>> All right, for the sake of time, we're going to get started, and I know that there's still people kind of strolling in from the parking, but because of time, if you guys can see the schedule that we have, we've allotted one hour because we're trying to fit in.

Initially, we didn't have Q&A, but we thought that the Q&A would be necessary because of applicational issues, okay? So for that reason, it's going to be pretty packed, and for that reason, we are not having praise in the beginning, so we're going to go straight into the teaching, and then there's going to be a 10-minute break, and then come back to the second session, and then right after the second session, we're going to lead into the Q&A, okay?

So depending on how the time works, that's kind of like the rough breakdown, so if we're off by 5 or 10 minutes, just be patient with us, just to give you what's going on. So according to the sign-ups, this room should be packed, and because the parking, some people are still being shuttled back and forth, so if you have seats that you're sitting, and there's like a large gap in between, if we can ask you to fill that up.

So they might have signed up and not shown up, but either the case on paper, it should be packed, so if you can do your best to pack the seats in between, that would be helpful. Before I introduce our speaker, I wanted to give a brief reason behind why we're doing this, because there was a period in church history, not that long ago, the debate over abortion was a Christian and non-Christian debate.

There was almost no Christian who fought for abortion rights. And so as time has gone, and the church has fallen off, you know, where less and less churches are teaching the Bible, they're more and more illiterate, and I just read this week that according to a recent poll of professing Christians, only 6% of people who profess to be Christian has a Christian worldview, meaning the Bible is irrelevant in how they determine what is right and wrong, right?

This is among people professing to be Christians. So we've been noticing, as our church grows, that there is more and more people who are coming in, wanting to debate this issue, and I've made it very clear from the pulpit that this is not within Christian debate, right? We wanted to make sure that our church understands biblically where we ought to stand biblically, not what you think is right, not what politically you should be thinking.

All of these things are relevant, but first and foremost, what should a Christian be thinking on this issue? And the reason why this is related to IVF and birth control is because it's almost impossible to debate about abortion, fight against abortion, until we have a biblical view and how that affects the way we view IVF, because IVF, the issues with that is related to abortion.

So if we don't deal with that issue, it bleeds into the argument against abortion. And so that's why these things are connected, and that's why we had Pastor James, he's going to come and he's going to give us a lecture, a talk, a sermon, but biblically open up the word for us and help us to see a biblical world perspective on this.

The reason why we chose him, and we wrestled over this for quite a bit, like who should we ask to come? Should we do it? Should we have somebody else do it? But he gave a really good talk at his church on this issue, and we thought he did an excellent job on that, and we thought it would be beneficial for us to hear.

His teaching on this is more extensive than what he's going to be teaching today, but we gave him two hours, so he's kind of condensing, taking some of the stuff out. But we asked him because I think he would be doing the best job on this particular topic, so we asked him to come.

So as you guys know, he's one of our go-to speakers at our church if I have to go somewhere or if we need a guest speaker. But he's the pastor, he's the founding pastor of Cross Life Bible Church, right? And so, again, he's a brother of ours, he's very close, I mean, he's the closest to a sister church that we can have, you know, nearby.

And so I know many of you already know him, but we want to give him as much time as possible. So let's welcome Pastor James Lee. All right, good, oh, you can hear me breathing. All right, let me check, check. How's that? All right, I felt really intimate, you guys can hear my breathing.

All right, I think we're good. Thank you, Pastor Peter, for that gracious introduction. Thank you for the leadership at Brain Community Church for inviting me to come and to deliver God's Word and the teaching with regards to this subject on abortion and life of the unborn and even reproductive technology.

And I hope it is an encouragement to all of you guys. For the sake of time, let me just open us up with a word of prayer and we'll get right into it. God, we know that you are the God of life. It's because of you that we breathe every single morning.

It's because of your grace that we are alive. And by your grace, you have also given us new life in union with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And Lord, so we know if there's anybody who should be fighting for life and even proclaiming and heralding the message of eternal life, it is the Christian.

