Fundamental Christian Attitudes: Love [vs. abortion, etc.]

Excerpt from longer sermon:

Let me take it a step further, and just kind of pique your thinking about where our culture is. The abortion battle, for example – to show you how steeped we are in this false love, how steeped we are in the sexual definition of relationships, let me talk about abortion for a moment. The abortion battle is not over babies. The abortion battle is not a battle about whether we ought to kill babies just for the sake of killing babies. Nobody is going to vote to legalize killing babies just for the sake of killing babies. The only reason people want to kill these babies is because the issue is not babies, it is sex. That’s the issue. If abortion had nothing to do with sex, it would never be legalized.

Now, when I was a little kid, I first heard that storks brought babies. I’ll tell you this, if storks brought babies, nobody would legalize abortion. Nobody would legalize the murder of those babies if storks brought babies. But, you see, sex is the issue. People demand to have sex. And a conceived child may be an unfortunate consequence to that sex, so the issue is not stop the sex, the issue is what – kill the child. What are they trying to say? It’s not that they hate babies – it’s not even that they hate fetuses. It’s not that they love murder. It’s that they want their sex to that degree. We are willing in our society to murder the most innocent among us, willing to murder the most defenseless.

Willing to do that – follow this one – willing to do that in the face of the strongest instinct to protect, which is motherhood. When a society can convince the mother to execute her child, that society has a powerful influence, because motherhood is instinctively protective. It is a miracle of black magic, satanic magic. It is a stunning success, this abortion. It is not a success for those who hate babies, that’s not the issue. It is a success for those who want sex without any implications. Free sex means we have to accept fornication; nothing wrong with that. Free sex means we have to accept adultery. It means we have to accept homosexuality. All of those things have to be redefined as honorable and loving expressions. As long as there’s love, we hear, it’s okay.

And I just want you to understand, folks, everything is for sex, everything; and it has corrupted our culture to the core. The family, the home, the place where unselfish love is learned is a disaster of sexual promiscuity on every front. We have a whole society geared to take whatever they want, with no heart to give. Take your sexual fulfillment; if you don’t like the consequences, kill it. Take, and if you get AIDS, elevate your punishment to a symbol of courage, become a hero. Take your sexual activity, and when you’re tired of the one you’re taking from, discard that one and go take from another one. Our society is absolute obsessed with sex, and with it is the death of any normal, reasonable understanding of love.

I’m not sure we really always recognize these things. I think you can go back to, as Augustine put it, the war between the city of God and the city of man; there’s a massive cultural war, a massive cultural conflict, and the war is raging today. And let me tell you something, folks, the war that rages between the city of God – that would be biblical Christianity – and the city of man – that’s the satanic world system – let me tell you this, it surrounds basically one single area, and that is sex. Within the moral realm in our society, the conflict is almost exclusively about sex. That one thing sums up all the most violent areas of battle between Christians and the world. Abortion, fornication, adultery, divorce, homosexuality, even feminism, those are all sexual issues. And they are all an outright assault on love.

Satan has kind of a seven-step plan; maybe it goes a little like this. Step one: the ultimate end for Satan is to win souls to his cause. Step two: a powerful means to this end is the corruption of society. This works especially well in a society of conformists, of other-directed people. After all, a good society is simply one that makes it easy to be good. The satanic corollary is also true: a bad society makes it easy to be bad. In other words, what this means is that where you have a society of conformists, who all tend to follow each other, where you have some singular controlling influences, such as the media and all of that, you can control the whole culture. So all Satan has to do is make a bad society a place where doing bad is easy, and that’s how it is in America. It’s easy to be bad because we have a bad society.

And what do I mean by that? We tolerate wickedness. We not only tolerate it, we elevate it to a freedom status. Third step: the most powerful means to destroy society is to destroy one fundamental building block, and that is the family, where sacrificial love is learned. The only institution where we can learn unselfishness on an everyday basis – just shatter it to ribbons. Step four: the family is destroyed by destroying marriage. Five: marriage is destroyed by loosening its glue, sexual fidelity. Six: fidelity is destroyed by the sexual revolution. That’s just the way it all works out. The sexual revolution will quite possibly prove to be the most destructive revolution in history; far worse than any revolution I know of.

Far more than any political revolution, far more than any military revolution, the sexual revolution has destroyed this nation. We were worried all the time about Russia, we were worried all the time about the Iron Curtain world, we were worried all the time about arming ourselves – Star Wars, military might, armament, nuclear weapons, the H-bomb. We were worried all about that. And we were having a revolution here that has destroyed our society in a way that no bombs could, because it has destroyed the wellsprings of life. We have been brought to moral relativism. And sex has carried the day. The sexual revolution is a demand that we be free to do whatever we want sexually. That is the compelling issue in the city of man in our culture.

