 One of the most memorable experiences I had in medicine was part of a tour that I had of a hospital that I was working at. The lady who was giving us a tour of this hospital took us all around and then she took us to a lower level of the hospital and there she said that we needed to pay special attention to this particular room. The room had a label that read Special Orthopedic Procedures or something like that. And she told us as we were standing outside the door she said actually this is the room where we do all of the abortions in the hospital and we intentionally mislabel this door because we don't want people to know that there are abortions happening in this hospital and We also want to avoid all of the protesters. So we keep it a secret. It bothered me a lot. I would work in that hospital for many years and I knew that a couple hundred yards away from where I was working with cancer patients and trying to save lives lives were being taken. I Spent a while working in the neonatal ICU or NICU of this hospital and we would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars to help save the life of a baby who was 22, 23, 24 weeks of gestation and again a couple hundred yards away the exact same gestational age there would be babies who had their lives being taken away. I can remember thinking the only difference between the babies in this NICU and the babies that are in that secret room is that some are wanted and some are unwanted. They're the same age. They have the same physiology. There is no difference except some are desired and some are rejected. I felt haunted by this. I felt haunted by this juxtaposition. I wondered if I or anybody else could hear their cries. Ultimately, I left that hospital frankly with a sense of failure. I felt that I had failed in my duties. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what I was supposed to do but I know that being a doctor meant that you were supposed to be saving lives and I felt like I was silent while lives were being destroyed. But ultimately this is a call upon all of the people of God. I am going to only read two short passages of scripture this morning, but I ask that you please read them with me. The first passage comes from the book of Proverbs chapter 24. We'll read Proverbs chapter 24 verses 10 through 12. If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Deliver those who are drawn toward death and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. If you say surely we did not know this, does he does not he who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, does he not know it? And will he not render to each man according to his deeds? So let's look at this passage together. In verse 10 it's the author says that some people will faint. They'll give up on this day of adversity. We heard a good talk last night from Brother Kurt who talked about the adversity of our day. Specifically with abortion, who isn't overwhelmed by this problem? When you hear the millions of lives that are lost, it's hard to even begin to fathom these kinds of numbers. Most of us I think feel numb when we hear these sorts of statistics. We just want to throw our hands up in the air and give up. How do we even begin to address a problem of such magnitude? But this is the path of those whose strength is small. Verse 11 gives a general statement. It talks about those who are stumbling in Hebrew. It's literally slipping to death. I like how one translation renders this verse. It says deliver those being taken away to death and hold back those slipping to the slaughter. This morning I want to make three points to you. The first point is that it is incumbent upon God's people to rescue those who are being slaughtered. That's simply what verse 11 says. Verse 11 is a general command. It doesn't seem to have any one particular situation in mind. This seems to be a general command that God is giving to his people. How will we, how will I stand before God on that great day of judgment? How will we stand before the one who weighs our hearts, before the one who renders to each one according to their deeds? And to give a testimony as to how we obeyed this, how have we delivered those who are being taken to death? Note the response in verse 12 is basically to plead some kind of ignorance. It's easy to do that, but God says that he knows our hearts. If somebody were here at this camp abducting children, taking them to some room and having them killed, we would not be sitting here. We would be running around. We'd be coming up with some kind of strategy. We would be doing something to help stop this killer. We would not be able to rest because of the burden of our innocent children being delivered to the slaughter. Why then are we inactive? Are we attempting to plaster ignorance over the walls of our heart? Or have we fainted on the day of adversity? For the second point, I would like us to turn to the New Testament. Please turn with me to the book of Ephesians and let's look at Ephesians chapter 5. We'll look at just one short verse. Ephesians chapter 5 verse 11 reads, And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. I'll read that again, and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. So I believe that this verse could actually be a theme of the whole weekend. I know we've chosen the verse in Isaiah about lifting up a standard, but I believe that just as relevant, we could have chosen this. To explain the significance of this verse, I want to cover a concept about how often God gives us things in pairs. They often come in pairs, and when you contemplate the design of these pairs, you realize that you need both elements of the pair and if you just have one without the other, something becomes dysfunctional. Something goes wrong. Let me give some examples. A famous example would be faith and works. So we all know from the book of James. It says that if you have faith and don't have works, your faith is dead. Similarly, if you have