Grant us much grace to understand the Scriptures, give us clarity of mind, and Father, help us to be bold and courageous in a world that despises you, hates you, offends you, and transgresses the commandments of God. And we be a people who fear God and not man. Lord, thank you again for this time we have.

Thank you for everyone here who are really willing and longing to learn more about the Scriptures. Lord, we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. >> Well, again, it is a joy to be here and to be talking about this subject today. It's a very important subject to me, the subject of the sanctity of life.

And today, at least for this first sermon, first, I guess, lecture, it's going to be on when does life in personhood begin. In order to understand how we are to approach the life within the womb, we need to first understand that it's a human being. And so that's what I want to talk about this morning.

But before I do that, I feel like it's important, it's appropriate for me to share some words about abortion because, obviously, as Pastor Peter talked about, the subject is related. Abortion, as many of you are aware, is not as straightforward as someone might think because the solution, when it comes down to abortion, is not just, "Hey, we just got to save the child's life." The reason why abortion is an issue is because, you know, the child is unwanted.

The child is unwanted for many reasons, the pressure from parents or from the boyfriend, the fear of raising the child alone because of the abandonment from the father. There might be financial uncertainty, absence of financial security, the cultural shame, right, growing up in a conservative culture. But the reason why any of these have become a crushing burden and concern is because oftentimes men and women are casually having sex outside of the protective and provisional and sacred bonds of marriage so that if a woman finds herself to be pregnant, it's outside of the place of stability.

It's outside of the place of unconditional love. But the solution is more than just a matter of addressing the problem of fornication. It's more than just addressing the problem of sexual immorality but about preaching the gospel that forgives people of their sins and transforms the soul. And for those who are suffering from the guilt and shame of abortion, we know from Scripture that if there is any healing, it's in the gospel.

It's in the gospel of Jesus Christ. If there's anybody who is fit to administer the hope of the gospel with sympathy and love, it's a Christian because Christians, we are the ones who know what it means to take an innocent life, right, because it was our sins that crucified our Savior Jesus Christ.

It was our sins that condemned him upon the cross. It was our sins that caused him to suffer the damnation of his own father. But in the providence of God, it is through his death that we are forgiven of our sins. It's the forgiveness that we proclaim to those who may be suffering from the shame and the guilt of having taken innocent life.

So of all people, the Christian should understand. Of all people, we should be the herald of the message of healing and forgiveness. Now, with that being said, the hope for today is to talk about the sanctity of life within the womb, the sanctity of life of the unborn child.

And after this first lecture, we're going to be talking about reproductive technology, specifically IVF, in vitro fertilization. And I hope to bring some clarity to the subject today and that this would just be maybe a platform even for you to begin studying the subject even more. So we're going to be talking about when life and personhood begins.

The reason why I want to talk about the subject of the beginning of human life is because I've come across some believers who genuinely, genuinely question when human life begins. And this obviously affects how we think about things like the after-morning pill. It affects the way that we approach IVF.

For the longest time, I thought the straightforward passages in scripture would be sufficient to establish the sanctity of the unborn baby's life. For example, in Psalm 139 verse 13 to 14, it says, "For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well." And so I think passages like that make it pretty obvious. But for some, it's not enough. They may acknowledge that the unborn child is a human being at some point of development within the womb, but they can't be absolutely certain that life begins at the moment of conception because the Bible doesn't explicitly say that life begins when the sperm meets the egg and fertilizes it.

Now when I hear this, I think it's pretty obvious that the burden of proof is upon the person who questions the humanity of the unborn child because the scripture always ascribes human worth to the unborn child, always. So if a challenge is posed against the general pattern presented in scripture, if an exception or specific aspect that goes against a broader tenor of truth, then that exceptional case should be shown biblically.

So that again, the burden of proof is upon the individual who questions and doubts the broad tenor or the general teaching of the humanity of the unborn child. Furthermore, I believe that the Bible is sufficient for many things, especially our salvation, but also obviously for morality. In 2 Timothy 3.16-17, it says, "All scriptures breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." The reason why this is important is because the questioning of someone's humanity is not a neutral thing.

