Roe v. Wade Has Ended — Our Pro-Life Work Has Not

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - Hello everyone,

00:00:05.380 | and welcome to this special episode of the podcast.

00:00:07.780 | I just returned home from Brazil

00:00:09.480 | and there we launched my new technology book in Portuguese

00:00:12.840 | at the conference hosted by our friends at Fiel,

00:00:15.580 | which was a wonderful honor.

00:00:16.800 | In fact, I discovered that thousands of Brazilians

00:00:19.320 | listen regularly to this podcast.

00:00:22.260 | And there's even a Portuguese version of APJ.

00:00:25.300 | So hello to all of you listening right now.

00:00:29.020 | It was a delight to meet many of you in Achebeia

00:00:31.600 | and to receive your gratitude for this podcast for APJ,

00:00:35.880 | which you wanted me to pass along to Pastor John.

00:00:38.440 | So I get to do that now.

00:00:39.280 | - Thank you very much.

00:00:40.480 | I appreciate it.

00:00:41.320 | - Yeah, so on behalf of at least the hundreds

00:00:43.120 | of Brazilian Christians that I met,

00:00:45.260 | thank you Pastor John for your decade long investment

00:00:48.220 | in this podcast.

00:00:49.640 | - And enjoy.

00:00:50.680 | - Well, while I was in Brazil,

00:00:52.160 | big news broke here in the States.

00:00:53.760 | Roe v. Wade has been overturned by the Supreme Court.

00:00:57.360 | On Friday, the SCOTUS ruling was made official.

00:00:59.500 | We knew it was coming.

00:01:00.880 | Back on May 2nd, a draft opinion of the decision was leaked.

00:01:04.140 | I texted you immediately when that news broke, Pastor John,

00:01:07.460 | and that's now official.

00:01:09.220 | Roe was overturned Friday on June 24.

00:01:13.380 | This is not the end of abortion.

00:01:15.360 | This simply turns the legal status of abortion

00:01:18.980 | back to individual States,

00:01:20.760 | and the work of defending the unborn is far from over.

00:01:25.700 | Discerning Christians will continue to ask

00:01:27.380 | what should Christians be doing?

00:01:30.460 | Our work is urgent, and our work is now more local.

00:01:34.420 | So it might be helpful for our listeners

00:01:35.820 | to know something of what you have done, Pastor John,

00:01:38.100 | over the past four decades.

00:01:40.200 | As the work continues,

00:01:41.740 | what has been your answer to the question,

00:01:43.540 | what should I do?

00:01:45.460 | How have you answered that question

00:01:46.780 | in your own life and ministry?

00:01:49.100 | - Well, I don't see myself as the ideal pro-life person

00:01:53.860 | because I am fallible, I am sinful.

00:01:57.580 | There are things I've left undone in the last 40 years.

00:02:00.980 | Things could have been done better.

00:02:02.900 | But as you and I have reflected on this,

00:02:07.900 | and as I've thought about my own life,

00:02:10.420 | looking at imperfect examples in my life

00:02:14.260 | has often proved very helpful,

00:02:17.260 | very inspiring to me in my Christian walk.

00:02:20.060 | And so I will go ahead and venture to say some things

00:02:24.500 | that I've done imperfect, though they have been,

00:02:28.520 | and hope that they will be a help to others.

00:02:32.000 | So here are the sorts of things

00:02:33.400 | that I've done in the last 40 years or so.

00:02:36.580 | And I think they are the sorts of things

00:02:39.120 | that will probably need to be done now

00:02:41.740 | for years to come, long after I'm gone.

00:02:44.460 | So beginning in 1987,

00:02:46.740 | I preached at least one explicitly pro-life message

00:02:51.100 | every year with, I think, two exceptions along the way

00:02:55.300 | in my pastoral trek until my stepping away

00:02:58.800 | from the pastoral leadership in 2013.

00:03:01.500 | The last one I preached was January, 2021,

00:03:04.980 | because the church invited me back for that Sunday.

00:03:07.820 | It was called "Doing the Right Thing Never Ruins Your Life."

00:03:12.340 | I looked at it the other day and I'm really persuaded

00:03:15.460 | that message is super important.

