Posted on 02/05/2015 2:09:56 AM PST by Morgana
Some Christians wish they attended a church where the pastor or priest took a more outspoken stance against abortion. While sermons or homilies may touch on pro-life issues from time to time — or not at all — some Christians sit in their pews wondering why their church leader is reluctant to speak out against the human rights issues of our time.
The folks who attend Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas don’t have that problem. Their Pastor Matt Chandler is no stranger to speaking up for life.
Last year, Chandler joined millions of Christians across America come together under the banner of the National Day of Prayer, but specifically working with pro-life groups to pray for an end to abortion.
“Scripture clearly calls us to protect and defend the innocent, and that most certainly includes the unborn. While we should come together to pray for God’s blessing on our country, we cannot expect God to bring revival when we allow an estimated 1.2 million babies to be aborted within our shores every year. Abortion is primarily a spiritual issue, and it is, bar none, the predominant challenge for the American Christian today,” observed Brian Fisher, the head of that prayer effort.
Now, Chandler has preached a sermon specifically condemning abortion as “murder” that is going viral:
Chandler — of the Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas — told parishioners during a January 25 sermon that he believes “abortion is murder” and that he doesn’t think it’s a political issue, instead, calling it a ”scientific … and a deeply theological issue.” But while he was stern in his definition, he reminded the congregation that there is grace for the “murderers among us.”
Chandler held little back in making his stance clear to the congregation.
“I need to — with all the boldness that the holy spirit will grant to me — tell everyone in this room that abortion is murder. It is the murder of a human being,” he said. “I’m going to have to say it, I’m going to show it to you in the word, I want to prove it to you with science. … It’s a holocaust like the world has yet to see.”
“The United States since Roe vs. Wade … has blown past both of those brothers and have made them look angelic as we have slaughtered, wholesale, 55 million little boys and little girls,” he said.
But rather than convict and condemn, Chandler was quick to note that the Christian gospel does not preclude anyone — even murderers — from receiving God’s grace. He cited Saul of Tarsus, the biblical figure who persecuted Christians before converting to the faith and penning a fair amount of the New Testament, in making his point.
“I am no fool: There are murderers among us. And so at the same time that I prophetically, and boldly, and courageously say ‘abortion is murder’ I also need to step into this space knowing that we are guilty of it — many of us are guilty of it,” he said. “And maybe we weren’t the ones that had the abortion, but maybe we coerced and pressed somebody to have the abortion, or just paid for the abortion.”
Regardless of these facts, Chandler said that all hope isn’t lost, as God is forgiving.
“I need to say to you, listen to me: Where the volume of sin increases, the volume of grace always abounds much more” he said, adding his belief that murder is not a “disqualifying sin” when it comes to discovering God’s forgiveness. ”The grace and mercy of God covers sin.”
Here’s the sermon: VIDEO ON LINK
Good grief!!!!!!!!
Humanity is depraved beyond redemption when you look at these numbers.
I’m not sure the analogy with warfare is entirely accurate or reasonable here in the “war” against abortion. In other words, the fight against the practice is engaged on two fronts really, the moral and the legal.
The question really is, for each person to decide and this prioritize, what is, or should be, the main goal. The decrease in the number of abortions or winning the moral argument against abortion.
Laws (or regulations) are not designed nor intended to win any arguments. They are by definition an extension of the people’s will as a society on said society, intended to enforce a particular moral decision. So in the case of abortion, for example, there is no way anyone can reasonably assert any law, no matter how strict, will end all abortions. The only way that goal will be achieved is when the moral argument is won in the hearts and minds of every person.
However again, laws don’t win arguments they enforce collective decisions made already. So to expect some perfect law to be written and magically end all abortions is expecting something unreasonable. It’s setting a goal that is unreasonable in that circumstance.
It’s not unreasonable to have as a goal, an end to all abortion. But this goal must be worked for and ultimately achieved by education of people either through scientific education or philosophic education or religious. The goal of ending all abortions cannot be achieved by legislation alone.
This doesn’t mean though that one shouldn’t work towards legislative means to limit abortions as much as possible. Indeed, by doing this in concert with the educative process described above, one actually aids the eventual goal of ending all abortion not hinders it. Why? Because those who we seek to educate as above can see we are serious about the issue, and take the issue we describe in education seriously enough to want to stop as many as possible now.
Otherwise the cause of education (again as described above) is hindered because those who oppose such educative efforts can be and are scandalized by our seeming unwillingness to put any effort into the issue legislatively. They can point to such inaction and say, “You make all these arguments against abortion but you don’t seek to end it at all, why should I take you seriously?” And they would be right to make such an objection.
Actions speak louder than words alone, as we all know, so to add realistic weight to such arguments as above, one must fight to end as many abortions as possible now. Otherwise the moral urgency of the situstion is lost in an echo chamber of sterile thought and argumentation.
The other extreme is equally lacking, which would seek by the force of the State alone, the end of all abortion. Devoid of arguments based on reason, there would always be abortions just abortions done illegally. One could say there would be far fewer, but then the purist insistence on only laws that outlaw all abortions severely suffers from the same relativism that such proponents accuse the current pro life movement.
One baby dead is too many, under either strategy, from a strictly purist approach. There is no way to guarantee that the practice would be completely eliminated by instituting strict laws against it now, laws devoid of a complementary strategy of education. A strategy of education that itself relies upon legal action now, in order to be taken seriously. Legal action that has a reasonable chance of succeeding in the current environment.
There’s nothing wrong with an incremental approach, per se.
The problem is when your incrementalism includes the codification of permission in the statutes to murder individual persons. All of them, as long as your illogical, unreasonable, arbitrary requirements are met.