It's not a fair question. I know some might say, "I don't know if a human being begins at conception, but I'll err on the side of safety and I'll just treat that person like a person. I'll treat that being like a person, just in case it's a person." So practically, they might treat the unborn child no differently from somebody who believes that that child's life begins at the moment of conception, but the issue is more than just the matter of how we practically treat the unborn child.

It's a matter of whether or not we honor God, glorify God. Can you imagine, given our history of slavery, going up to a black man and says, "You know what? I don't know whether or not you are a person." That's not a non-offensive question. That's not an amoral question.

To question the humanity of an individual is a sin in and of itself. But it is a sin against the individual and a grave offense against the God whose image they bear. And so to suggest that the Bible cannot give clear direction with regards to the humanity of a zygote practically testifies to its insufficiency in dealing with a very serious moral issue.

And so for these reasons, I believe that the straightforward passages in scripture is enough to believe that life begins at conception. But regardless, my objective this morning is going to undertake the task to show biblically and logically that the child in the womb is not a potential person, that it's not a potential life, but it is a precious child made in the image of our God.

And that precious child begins to live at the moment of conception. So I want to cover two points to show that life and personhood go hand in hand, that you cannot have one without the other. The first point, life and personhood go hand in hand in creation, and life and personhood go hand in hand in new creation.

So that's going to be my two broad points for today. So let's talk about how life and personhood go hand in hand in creation. And what I mean by that is that you cannot have one without the other. To have human life is to be a person, and a person is to have human life.

So in order to show that life and personhood go hand in hand, I want to cover two sub points. First, an unborn child at the moment of conception is a distinct living human being. So distinct living human being. My second sub point is that a distinct living human being is a person.

That's how I'm going to argue my case. So an unborn child at the moment of conception is a distinct living human being. I want to take Hosea 12.3 as an example to launch our study. In Hosea 12.3 it says, "In the womb he took his brother by the heel, and in his manhood he strove with God." So in the womb he took his brother by the heel.

It's talking about Jacob when he was in the womb. Passages like this, of which there are many, we see a number of important qualities about Jacob, that within his mother's womb he is a distinct living human being. Jacob is not part of his mom, he is distinct. He's living, he's moving around, he just grabbed his brother's heel, he's moving around.

He's human. He's not a pig, so he's a human, so he's a distinct living human being. So let's first talk about, I want to first talk about life, life of the unborn. In Roe v. Wade the justices speak about the fetus representing the potentiality of life, but that statement is incorrect.

It's a nearly uncontested idea that a fertilized egg is in fact alive. Even the sperm and the unfertilized egg before coming together is alive, right? You guys know that from high school biology, it's alive, it's a living cell. As a result, there's internal dynamism within the zygote that is a fertilized egg that continues to grow within the womb and eventually outside of the womb until he or she finally dies.

The ethicist John Feinberg quotes Patrick Lee, a professor of bioethics, who says the following, "Once fertilization occurs, the new embryo possesses the internal resources and dynamism needed actively to develop himself or herself to full maturity. And unless deprived of a suitable environment or prevented by accident or disease, this embryo will actively develop itself in its own distinct direction towards its own survival and maturity." Dr.

Alfred M. Bongiovanni, who is a professor of pediatrics and obstetrics at the University of Pennsylvania, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to give his expert opinion on when life begins. He said the following, "I've learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.

I submit that human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of human life. I'm no more prepared to say that these early stages of development in the womb represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty is not a human being.

This is human life at every stage." So the idea that a zygote is alive is very difficult to contest considering the internal dynamism and the vitality, and even more so when you consider the fact that the sperm and, again, the sperm and the egg, which come together to make the zygote, is also alive.

So the more precise question we should ask is not whether a zygote is life, but whether it's a human life. Is it a human life? And this brings me to the second characteristic of the unborn. It's humanity. It's humanity. The same way that people talk about the embryo being a potential life, some people make the argument that the embryo has the potential to be human.

I don't know if you guys heard this stuff before, right? The potential to be human. But the fact is, it is human, not a potential to be human. It's human. The unborn child is genetically distinguishable from, like, a bat or cat or a dog, right? It's a human embryo, a human, therefore, life.