00:03:17.420 | So it's there at Desiring God.

00:03:19.820 | That's about 25 morning messages on Sanctity of Life Sunday

00:03:24.820 | over my pastoral life.

00:03:27.260 | I recall the very first pro-life sermon I preached

00:03:30.980 | was from James 4, verse 2,

00:03:33.900 | "You desire and do not have, therefore you kill."

00:03:38.900 | And I still think that text

00:03:43.260 | is one of the most penetrating biblical texts

00:03:46.460 | about the origin of abortion in the Bible.

00:03:50.580 | Second, I tried to spread those messages

00:03:54.660 | by putting a few of them in a little book

00:03:56.300 | called "Exposing the Dark Work of Abortion,"

00:03:59.860 | which I think is free at Desiring God.

00:04:02.460 | And then when Desiring God came into existence

00:04:05.120 | in the mid '90s, we put all these sermons online

00:04:08.260 | where they are today.

00:04:10.180 | Third, I wrote articles for Desiring God

00:04:13.140 | and for other outlets.

00:04:14.420 | And the one that I think is still about the most helpful

00:04:18.460 | is "15 Pro-Life Truths to Speak,"

00:04:23.100 | which I think is available there at Desiring God.

00:04:26.060 | Fourth, since we started, you and me, Tony,

00:04:29.580 | how long has it been, 10 years since we started?

00:04:31.420 | - Almost a decade, yeah.

00:04:32.260 | - Okay, so for those 10 years,

00:04:34.700 | there are at least, as I counted them,

00:04:36.800 | 10 podcasts of "Ask Pastor John" related to abortion.

00:04:42.800 | - Yeah.

00:04:43.640 | - Fifth, I love to write poetry

00:04:46.960 | about the things that move me.

00:04:49.000 | And I mean move me positively and move me negatively.

00:04:53.600 | And I've written two relating to the pro-life cause.

00:04:57.560 | One is called "It," about a young woman

00:05:00.160 | who goes in for an abortion,

00:05:01.880 | and they keep referring to her baby as "it."

00:05:04.920 | And then after the procedure, she lifts up her head

00:05:07.680 | and sees this little tiny torso on the tray

00:05:11.000 | and notices it's unmistakably female

00:05:15.560 | and is overwhelmed with her.

00:05:16.840 | This is not an "it."

00:05:18.120 | This was not an "it."

00:05:20.740 | Experiences like that, hearing things like that

00:05:23.240 | have moved me over the years

00:05:24.560 | to write poetry about the cause of life.

00:05:28.680 | Sixth, I've tried to pray and lead our people in praying

00:05:33.600 | against the sin of child killing

00:05:36.400 | and for the spiritual miracles

00:05:38.740 | that will have to happen in people's lives

00:05:41.640 | so that it is overcome in what they want,

00:05:45.600 | not just what they do.

00:05:47.060 | Seventh, I mobilized our people to be part of major rallies

00:05:53.120 | and I participated in them myself,

00:05:55.760 | like the MCCL, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Rally

00:05:59.760 | at the Capitol here in Minnesota every year.

00:06:01.600 | Usually it's below zero.

00:06:03.760 | It's just absolutely unforgettable

00:06:05.680 | to march with five or 10,000 other people

00:06:08.680 | and the wind is howling

00:06:09.920 | and everybody's bundled up like Eskimos

00:06:12.960 | and you're walking in the cause of prayerful support

00:06:17.960 | for the opposition to child killing in this country.

00:06:23.160 | Eighth, there was a season of about three years

00:06:27.440 | where I was part of direct action and civil disobedience

00:06:32.000 | sitting in front of abortion clinics

00:06:33.680 | to block the way into the place of death,

00:06:36.540 | arrested several times, spent one night in jail.

00:06:40.600 | Ninth, I encouraged and shared in sidewalk counseling

00:06:45.600 | where you simply stand peacefully outside abortion clinics

00:06:50.920 | and offer literature and conversation to anyone

00:06:54.700 | entering in the hopes that perhaps one last obstacle

00:06:58.600 | to overcome would help and might change their minds.

00:07:03.600 | Tenth, I took an abortionist doctor.

00:07:08.220 | This is one of the most memorable things in my life.

