In the wake of SCOTUS decision to strike down Roe v. Wade and the so-called “right” to abortion, we praise God for the dozens of states in the nation that have moved to ban or greatly restrict this heinous practice. In blue states like Illinois however, those who love death are busy establishing new death chambers, expanding to strategic new locations and inviting people over the state line to destroy innocent human life. Illinois State Lawmakers are going out of their way to support an industry committed to ending the lives of innocent pre-born babies.

As we once again recognize Sanctity of Human Life Sunday (January 22, 2023), Christ followers must respond intentionally, bringing both salt and light to this desperate situation. (Click HERE for a bulletin insert.) Here are some suggested deliberate steps we all can take:

Be intentional in prayer. If we truly believe that the fervent prayer of the righteous “avails much” (James 5:16); and if we truly believe that God hates the shedding of innocent blood (Proverbs 6:17); and if we truly believe that we are called to “deliver those who stumble toward death” (Proverbs 24:11); and if we truly believe that the second great commandment in God’s law is to love our neighbor—born or unborn (Matthew 22:36-40); we should be offering up earnest prayers regularly throughout the day.

We should pray for mothers who are facing an unplanned pregnancy or who are facing threats, abuse, and coercion to end their pregnancy. We should pray for abortion workers to leave their work that enables the “termination” of pre-born life. And we should pray for our local community, elected officials, leaders, and neighbors who do not understand the gruesome truth that abortion takes a human life.

We highly recommend that Christians intentionally participate in 40 Days for Life prayer vigils. If we truly believe that God’s ears are attentive to our cries and that He answers every prayer that aligns with His perfect will (1 John 5:14, Psalm 34:15 and 5:3), we can wait in eager anticipation for His hand to work when the time is right.

• Pray that human life would be cherished at every stage of life, regardless of circumstances.

• Pray for the end of abortion in all states.

• Pray for the pregnancy resource centers that are helping women facing an unplanned pregnancy.

• Pray for political and church leaders, and that they would be willing to stand up for life.

• Pray that God will open the eyes of policymakers and candidates running for office to the sanctity of life. Pray that they will become defenders of innocent human life and not enablers of sexual immorality and death.

• Pray for a softening of hearts and minds. May God give us opportunities to minister to those who are hurting and may our conversations be filled with His grace and love.

Be intentional to educate yourself. Being pro-life is much more than being anti-abortion. Contraception, sterilization, IVF and, on the other end of the spectrum, the so-called “right” to die movement, all foster and promote a culture of death. Read and/or watch experts on these topics to learn how to defend the pro-life position with reasons.

Also, be cognizant of the ways contemporary negative attitudes toward having and raising children undermine the culture of life. Avoid making critical remarks about children being a burden or interfering with your sleep/work, schedule or budget. Start seeing them through God’s eyes, as a blessing and a reward. (Psalm 127:3-5)

Moreover, Bethany Bomberger’s book, Pro-Life Kids, is an excellent resource that reinforces the importance of every human life and Ryan Anderson’s newest book, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing, discusses the lasting impact that abortion has had on our country.

Be intentional and proactive in your church. Talk to your pastor and church leaders about supporting a local pregnancy center, recognizing and celebrating Sanctity of Life Sunday, and explaining the importance from a biblical view of voting for candidates committed to supporting pro-life legislation. There are a variety of resources that you can share with your community. You can find these at sanctitysunday.com.

Encourage your church to host meetings throughout the year to highlight the battle for the right-to-life. These can include documentary film screenings, special speakers, right-to-life apologetics, and Bible studies on God’s view of every human life.

Encourage your church to have a ministry that reaches out to post-abortive women who, like all of us, need to know that Jesus paid for all of our sins on the cross and that His love, mercy, and forgiveness are available and sufficient. The local church can be a place for these women to start healing.

Be intentional to be an advocate. Whether with a large audience or just your family, start a conversation about life and its value.  Need help talking about abortion? Check out the pro-life apologetics organization Life Training Institute. They have been equipping Christians to defend their unborn neighbors since 2004.

You can also attend the Annual SpeakOut Illinois pro-life conference. This year’s event will be held in Oakbrook Terrace on February 25th. For more information, click HERE.