When we utilize a term like human, we have brought ourselves into the discussion or framework about creational types or species or kinds, the nature of what type of thing that creation is. To be human is a categorical description of a kind. That is a kind of being. We are mankind or humankind, as opposed to a kind of dog or a kind of cat.

Now, when we talk about the potentiality, we're talking about precursors to what something might become. To have the potentiality to become a thing means that it has yet to become that thing. Correct? Right? To have the potentiality to become a thing means that it has yet to become that thing.

But because the embryo is human, there is no potentiality. It's not a—again, it's a human sperm that comes together with a human egg. The product is a human embryo. What would it actually mean for something to be potentially human? Like, what is that thing? We're not talking about inorganic material that somehow evolves into a human being.

We're definitely not talking about a cow becoming a human being. What does it mean to be the potential to be human? It's a nonsensical term. It is human from the get-go so that there is no potentiality. It is human. The last characteristic is whether the living human cell is distinct from the mother.

As many of you know, it is. What is growing in the mother's womb is not something that is part of the mother. The child within the womb is not a tumor. The child within the womb is not another foot or a fingernail that has attached itself to the uterine lining.

It is another being that is growing. Even genetically, the child has a different DNA blueprint that is distinct from the mother. And this distinction is obvious when we see the child grow within the mother's womb. And so it's clear that the unborn child is a distinct living human being.

To claim that it has the potential for life is blatantly incorrect. The idea that it has the potential to become human is nonsensical. And it's obvious that the embryo is not a part of the mother. It is its own unique being. So what is true of Jacob in Hosea chapter 12 is true of a child the moment he or she is conceived.

So I think here's the fair question then. Is it a person? Is it a person? Are you guys tracking with me? Yeah? Yeah? Okay, are you guys tracking with me? All right. So sometimes it's kind of like, anyway, okay, good. All right. So does the embryo have the potential to become a person?

And that, I would say, is a good question. Another way to understand it, is there a time of bodily development of the child when the soul enters into the physical body? Is it like the body being formed within the womb and the soul comes in in three months, four months, five months?

Or is the soul knit into the body the moment that it is formed at conception? And so we come to my second sub-point, that a distinct living human being is a person. The question of personhood is philosophical in nature or theological or metaphysical. And the reason is because we're talking about what it means to be a person.

And this is not only relevant when talking about the unborn, but it's a question that needs to be addressed when we're talking about issues like slavery or genocide, where people are dehumanized. What we see is that because the question of personhood is philosophical, theological, or metaphysical in nature, people cannot objectively determine what makes a person a person.

So you see a lot of confusion in the secular society. Mary Ann Warren was a professor of philosophy at SF State University, and she believed that personhood was determined by five criteria. She said the following, "I suggest that the traits which are most central to the concept of personhood or humanity in the moral sense are very roughly the following, consciousness of objects and events external and/or internal to the being, and in particular, the capacity to feel pain." Two, reasoning, the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems.

Three, self-motivated activity, activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control. Four, the capacity to communicate by whatever means messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics. Five, the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness, either individual or racial or both.

So this is her criteria to determine whether a human life is a person. Now immediately you can see how troubling this criteria is, because a newborn child or a severely mentally disabled person cannot meet this criteria. But it's not only these criteria that is the problem. You have to wonder on what authority she can even assert these qualities to be determinative of personhood in the first place.

At the end of the day, these are just subjective assertions of what makes a person a person. In other words, she just made it up. She just made it up. She says this is the criteria for personhood, what says who? Her. And if the criteria for personhood could be made up, then anyone in power can just make up whatever he wants to establish as the boundaries of personhood and dehumanize anybody who falls outside of that boundary in order to enslave them, to abuse them, and to kill these subhuman, inferior subhuman beings.

What if someone said that personhood is determined by skin color? That's the boundary. Isn't that what we have done in the past of this country? Or what if someone says that personhood is determined by the stage of development? That's the boundary. And that's exactly what we're doing in the present as a nation.

