion, and where we may be headed soon on that crucial topic. And I want to center on the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is our only hope, our great hope, we don’t need another hope. It is a sustaining hope, and it brings me great joy, even as I stand here and preach today.
I. “In Christ” Is Biological Life
So, I want to begin with the simple assertion, “in him was life,” and by that I mean in him here at the beginning, I mean biological life. Now, let’s set this statement in its context, in John, chapter 1. I believe that the purpose of the entire gospel of John is to proclaim in clearest terms the deity of Jesus Christ. And that we as sinners, having received that testimony, and believing in it we might have eternal life, that’s why John wrote the gospel of John. And so right from the very beginning, we have a proclamation of the deity of Jesus Christ. Look at John 1:1, very familiar. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s a very plain statement. Now later in verse 14, we have the statement, “the Word became flesh.” That means He became human and made his dwelling among us. And then a couple of verses after that, in verse 17, lest there should be any doubt at all as to who John is talking about, he says, “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
So you put all that together right from the very beginning, we have the statement at the beginning of John’s gospel, Jesus Christ is God. And in verse 14, Jesus Christ is human, took on a human body. And very clearly in these first 18 verses of John’s gospel, really from the very first verse, we have the deity of Christ established. The climax of the Gospel, as I already alluded to, the great resurrection appearance of Jesus in John 20 to his 12 apostles. Thomas wasn’t there the first time, and so a week later, Jesus appears again for Thomas’ benefit. Now, in the intervening time, Thomas had made this pronouncement in John 20:25, “Unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hands in the side, I will not believe it.” Well, a week later, Jesus proved His resurrection directly to doubting Thomas for our benefit.
Thomas made, I think this statement for our benefit, because we don’t get to do that, do we? We don’t get to put our finger in the nail marks, our hand in the side, we don’t get to see him or touch his clothes or do any of that. And so for our benefit, I believe, Thomas stated his doubts. And so He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, see my hands, reach out your hand, put it in my side, stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Can I tell you that abortion really isn’t the ultimate point of my ministry? It’s not really the ultimate point of my sermon, but rather that you might be able to fall before Jesus by faith and say to him, “my Lord and my God!” That you could make Thomas’s confession from the heart, and that you would know the eternal joy that comes from doing that, that’s the purpose of each of my sermons, really the purpose of my whole ministry.
So yes, I think we need to talk about abortion and sanctity of human life, it’s right for us to do so, but that’s not the center, is it? You can reject abortion and still be lost. But rather that you can make Thomas’s confession, then Jesus told him, and through him and through John, really all of us. “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed [that means happy] blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Is there anybody like that here today? Those that have not seen and yet have believed? Well blessed are you, happy are you to not see Jesus, and yet you believe that he is God, that he died for you and that he’s raised from the dead and sits right now at the right hand of Almighty God and is interceding for you and some day you’re gonna see him. “Oh, blessed are you”. That’s the pronouncement. But then he declares why he wrote the Gospel. John 20:31, “Jesus said, ‘These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have,” Have what? Well, “have life in his name.” And so the point of the ministry, the point of the writing of the gospel, the point of what Jesus did is that we might have life. It’s all for life, friends. So we have to go back to John 1, and look at Christ and creation. John reveals that Christ, not only is God, but the creative instrument — it’s some mysterious way that I do not understand — but the creative instrument by which God made everything that exists. Everything in all creation was made through Christ.
Now, John makes that very clear in verse 3, that nothing in creation exists apart from Jesus Christ’s direct involvement, and he stresses it really by repetition. Look at verse 3, “Through Him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.” We were singing earlier that beautiful hymn, This is My Father’s World, that happens to be Daphne’s favorite hymn. So we sing it, each of us gets a chance, in family devotions, to choose a hymn, and I think she chose that one 27 consecutive times, something like that. So we know it very well. She knows it well, and so we were singing, This is My Father’s World. What a sweet, sweet hymn that is. But we, as Christians, have permission from the Scripture to say, this is my Savior’s world too. This is Jesus’s world, for God made it through him. I don’t know what that preposition means through, but I just accept it that through Jesus everything exists. Colossians 11:6 uses the preposition by. It says, for “by Him all things were created, things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, where the thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things are created by Him and for Him.”