Additionally, we encourage you to join us for the annual IFI Worldview Conference on March 18th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year we are featuring three well-respected Pro-Life Christian leaders who will help us better understand, debate and persuade people in our spheres of influence to the sanctity of human life. Learn more HERE.

Promote, help, donate to, and fundraise for your local crisis pregnancy center and/or local pro-life group. Attend a Hike for Life fundraiser or banquet.

Speak out against pro-abortion legislation. Most people have absolutely no idea what bills are being decided in Springfield or Washington, D. C. It is vital to get alerts from IFI and other pro-life groups who will let you know when to speak out on specific pending legislation.

Visit your local lawmakers to thank them for their service and to see how you can pray for them. Let them know how important the life issue is to you and to our culture. Urge them to become a champion for the pre-born.

Make sure you are subscribed to Illinois Family Institute’s emails and Action Alerts to stay involved about bills affecting the unborn! As responsible citizens that love their community, use this information to contact your representatives. Hold them accountable to protect human beings at all stages of life, from conception to natural death.

Be intentional to celebrate life. It is tragic to realize that we are immersed in a culture that does not value life. Many babies diagnosed with Down Syndrome in the womb are aborted. Other potential disabilities and/or genetic conditions are targeted as well. Women use abortion as a means of birth control. Senior citizens who need assisted living or who live in nursing homes are frequently mistreated, ignored, or forgotten.

Celebrating the people you know who have challenging conditions can set an example to others not only how to treat “the least of these” with respect and dignity, but to think about them as equally worthy of life as those of us blessed with good health.

Be intentional to promote and support pro-life candidates. In every election cycle we have opportunities to promote pro-life candidates running for local, state, or federal office. You should pick a candidate or two to support in word, with your time, and, if possible, with your finances. They are the ones voting to pass laws that either expand or limit ending precious pre-born human life.

You should make your pro-life views known to your community during election time.

“It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.” ~ George Washington

Additionally, you can support pro-life candidates by putting up yard signs, making phone calls, distributing literature, going door-to-door with the candidate, hosting a meet-and-greet in your home, using social media, attending rallies, and marching in parades.

Go one step further and identify your local pro-life elected officials and write them a letter of encouragement and thanks.

Conclusion

Scripture is clear, God is infuriated with the shedding of innocent blood (Psalm 106:38; Proverbs 6:16-17) and the apathy of so many Christians who remain on the sidelines in the face of evil (Ezekiel 12:2; James 1:22-25). Make no mistake, He sees what is going on in Illinois and in the rest of the world. But God gives us insight into why it appears He may have overlooked this grave evil.

The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. ~2 Peter 3:9

God wants us to repent, and He is sovereign. He wants to work through us to change everything–even the hearts of those who work inside these clinics. Let’s not forget that God specializes in cases that look surmountable. (Jeremiah 32:37; Luke 1:37; Ephesians 3:20; Luke 18:27)

God wants us to repent, and He is sovereign. He wants to work through us to change everything–even the hearts of those who work inside these clinics. Let’s not forget that God specializes in hard cases. (Jeremiah 32:37; Luke 1:37; Ephesians 3:20; Luke 18:27)

We are to pray for one another too (Ephesians 6:18; James 5:16), because we tend to grow weary and discouraged. Therefore, we should be praying for the strength and resolve of those who are on the frontlines of this battle as we also pray that God would remove all fear and timidity from Christians who have not yet engaged in the battle for truth, righteousness, and the sanctity of human life.

---

Written by Mike Riccardi

“Never, never will we desist till we . . . extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonor to this country.”

These words were spoken by William Wilberforce, the British politician who worked tirelessly to end the slave trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though Wilberforce penned those words in reference to the centuries-old and universally-condemned practice of slavery, they very well could have been written today in reference to our own national “disgrace and dishonor.” I am speaking, of course, of abortion. The constitutionally protected right to murder one’s own unborn child is the preeminent social injustice of our day. Should the Lord Jesus choose to patiently prolong His coming, the history books will surely regard such a moral atrocity with the same shame and outrage that we experience as we read about the African slave trade or Hitler’s Holocaust, bewildered that such miscarriages of justice could have been allowed to persist in a civilized and educated society for so long. 

