The Local Church and Abortion Ministry: #endabortionnow conference

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Hi everybody, I'm Jeff Durbin with Apologia Church. Thank you again for watching endabortionnow .com, the live stream event.

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Don't forget to hashtag endabortionnow .com and share the live stream across your social media platforms.

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And if you would, consider partnering with Apologia Church as we communicate the gospel in the area of abortion across the

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United States of America. You can do so by going to endabortionnow .com, go to the donate tab, and if you feel led, give there.

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You can partner with about a hundred churches right now that have partnered with Apologia Church across the United States.

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Just this week, babies have been saved. Just this week, Christians have been getting involved in this ministry, bringing the gospel to their local abortion mill, and you can do the same.

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But if you feel led, give today at endabortionnow .com and help us continue this effort to end abortion immediately in our nation.

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endabortionnow .com. It is grace on grace that I would be invited to speak at a conference like this.

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I don't feel like I'm worthy to preach on this platform with these men. I'm just thankful for the opportunity to be here.

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John Barros and I had a chance yesterday to hang out a whole bunch and did a lot of laughing together. He's been discipling me, whether he knows it or not.

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I'm very thankful for John. I think one reason, I guess, that the

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Lord would have me be here is just to speak a little bit to the issue of the tension that often exists between pastoral leadership, leadership of a local church, and the street evangelist or the abortion clinic minister, missionary, whatever you like, however you like to refer to yourself, if that describes you.

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I've been in ministry for a little while. I've done pastoral ministry for about 16 years.

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I've done nine years of parachurch ministry, so I've seen both ends of that spectrum.

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In 2005, I got saved in 2003 after being a pastor for about 12 years.

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That helps a lot, you know, in ministry. Really, it's amazing how much easier it gets when you're saved.

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But what happened after that is my whole life turned upside down.

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And I ended up going into full -time street evangelism from 2005 to about 2011.

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Part of my job at the ministry I was working at for a few years was to coordinate and to train leaders who were doing evangelism on a weekly basis in nine different countries.

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I think, I can't remember how many different teams that represented, like over 120 different evangelism teams, and those teams all came out of the ministry of Living Waters, Way of the

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Master. In 2005, 2006, it was just exploding. And so in like two years,

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God raised up over 120 street preaching teams.

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So you'd have anywhere from 10 to 20 to 30 people on each one of these teams. It was remarkable what

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God did. In the process, we did a lot of things that were great, that were right, and we did a lot of things that were wrong. And so I've been able to observe over this time, both as a pastor in that role and working in the street evangelism world in that role, what can go right and what can go wrong.

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And so what I want to talk about today is bridging the gap. I want to talk about bridging the gap between pastoral leadership and between the passionate, hardcore, fire -breathing street evangelist.

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I've been both of those things. And so I want to talk about how we can do that. I wrote this out.

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My thesis is this. For a group of people, Christians, who've experienced the electing love of the gracious Savior, there is often an appalling lack of love between pastors of local churches and street evangelists.

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Particularly evangelism in front of the abortion clinic is very easy. It's easy for the street evangelist who's just evangelizing to get frustrated with a local church.

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But when you start going to the clinics, there's even less people that want to go out with you. And so the guilt, there's enough guilt to go around here.

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There's guilt, certainly on the part of the street evangelist. I'm kind of popular or not popular for talking about that.

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But at the same time, there's a lot of guilt that the pastors bear. And so we have to just own it.

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We just have to own it and we have to repent. All of us on both sides of the issue.

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And so the issue is love. What did Jesus say? That they would know that we're his disciples by what?

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By the love that we have for one another. And if there's fighting within a church, you know, you come back from a conference like this and maybe some of the people are fired up and pastor's not quite on board yet.

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And then everybody that comes back that's not a pastor wants to end abortion now and there's tension. We got to do it now.

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We got to hurry. We got to get to this. There's a lack of patience sometimes that exists on both sides.