00:07:10.460 | I just felt so inauthentic

00:07:12.380 | not dealing directly with abortionists

00:07:14.980 | that I found a way to contact an abortionist doctor

00:07:18.640 | about four blocks from my house

00:07:21.040 | and I took him out to lunch.

00:07:22.920 | I told him, "I'm a local pastor.

00:07:25.780 | "I'm pro-life.

00:07:27.060 | "I wanna understand you.

00:07:29.240 | "Would you go out to lunch?"

00:07:30.320 | And he was willing.

00:07:31.960 | And so I went with my 10 points

00:07:34.640 | to make the case that he was killing children.

00:07:37.660 | And he disarmed me immediately by saying,

00:07:40.800 | "I know I'm killing children.

00:07:43.760 | "It's the lesser of two evils."

00:07:47.020 | And the other evil, he said, was,

00:07:50.660 | "It's unjust that men can have sex and bear no consequences

00:07:55.660 | "but women can have sex

00:07:58.080 | "and have to bear all the consequences.

00:08:00.720 | "That's unjust.

00:08:03.280 | "Killing the child is the solution to that injustice."

00:08:06.800 | His wife, he said,

00:08:08.220 | I mean, he really was unbelievably honest with me.

00:08:11.160 | He said, "I wouldn't be doing it

00:08:12.660 | "except my wife pressures me to do it.

00:08:15.620 | "She believes it's the path of justice."

00:08:19.980 | Eleventh, I give financially, regularly,

00:08:24.720 | to several pro-life organizations.

00:08:27.700 | Twelfth, while I was a pastor,

00:08:30.200 | I tried to cultivate a life-affirming culture,

00:08:34.280 | which included things like

00:08:36.560 | a strong positive view of adoption

00:08:39.480 | as a beautiful and normal thing,

00:08:42.720 | a strong ministry to the disabled,

00:08:45.820 | to combat any notion that would have been better

00:08:51.280 | if they'd been aborted.

00:08:52.600 | I tried to encourage the most pro-life engaged people

00:08:58.360 | so that they didn't feel like they were marginal

00:09:00.760 | in this church but crucial.

00:09:03.240 | And generally, I tried to create the atmosphere

00:09:05.680 | that this church community is unashamedly pro-life

00:09:10.680 | and anti-abortion without any fear

00:09:16.120 | that this would have offensive effects on some people.

00:09:21.120 | I'm sure those people just migrated to other churches

00:09:25.360 | where this issue was completely neglected

00:09:27.960 | and that was sad.

00:09:29.600 | I would rather have them change their mind,

00:09:31.880 | but we weren't gonna mute this crucial reality.

00:09:35.760 | And finally, and this may be the most important thing, Tony,

00:09:39.640 | we did not turn the church

00:09:42.760 | into a political or social think tank or action group

00:09:47.180 | for the sake of any earthly cause,

00:09:49.000 | including the cause of pro-life.

00:09:52.720 | For the sake of preserving the power and effectiveness

00:09:57.680 | of our prophetic witness,

00:10:00.680 | we did not make the pro-life cause the main thing.

00:10:05.160 | The main thing is the glory of God.

00:10:08.540 | And under the glory of God, the salvation of sinners

00:10:12.800 | from the wrath of God

00:10:14.440 | through the glorious substitutionary work of Jesus Christ,

00:10:19.200 | dying for sinners on the cross,

00:10:21.940 | the glory of God shining through the salvation of sinners

00:10:26.320 | by the blood of Jesus is the main thing.

00:10:29.800 | Far greater than the danger of abortion

00:10:34.840 | is the danger of hell.

00:10:38.060 | Rescuing people for eternal life

00:10:42.680 | is more crucial and more loving

00:10:45.840 | than rescuing babies from abortion.

00:10:49.600 | In other words, we care about all suffering,

00:10:55.600 | especially eternal suffering.

00:10:59.280 | And I think it is precisely this maintenance

00:11:03.520 | of spiritual proportion

00:11:06.360 | that is, which keeps in clear view

00:11:09.960 | that our citizenship is in heaven

00:11:12.760 | and we're rescuing lost people as we wait for our Savior.

