Categories
Ethics

The Holiness of Every Human Life – Including the Life of the Unborn

From the title, you can tell that this is going to be a pro-life post. I know that some may not care for a post on such a controversial topic. But God’s Word on this is clear, and with this being an issue that is currently before the United States Supreme Court, I feel that now is a good time to share about the Sanctity and Holiness of Every Human Life.text image saying - sanctity of life

Life has value. God is the one who creates life. And regarding the uniqueness of human life, God made us in His image.

God is holy. His image is holy. Therefore every God-ordained life of every image-bearing human has inherent holiness. Inherent sanctity.

When one adult murders another adult, the life of an image-bearer of God is prematurely ended. The murderer demonstrates his contempt for God by de-valuing the God-ordained life of his fellow human. God created us to be His image-bearers. And to destroy that image shows contempt for God and His image.

In America, we have freedom and prosperity and live in an advanced society, and yet there are still so many people who are unhappy. Why is that? Part of the reason is our rejection of God’s morality. God created us to be like Him, so when we refuse and resist the morality that He has built into us, we become troubled. And so a key reason we find ourselves living in a troubled nation is because of our loss of the moral and spiritual center that God has established.

Yet here in our advanced nation, many of the leaders in science and education continue moving us further away from God – further away from His morality – by moving us away from His Life Ethic. God’s life ethic is the idea that Human Life is sacred from conception to death. And even as a nation, we don’t always disagree about this life ethic.

For example, WW II was a terrible war that pointed out the immorality of several other nations who did not value human life and who had a twisted life ethic.

At Pearl Harbor, we lost 2402 human lives.

Throughout the war, we lost 418,500 American Soldiers in battle.

And in the Holocaust of the war, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews and another 4 million people and prisoners of war. Ten million human lives – ten million image-bearers of God – murdered by the Nazi State.

All because of a flawed or missing life ethic.

We rightly call this blatant disregard for human life an atrocity against humanity. That is definitely what it was. It was the opposite of the sanctity of human life. But here in America, we have also committed an atrocity against humanity – as a nation we have disregarded human life in the womb.

In the United States, we have committed 59.5 million abortions. Where is our nation’s life ethic?

Such big numbers are hard to visualize, so let me show you a map for some perspective.a u.s. map showing the southeast u.s. in red to represent the number of abortions - the evidence of the lack of sanctity for human life

The number of abortions we have committed in 49 years equals the current populations of LA, AR, MS, TN, AL, GA, FL, and SC.

All the people living in those states right now equals 59.5 million people. Wipe out all of us living in the Southeast United States today… and that equals the same number of babies that have been murdered in our nation in the last 49 years.

Right now, our life ethic has us rightly angry over the devastation that is taking place in Ukraine. And if a bomb were dropped which destroyed the lives of everyone in the southeast United States, there would be outrage throughout our nation. And yet, because we have deemed abortion “okay” as a nation, we have allowed the same number of babies lives to be ended over these past 49 years.

God values human life. He created it. He ordained us as His image bearers. We do not have the right to end the life that He creates just because it has not yet exited the womb.picture of an infant holding the finger of an adult - reminding us of the sanctity of human life at all ages

Embracing God’s life ethic is important, though it is obvious that much of our nation does not. As a nation, we have embraced this sin as normative – and it has gone so far that we have now killed millions of our own children. The Holocaust sickens us. Rightly so. And yet, here in America, we have murdered 6 times the number of humans killed by Nazi Germany.

We need to become advocates for the Sanctity of Human Life.A bill from Mississippi is presently before the United States Supreme Court. I hope you will join me in praying that our Justices will help us to become a nation that believes in the Holiness, the Sanctity, of every Human Life, from conception to natural death.

Heavenly Father, we ask You to help us become a nation that holds life sacred. You made us in Your image. Transform us into a nation that honors You, the Giver of life who has defeated death, by holding every human life as sacred. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Categories
Ethics

Pigsties, Rotten Apples, and Morality

One of my favorite quotes deals with pigsties and rotten apples, and the idea that you cannot legislate morality. So many times we want to force people to change.

pig laying in a fithly, muddy pigsty representing the idea that if we legislate morality but don't change the pig's nature we have not done anything of value
Certainly we might be able to clean things up a bit… clean up some violence on the streets, enact new laws that force people to behave, tell people that what they are doing is wrong. But the problem is that if you don’t change the heart, the violence will return, the people will only “behave” when they think someone is watching, and they will never agree that what they are doing is wrong. Here’s the great quote –
“Clean up a pigsty and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again. Preach the gospel…preach to the hearts of men. That‘s your business. Then the fruits, including the reforms in other areas, will follow as fruits. But it’s no good tying apples onto a tree. Soon they’ll be rotting apples.”