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And so rather than the relationship being characterized by love, it's oftentimes characterized by other words.

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Tolerance. Maybe even amusement at each other. Self -righteousness.

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Annoyance. Anger. Separation. Hurt. And then bitterness.

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And once you descend to bitterness, no matter which party you are a part of, there is no confession, there is no creed, there is no church, and there is no truth that you will not abandon in order to make a point.

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Because you're hurt. A bitter person will abandon all that they used to hold dear.

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I'm talking about beliefs and I'm talking about people. Because they want to lash out.

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Now my text is Romans 13, 8 through 10. That's what we're going to be looking at today. And for the purpose of this message,

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I'm addressing members of local churches. That's what we've got here. Pastors and members of local churches. We've gathered together here as brothers and sisters in Christ and we want to see abortion end now.

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But this is an issue that you're going to have to face sooner or later if you're going to be serious about this. And if you don't think Satan will use something like this in your church, you're only fooling yourself.

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I was just talking to Rusty about it here a few minutes ago. It's painful when it does happen.

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We're going to look at the book of Romans. Romans 13, 8 through 10. Romans is really more of a treatise on missions that happens to talk about the gospel than a theological treatise on the gospel, which talks a little bit about missions.

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I think a lot of times we look at, okay, this is a theological treatise. This is justification by faith. The first 11 chapters we see that, but then we look at 12 through 16 as sort of a add -on freebie or something.

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But it's all together. Those last chapters show us what a godly church looks like that takes the message of the first 11 chapters of the book of Romans and puts it out there.

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The main thing in chapters 12 through 16 is unity within the church.

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So let's kind of overview it a little bit. Of course, we've already mentioned Romans 1 through 11 and the doctrine of the gospel.

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You get to chapters 12 through 15. It's the local church and how it acts with that message. Romans 12, we're reminded that we all have various gifts and ought not to expect everyone to do exactly the same things in ministry.

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That's just a simple reality, but oftentimes we all want everyone to be just like us.

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We're given a series of commands that if obeyed, maintain unity in the local church. We are told how to conduct ourselves toward those who are not part of the church.

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All of this preserves not only the unity of the church, but it maintains its testimony, the local church's testimony within the community.

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If you guys start fighting within your churches about how quickly to pursue this and how exactly to do these things, you will wreck your testimony in your community.

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Doesn't matter how big, how small. You'll be known as a church that fights over stuff and the world looks at it and they don't get it.

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What's the big deal? They don't understand it. But know that you will wreck your testimony. And I think

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Paul's concerned about that here. In Romans 13, 1 through 7, we're shown two things, what a just government would look like and how a church relates to good government.

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Come back to verses 8 through 10 in a minute. Chapter 13 finishes with a series of commands regarding personal holiness.

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And then you get into chapter 14 and 15 and some Bible scholars think that chapters 14 and 15 may be dealing with a very specific situation going on in Rome at the time.

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They think that it's possible that the Jewish slaughterhouses in Rome were made illegal.

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They shut down the Jewish slaughterhouses. Suddenly that gives a whole new light to what's being talked about in Romans chapter 14 and 15.

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And the tension that may have existed right there in the church. Do we eat meat? Do we not eat meat?

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We don't have any kosher meat. Do we eat meat? Do we abstain? What do we do in this situation?

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So you're obviously in the context, you are talking about a local church situation.

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They're having meals together. It can apply universally to the universal church, but Paul has in mind,

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I believe, a very specific situation that's going on there in Rome. So keep that in mind because sometimes people say, well, you can't talk about what you're about to talk about in relation to the local church.

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Paul's thinking about that church. Read chapter 16. He starts talking about all these individual people that he knows there in the church of Rome.

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He's talking about that church in Rome. So yeah, we come back to that.

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By the way, I've never seen a universal church fellowship meal. It's always a local church thing, usually.

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So anyway, in the second part of 15 to the end of the book, we see the missionary heart of Paul. So turn to chapter 15, verse 9, and that the

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Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy as it is written, for this cause, I will confess to thee among the nations and sing unto thy name.