00:11:16.880 | That spiritual proportion,

00:11:18.960 | that maintenance of spiritual priority and proportion

00:11:23.400 | is what gave us Christian credibility over decades

00:11:28.400 | in the cause of life,

00:11:29.920 | rather than simply sinking down to the level

00:11:33.720 | of being a world-oriented band of do-gooders.

00:11:37.960 | We are Christians before we are pro-life.

00:11:41.520 | We are Christ-exalting before we are life-exalting.

00:11:48.620 | We want to save souls, the souls of mothers and fathers,

00:11:53.620 | as much as we want to save the bodies of the babies.

00:11:58.260 | The aim for us is not just the end of abortion,

00:12:04.120 | but the eternal joy of forgiven sinners.

00:12:09.660 | - Amen.

00:12:11.940 | Yeah, you've been in this fight against abortion

00:12:14.660 | for a very long time.

00:12:17.020 | So now the court has effectively struck down Roe v. Wade,

00:12:20.900 | making it possible for states to legally protect the unborn

00:12:24.460 | and many states are doing that very thing right now.

00:12:27.380 | So what's your own reaction to the SCOTUS decision

00:12:30.140 | and this most recent news?

00:12:32.420 | - I am thankful.

00:12:34.100 | And the reason I am thankful

00:12:36.980 | is mainly because this was the right thing to do.

00:12:42.140 | A federal law that prevents the legal protection

00:12:47.140 | of children from being killed is an evil law.

00:12:53.300 | An evil law has been in place for 50 years.

00:12:59.500 | It is a good thing that the evil law is gone

00:13:04.140 | and I am thankful to God,

00:13:06.620 | to God in his glorious providence that it is gone.

00:13:12.460 | And if someone says to me, which I thought they might,

00:13:15.260 | so I said it, if someone says to me,

00:13:17.900 | "Aren't you thankful, John,

00:13:21.660 | because lives are going to be saved?"

00:13:25.580 | You seem to stress it's the right thing.

00:13:27.860 | Aren't you thankful that lives are going to be saved?

00:13:30.980 | My answer is, "I hope they are

00:13:34.400 | and I will be thankful if they are."

00:13:40.420 | But there are too many variables at play here

00:13:45.420 | for me to know what is really going to happen in America

00:13:50.060 | as far as the loss of life goes.

00:13:52.440 | For all I know, we may be entering an era

00:13:57.620 | of such visceral rage and coldness of love

00:14:02.620 | and multiplication of wickedness,

00:14:05.940 | both on the right and on the left,

00:14:08.620 | that a civil war right here in America

00:14:11.780 | could take hundreds of thousands of lives.

00:14:15.180 | It happened just 160 years ago

00:14:18.340 | and the issue of killing millions of children

00:14:21.540 | is as explosive as the horrors of slavery.

00:14:24.880 | Or another upshot could be over the next 10 or 20 years

00:14:30.360 | that the morning after pill or some new pill

00:14:34.340 | for weeks after or months after

00:14:37.660 | becomes so cheap, so effective, so free from side effects

00:14:42.500 | that abortions may double, triple, quadruple

00:14:47.260 | in their frequency over what they are now

00:14:50.660 | with no need for Planned Parenthood at all.

00:14:53.580 | I don't know whether that's going to happen or not.

00:14:56.420 | It could.

00:14:57.540 | Or another possible scenario is that this kind of freedom

00:15:02.220 | from consequences of pregnancy

00:15:06.420 | unleashes a new tidal wave of premarital sex

00:15:12.340 | and some new lethal strain of venereal disease arises

00:15:17.820 | with hundreds of thousands of young people dying every year.

00:15:22.860 | That's an easy possibility.

00:15:25.100 | In other words, I don't know.

00:15:27.540 | I don't know if the overturning of Roe v. Wade

00:15:30.740 | will save lives.

00:15:32.140 | I hope so.

00:15:33.740 | I pray so.

00:15:35.820 | It was absolutely the right thing to do,

00:15:39.980 | whether more lives are saved or not.

00:15:42.760 | But the wickedness afoot in America is very deep.

00:15:48.620 | And where it will take us as a culture, I do not know.

00:15:54.880 | Lives are destroyed by sin.