And speaking of Christ’s ongoing work in creation, Colossians 1:17 says, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” So Jesus is constantly exerting sovereign power to hold everything in the universe together. But then John gets specific about the issue of life, not just physical creation. We sang about this in This is My Father’s World, “the rocks and the trees, the skies and the seas,” those are the physical creation, but he focuses then on the issue of life. “In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.” Now, there’s a vast difference between non-living and living things in God’s universe. Life itself is a mystery, very difficult to define, but from the beginning of his gospel, the apostle John makes it clear that God has linked Jesus in life, in effect saying, there wouldn’t be any life, if there weren’t for Jesus. Now here, we’re speaking simply of physical, biological life at first, though I think it’s pretty plain across John’s gospel, he means far more than that, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But he is at least speaking of biological life, that Jesus is the original creator and the constant sustainer of it.
“Speaking of biological life, that Jesus is the original creator and the constant sustainer of it.”
So what constitutes life? Well, I told you it’s difficult to define. I went to biological textbooks, I went to websites, nobody could really give a good kind of suitable definition of life. Instead, they just tend to describe living things and how they’re different from non-living. For example, living things are made up of cells; living things adapt to their environment so as to promote their own survival; living things can reproduce organisms of the same type. Is this satisfying to you? Reading from a biological textbook? Oh, Pastor, give us the Scripture, I’ll get back to the Scripture in a moment, all right? But these are the descriptions biologically of life.
Living things are capable of growth and development at some point over their lifespan. Living organisms obtain energy from the environment and use it in unique ways, so plants do it through photosynthesis, hence my green tie today, do you like it? Okay, the picture of life. All right. And so they are able mystically, in some way, to turn light into food for them, and then of course, animals by eating. So that’s how they describe life, it’s really hard to do. But Genesis 1 speaks of God creating all living things in their various places, each of them assigned a certain place, plants of various kinds, sea creatures of various kinds, birds, land animals, insects, beasts of the field, all kinds of things, a wide array of living things. And God created all of them the Scripture says, by the word of his power. God said, “Let there be” and there was. And John 1:3 tells us, it’s by the word Jesus Christ that all of this came about. And in him was life. So therefore, Jesus creates and upholds every biological form of life, every species of plant life on Earth was created by Christ, every blade of grass waving in a tundra out there in Siberia, Jesus created it and sustains it. Every mass of plankton floating in the North Atlantic Sea, Jesus created it, sustains it. Wild flowers, cultivated plants, crops all of this created by Jesus, for he is the author of life. So also every species of fish, from those brightly colored tropical fish that school in the Caribbean, to a great sperm whale, 67 feet long, swim in pods off the continental shelf, Jesus created all things. So also every mammal, small and great, every insect, solitary or swarming. Jesus created all of these things and sustains every one of them. “In him was life.”
But of course, the Scripture focuses especially on human life, and hence we have this idea of the sanctity or sacredness of human life. It’s as though there’s somewhat of a pause in Genesis 1. “Then God said, let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” And so there’s a set-apartness to human life. And again, Christ is the creator of it. Psalm 139:13, “You created my in most being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” And so, as we put John 1 together with Psalm 139, it’s Jesus who’s actively knitting the babies together in their mother’s womb. Jesus is all over that process. A magnificent thing, it is, it’s his handiwork. The marvelous steps of development, or a picture of Christ’s compassion and wisdom and crafting and creating every human being after his own image and likeness.
And so there are steps. Eighteen days after conception, the baby’s heart starts beating. Most mothers don’t even know that they’re pregnant at that early stage. Twenty-one days, this little baby pumps its own blood through a separate closed circulatory system with its own blood type. Twenty-eight days, the eye and the ear, and the respiratory systems began to form. By 42 days, brain waves are recorded, the skeleton is complete, the reflexes are present. At seven weeks you can have those magnificent photos of the baby sucking his or her thumb. I have one on my… the door of my office, been there for years. At eight weeks, all bodily systems are present. Nine weeks the baby squints, swallows, moves the tongue, makes a fist. At 11 weeks, there are spontaneous breathing movements, the baby has fingernails, all bodily systems are working. By 23 weeks, there’s a 15% chance of viability apart from the womb. At 24 weeks, that number goes up to 56%. Babies that survive premature birth at 25 weeks, the number goes up to 79%, and you know those numbers are changing all the time, just by even research done by physicians here in this city. We’ve even seen some amazing things in our congregation, haven’t we, concerning that?