works, but don't have faith, that's legalism. You need both. You need both of the two working together. It's in a sense almost two sides of the same coin. I'll give you another example. Repent and believe. So if you repent without believing, that's a form of moralism. It's a type of self-improvement philosophy that misses God. But if you believe without repenting, well, that's disobedience. The technical term there would be, that's the antinomian heresy. This is the plight of the modern American churches. It's obeying without repenting. I'll give you another pair. Teaching and discipline. If you teach without discipline, you actually harden people to the truth. Have you ever seen a scene of parents telling their children to do something? The child totally ignores what they do and they keep saying it and the child keeps ignoring. There's no discipline. There's no consequences. When you see a situation like that, I don't know how you feel, but I feel like saying if you're gonna say these things and not follow through with discipline, just don't say it. You're better off not giving these instructions to your child rather than give them without providing the discipline. Similarly, if you discipline without teaching, will you fail to win hearts and minds? There are other pairs that we could look at, mercy and justice, or even male and female. We need both. If we lack one or the other, we have disastrous consequences. Now Ephesians 511 contains a very powerful pair. Please don't miss this. Paul is telling us here that we are not to first fellowship with those who are, sorry, he says we're not to fellowship with unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. Okay, so let's think about this. Let's imagine what it would be like to have one half without the other half, one part without the other part. Okay, so let's think about what it would be like to be exposing the works of darkness, but still have fellowship with them. So what would that be like? Well, there's a lot of cases like that. There's a lot of examples of pastors who get up and they preach these thunderous messages to roaring crowds about how wrong adultery is or pornography or immorality, and lo and behold, they're caught in an affair. They're caught in adultery. They're caught in some kind of immoral situation. What do we call that? We call that hypocrisy. There are many examples we can think of those who have exposed evil while yet have remained in fellowship with evil. But what about this? What if you do the first part of the verse without the second part of the verse? What if you're not having fellowship with evil, but you fail to expose these works of darkness? There is a term that someone has coined for this. The term that has been coined is it's an avoidance ethic, an avoidance ethic. An avoidance ethic is basically where you say, I'm going to practice my own personal private religion. I'm going to do the right thing, but I'm not going to stand up in a public way and suffer the consequences. I'm not going to be this very visible, prophetic, persecuted witness. This is something which I believe is probably more relevant to all of us. Have we fallen into this trap of only doing the first part of the pair, but neglecting the latter element there? So my second point is that personal holiness and a public witness against evil should go hand in hand. They should be wed together. When I was asked to speak on the subject of abortion, my first reaction was, doesn't everybody here already believe that abortion is wrong? I didn't want to preach to the choir, as it is said. But as I wrestled with them more and thought about it more, I began to realize that with this topic, and I believe with every other topic that we're going to be looking at over the course of the weekend, we have generally embraced an avoidance ethic. We have not exposed this evil to a watching world. We've been content to practice a holiness privately and have not served in the prophetic office that God has called his church to serve. You see, we are supposed to be the conscience of the world. We are supposed to be the light of the world that exposes evil. Even that term, light and exposure. Note how those words connect. Jesus says we're supposed to be the light of the world, and what does light do? It exposes things. It exposes darkness. It exposes those things that are hidden away. John the Baptist, he lost his head because he served as the conscience for Herod. This avoidance ethic that I believe has plagued many of our churches is also a form of disobedience. It's very comfortable. It's very easy for us to practice Christianity privately. It is far more difficult. It is far more taxing to make a public stance. And let's be open about it. There is so much to expose. There is so much wickedness to expose with this particular evil, this particular plague of abortion. We should expose the hypocrisy of a system of laws that makes it illegal to crush the egg of a bald eagle, but yet allow for the destruction of a human life. Look this up. It is illegal. You can go to jail for five years for destroying the egg of a bald eagle. We should expose the deceit of an industry that causes more psychological harm to women than can be measured. We should expose the anti-child worldview that we live in today. Children are viewed as burdens, not blessings. I read an article in a medical journal recently that was talking about a survey that was conducted where they asked women who had had an abortion what the number one reason was that they had for doing this abortion. And the number one reason that women gave, 40% of women said it was because they feared the financial consequences of having a child. Children are seen as being financial drains, as party poopers. They're seen as threats to the rainforest, and that what takes away our fun. When I first came into kingdom churches, I knew that I had encountered something special. I knew I was in the right place because I saw parents