In California, a child can be aborted until fetal viability, which is about 24 to 26 weeks. In Nebraska, a child can be aborted until 12 weeks. In Utah, 18 weeks. In Oregon, there are no restrictions, no restrictions. But things get even more extreme. I mean, that alone is shocking.

There's an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics published in 2012 by Gubalini and Minerva entitled "After-Birth Abortion, Why Should the Baby Live?" The writers argue that we should not only have the right to kill the child within the womb, but they argue that we should be able to kill the child outside of the womb.

This is the abstract to the paper. This is what it reads. Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus's health. By showing that, one, both fetus and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons. Two, the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant.

And three, adoptions is not always in the best interest of actual people. The authors argue that what we call after-birth abortion, killing a newborn, should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. These guys are basically saying that newborn children, like unborn children, do not have the right to life because it doesn't matter whether they are persons, potential persons.

So they say, "What does it mean to be a person?" They go on to say, "Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a person in the sense of subject of a moral right to life. We take persons to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some at least basic values such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her." They're saying a human being becomes a person when they become aware of his own value as an individual.

And since a newborn child, like an unborn child, is not aware or self-aware of its own existence by thinking, "Hey, my life is important. Hey, I'm here," they do not have a right to live. This is crazy. You see how this line of thinking, if you draw it out to its logical end, it leads us to a very, very, very dark place.

Even now it's a dark place, but we have become accustomed to the dark, sadly. Without God, people are just making up what constitutes personhood. They're just making it up. So that some people are saying that children outside of the womb can even be killed. And Guglielmini and Minerva are not the only ones who think this way.

There's a Washington Post article that came out, and it said this, "Accordingly, from Should the Baby Live, it does not seem wise to add to the burden on limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled children." Also in that book, Singer and his colleague Helga Kuss suggested a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others.

Singer, I believe, was a professor at Princeton University. Now, the reason why people are floundering in the dark and trying to answer when personhood begins unable to reach a consensus is because the question, again, is philosophical in nature. It is theological or metaphysical, so that an answer cannot be determined and discovered from the natural order.

It cannot be assessed through our senses. It must be revealed to us, and it has been revealed to us from God himself, the source of our life in personhood. And so, of course, to answer the question, we must go to the Bible. We have to go to the Bible, and what we see from scripture is that personhood is not determined by a stage of development, it's not determined by your skin color, it's not determined by social acceptance or a mother's choice, but whether or not a creature is made in the image of God.

In Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 to 27, take your Bibles, turn with me there. Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 to 27. Genesis chapter 1, verse 26 to 27, this is the reading of God's word, "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." To be an image bearer of God is a loaded idea, so that it's difficult to come up with a narrow definition.

The accurate understanding of this term is probably the most general. The accurate understanding of this term is probably the most general, which is to be like God. And who God is, is a personal being expressed in the person of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And also we know that God is a living God.

In Psalm 42 verse 2 it says, "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God." In 1 Timothy chapter 6 verse 13 it says, "I charge you in the presence of God who gives life to all things." And so to be made in the image of God is to be a living person.

And just as God's nature, personhood, and life, though distinguishable, is not separable, so we as image bearers of God share in the distinguishable, though not separable, unity of the realities of our nature, personhood, and life that God has communicated to us. And that's why throughout the Bible we see personhood identified with distinct human life.

This is demonstrated to us in Genesis chapter 2, where we see personhood the moment that God breathed life into Adam. In Genesis chapter 2 verse 7 it says, "And the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living creature." And so Adam is alive, but he's not some unprogrammed robot, right?

What do we see in the following verses? We see personal interactions of a person. In Genesis chapter 2 verse 15 to 17 it says, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die.'" So God speaks to him, commands him.

What we find from Scripture is that we find both life and personhood in God, who has breathed into us, which makes sense because God is alive and he is a person, in fact three persons in one. As a result, the identity between personhood and life is something that we observe throughout all of Scripture.