00:16:00.660 | Abortion, whether with suction or a pill,

00:16:05.660 | is only one kind of sin that destroys life.

00:16:11.040 | There are so many more.

00:16:14.260 | Over 100,000 people, for example, just recently now,

00:16:18.500 | are dying every year from drug overdoses.

00:16:22.540 | And most of those people

00:16:24.120 | are not people on the street anymore.

00:16:26.980 | They're middle-class opioid users

00:16:29.740 | who can't find meaning in life.

00:16:32.180 | And there will, I don't doubt,

00:16:34.420 | arise other new ways of destroying ourselves

00:16:39.100 | as wickedness multiplies.

00:16:41.620 | - Yeah, the dark side of our potent technologies

00:16:44.780 | amplifying our self-destructiveness.

00:16:47.340 | And this leads to my final question

00:16:49.260 | as we wrap up this special episode.

00:16:51.500 | I heard you say recently in a meeting

00:16:54.200 | that the real post-Roe v. Wade challenge

00:16:57.620 | will not be how to make abortions hard to get,

00:17:01.060 | but how to make them hard to approve of in the human heart.

00:17:06.060 | Explain that.

00:17:07.040 | What did you mean by that line?

00:17:09.420 | - I meant that the main battle for human righteousness

00:17:14.420 | is not fought at the level of human behavior,

00:17:21.500 | but at the level of human desire.

00:17:24.280 | Jesus said in Matthew 15, 19,

00:17:28.240 | "Out of the heart come evil thoughts,

00:17:31.880 | "murder, adultery, sexual immorality,

00:17:35.960 | "theft, false witness, slander."

00:17:39.400 | Now, at least four of those sins

00:17:43.160 | relate directly to abortion.

00:17:45.680 | Murder, that's what abortion is.

00:17:49.000 | Adultery and sexual immorality,

00:17:51.880 | at least 85% of abortions are owing to sexual immorality

00:17:56.560 | because 83% of abortions are done on single women,

00:18:01.200 | not counting the cases of rape and incest.

00:18:04.040 | Those women and their boyfriends sinned by having sex,

00:18:09.040 | which God has protected by putting it

00:18:13.880 | in the happy bounds of covenant-keeping marriage.

00:18:19.440 | False witness, that too comes from the heart,

00:18:23.440 | and the entire abortion industry is built on false witness,

00:18:28.000 | namely that the unborn are not human persons.

00:18:33.000 | We can build legal dams to keep the river of sin

00:18:39.100 | that pours out of the human heart from flooding the world

00:18:44.740 | with actual behaviors like abortion,

00:18:48.240 | and that's a good thing.

00:18:49.760 | That's a good thing to build those dams with laws.

00:18:54.460 | That's what all good laws do.

00:18:57.100 | They make it harder for the sinful heart

00:18:59.520 | to overflow in outward crimes.

00:19:02.560 | That just happened with the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

00:19:06.760 | It was a good thing.

00:19:08.240 | But we should remember that if the river of sin

00:19:13.240 | that flows from the human heart is simply dammed up,

00:19:18.140 | and nothing changes the heart,

00:19:20.400 | that river is going to build behind the dam

00:19:26.480 | until the reservoir is so deep and so heavy

00:19:32.840 | that no legal dam, no mere law can hold it back,

00:19:39.160 | and a tidal wave of wickedness will overflow the land.

00:19:46.400 | So what I meant was, and I'm thinking of Christians now,

00:19:49.900 | especially pastors, is that's our job,

00:19:53.700 | preaching to change those hearts.

00:19:55.340 | That's our job, to portray the glories of Jesus Christ

00:19:59.660 | so clearly with such spiritual power

00:20:03.340 | that people will see and their hearts will be changed.

00:20:08.220 | 2 Corinthians 3:18 describes that miracle.

00:20:11.620 | It says, "Beholding the glory of the Lord,

00:20:15.380 | we are being changed from one degree of glory to the next."

00:20:20.380 | Our main job is not new laws, good as that may be,

00:20:26.140 | but new hearts.

00:20:30.320 | That's our main job.

00:20:32.200 | If that doesn't happen, new laws will collapse

00:20:36.840 | under the pressure of unchanged hearts.