The extent to which that satanic system will go for freedom to commit sexual sin is nowhere better seen than in abortions. We read about murders and we read about killings all the time, but just remember this: ninety-nine percent of all murders in the U.S. are abortions. That’s how much we want our sexual freedom. People are willing to murder to maintain it. As one writer put it, “Abortion is the willingness to kill for the sake of the willingness to copulate.” That’s it. So here we are in this society, redefining love in connection with its sexual demands and sexual freedoms, and nothing could be further from a proper understanding. In fact, it’s exactly what Ephesians 5 expects; that instead of the real thing, the world is going to come along and substitute immorality, impurity, driving lust, filthiness, silly talk, coarse jesting, all the dirty talk that goes with a sexually-oriented, promiscuous culture.

Now, the question comes to us, this selfish sexual society desperately needs to see true love, where they going to see it? Well, there’s only one place they’re going to see it, and that’s in us. Let’s go to John 13. That was just an introduction. John 13 is really what we need to talk about. I probably spent too long on that, but I want you to understand where this society is. And this is one of those great passages. I still remember the Sunday that I preached on this passage, probably – I don’t know – twenty-two or twenty-three years ago. I’ve only preached on it once since I came here. It was over in the chapel. It had a profound effect on me. It had a profound effect upon our church.

And it had even a profound effect beyond the walls of our church, as the message sort of went beyond the church, and I was asked to go various places and preach on this very same chapter. It is a profound insight into this most needful of spiritual motives, love. This most essential of spiritual attitudes, which our Lord addresses here. Let’s start in verse 1, “Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He should depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end,” or to the limit, to the max, to perfection. Jesus is on the edge right now of a very, very terrible experience. They are gathered together, these disciples, in the upper room.

This is that final evening when Judas did his terrible treachery against the Lord and went out to betray Him – that all comes out in this chapter. These block-headed, self-centered disciples are having an argument about which of them will be the greatest in the kingdom. And in the midst of the treachery of Judas, and in the midst of the dissimilation of these disciples away from the Lord toward their own selfish purposes and goals – here is Judas who is about to betray Him, here are the disciples in this ugly debate about which of them will be the greatest – and all of them certainly having no consideration for what the Lord is about to go through, even though He has told them just before this that He’s going to have to die like a grain of wheat that falls into the ground.

They’re indifferent to that, and preoccupied with their own course. It is in that very environment – which would find them as distasteful as possible to any normal human feelings – where it says, “He loved His own who were in the world and He loved them to the max.” The love of Jesus toward His own is not conditional; He loves them to the max in the moment of their ugliest indifference. In verse 2, this begins to unfold the demonstration of this love. It’s as if verse 1 identifies the subject of the chapter, the subject is how Jesus loved, and here’s the story. “During supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot” – that means from the town of Kerioth – “the son of Simon, to betray Him.”

The devil had already done his work, and captivated the unconverted heart of Judas, and set it up for the betrayal. “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God” – this is very important. In the midst of all of this, there really was never any fear on Jesus’ part. The betrayal had to come, the execution had to come, but Jesus knew, in the end, that He had come from the Father, and He was going back there, in spite of all of this. Certainly, in the garden He agonized over the reality that He would have to be separated from the Father and bear the weight of guilt for sin, all of that creating sweat which, as it were, was great drops of blood.

There’s no question about the agony, but there was no fear about how it would turn out. Jesus knew how it would turn out. He had come from God in His incarnation and He would go back. And, of course, He prays to that end so magnificently in the seventeenth chapter. “He rose” – verse 4 says – “from supper, and laid aside His garments.” He took off His outer cloak, and was probably stripped down to the waist, with just the garments that were discreet and modest worn around the waist. His legs, perhaps, bare, and His upper body bare, as He stooped down, took a towel, it says, and girded Himself about. He put a towel around His waist. “He poured water into the basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.”

This is one of the great scenes in the life of our Lord.

Something you need to know. It was customary, it was traditional, but more than that, it was necessary to have a foot-washing before you had a banquet, because in those days the people wore sandals, and sometimes were nothing but bare feet. And when you came to a banquet, it would only be appropriate that you would wash your feet, because either they were dusty, if it was dry, or they were muddy, if it was wet. And since folks had prolonged dinners, which went on well through the evening, it would be a terrible, terrible lack of thoughtfulness to approach such an occasion without having your feet clean. It was also customary to recline at dinner.