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And again, he saith, rejoice ye nations with his people. And again, praise the Lord, all ye nations and laud him, all ye peoples.

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And again, Isaiah saith, there shall be a root of Jesse and he that shall rise to reign over the nations.

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In him shall the nations trust. Paul's interested in the nations.

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He's quoting the Old Testament scriptures and he's saying, my passion is to see the gospel, this message of the first 11 chapters go everywhere and your church had better be unified if you're going to proclaim this.

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So he finishes up chapter 16 with a list of people, you know, talking about them and praising

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God for their ministries and he finishes with a beautiful benediction proclaiming Jesus Christ above everything else.

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So how do we as pastors and we as abortion clinic evangelists, missionaries, how do we function in the church?

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How can we improve our relationships? How can we bridge the gap? Look at verses 8 through 10 in Romans chapter 13.

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I'm going to give you basically two characteristics of love and some applications. Owe no man anything but to love one another.

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For he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. This is the first characteristic of love that we're going to look at.

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And simply this is a standing debt that you owe to everyone.

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Now grant you that here in the text, it's talking about really everyone, not just the church.

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In the text, it's talking about everyone, believer, unbeliever, whoever.

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Owe no man anything, especially considering the context of the first seven verses of Romans 13. When you're talking about the government, it's obvious that we're talking about not just the church, right?

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Verse 7, look what he says in verse 7, render therefore to all their dues. Tribute to whom tribute is due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.

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I think the ESV has it owed at the end of each one of those phrases. You owe these things to the government.

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And he says, by the way, in verse 8, we're talking about what we owe. What you owe to one another is to love one another.

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Now, what I want to point out to you, where it says, he that loveth another,

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I'm reading the King James, he that loveth another, that word another that's translated another in the

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King James is actually the other. Love the other. And the emphasis in the

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Greek word other means someone that's different from you.

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Anyone that's different from you. So obviously you think back to the parable of the good Samaritan. That's a beautiful example of that.

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The Samaritan was completely other in that context. Bring it back to what we're talking about.

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You have a passion to see evangelism happen in front of an abortion clinic.

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You want to see babies, precious babies' lives spared. You've been to this conference.

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You'll have had the benefit of this conference. You go home and the others in your congregation haven't had the benefit of all this.

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And maybe they've had the benefit of the pro -life movement for the last 40 years, and they don't understand this at all.

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What are you going to do? What are you commanded to do? Love the other, right?

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They are the other. They are the one that's different. I'm a church planter. I'm a

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Southern Baptist church planter on top of that, which means that statistics are everything and they've got strategies for everything.

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So when I started out, the strategy they advised me was just to try to target people that are just like me.

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I don't know what I am, but 45 and whatever. So I don't know any of this stuff about strategy.

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I just don't preach the word of God. And God didn't do that. He said, Oh, God's just going to bring people like you.

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So I'm going to have a bunch of 45 year old fat guys in my congregation, I guess. And so I just start preaching and then we got all kinds of people that came.

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Well, I'm not fitting the model. I guess I should just quit. But oftentimes that's a strategy in church planting.

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I understand why it's done. But if you read this and you say, we need to love one another, and you look at each other in your church and you're all just like each other, it kind of misses the point here.

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We're supposed to love people that are different from us. And that happens within the church.

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And this is an opportunity for you in the church to love the other people who don't necessarily get it right away.

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By the way, the other includes the abortionist. We had a situation a few years ago where the one, he's retired now, the one abortionist that works at the clinic where we go.

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But he got into the habit of crossing the center line while we were standing out there on the street and trying to get as close to either me or my wife as he possibly could with his

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Lexus. And my wife was holding a sign, babies are murdered here.

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And he actually hit her hand with his mirror and a little bit of the paint from the sign or the marker from the sign wiped off on his nice white

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Lexus mirror. And he'd been doing it for a while. And I had video of it.