There's absolutely no case in the Bible, absolutely none, where an individual is alive but is not considered a person. No case in the Bible. And so to make a divorce between life and personhood is something that is alien to what we find in Scripture, and specifically what it means to be an image bearer of Yahweh.

And we see the relationship between personhood and life at the end of life. A corpse has the DNA information to show that it is a distinct human corpse, right? Not a distinct human life, but a distinct human corpse. It is human, it is distinct. But we do not treat that human corpse as a person, why?

Because it does not have life. The fact that it has no life means that the person is gone, that it's a soul. You can technically hit it, you can make fun of a corpse, it's not going to respond. You can bury a corpse and it's not a crime, whereas if you bury a living person, a living human being, it is a crime, it's a crime against that person.

So death is a reverse parallel of the creation account. In creation there is the body, or a pile of dirt, we don't know the actual composition of that human shell, but then it's when God breathes life into that body, right, into the individual, breathes life into the individual that it has life and personhood.

And when the breath of life leaves the body, the person departs from the body. From thus we came to thus we shall return. And I think it's relevant to mention just because a man dies physically, his vitality is not extinguished. That is really interesting too. The life energy of his existence continues in the form of a soul.

And again what we see is that where there is a human vitality, I guess you can say human life energy, there is personhood. In Revelation chapter 6 verse 9-10 it says, "When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne.

They cried out with a loud voice, 'O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?'" So I saw under the altar the souls of those who have been slain. So vitality, whether bodily or solely, immaterially, vitality and personhood is identified with one another.

To suggest therefore that the soul comes into the shell of the human flesh in the unborn child at later stages of development is incompatible with the biblical data because vitality begins at conception. The moment the egg is fertilized, it begins to divide. And where there is vitality, as we have seen, there is personhood.

And that is true from the beginning of life to the end of life. John Feinberg quotes William B. Hurlburt, who is a senior research scholar in neurobiology at Stanford Medical School, and he says the following, it's an extended quote, so bear with me, as Hurlburt adds, "Unlike an assembly of parts in which a manufactured product is in no sense present until there is a completed construction, a living being has a continuous unfolding existence that is inseparable from its emerging form.

The form is itself a dynamic process rather than a static structure. In biology, the whole, as a unified organismal principle of growth, precedes and produces the parts. Thus, to interfere in the embryo's development is to transgress a life in process. Hence the notion that at some point in the development of the fertilized egg, the embryo, it is not a human being and that it later does become one contradicts the fact that a continuous process begins at fertilization and runs the whole course of the new organism's life.

One, of course, can arbitrarily draw a line of various points in the gestation process and say that before that point it isn't a human entity or being an after that point it is. But it's hard to defend any particular drawing of such a line when any drawing would be arbitrary.

The only line that can be drawn and supported on objective grounds is a line between sperm and egg as distinct entities unconnected to one another and the point when the sperm fertilizes the egg. The developmental process doesn't exist before fertilization and after fertilization it never stops until the new organism dies.

That is a difference that is objectively measurable and it is a difference that makes a difference. Neither sperm nor egg alone can generate the developmental process that leads to a baby but an embryo can does. Since the developmental process is continuous once it begins and since it is generated and governed from within the new organism there seems to be no objective grounds for thinking the embryo is a human being at some point in its development but not others.

Feinberg quotes Herbert again and he says the following, "Zygote, morula, embryo, fetus, child and adult, these are conceptual constructions for convenience of description, not distinct ontological categories. With respect to fundamental moral status, therefore, the human being is an embodied being whose intrinsic dignity is inseparable from its full procession of life and always present in its various stages of emergence." One of the reasons why I believe there might be confusion as to the personhood and the humanity of the unborn child is because we have made scientific classifications for certain stages of fetal development, points of growth that we can demarcate and label.

And so to ponder the question of personhood and to anchor it in the label points of development seems to have an air of scientific legitimacy but we fail to see that the scientifically labeled points of development are themselves anchored in nothing but categorizations whose lines are arbitrarily drawn. In other words, people are anchoring personhood in something that is not anchored in it of itself.