In other words, they sort of lounged a bit, and that could be exceedingly distressful if your head was near the next guy’s feet. It was therefore appropriate in ancient times for a foot washing to occur, and whoever was the lowest slave on the social ladder got that job. Obviously, that wasn’t one job that you lined up for. That wasn’t the most popular job, but it was a job for the lowest slave on the totem pole. Apparently, in this upper room which the Lord and His disciples had rented or borrowed for the evening to have their Passover supper in Jerusalem, there was no such servant available, and none of the disciples, in an argument about who is the greatest in the kingdom, is going to do that.

More at link

Once sperm and egg meet and implant, there is an entity there.

It has all the chromosomes of the species homo sapiens (i.e., human beings.)

Its chromosomes don’t match the mother’s or the father’s, although they come from both.

Left to develop, it comes out and it’s a baby. Not a car, not a tree, not a pizza, a baby.

If it’s not a person, then what is it? No other answer makes sense.

So how can anyone justify killing it, especially in the light of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments?

“nor [shall any person] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” — Amendment V

“nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” — Amendment XIV

And remember the words of Jesus, “What you do to the least of these, you do to me.” (I don’t think he was talking only about himself in this circumstance. What you do to the least of these, you do to all of us.)

Now, the question arises: When does the embryo/blastula/zygote/fetus become a person? While I think I’ve answered that above, let’s consider that there are only two possibilities: Either we know when, or we don’t.

If we know, there is no logical line but conception, for teh reasons I cited above. if we don’t, then we are risking the possibility that in allowing abortion, we are indeed killing a human being — a person — and as I have shown above, this is a violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, and of state murder laws.

If it’s OK to kill your child that you’ve conceived, why is it logically not OK to kill the child after it’s born? Call it post-partum abortion.

Someone has to speak up for the defenseless. Someone has to protect the children, and The Party of Compassion is not going to do it. And if you’re going to whine about a War on Women, then how about protecting the smallest, most vulnerable, most defenseless females, the girls who will grow into women?

Come on, do it for the children. And do it for teh Constitution.

If it’s OK to kill your child that you’ve conceived, why is it logically not OK to kill the child after it’s born? Call it post-partum abortion.

My analogy is that while your car is your car, that does not give you the right to kick someone out of it at high speed if you decide you do not want them there. Even if they someone left an infant in your car that would be wrong. Yet i have actually had a liberal argue against me on this.

I’ll tell you this, if storks brought babies, nobody would legalize abortion.

Far more than any political revolution, far more than any military revolution, the sexual revolution has destroyed this nation. We were worried all the time about Russia, we were worried all the time about the Iron Curtain world, we were worried all the time about arming ourselves – Star Wars, military might, armament, nuclear weapons, the H-bomb. We were worried all about that. And we were having a revolution here that has destroyed our society in a way that no bombs could, because it has destroyed the wellsprings of life.

I do not agree with all MacArthur has preached, but i think this is one of his best sermons.

A good one. Thanks for posting. JM is spot on this one.

I have decided that my go to answer for those who try to justify abortion by claiming that the woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her own body, is that Yes, she DOES have the right to do whatever she wants with her own body.

But my problem with abortion isn’t what she’s doing to her own body. It’s what she’s doing to someone else’s body that is the problem for me.

As one writer put it, “Abortion is the willingness to kill for the sake of the willingness to copulate.” That’s it.

Yes, that IS it. I found this poem among a bunch of papers I was sorting through and I decided to keep it. It says quite a lot that we, as a society, MUST come to recognize about this terrible sin of abortion. It touched my heart:

Unwanted Angels

Johnny can't come out to play
And Meg won't be at her ballet.

Mike won't stop that play at third
And Sara's voice will not be heard.

Words unspoken, tears uncried,
Spirits broken, hearts untried.

Without a thought, to plant a seed,
Then pluck it out - though it may bleed.

Listen for the deafening cry!
Dare look inside...as each one dies.

Countless thoughts forever lost.
The right of choice...how high the cost!

No hearth will ever be the same,
Each loss diminishes the flame.

Angels passing in the mist,
Fifty-six million - never kissed,
Souls...on the unwanted list!

By: Linda Bernazzani Dolan

Thanks and may God bless

Abortion is so insanely evil that people who endorse it will not discuss it rationally. They will discuss all their other beliefs but not the ones they know in their heart are evil. It’s the means by which you test evil thoughts.

You cannot simultaneously say that babies are a blessing and a curse. It’s not rational to say that one child lives and one child dies based on whether one person “wants” them. You cannot base a human’s rights on the desires of another person. It is irrational to put one person in jail for for killing an unborn child but another person gets paid to do it. Abortion is as irrational as slavery.

My response is always “I’m OK with abortion so long as the unborn child isn’t harmed in the process”.