00:20:40.420 | It's only a matter of time.

00:20:42.960 | But even that way of saying it bothers me.

00:20:47.120 | It skews the reality in an unbiblical direction.

00:20:52.120 | It gives the impression that we want to change hearts

00:20:55.880 | mainly to preserve good laws.

00:20:57.740 | That's not the main reason.

00:21:00.280 | The main reason to quote Jesus in John 3:3 is this,

00:21:08.160 | "Unless one is born again,

00:21:11.280 | he cannot see the kingdom of God."

00:21:15.520 | Without a Christ-exalting heart change, people perish.

00:21:20.300 | We perish.

00:21:22.280 | It is a loving thing to work for good laws.

00:21:28.320 | It is more loving to help people enter the kingdom of God.

00:21:34.880 | The overturning of Roe v. Wade will have its greatest effect

00:21:39.840 | if its limitations give life to the Christian truth,

00:21:44.700 | you must be born again.

00:21:47.560 | - Yeah, new hearts that love Christ and as a result,

00:21:51.280 | love others, especially the most vulnerable.

00:21:54.400 | That's our ultimate aim here.

00:21:55.400 | Thank you, Pastor John, for this perspective.

00:21:58.280 | Well, I doubt this will be the last time

00:21:59.800 | we address the evil of abortion on the podcast.

00:22:02.440 | It's certainly not the first time.

00:22:03.860 | As you mentioned earlier,

00:22:04.720 | we have 10 or so episodes in the archive.

00:22:06.440 | You can find them all at askpastorjohn.com.

00:22:09.840 | Type the keyword abortion to see that title list.

00:22:13.520 | As I look through that list,

00:22:14.920 | APJ 9 stands out way back in episode nine.

00:22:17.920 | We looked at your own involvement

00:22:19.800 | with the anti-abortion demonstrations

00:22:21.880 | in the late 1980s and early 1990s,

00:22:24.480 | including times when you were arrested and once imprisoned.

00:22:27.680 | You can find that episode at askpastorjohn.com.

00:22:30.600 | That's APJ number nine.

00:22:33.420 | Well, we have a slate of new episodes recorded

00:22:36.380 | and ready to go for you all summer long.

00:22:38.780 | The next two months are full of fascinating questions

00:22:40.940 | that you have emailed us.

00:22:41.920 | Be watching for those new episodes.

00:22:44.140 | But this is a wrap for us.

00:22:46.180 | We're about to split for the summer,

00:22:47.360 | taking a break from our recordings.

00:22:49.940 | And Pastor John, you're repositioning

00:22:52.140 | for a few months on the East Coast to focus on a project.

00:22:55.780 | - Yeah, eager to do it.

00:22:57.280 | Sorry to be away from you,

00:22:58.380 | but I'm glad we've been able to stay on top of this

00:23:01.820 | so people don't have to take a break from APJ.

00:23:04.140 | And I'll be working on "Look at the Book" mainly

00:23:06.660 | for seven weeks as I kind of bury myself out of the way

00:23:10.140 | and try to make progress on that project.

00:23:12.540 | - Excellent.

00:23:13.700 | And then in two months,

00:23:14.580 | we will be together on stage,

00:23:16.180 | live at the Getty Sing Conference in Nashville.

00:23:19.160 | - I was working on my message yesterday, in fact.

00:23:21.220 | - Well, I can't wait for that too.

00:23:23.220 | That's coming up on September 6th, 1.30 p.m. local time.

00:23:26.380 | We'll be the APJ recording.

00:23:28.600 | We'll be on the main stage, Pastor John and myself,

00:23:30.760 | and we will record five episodes live, Lord willing.

00:23:33.280 | We did this exact same thing back in 2019.

00:23:36.620 | And so I hope to see many of you in Nashville

00:23:38.620 | on September 6th.

00:23:40.780 | For now, thanks for listening to this special episode

00:23:43.140 | of the Ask Pastor John podcast,

00:23:44.740 | and we will see you again very soon.

00:23:47.460 | (upbeat music)

00:23:50.040 | (upbeat music)

00:23:52.620 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Roe v. Wade Has Ended — Our Pro-Life Work Has Not

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