that love children. I saw the large families. Who can't miss that? That was something that moved me greatly. And one person told me something. He said this question to me, and I'll never forget this question. He said in a talk, he said, imagine I give you two options. Option A is I give you a million dollars. Option B is that I give you a child. Which do you choose? A million dollars or a child? And I can remember wrestling with that because a part of me thinking, wow, a million dollars, that sounds pretty nice. And his talk, he says, if you have a biblical worldview, you will choose the child every day. Children are far more precious, more valuable than money. What would you choose? Our world chooses pleasure, our world chooses money. What do we choose? There's much to expose there. When you go to the grocery store and someone says you have your hands full, right? How many women here have had this experience where you go with your five, six, seven children and you get all kinds of comments. We get this on a nearly daily basis. And I know my wife has come up with various answers to give when people say you have your hands full or how do you do it? She says, I have my hands full with blessings from God. Do we expose the anti-child worldview? Or do we partake in the jokes about children being irritating our pests? Do we expose the worldview that is so common today about all of these matters relating to the burden of having a child? We should expose the apathy on this issue by praying. How much do we really pray about this? I was convicted myself to think about this. Often when there's times of war, we pray and that's tremendous. We are called as a church. One of our main ministries is to be priests that petition God for peace on earth. Praise God for that. But abortion kills far more people than war. Do we agonize in prayer over this or do we forget? Do we plead ignorance? Do we expose apathy by working in crisis pregnancy centers, by adopting, by showing love, not just in word but in action? My sister-in-law just recently adopted a child who has Down syndrome, a baby who has Down syndrome. And I was so convicted to see this. About 90% of the time in the United States when a couple finds out that they have a child who has Down syndrome, it ends in an abortion. 90% of the time. Almost nobody wants children who have Down syndrome. And to see my sister-in-law do this, it made me think, would I be willing to have that kind of sacrifice to make that kind of commitment? That is probably one of the most powerful witnesses that the world can see. We should also expose the hypocrisy of those so-called pro-choice advocates. These same advocates are nearly always in favor of things like gun control, welfare, minimum wage, and affirmative action. They want choice restricted on all those issues for the sake of protecting a broader population. This is absolute hypocrisy. We should expose the hypocrisy about this being about women's health. So often you hear about this is an issue about women's health or women's rights. When everybody agrees that far more women, far more girl babies have been killed than boys, the reality is simply that people don't generally want, in the world, they want boy babies. They don't want girl babies. There's rampant gender selection in places like India and China and even in the United States. I remember when I was in medical school, we had somebody come in and give a lecture to our class on OBGYN and this person worked right in Boston at a Harvard teaching hospital and he frankly came right out and said gender selection in the United States is rampant. People don't always make it as explicit as we might think, but it happens all the time. This is absolute hypocrisy to have this be an issue about so-called women's health. Even the most staunch defenders of abortion squirm when they contemplate this issue, have a dialogue with somebody about this, expose the fallacy of that argument. If an abortion is about removing excess tissue, just like cutting off your toenails or removing your hair, ask them, do you have a problem with sex selective or gender selective abortion? Most people, like I said, even the most staunch pro-choice advocates, they struggle on that issue. They understand that. There have been people who have estimated the so-called missing girl number. So how many girls have been lost due to pure gender selection? So they find out it's a girl and they decide to have an abortion. So there have been three or four serious estimates that have been made in the secular literature. Estimates are somewhere around a hundred million girls are missing today because of abortion due to their gender. Think about that. A hundred million girls have been selectively killed because of their gender. Somebody has rightly said that the three deadliest words in the entire English language, do you know what they are? It's a girl. The three deadliest words in the whole of history, in the whole of English language are it's a girl. If you hear those words pronounced at an ultrasound, there is a significant chance that that baby will be killed. How tragic. I have personally four boys and a girl. I love my girl so much to think of somebody ending a little girl's life because she is a girl. I can't contemplate. I can't think about how wicked that is. May God have mercy on us. There is much to expose about the works of darkness. Let's go to the final third point. Good works supply the attractive power of evangelism. So it's very interesting as this subject is raised in all kinds of churches all across America. Do you know what a lot of people say? They say this, this is not an issue for the church to talk about and the main reason that's given is they say this is not about evangelism. They say our job is to do evangelism and then all these other things will get sorted out. It's a very common protest that a lot of churches of all denominations all stripes raise. They say it's not an evangelism issue. It's