How anyone, any politician, anybody can say, “I have no idea when human life begins, that’s above my pay grade. I have no idea.” They suppress the truth in unrighteousness, friends. Is it not clear from Scripture and from biology that life begins at conception? Listen to the statement by Paul Rockwell, who is an anesthesiologist. He wrote this 11 years ago, “While giving an anesthetic for a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, at eight weeks gestation, I was handed what I believe was the smallest living human ever seen. The embryonic sac was intact and transparent within the sack was a tiny human male swimming extremely vigorously in the amniotic fluid while attached to the wall by the umbilical cord. This tiny human was perfectly developed with long tapering fingers, feet and toes. It was almost transparent as regards the skin and the delicate arteries and veins were prominent to the ends of its fingers.” Baby looks like a human, has the genetic make-up of a human, has all the organs of a human in the proper place, all the bodily functions present by 12 weeks on. How can anyone say, rightly, it’s beyond my pay grade to determine when life begins?
II. “In Christ” Is Eternal Life
My point from John 1:4 is that the development of this baby is done by Jesus Christ, your Savior and mine. Secondly, I wanna say, in Christ is eternal life. Physical life, friends, is not enough. Clearly, John intends to bring his physically alive heirs to a higher level of life through faith in Jesus. This is a spiritual life. This is eternal life, that’s what he has in mind. That they would know God. As it says in John 17:3, “This is eternal life, that they may know God, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Jesus prayed that. Apart from Christ in our natural state, biologically alive, we are spiritually dead. The Bible reveals this in Ephesians 2, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature, objects of wrath.”
“Apart from Christ in our natural state, biologically alive, we are spiritually dead. “
That’s who we were. We were the living dead, biologically alive, but spiritually dead. I tell you, you spend much of your life surrounded by the living dead, and the issue goes far deeper than abortion. It has to do with their relationship with Almighty God. They don’t know him, they don’t love him. They don’t live for his glory, they don’t thank him for his blessings, they’re not aware of him. If they have any thoughts about God, their idolatrous and wrong thoughts, handed them by some satanic system. They do not know him, and God says that they’re dead while they live. And it was because of that that Jesus came, it’s because of that that John wrote his gospel, that we should no longer be dead but now alive through faith in Jesus Christ. And so John says, “In Him was life and that life was the light of men.” This radiant shining life of Jesus Christ, the word ‘life’ appears in John’s gospel fifty times, actually over fifty times, usually with the prefix eternal. Eternal life is in view, and that speaks of the duration of the life, that it will have no end, will go on forever and ever. There’ll be no end to the life that Christ gives, well beyond the ending of our physical lives, beyond our death, that we would live forever in the presence of God and have a relationship with him.
But Jesus also uses other analogies that speak of the nourishing and the sustaining of life. Maybe one of those is hinted at just here in verse 4, where it says “that life was the light of men,” and you know without light, the plants can’t live and without the plants and every animal dies, and so light is essential to life. And so Jesus is the source of life for everybody. But then he says to the Samaritan woman, he likens himself to a spring of water welling up to eternal life, that we drink from it and we are satisfied. He speaks later of Jesus being the bread of Heaven, come down so that a man may eat and not die. So Jesus is the living water, Jesus is the bread of life. He says in John 10:9, you heard Eric earlier, “I am the door of the sheep, and through me, they can come in and go out and find pasture.” In the very next verse, he says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill, end life and destroy, I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Jesus came to give us abundant life.
And the ultimate definition of that is certainly life with God, and by repentance and faith friends, simple faith in Jesus Christ, his death on the cross, his blood shed for you. You can have that life. That’s not complicated. You don’t have to have an advanced degree in theology, you don’t have to understand all things, you just have to know that you’re a sinner and that Jesus’s blood is enough for you. And looking to him, find in him what Thomas said, “My Lord and my God”, and that he died for you. Just ask him to be your savior and he will its really that simple. So that’s the Gospel, that’s the life.
III. Understanding Our Present Times
What about our present times? Well, as I mentioned it, Barack Obama is going to be inaugurated as the first African-American President of the United States, 44th President. And I must tell you in this, I greatly rejoice in one aspect that racism has been so thoroughly kicked in the teeth, frankly, I rejoice in that. I look on it as a great wickedness and a great evil. Not everyone who’s against racism understands the origins of the concept that all men are created equal. I find it in the Bible, I find it in the creation account, I find it in the redemption of Jesus Christ, where the ground is level at the cross. And I find it in the promise that in Revelation 7:9, we’re gonna be surrounded by people from every tribe and language and people and nation, we’re gonna delight in the same Savior then. And that’s a delight to me. So I’m glad that… At least to some degree, I would not say that racism is gone from our country, but that we’ve been able to progress to that point is a good thing for me. So I celebrate that.
