(Human Defense Initiative) Between now and the time the preacher stands at the pulpit this Sunday and delivers his message, around 17,000 babies in the United States alone will have been murdered in the womb. That’s nearly 2,400 every day. Ninety-eight babies every hour. About one baby every twelve seconds. Innocent human beings are dismembered, poisoned, crushed, harvested for organs, put in trash cans, and disposed of in the name of “women’s rights” and “the right to choose.”
This happens day after day, week after week, and the church largely remains silent.
The most forgotten, marginalized human beings today are the preborn. Their deaths are easy to ignore since their dead bodies are not something we have to regularly see. We do not have to visually deal with the violence being committed, and that makes it easy to focus on other issues. It makes it easy for many to claim there is peace when there is in fact no peace (Jeremiah 6:14).
Lonely, often desperate women walk into a clinic with a precious image-bearer of God inside of them, and they leave that baby behind to be discarded in a biohazard waste bag or sent off to some biotech company for research. Since the legalization of abortion in the U.S., more than 60 million babies have been slaughtered. That number is so large it is impossible to fully wrap one’s mind around it. It is so large it is easy to have this theoretical belief that abortion is wrong, but not take any personal action to stop it.
One in three women were attending church at least once a month (if not more) at the time they had their first abortion. Around 75% of women indicate churches had no real influence in their decision to end their baby’s life, and most of them expect the reaction to be one of judgment if it is ever found out they obtained an abortion. Only four in ten women believe churches are a safe place to talk about having had an abortion.
READ: Pastor who was adopted urges fellow ministers to defend the preborn: ‘Refuse to be silenced!’
If abortion is an issue which rarely gets discussed from the pulpit, and if pastors do not regularly preach on the value of human life and what the implications of that look like in the world, we end up with people who think the church does not have much to offer in this regard. The silence tells people that it’s not safe to bring up, that it’s not a big deal to the leaders in the church. Silence on important moral matters makes a loud statement of indifference to the church members and to the surrounding culture. The question is not, “Does the church make a statement about abortion?” It does. The question is, instead, “What statement is the church making and do our actions honor God and defend human life because we are made after the very image of God Himself?”
The battle is raging around the value of life. And yet the majority of pastors are silent. Many, for the most part, say and do nothing about one of the greatest injustices in history.
Some churches may make a passing mention one Sunday a year, or maybe they talk about a walk for life once a year, but other than that, the issue is completely avoided. This silence and avoidance encourages apathy towards the innocent babies that are killed.
According to Pew Research, one third of evangelical protestants, sixty percent of mainline protestants, and forty eight percent of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Many of us are sitting next to people in pews who claim the name of Jesus Christ and yet support legal abortion.
This shows a deep and dangerous dichotomy in the mind of many people who claim to be Christians. We claim to follow Christ, but we don’t live for Him on this question of unborn children. One possible reason for this is the Biblical illiteracy among professed Christians, which reveals complete ignorance as to what Scripture teaches.
“According to data from the Barna Research Group, 60 percent of Americans can’t name even five of the Ten Commandments…According to 82 percent of Americans, ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ is a Bible verse.”
Though people hear Scripture on Sunday and may read some of it during the week, a solid understanding of a biblical worldview and how Scriptural principles are applied to cultural issues is strikingly absent. Due to this lack of Biblical knowledge, we are surrounded by people who claim to know Jesus and yet do not understand His teachings. They have no idea how to properly apply a biblical worldview.
When we claim to love and know someone, that entails understanding Him and listening to Him. If we say we know God, if we say we love Him, we need to know what He loves, what He desires, and what He commands. We need to know the heart of God. The biblical illiteracy among professed Christians reveals that many claim to know and love Jesus, but their actions, beliefs, and lives tell a very different story….
Click here to continue reading full article at Human Defense Initiative.
Editor’s Note: This article was published at Human Defense Initiative and is reprinted in part with permission.
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