by Corey Davis
One of the most important and necessary expressions of our Christianity at this point in history is to act on our pro-life convictions. In general, I am going to encourage all of you to walk as a Christian when you get on the other side of the Church doors, but I will make no apologies about advocating your involvement in pro-life activism.
We want so much. We want a good job. We want to do well in school. We want a nice home. We want an intelligent, beautiful wife (or an intelligent, handsome husband). We want beautiful, happy children. We want. We want. We want. And hopefully, what we want more than anything else is to be faithful as Christians. We love to see inspiring movies like "Chariots of Fire," or hear stories about faithful Christians like John Huss, or read Bible passages like Hebrews 11:32-12:3, or listen to nationally known preachers exhorting us that obedience is better than sacrifice. But if we want to be great Christians with children "of whom the world is not worthy," we have to do something; we have to enter the spiritual war.
Children are going to go where they are led. They are going to follow someone. And the people with the most influence over children are their parents and extended family. We cannot lead our kids by remote control. We need to be the kind of Christians today that we want our children to be tomorrow. We need to encourage them to be salt and light by being salt and light ourselves. If we are experienced in spiritual warfare, then we have a practical wisdom to pass on to our children that will make an eternal difference in how they live their lives. Imagine the children of the Church growing up knowing what it means to take Christ into the world. The world would not be worthy of such children.
When we act as if Jesus is our Lord, we meet with serious opposition rooted in the flesh and/or the demonic. John 3:20 states, "everyone who does evil hates the light." When we "practice the truth" of Jesus (John 3:21) evil is exposed, and those who are involved in that evil are going to hate us. Being that light among evil is not going to be comfortable or convenient, but at some point in our Christian lives, we are going to have to take the training wheels off and venture out into the world. Is God's gift of immortality so meager that we won't risk our present comfort and plans to take up the cause of Christ? God expects us to get out there and fall down a few times, bang our knees, get our feelings hurt, and come back home with our hands dirty from being in the war.
Bible study and coming to Church does not amount to being in the war. Maybe participating in Church activities is a personal battle of discipline, but it is not spiritual warfare. In the Ephesians 6 armor passage, verse 15 tells us it is the "gospel of peace" that carries us into battle. If we are walking in the Spirit we will ultimately (sooner than we think) find ourselves in the spiritual war.
If you become involved in pro-life, you will be hated by some people. You will be hated because you are a Christian. The pro-abortion (pro-death) activists I encounter at abortion clinics, hate me because I am a Christian on the wrong side of the Church doors. It is not my political position they cannot stand, it is my religious position they oppose. That is how I know abortion is one of the major fronts of the spiritual war.
The pre-born are the perfect victims of oppression. They are human beings, endowed with inalienable rights from God (not America), who can do nothing to protect themselves. They cannot even cry out to their mothers (who are the other victims of abortion). They are killed and their remains are incinerated, or if they are old enough their bodies are sold for medical experimentation. It is ironic that the closer children come to being born, the more valuable they are dead.
Obviously, the pre-born cannot come knocking on your door in the middle of the night asking you for help, but I can. I am asking you in the name of your Lord Jesus Christ to become a protector of the babies.
Since they are human, we have a spiritual duty to fight for pre-born children. "Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don't stand back and let them die" (Proverbs 24:11). Pre-born children need us to take that word of God seriously. I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion because they are a Christian. But I have met hundreds of people who are pro-life because they are Christian.
The Church is full of Christians who recognize the horror of abortion, but for all their sympathy and outrage, they do absolutely nothing. They have hearts of gold and feet of clay.
There are a lot of things we can do to fight abortion. We do not have to do all of them. We do not even have to do two of them, but in the name of God--do one of them.
The cost is real. It is taking a day off from work (unpaid) to participate in some activity. It is time used to organize people for an event and hold their hand all the way through it. It is stuffing envelopes. It is being the dissonant voice in a meeting that was going so smoothly until you opened your mouth. It is being arrested. It is making some enemies of people who hate Christ. It is being misunderstood by other Christians. The cost is real. It means mowing your lawn next weekend because this weekend there is an opportunity to stand up for Jesus. It means (God forbid) not watching the Nebraska Whos'its vs. the Tascaloo Kangaroos. Mostly (today) the cost is inconvenience, but the cost of being a Christian in this world will not always be that cheap and paying it will not always be voluntary.
One night after Church, I was talking to someone in the Sanctuary, when she noticed some small children (at least one of them was mine) playing under the altar and commented, "Look! the Saints under the altar." The "Saints under the altar" is from the book of Revelation and refers to the Christians who were killed for the cause of Christ. I hope to God she was not a prophet.