I do not, however, celebrate President-elect Barack Obama’s views on abortion, and I reluctantly want to tell you what they are, I actually had somebody this week connected with our church, send me an incredible paean of praise about Barack Obama and just how glad he is, writing as a Caucasian, as a white man that an African-American has become president, and he actually rearranged the words of our national anthem in a very artful way, I read it to the staff, we were quite astonished, but one thing I didn’t know is if he happened to know Barack Obama’s views on abortion. So I sent them to him and he was shocked. Had never heard them. So today, you’ll hear them, not because I’m trying to affect an election. I’m not, the elections over. I just want you to know where we may be heading.
This information comes from Robert P. George, who’s a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. He just went over Obama’s voting records. So just look up Robert P. George, Princeton University, you’ll get the whole article, but he basically takes us on a descent, like Dante’s Inferno, down lower and lower and lower into how bad the views really are. He says that he’s the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of president of the United States, or to hold the office of Senator. I think he’s right. For starters, of course, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects taxpayers from paying for needless abortions that are not necessary to save say the life of the mother and not the result of rape or incest. That’s what the Hyde Amendment says. So that would be repealed. So we’d be forced to pay for those, that’s just the start though, he has promised… He said this at a Planned Parenthood rally, “The first thing I’d do as President, is to sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” Now, this proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed fundamental right of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including a right to abort a fully developed child in the final days for undefined health reasons. In essence, the FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent to notification laws for minors, state and federal funding, restrictions on abortion, conscience protections for pro-life citizens who are working in the healthcare industry. They will be forced to participate or lose their jobs. Freedom of Choice Act, I don’t see choice there, do you? The pro-abortion National Organization of Women (N.O.W.) has proclaimed, with approval, that FOCA would sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws and policies. Now, he said, it’s the first thing he’d do, of course, he’s skipping the fact that it has to be passed by Congress first, the law has to get to his desk. Oh friends, may it never get to his desk!
“Let’s pray that.” Exhort later. We will. Should we pray right now? Well, let’s pray right now. Father, I pray that the Freedom of Choice Act would never get to Barack Obama’s desk, because he will sign it and the courts will probably uphold it, and so we pray it wouldn’t even reach, in Jesus’s name, I pray, amen.
But it gets worse. Obama, unlike even, many pro-abortion legislators, opposed the ban on partial birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice, which I will not describe to you, but it’s nothing short of infanticide. He opposed it. He said he didn’t want to condemn a young woman to the punishment of a baby. But it gets worse, Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party has not endorsed or supported the Pregnant Women Support Act, which is the signature bill of Democrats for life meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal, it would simply make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test in whether Obama is pro-choice or pro-abortion, and he flunked the test. Let’s get rid of the language of pro-choice, that’s not what it is, it’s pro-abortion.
But it gets worse still, in an act of breathtaking injustice as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed, listen to this, legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful attempt to kill them in the womb or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability, the legislation would not ban any abortions. Instead, it included a specific provision ensuring it did not affect existing abortion laws. Everybody supported that one. Edward Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, all of them. It was unanimous. You know why? Because these are viable babies outside the womb, living on their own now, they’re human. What’s left to say? He opposed that. I can’t understand that. I went to a website and there were 10 reasons that he gave or that someone gave defending it, and all of them inadequate. There is no defense, friends. This is a viable human being breathing air outside separate from his mother’s womb, and it would make it illegal to give it assistance because it was intended to be aborted. It goes even worse: concerning human embryos for stem cell research, in effect making it illegal to develop alternate sources of stem cells; they must come from aborted babies.
And we as a nation elected him president. This is where we’re heading. I see dark times ahead. The church of Jesus Christ in America has had a comfortable relationship with the surrounding culture and with the government for 200 plus years. That may be ending. Most of our brothers and sisters in the world, throughout the world, do not have that kind of comfortable relationship with their surrounding culture. For the most part, they know that they’re aliens and strangers on earth, and they are reminded about that every single day. We’ve had a comfortable relationship, God has used it for His glory, but it may be decaying, a decaying orbit, we may be seeing it end. Fight the Freedom of Choice Act. It’s wickedness, pure wickedness. It will make it very difficult for any pro-life grass movements to do anything. Do you understand that?