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And I'd gone to the police with the video before and they wouldn't do anything until somebody actually gets hit. So I called the police and said, look, this is what happened.

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They came down. They saw it. They went in and they actually talked to him. First time

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I could actually get them to go in there and address this issue. And they did. So praise the Lord for that. My wife was not hurt, but you can bet

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I was ticked. This is my wife. You're trying to run over my wife?

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I wasn't loving the other at the moment. The next week, we're standing out there.

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He crosses the yellow line again, but this time his window's coming down. And my first thought is, duck, he's going to shoot us.

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I don't know what's going to come out of that window. This is Syracuse in January. Nobody rides around with their window down.

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So he pulls up and he's got tears in his eyes. And he says, look,

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I know what you believe. And I know that you disagree with me, but they shared a building with an eye doctor.

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And the eye doctor died about three days before we were out there the second time

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I'm talking about. A good friend of his, only like 54 years old, great health, dropped dead of a heart attack.

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And he said to me, I know what happened last week. I know all about that.

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He says, I'm asking you to go home because of his wife who is grieving.

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It was a family business, this family eye doctor sort of thing going on. And he says, would you just consider going home?

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Now, I know what some people advise me I should have said.

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You know, when you go home, I'll go home. When you stop murdering the babies, you know that's when I'm going home. I know all about that.

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And I understand the spirit behind that. And I know what's real here. Okay, I got that. But in that moment with the tears running down his eyes,

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I looked at him. And for the first time, I think I love the guy. And I said,

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Jack, yeah, out of respect.

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And I said, Jack, I am sorry. I am so sorry that your friend died.

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We'll go home. So we went home and we called the florist.

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And we sent a care package to not just the eye doctor's office, but we also sent one to the abortionist.

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We put the church's name on it. Do you know that changed things a lot?

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He didn't come across the center line anymore. He didn't want to run over my wife anymore. And when he would show up, we would talk and I'd say, hey,

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Jack, how are you doing today? Oh, I'm doing pretty good. Weather's good for you today out here. He would actually say things to us instead of cuss us out.

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What happened there? We didn't change our message. We didn't put up different signs.

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We didn't go all Joel -stein on them. I just said,

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I hope you have a good day, Jack. And I hope you repent and trust Christ. You know, I mean, it's what we would do, but it was neat.

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It was really something and it changed things down there. Love the other. Love the other.

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Why? I don't know. Romans 13 .8 says that's good enough for me. Love the other.

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And sometimes the other is the abortive mom, right? And I know the deal.

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They're not victims, right? I get that. And Paul G. is doing a fantastic job of showing that they're not victims in most cases.

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But there are some cases, there are some where they are forced, they're brought in there to have the abortion.

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And I knew a girl who was 19 years old who was forced by her mother to have an abortion.

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Well, she was 16 when she had the abortion. I met her when she was 19. Do you know what she was doing when she was 19?

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She was playing with toys for a three -year -old and playing with an imaginary friend.

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She was playing with her daughter and her mind. I've never seen anything like that.

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This wrecks people. Listen, I know guys that you get frustrated.

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My pastor won't talk about this because there are people in our church who've had an abortion. Yeah. And some of them have been wrecked by it.

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And some of them are still, even though they know they're in Christ, some of them are still dealing with this huge load of guilt.

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In some cases, it's driving them crazy. And your pastor knows that, but you don't even know who the people are in your church that have had the abortion.

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But your pastor knows because he's wept with her. Don't come down so hard.

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I'm the pastor who's really trying to minister to those who are dealing with the fact that their hands have shed innocent blood.

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They are dealing with that. I know there's all kinds of things that go on. Don't misunderstand me.

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I think you see where I'm trying to come at here. And understand this in verse 8, you will never pay off this debt of love.

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That's really the idea here in verse 8. There is never a time where you can say,

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I've paid off that debt. Now I can go do something else. I've paid off that debt of love.