How very true. Tying apples onto a pine tree doesn’t change the nature of the tree. It might vaguely “look like” an apple tree for a moment, but we’d know it was just a facade. Next year it’ll produce pine pollen, pine cones, and pine needle, but never apples. So the idea is that instead of worrying so much about new laws and legislation and cleaning up the pigsty, we should focus on helping our family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers to be changed from the inside. Instead of trying to force change externally which is a momentary fix, our efforts should be to help people change internally, which cleans up a person for a lifetime.

The idea is explored a bit more fully in the conversation below which ends with a powerful statement:
        “You know, David, we’re out to win people, not war with them.” Miss Alice’s view was that we had an infinitely larger task than trying to end moonshine stills and stilling. We were to create an atmosphere in which men’s hearts could be changed so that they would want a better way of life than “stillin’” represented.

        Like so many of us, David did not agree with this…”what’s wrong with preaching the gospel and cleaning up the pigsty at the same time? Why should I put on blinders to walk by the pigsty? Besides, I don’t agree that if I preach and do nothing else, men’s hearts are automatically going to be changed and then they’re automatically going to want to do the right thing….Not by a long shot!”
        “The question at issue, David, is how to get rid of the evil in men. Attacking corruption in the environment won’t do it. That’s like cutting weeds in a field. In a few days the weeds will be grown again. And attacking the men themselves won’t work either. Whatever separates men from love can’t be of God.”
        “Then,” David said, “if that’s the technique, why aren’t people changed more drastically by today’s preaching?”
        “Could be because we don’t often have the courage to give the good news to people straight. Most of us are still talking religious theory that we haven‘t begun living; and talking in wornout clichés at that. A watered-down message is as futile as applying rose water to a cancer. When your heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people–especially the rip-snorting sinners–so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results. One of two things will happen. Either there’ll be persecutions, or the fire will leap from your heart to catch and blaze in the depths of other men’s beings. I‘ve watched the process over and over. And then when the blaze starts; the reforms will follow as surely as the flower follows the bud, or the fruit comes after the blossom on the tree.”
        “It’s too slow a way.”
           “No, David, it isn’t too slow a way. The other is no way at all.”

I agree. The other is no way at all!

(Quotes from the book “Christy” by Catherine Marshall)

Categories
Ethics

One Way Follow Up

A quick follow-up to my post from earlier tonight… absolute truth exists!

“Wrong will always be wrong even if everyone is doing it; and Right will always be right even if no one is doing it.”

Another way to say this is:
Error does not become Truth because it is widely accepted; and
Truth does not become error, even when it stands alone!

one way street sign to represent that absolute truth existsRavi Zacharias indicates that there is a fight taking place against the idea of absolute truth. And that the educational environment (especially universities) has worked to remove any idea of absolute truth. That there came to be the belief that “If young, fertile minds could be programmed into believing that truth as a category does not exist…then it would be only a matter of time before [everything] could be [used] in the fight against the absolute.

“However, over time the sword has cut the hand that wielded it, and learning itself has lost its authority. Today as we look upon our social landscape, the answers to the most basic questions of life—from birth to sexuality to death—remain completely confounded. …No one knows what to believe as true anymore.”

Oh that we would discover the Truth that Jesus defines what is True!

Categories
Ethics

One Way

Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Each of us has our own convictions, and so what you consider to be wrong might be okay for me. This is the view where each of us gets to determine what is truth for us – that morality is relative depending on who you are and that there is no absolute truth. But if you read the Bible, you’ll find that God takes a different view.one way street sign representing there is only One who provides absolute truth

There is an absolute truth – truth that is right at all times, in all places, for all people. That truth is found in the character traits of Jesus Christ. This is the declaration that God makes to us.

Living on the coast after Katrina, thousands of volunteers came in from all over the world to help us. A volunteer who lived in a large city in Colorado told me that until he came to the MS coast, he had never seen such “moral relativism” – meaning that each person could justify any immorality by believing that what one person might call sin wasn’t sin to them. And that view is expanding all over our nation and world. I find that it is now a strong belief in middle MS – in what we used to call the “Bible Belt.”

There have been plenty of Christian scholars who have convincingly argued that there is absolute truth, but one of the simplest and most effective ways I ever saw it written was in a teacher’s room at Bay High School. It was a poster that hung above the chalkboard and it said:

Wrong will always be wrong even if everyone is doing it;
and Right will always be right even if no one is doing it.

This next week, my plan is to go out each day with the knowledge that Jesus Christ and His character is to be my guide –
I will be a person of love, b/c Jesus is the embodiment of love.
I will be a person of joy, b/c Jesus is my joy.
I will be a person of peace, b/c Jesus is the ultimate Peacemaker.
I will be a person of faith, b/c Jesus is faithful.

May we always base our behavior on Jesus – the authority of what is absolute truth.

“I am the way, the TRUTH, and the life.” – Jesus

Have you encountered people who justified their behavior even though it went against God’s Word? How do you help them find the Truth?