Let’s remind ourselves of the Scripture, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” Okay, so who wins? Light or darkness? Well, I tell you, the light wins, the light sovereignly wins, but we ought to know the darkness that’s surrounding us, we ought to be aware of it, we ought to be courageous in the midst of it, we ought to shine the light… No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bowl. He puts it on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. The people in this house, the world, need the light of Jesus Christ, amen? And they need us to speak up and they need us to fight with the weapons that we have, not the weapons of violence, or the weapons of blockade, or the weapons of physicality, which changes nothing.
But with these weapons, 2 Corinthians 10, “Though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world. No, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of Christ, and we’re ready to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.” That’s a battle of the minds. It’s a battle of arguments, not arguing the way we understand, but I mean, filled with the Spirit of God, characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, you stand your ground and tell the truth, and you show how sweet it is to know Jesus, how sweet it is. And we make abortion obsolete. Can I tell you this? That even if he just changes his mind, that’s not going to be enough, and I think we ought to pray for it. There are precedents, friends. Well, let’s take Saul of Tarsus, for example, woke up that morning, breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples ended up that day, one of them. How do you explain that? The sovereign grace of almighty God.
Or take Nebuchadnezzar as an example, filled with arrogance and filled with violence, a man who could sweep away all of his closest counselors with one command, ’cause they couldn’t tell him what his dream was, kill them all. He had a friend, his name was Daniel, he confronted Nebuchadnezzar, told him the truth. Renounce your sins by doing what is right and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed, it may be that then your prosperity will continue. Oh, that someone would tell Barack Obama, the truth like that. Renounce your sins and your wickedness, turn away from this. It may be that then your success will continue. For in him Barack Obama and all of us live and move and have our being in his hand, we live as long as he wills. It may be that then your prosperity will continue.
So what happened to Nebuchadnezzar? God changed his mind. Now, it didn’t happen one day, like Saul of Tarsus. It happened over seven years of being an animal and eating grass, but at the end of the seven years, he was greatly humbled and gave one of the greatest testimonies to the sovereignty and the kingship of Almighty God you’ll find anywhere in the Bible, and I have good hopes that we’ll see him in heaven. And so we are commanded by the Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 2 this, “I urge then, first of all, that requests, prayers and intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone, for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good and pleases God, our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.”
So we should pray for kings, despite the fact that we might think the odds are against it. It seems surprising that we should pray for kings and those in authority, the ones that are least likely, it seems to turn and repent. But he says, do it. First of all, that we might live peaceable and godly lives, we ourselves as Christians, but also that we can stamp out heinous and corrupt and wicked laws like these abortion laws. We can live upright lives in this present world, but pray secondly, for their sake, that they won’t have to spend eternity in hell, that they can know the forgiveness and love that God gives, pray for them, because he desires all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. So pray for Barack Obama. Could it be that he might end up the number one greatest pro-life advocate this country has ever seen? Is that possible? Could God’s grace actually do that? I tell you, it is possible. As I said, there are precedents, so pray for that, but you know even there, that’s not enough. Our nation still elected him by the millions. So there’s still a lot of work to be done. America as a whole has embraced pro-abortion ideology. The genie’s out of the bottle, as some people speak. It’s going to be hard to get it back, and so you have to win it one mind at a time, one person at a time, one crisis pregnancy at a time.
“We should pray for kings, despite the fact that we might think the odds are against it.”
IV. A Word of Grace… and of Life
So let me give you some applications. First of all, be repentant, be repentant. Don’t excuse yourself, don’t say, “You know I’m against abortion, so I have nothing to confess in this area,” but just be repentant. Whenever I preach on the sin of abortion, I’m mindful that there may well be some here who have sinned specifically in this area. I never forget it, friends. I think much about people like that, and I want to speak to their hearts. I wanna speak tenderly to you about God’s grace and mercy of forgiveness, but you have to repent. If you don’t repent, rather than just be repentant, I would say be warned because you’ll make God, your enemy, but I just speak to you as though there is was some perhaps melting in your heart and that you’re willing to repent. Perhaps you’re young man who sinfully had relations with a young woman and she became pregnant and you actually advised her to get an abortion. Perhaps you’re a father whose daughter became pregnant, and you felt more about your own shame and embarrassment and inconvenience and expense than you did about what was right and urged her to get an abortion. Perhaps you’re a woman who chose some time ago to get an abortion, and now you have to live with the memories and the pain of that the rest of your life. Perhaps you’re a public official, a judge, an elected official, a legislator who used your position to establish and entrench the sin of abortion even more deeply in our nation. Perhaps you’re a medical professional who aided in the taking of innocent life in abortion. Or perhaps you’re just like me, been negligent of the opportunities God’s given you to fight abortion sufficiently. God calls us to repent.