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Now I can go do something else. You never will pay off that debt. If your church can get into the mindset of, if you can teach your people in your church, when you gather together, you minister together, you look at each other to train them to think, how do

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I pay off the debt of love that I owe to everyone in this assembly? And everybody's doing that with each other.

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How do I pay off the debt of love that I owe to everyone in this assembly? You'll have unity.

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Is that not true? And you won't fight over stuff. You'll say, well, okay, they don't get it yet.

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I'm going to pray some more. I'm going to give them some more information. We're going to wait. Wait on the

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Lord. We talk about it, right? What's that mean? Somebody asked me that once. What does wait on the

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Lord mean? I don't know. I think it means wait. Wait, it's okay.

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So that's the first thing I want to point out. Love is fulfilling the law of God. Last part of verse 8 through 10, he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

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For this thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness.

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Thou shalt not covet. And if there be any other commandment is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

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So it's the second table of the law of God, all the commandments that have to do with the neighbor, right?

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The first table, the first five commandments deal primarily with our relationship to God. This table deals with relationships to others.

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If you love your neighbor, you're not going to try to cheat. You're not going to try to get their husband or wife.

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If you love your neighbor, you're not going to try to kill them. We'll come back to that.

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If you love your neighbor, you're not going to steal his stuff. If you love your neighbor, you're not going to bear false witness about him in court.

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If you love your neighbor, you're not going to covet his things. And if there's any other commandment, it can be summed up this way.

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Love your neighbor as you love yourself. It fulfills all the rest of the commandments.

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If you look at them, they're fulfilled this way. And the command here is to love your neighbor in the same way that you love yourself.

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If you love someone, verse 10, you will not wrong them. Love worketh no will to its neighbor. Therefore, love is a fulfilling of the law.

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You will not wrong them. What are some ways? I'll start with the street evangelists and then

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I'll finish with the pastors. How have street evangelists wronged their churches?

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How have I wronged churches that I have been in? So we'll just talk about me.

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So nobody here thinks, I wonder if he's talking about this or that. No, talking about me. The first thing, you have to be meaningfully involved in your church.

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Now, if you come back from this conference and you haven't done a thing in your church, you haven't ever picked up a broom to sweep a floor, you've never mopped the floor, never changed a diaper in the nursery, whatever.

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But now you're going to lead a ministry to end abortion. Let me just slow you down a little bit and encourage you.

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Before you do that, why don't you go to your pastor, to the leadership and say, pastor, elder, whoever, where can

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I serve? You know, your pastor probably did that before he became a pastor.

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Before I became a pastor, I was pounding nails on a building in January near Buffalo.

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On the outside of the building, I was, you know, doing all kinds of stuff. Serving, being involved in the youth ministry, stuff like that.

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Trustworthiness in ministry is only fulfilled that way. We can only measure faithfulness by doing those kinds of things.

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I know a lot of people that want to go out and turn the world upside down, but they won't wash a window.

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They won't take out the trash. Do that first.

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Be meaningfully involved in your church. Don't just have a membership there. Don't just show up once in a while and never really be actively involved.

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Be involved. Start there. This is common sense. This isn't rocket science. Make your local church your first priority and not your last priority.

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This is what I used to do. I'd be traveling all over the place doing street evangelism in the first church that I was involved in in Texas.

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I didn't really know anybody because I was gone so much and I couldn't really minister to anybody because I didn't know anybody.

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Be there. Let that be the first place of ministry for you. I'm not saying don't do those other things.

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What I am saying is let that be the first place of ministry for you. And if that's a first place of ministry for you, you'll probably get a lot farther with the leadership.

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It might take a little time, but I encourage you to do that. Support your church financially first and give to other ministries and causes second.

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It's right to have your pastor make a living. It's okay. It's really all right.

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I wish I could do that. I'm bivocational. For a while I was tri -vocational,

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I guess, and it's hard doing that. But if you can do that, support your church financially first and give to other ministries and causes second.