There is a simple two part test of all legislation:
1. Does it recognize the God-given, unalienable nature of the individual right to live?
And
2. Does it provide the equal protection for every innocent person that the Constitution absolutely requires?
If it fails on either hand, it is immoral and unconstitutional, and in fact is reinforcing the practice of abortion on demand.
There is another horrible problem piled in on top of what I said above, which is that most all of the incrementalists who are pushing this immoral, failed strategy are also judicial supremacists.
And so, no matter what you do, the judges are simply going to continue what they have now done for decades, which is strike down your ill-founded regulatory schemes as an impediment to the woman’s “right” to access to the means to murder their offspring.
Leaving you with absolutely nothing but to continue to deceive “pro-lifers” with empty promises of accomplishing something, somehow, somewhere over the rainbow. When it is politically expedient, of course. Which is never is.
Careful...arguing with crazy people will make you insane.
Your stupid Alinsky tactics add nothing of value to the discussion.
The problem is though that any law proposed that would satisfy the two tests you outlined has no chance of succeeding in its stated goal, which is (presumably) the end to all abortions.
It has no chance in doing that not because it has little chance of ever being enacted (even though that’s true) but it also doesn’t have a chance of succeeding because the current social environment isn’t convinced (as a general rule) that each fertilized egg is a person. After all, look at the practice of in-vitro fertilization for example. That entire barbaric and selfish process treats fertilized eggs as commodities that, if the time “isn’t right” can be put on hold, in an indefinite suspended animation hovering just a few degrees above absolute zero. Think about that for a second: thousands of babies are, right now, frozen in time, languishing in a man made limbo all because some “parents” thought it was their “right” to have a child at 50 years old. And that’s just the case with IVF!
No this culture (if it can even be called a culture) isn’t ready to state a fertilized egg is an individual with just as many rights as you and I, so the test #1 you describe would eventually fail, in the minds of many people, not just lawmakers. And as I’ve described (and I think you agree) laws alone don’t change people’s hearts.
If people’s hearts aren’t changed, then all the laws in the world won’t be worth a hill of beans in saving the unborn. And this includes the most moral and “constitutional” law.
And we can make the best, most impassioned arguments on the planet for why abortion is wrong, but THAT won’t mean a hill of beans either, if we don’t at least try something now that has a chance of succeeding: succeding to save at least some babies.
It’s a “glass is half empty or full” question really. I prefer to think of the legislation proposed these days that have a reasonable chance of success as saving some babies. Not “letting some babies die”. Again, half glass empty or full? This is the unfortunate position we find ourselves in today because of moral decay.
There is no such tbing as a “fertilized egg.” We’re not birds.
But, it doesn't.
And again, you won't convince anybody by giving up the only arguments there are against abortion. It's a mirage.
Since you asked...your posts on this subject have subtracted from the sum total of human knowledge. You would do more for the cause by not addressing it.
Again, your comments add absolutely nothing to the discussion.
Who said anything about “giving up” anything? That’s how you view it maybe but that doesn’t make it necessarily so.
If I make all the wondrous arguments against abortion but don’t actually DO anything to stop as many as I can NOW, then in fact I’m giving up my best “weapons”. Why? Because again, words don’t mean anything if they aren’t grounded in something real.
Why should anyone take anyone’s arguments against abortion, much less the best one which is that it kills a BABY, if I’m not willing to do something to stop such slaughter now, even if only peace meal?
Anyone could easily (and rightfully) say, “Well I guess you don’t really believe it’s killing a baby, after all you’re not trying anything that could stop at least some of the things you call babies being killed. If I believed they were babies being killed I’d do everything I could to save as many of them as I could, NOW. So I don’t believe you when you claim it’s a baby”.
And they would be right.
Village moved out of Denton?
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I think what everyone misses is that an abortion is a purposeful act. It’s different from taking a pill to cause an abortion IF you are pregnant. A doctor knows a baby is in the womb and destroys it.
If we can just outlaw that, we will have done a world of good. Pregnancy is a natural result of sex. Everyone knows how to greatly lower the risk of pregnancy. There are more ways to prevent pregnancy than there are ways to prevent HIV.
The Blackmun Supreme Court that decided Roe vs. Wade in 1973, in their majority opinion, to put it succinctly, ruled that unborn “fetuses” are not persons. But they openly admitted in their written opinion that if fetuses are persons, “of course” they would be protected by the explicit requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The “pro-life” movement, so-called, readily admits to the self-evident natural, scientific fact that babies in the womb are human persons, and then pushes legislation that ignores the explicit requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment that all persons be protected.
So, tell me, which position is worse, morally, constitutionally, and legally, Blackmun’s or National Right to Life’s?
Not that it matters much in the real world. The result is exactly the same: abortion on demand, ie rivers of innocent blood continuing to be shed.
How is it not purposeful? Why take the pill if your goal is not to kill the already-conceived child?
It's certainly not "different" for the child. They're dead either way.
“Why take the pill if your goal is not to kill the already-conceived child?”
Because you don’t know if the child exists. It’s the difference between firing a gun into the ground so that the bullet might ricochet up to hit someone and shooting someone in the back of the head.
Then there is habeas corpus.
That's really contorted logic.
Fact is, there are three groups in play here:
1. Those who say it's okay to kill all the children.
2. Those who say it's okay to kill all the children, as long as you comply with our arbitrary schedule and rules.
3. Those who say it's not okay, morally, constitutionally, or legally, to murder any innocent person.
No. It would be like firing a gun in such a way that you know that if a person is standing there it will kill them.
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