Secondly, be assured. Be assured that the grace of God flowing through the cross of Jesus Christ is sufficient for your sin and mine, and an infinitude of sins beyond. The grace of Jesus Christ is an ocean, and where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. And the tenderness of God in receiving broken-hearted repentant sinners is displayed throughout Scripture. “All day long I’ve held out My hands to a disobedient, obstinate people,” he says in Romans where there’s the image of the father of the prodigal son, happily welcoming the son back, be assured.
“The grace of God flowing through the cross of Jesus Christ is sufficient for your sin and mine, and an infinitude of sins beyond.”
Thirdly, be prayerful. We’ve already stopped and prayed, and I challenge you to pray, not just today, but every day for President Obama that God would grant him repentance leading him to a knowledge of the truth. Pray not only for him, but for all the pro-abortion legislators that might join with him on the Hill for the Freedom of Choice Act or for other heinous things that God would grant each one of them repentance and show them the truth. Pray for the hearts of America, pray for people’s hearts to be changed, pray for abortion to become obsolete in this land, not just illegal, but actually obsolete. You say, Well, that’s perfection. Well we pray toward perfection things all the time, don’t we? Pray for it.
Fourthly, be encouraged. I was reading World magazine yesterday. There are many, many reasons for great encouragement; one is that the number of abortions has been consistently dropping over the years. It just keeps going down and down and down, not every single year, and there’s still definitely way too many, in the 800,000 range, but down. Even the Democratic Party, after values voters, re-elected George Bush in the last presidential election, started to reassess their, at least their verbiage on abortion, and they started actually funding at lower levels pro-life Democrats, which would have been really party heresy some time ago. Pray that that would continue. Could come a day that the Democratic Party would be the number one pro-life advocacy party that there is. God can do great things. Pray for that. I’m not rooting for this party or that, I’m just saying, just pray.
One World magazine article, spoke of a victory like in Texas, the panhandle of Texas getting all 19 Planned Parenthood clinics shut down after a 12-year battle. They took them on one at a time and hit them in the pocketbook, in the purse, at their fundraising efforts. They handed out leaflets, they went to their neighbors, they talked to them about Planned Parenthood, they talked to them about abortion and Planned Parenthoods in Amarillo, Texas. Their funding went from $3.1 million in 1997 or 1998 to $230,000 last year, and then they shut their doors. They just couldn’t keep going, where they severed their ties with Planned Parenthood. Twelve-year battle won, by the way, Freedom of Choice Act would reverse all that, and it’d be against the law to do that kind of work. You see what I’m saying? So friends, that’s a battle we must not lose. It must never get to his desk. So be encouraged secondly, or fourthly, I guess.
Fifthly. Be vigilant and educated. Learn these pro-life things, read books like Randy Alcorn’s book on pro-life answers to pro-abortion physicians or questions, get facile and easily conversant in dealing with various things that people tend to say. Train yourself. Teach yourself, educate yourself.
Sixthly, be active. Pregnancy Support Services in Durham, you have a bulletin insert, Life Care Pregnancy Center in Raleigh, among the Crisis Pregnancy Centers that counsel women against abortion. I have some men in a men’s Bible study I teach on Thursdays that are actively involved in that and give counseling as they can, and they have incredible witnessing opportunities to non-Christians all the time. It’s a great ministry. Seventh, be generous. Give financially to pro-life causes, give to these causes. Pregnancy support services. Be generous.
Eighth, be courageous. Speak up. Talk about it. Bring it up. Blessed are you when people persecute you because of righteousness, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven. I’m not saying go out and… go get some persecution. That should not be your goal. Go speak the truth in love. Tell them the truth.
Ninth, be proactive. Are you the parent of some growing children? Oh, that they would not add to this problem. Tell them the truth, not only of the sanctity of human life, show them pictures of developing babies when they’re ready for it. Show it to them, teach them the humanity of the pre-born, but also the sanctity of marriage and of marital relations. Teach them the truth and teach them many times so that they are not part of the problem when the time comes.
And then finally, be hopeful. Be hopeful. We’re gonna win, friends. Jesus is gonna win. We’re gonna live in a world where there will be no abortion. Let’s go beyond that. We’re gonna live in a world where there will be no sin! We are going to go into a place that is called the New Heavens, the New Earth, the home of righteousness. So any effort we make will be ultimately victorious, so be hopeful. And close with me now in prayer.