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And if you get to the point where all you think about is the unborn, which is it's important to think about the unborn, but that's all you think about.

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You think your only responsibility is to the unborn and your only responsibility is to the lost, but you can't feel compassion in your heart when someone in your church is going through a difficult time.

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You need to check yourself. You have to check yourself.

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Your pastor is dealing with these things. The pastor shouldn't be the only one doing it because we're all

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Christians and these verses apply to all of us. I can think back to some of the things that I had to deal with that nobody in the church knew about.

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The time I had to go out, not in our church right now, this is ways back, but I had to go out one time to a situation where a deacon in our church decided it would be a good idea to try to get his wife in line by beating her head off of the floor repeatedly.

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And his 13 -year -old daughter called me at seven o 'clock in the morning, help, come get my dad off of my mom.

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And I get in there and there's the 13 -year -old daughter, the oldest in the household, right down to a three -year -old watching their dad beat their mom's head off the floor.

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That's the stuff that your pastor is probably not going to tell you about. You don't know what's going on.

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You don't know what's going on. You don't know what they're going through. Can I suggest this to you?

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Go to your pastor or your elders or your deacons and say, I'd like to meet with you once a week to pray with you.

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And you know, you can't do that with everybody. But boy, if you would do that,

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I did that in the second church I was in in Texas and that pastor and I are good friends because I was doing that during a time when it was ridiculous stuff going on in the church.

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All I thought was, you know, I'm just going to meet with him and pray with him. And we would be on our knees in his study crying over these situations.

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Be that kind of guy. Be that kind of person to your pastor. I've said all that.

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Pastors, how have we wronged street evangelists? And I'll just say this at the get -go.

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If you sometimes fantasize about the day that some zealous street evangelist or abortion clinic worker leaves your church because there's a constant pain in your neck, you do not have the heart of a shepherd towards them and you need to repent.

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If you think, man, I just wish they would leave. I'm tired of hearing all this stuff about abortion. I'm tired of hearing all about this stuff about evangelism.

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I just wish they would leave. I've been to enough pastors' fellowships. I've heard things.

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You need to examine that.

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If that's your heart towards them, you wish that they would leave, you have a problem. I would encourage you to acknowledge that street ministry is vital.

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It was mentioned last night. Acknowledge it like you would acknowledge any other ministry. I was involved in a church for a while as a street evangelist.

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They had a deal where they had ministry fair. When I first went to that church, they loved me.

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They were like, yeah, come on in, teach our people about evangelism. But as time went on, they began to see that sometimes it wasn't always nice and neat and clean and fit in a nice little box.

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Then slowly, they never told me about it, but attitudes within the whole church turned against me. One year

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I had a ministry table and the very next year I did not. And nobody explained to me why I didn't have the ministry table anymore.

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They used to run my announcements in the bulletin and suddenly they didn't. And no one explained to me why.

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And I was hurt. I was hurt. And I began to get bitter about that place.

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Acknowledge it as vital. Give the ministry the same exposure that you give other ministries.

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And occasionally drop by their venue of ministry to pray with and minister with them. Just show up once in a while.

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Just stop in. And look, if you can't get excited about that, what are you doing in the ministry?

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I mean, you want your people to be sharing the gospel, no? You want your people to be standing up for righteousness, no?

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You want that. So go out there and stand next to them. You say, I don't feel comfortable doing what they do.

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Don't do it. Stand there and pray with them. Ask them, how is it going today? What has happened out here today?

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And they'll share with you the joys and you'll see the heartaches. But you know what?

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If you do these simple things, you're likely to keep them in your church and keep them happy.

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We're not really asking for a lot. We just want some Christian concern, don't we?

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For what's going on. We want people to be generally interested. We have a basic human need to be wanted and loved.

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That's basic. Doing these things will do that, pastor. Just come alongside them, pray with them, minister with them.

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Give financially once in a while to help them with tracts, Bibles, gas expenses, at least once in a while.