And the categories are not categories of ontological differences. They're not differences of beings in essence. We're not like cow in week one and we become a monkey week two and then we finally become a human being in week three. The categories are not categories of ontological differences or essential differences, differences of nature, differences of being, but they are differences of development.

They're developmental differences. The procession of distinct human life begins at the moment of fertilization and it continues indivisible, uninterrupted until the day that we die. And so when David praises God for his development within the womb of his mother, it begins with the initial point of development that is conception.

For you form my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, wonderful are your works, my soul knows it very well. So distinct human life is a person from beginning to end. This relationship between life and personhood doesn't just have practical implications but practical implications for how we should look at the unborn, but it also established a prototypical framework for our salvation as a part of the new creation.

What I mean by this is that relationship between personhood and life as we see it in Genesis sets the pattern with how we experience new life and the renewal of who we are as a person in Christ. Just as we identify life and personhood in the first creation, so we identify new life and renewed personhood in the new creation.

So we come to my second point, life and personhood go hand in hand in the new creation. So the relationship of life and personhood as we find it in Genesis establishes prototypical framework of our salvation with respects to the new creation. In Genesis chapter 2 verse 7, it says this, "Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." Now in that text the word breath is from the Hebrew word neshama.

But there is another word for breath, you may have heard it, ruach. And that word ruach can also be translated as spirit or as in the spirit of God. So we get this relationship between the breath of life that God has breathed into man and the spirit of God that gives life to man.

I think this is super cool theologically, okay. So listen to this, Job chapter 27 verse 3, "As long as my breath, neshama, is in me, and the spirit, ruach, of God is in my nostrils," Psalm 104 verse 30 says, "When you send forth your spirit, ruach, they are created and you renew the face of the ground." What might not be obvious in Genesis 1 and 2 is made clear through progressive revelation that we are the image bearers of God because God breathed his spirit into us to make us like him.

So we are the image bearers of God because God breathed his spirit into us. But as you know, sin has corrupted the nature of man and marred the image of God within us. So there was moral decay, and as a result we came to know death. So a person, a man, would be morally twisted because of sin.

They would become hostile to God, naturally suppressing the truth in his unrighteousness. But the effects of the sin didn't just morally corrupt the person, it also killed his life. For with sin came death, so that the immoral life that we live would be a life that is dying unto death, even death in the lake of fire.

But the Lord in his grace chose to restore fallen nature of humanity, the marred image of God, to make us new, to save us from death and the moral corruption of sin. And just as he breathed his breath into man in the first creation to make him the image of God, so God breathed out his spirit unto man in a new creation.

In John chapter 20 verse 22, okay, it says this, "And when he had said this, he breathed unto them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.' The work of the Spirit in the new creation will not be as it is in the old, for the Spirit of God will intimately unite us with the Son of God in an inextricable, inseparable, intimate bond, a union with the resurrected Christ that restores the image of God within us." So what we have in the book of Genesis is that God breathed life into man so that man was made in the image of God.

Sin corrupted that image. And so what does Jesus do when he comes back, right? It says here, "He breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" And what the Holy Spirit does is that he unites us with the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ in Colossians chapter 1 verse 15 says he is the image of the invisible God.

Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, right? And so, for the Holy Spirit who is breathed into us unites us with the image of the invisible God. By being united with the image of the invisible God, the image of God that has been marred at the fall is fully restored.

And that's why in Colossians chapter 3 verse 10 it says, "Have put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." In Christ we have been remade in the image of God and the renewal was not simply a restoration what was lost in Eden, but an elevation from it.

First Corinthians chapter 15 verse 45 to 49 says, "Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.' But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from earth, the man of dust; the second man is from heaven.

As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we are born the image of man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven." The new life that we have is not a return back to the old, but an escalation towards something that is greater.

So it says in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 17, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed; behold, the new has come." In Christ the image of God has been fully restored so that what was lost to sin, our moral innocence, and our life was regained, and not only regained, but upgraded to a righteousness and eternal life that would be impervious to sin.