Forty-One Years Too Long

And yet it was on January 22, 1973 that the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Roe v. Wade that a child in the womb is not to be considered a human person. Since that time, over 50 million babies have died in America under the sanction of the law. Statistics tell us that one in three American women will have had an abortion by the age of 45. This illustrates that the right to take the life of a preborn child has been woven into the fabric of our cultural consciousness for an entire generation. It is now time for a new generation committed to the sanctity of life to stand against this injustice. As followers of Jesus Christ, we should be leading the way in defending the defenseless (cf. Prov 31:8) and in honoring the image of God in all people (Gen 1:27; cf.9:6).

Now, if you’re reading this and you name the name of Christ—if you profess to follow Jesus as the Savior from your sin and the Lord of your life—I pray that you have not been so deluded as to need convincing that abortion is evil, and that supporting it in any fashion is repugnant to the Father, grieves the Holy Spirit and is antithetical to the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. But if I’m not going to spend this post arguing for that, what do I have to say to you?

Well, even we who abhor this wicked practice need to be encouraged and exhorted. See, some things are just so horrible that it becomes difficult for us to think about them for too long. It’s the same reason we turn our eyes away from a terrible car accident, or can’t dwell for too long on a particular national tragedy like 9/11. Our instinct of self-preservation can tempt us to avoid thinking about such things for the sake of our own emotional comfort or peace of mind. But this is where we need to be strengthened. As grisly as it is, Christians must be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim 2:1), and face such a discomforting reality head-on. We need to feel the injustice of abortion and mourn the loss of life long enough that we might be stirred to action.

So What Can We Do?

Our first response to contemplating such an evil should be to pray that God would eradicate it. We must recognize first of all that this battle is not merely one of flesh and blood—of partisan politics or competing ideologies. There is no question that a nation whose feet are so swift to shed innocent blood—sacrificing our own children on the altar of convenience—is under the judgment of God, given over to the deluding influence of Satan. We must come to the realization that our struggle is against spiritual forces of wickedness (Eph 6:12), and, as a result, the weapons of our warfare must not be of the flesh, but must be divinely powerful (2 Cor 10:3–5). God alone is sufficient for such a task, and so it falls to us to pray that He would mercifully change the hearts of a nation who calls evil good and good evil (cf. Isa 5:20).

Secondly, we can support our local pregnancy resource centers. In his book, Answering the Call, Pastor John Ensor writes, “In practice, the best way to bring this winsome invitation to abortion-vulnerable women and couples in our neighborhoods is to partner with local pregnancy help ministries.” These pregnancy centers often offer free services and literature, and usually provide ultrasound free of charge. When an abortion-minded woman is presented with ultrasound imaging of the life growing inside of her, it becomes much less likely for her to follow through with ending their pregnancy. Our church comes alongside our local pregnancy center by hosting fundraisers, sending volunteers, and encouraging members to pray for and give to this ministry as they discern the Lord would have them to do.

Finally, we must proclaim the Gospel faithfully in our circle of influence. James tells us that the root of murder lies in the sinful desires that enslave the human heart (4:1–2). Therefore, victory in the pro-life cause will not ultimately come from a change in policy or new legislation. Though we would happily welcome that, the only remedy for the sinful human heart is the Gospel of Christ. If we want to change the thoughts, desires, and behaviors of the unsaved, we must first change their hearts. And the Gospel is the only thing that can do that. At this point, our compassion to protect innocent human life and our compassion to see sinners saved from eternal punishment come together in the church’s mission to preach the Gospel to all creation.

Not Theoreticians, but Heralds

In January 1984, President Ronald Reagan designated the third Sunday of every January as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, to coincide with the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. That’s this Sunday. So take some time this weekend to reflect, even if painfully, on the reality of this evil in our society, and mourn the loss of life that has been perpetrated in our midst under the protection of law. And along with praying for God to be merciful, prayerfully consider how you might strategically give of your time and talents in 2014 to bring the Gospel to bear particularly on the issue of abortion. As Ensor and Klusendorf have said,

“The world does not need highly developed pro-life theoreticians. It needs [Gospel heralds], people sensing the call of God on their lives and effectively appealing to the conscience of their generation. And it needs [those who will love their neighbors as themselves], ready to act on their convictions in practical lifesaving ways” (Stand for Life, 4).

May we who love Christ in this generation never desist until we have extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic.

---

 This article was originally published at thecripplegate.com blog.