really something that we shouldn't be spending a lot of time in. This is a tremendous mistake and I want to tackle it head on. The first thing we ought to say to that kind of foolishness is that we ought to declare the whole counsel of God. Murder and bloodshed, taking the lives of the innocent is one of the dominant themes of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Innocent blood, this is something that we should not shrink to declare. Chronically though, I believe that speaking about this issue is actually a great assist, a great help to evangelism. It's a great aid to a discipleship and let me explain what I mean by this. Jesus actually tells us in his teachings, there's three things that are the fuel, they are the attractive power for what draws people into the kingdom. There's three things and only three things that I'm aware of that he gives as having persuasive force to draw people in. The first thing he says, we won't look at these passages. I think most of us know them off the top of our heads. The first thing he says is in John 13, he says, by your love for one another, the world will know that you're my disciple. So when we love our fellow brothers and sisters, the world knows, hey, these are really God's people. That's the first thing. The second thing that Jesus teaches in John chapter 17 is unity and he says, may they be one, as you and I are one, so that the world will know that you have sent me. If we have unity, that has tremendous attractive power to draw people in. Jesus himself praised for that. And last year at Kingdom Fellowship, we had a whole panel just about that. The third element that has this persuasive power is good works. And Jesus talks about that in Matthew chapter five where he says, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. So when we do good works, when we are out there, that brings people in, that light is radiant and attractive and winsome. And so we ought to ask ourselves first about our respective churches, those three things, love, unity and good works. How are we faring with respect to those three dimensions? You see, the world now focusing on the third element, good works, the world marvels when they see sacrifice, when they see people who are committed to the cause. Think about people like Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King. The world gives them tremendous respect because it recognizes the value of those who give selflessly, who are committed to a cause. And that is a form of social capital, if you will. It's a form of persuasive power that helps you be known to them as a person to be taken seriously. How can that kind of sacrifice not command respect? The church can purchase social capital and evangelistic capital to use those terms by doing good works like adopting, serving in crisis pregnancy centers, taking leadership in these issues, speaking out on these issues and being that prophetic witness. One of the criticisms that's often made about non-resistance is that it's this criticism of, hey, you people are just shirking your duties. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. All of us are doing our duties. We're fighting for the country. We're doing this. We're doing that. Why aren't you willing to do your part? Well, this ought to be a natural offset and in fact dampen that criticism and in fact completely squash that criticism before it even begins. We ought never to be thought of as leeches or parasites or mooches because the world ought to see what we are doing on behalf of the most innocent and weak members of our society. At many levels, being active on this issue will serve the church with respect to evangelism and discipleship. We're going to have another talk that gives more concrete examples on this. I want to close by reading a poem that I believe captures some of the human dimensions of abortion. I'm actually not sure who wrote it. You can see it up on the screen. Month one. Mommy, I am only eight inches long, but I have all my organs. I love the sound of your voice every time I hear it. I wave my arms and legs. The sound of your heartbeat is my favorite lullaby. Month two. Mommy, today I learned how to suck my thumb. If you could see me, you could definitely tell that I am a baby. I'm not big enough to survive outside my home, though. It's so nice and warm in here. Month three. You know what, Mommy? I'm a girl. I hope that makes you happy. I want you to always be happy. I don't like it when you cry. You sound so sad. It makes me sad too, and I cry with you even though you can't hear me. Month four. Mommy, my hair is starting to grow. It is very short and fine, but I will have a lot of it. I spend a lot of my time exercising. I can turn my head and curl my fingers and toes and stretch my arms and legs. I am becoming quite good at it too. Month five. You went to the doctor today. Mommy, he lied to you. He said that I'm not a baby. I am a baby. Mommy, you're a baby. I think and feel. Mommy, what's abortion? Month six. I can hear that doctor again. I don't like him. He seems cold and heartless. Something is intruding in my home. The doctor called it a needle. Mommy, what is it? It burns. Please make him stop. I can't get away from it. Mommy, help me. Month seven. Mommy, I am okay. I am in Jesus' arms. He is holding me. He told me about abortion. Why didn't you want me, Mommy? God, please have mercy on us. Father, please have mercy on us for silence, for not exposing the works of darkness. Father, may we not shrink from our call. May we be people of courage. May we rescue those who are being handed over to the slaughter. Father, this is a great day of adversity. We need your Holy Spirit. I pray for wisdom. I pray for courage. I pray that you would give us the ability to act wisely with boldness, that our hands would not be stained with the innocent red blood that is flooding our land. Please, God, help us. Help us, O Lord. We pray these things in the name of Jesus, your Son. Amen.