Before it was innocence, now we have righteousness. Before it was life, now we have eternal life. To be united with the resurrected Christ is to experience the life of the resurrection. Just as the Spirit of God made Adam a living creature, so the Spirit of God made us, who were once dead in our trespasses, a living creature, born again in union with the resurrected Christ.

The life we live is a life eternal, but the resurrection life of Jesus Christ is eternal. In John 14 verse 19, Jesus says, "Because I live, you also will live." In Ephesians chapter 2 verse 5, it says, "Even when we were dead and our trespasses made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved." We are alive because Christ lives, but to be united with the resurrected Christ is not only to experience the life of Christ, it's also to experience the person of the resurrection, that is Jesus, so that we are transformed to be like Jesus himself, so that in him we are a new man, with a renewed mind and a renewed heart.

Our old self is dead upon the cross, and a new self has risen from the grave. We have been born again. First Corinthians chapter 2 verse 14 to 15 says, "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one." First Corinthians chapter 4 verse 16, "So we do not lose heart, though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." Galatians 2 20, "I have been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Just as God breathed his Spirit into man to make him a living person in the first creation, so he breathed his Holy Spirit to make us a renewed person with eternal life in the new creation." So from the beginning to the end, the life that has been endowed to us has always been expressed through personhood.

So that in the beginning, it's a person who lived. After the fall, it was a person who was dying, and upon the resurrection, it is a person who lives again. So that where there is life, there is a person, and when there is death, the person is gone. So the beginning of new life of a child within the womb of a mother is not a life whose personhood is to be sacrilegiously questioned for, even that child bears the image of God, the living God, the God of three persons.

The glory and the sanctity of human life in the first creation is the foundation and the framework for the new life that we have in Christ, the new creation where we are given a new nature and eternal life which coincides with a renewed heart and mind that loves God.

We are a new person, so to speak. The same way that God breathed life into Adam to bring him into existence, so the Lord in the moment we came to faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ breathed into us a new life through his Spirit. We cannot deny personhood that is essential in the distinct human life of a child any more than we can deny the renewed personhood that is identified with the new eternal life that we have in the resurrected Christ.

Life therefore is sacred, for where there is life, there is personhood, a man, woman, or child who bears the image of the living God. All that to say, the baby in the womb is a baby, okay? That's the point of the sermon. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you for your grace.

It's time we can enter into the study. I know a lot of information was said, but the beauty of your truth, O God, is that even with its complexity, there's a simplicity that is easy to just know, that God, you made us in our mother's womb. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

God, thank you for giving us life, and thank you, Lord, even though we like fools have sinned against you, even though we have inherited the curse of Adam, you made us a new creation. God, you've given us new life. God, you renewed our mind and our hearts so that the old self is crucified and our new self is being renewed day by day into the image of Jesus Christ.

Again, Lord, I pray that for all the members here, we will stand in awe of your grace and your goodness in the life that you give to us, that we will guard it, we will protect it, and more so, we will proclaim the message that renews it and restores the image of God that was marred at the fall.

Lord, thank you again for our time together, Lord, we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, it's 9.54, and we're going to take a break until 10.05, okay, so we're going to get back together a little bit earlier because we wanted to save more time for later when we have Q&A.

The Q&A is not going to be an open Q&A where we're going to have an open mic, people come and ask questions for the sake of time. We don't want the time to be just kind of dictated anywhere we go. We already have some questions that we will ask, but if you have a question that really, really want us to address or Pastor James or any of the other leaders to try to address, you can, like, if you text it to me, I'm not going to be able to read it, you're going to have to write it on paper and put it next to me in large letters in order for me to read it.

Or text one of the pastors, and if they feel like this is something that maybe we need to address that we don't already have, then maybe it'll come through that. But we're not going to have open, we're not going to just have any questions because we just won't have time.

So we'll address that later, okay? And so after the second session, we'll take a short break, set up the Q&A, and we'll try to address some of these issues. So for now, we'll take a 10-minute break and 10.05, we're going to start right at 10.05, okay? So you can go to the bathroom, you can leave your stuff there, go to the bathroom, go get some coffee, do whatever you need to do, but 10.05, we're going to get started, okay?

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