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If you do not do some of these things, they will be hurt. They will look for another church.

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You don't know where they'll land. If they're bitter enough, you don't know how far they'll go to try to get back at you by doing something weird.

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And they'll become nomads that are accountable to no one. If you do some very simple things, you can keep people really happy.

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And don't you want to keep happy the people that are the most passionate about sharing the gospel? You should.

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All right. So having said all that, pastor, if you're not urgent about abortion based on this text, you really should repent.

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Because the text says, going back to verse nine, thou shalt not kill. We have a responsibility to love our unborn neighbors.

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They are the other. They're different from us because we can't see them. They're in the mother's womb.

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We can know a lot more with science now, but we just don't see them all the time. So there's this thing that happens that somehow we tend to start thinking of them as less than human, even though we call ourselves pro -life and even though we say we want to end abortion.

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And when we do that, we somehow start thinking of them as in any way, and even a small way, less than us.

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We have fallen into the pro -choice trap. You have a debt of love that you owe to your unborn neighbor.

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They are the easiest to love among us. They are among the most innocent among us, and they're the weakest among us.

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You have a debt of love to them. Everything and a lot of things in my life changed last

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March. I was in Texas visiting our church in Texas and I was out taking a walk in the prairie somewhere and my phone rings.

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It's my wife and she's 47 years old and I'm at the time 44 at that time, and she sends me a text message and says, you better call me.

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So I pick up the phone and I call her. John knows where I'm going with this. I pick up the phone and I call her and she says, guess what?

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What? We're pregnant. I did the guy thing, you know, how'd that happen?

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And she says, if you don't know, I'm not telling you. I said, you're kidding. She goes, no.

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I got a 22 year old daughter, a 21 year old daughter at that point.

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I got a 13 year old son and a nine year old or 12 year old son and a nine year old son at that point. And now we're pregnant.

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And so I come back to the house that I were staying at and I go in and I tell my boys, my boys had been praying that they would get a little sister.

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So I walk in and I say, boys, guess what? They're watching TV. What? Mom's pregnant.

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What? How'd that happen? Not telling you.

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Not yet. So I, and my son, my youngest son, he's nine, he starts crying.

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I said, God heard your prayer, didn't he? He says, yeah, you heard my prayer. And then my other son starts crying and I start crying.

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It's a mess. And all that happens. And then about 15 weeks,

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I guess probably around 15 weeks, Kim, she's 47 at that point. They're taking a lot of examinations, a lot of watching the baby.

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And they, they, they're watching the baby's development very closely.

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And they look at an ultrasound and they say, there's something here we're not sure about. And they end up saying, well, we have to have an echocardiogram, prenatal echocardiogram.

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So the next week she's in there for a prenatal echocardiogram. It turns out her heart was calcified entirely, both inside and out, very, very rare.

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It's only happened like 14 times. And they tell us, they tell Kim, I wasn't there, but they, they tell her, look, there's like a 50 -50 chance that she'll survive.

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Well, we go from this high to just being kind of crushed, not knowing.

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And man, we started praying. We already told the doctor early on in the pregnancy, don't even talk about abortion.

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And so, so we're praying. And unbeknownst to me, about a couple of days before she would go in for a second echocardiogram a month later to check on the baby's condition.

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There's nothing they can do, by the way, for that. There's absolutely no medicine. There's nothing they can do. And so we go back in and, or Kim goes back in a month later, but two days before I find out that our church in Texas had a special prayer meeting for Susanna.

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And we've got some pictures, right? Somewhere. Look at that.

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God healed her completely. We, we went in there or Kim went in there and the doctor goes to look at the

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EKG and he does like a double take. And he says, it's gone. And they've never seen that before in this thing.

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They've never seen that before. Now, I'll tell you something.

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That's my 13 year old there in the middle. But what a joy.

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Like every day I get up and I hold her and I say,

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Susanna, God healed your heart. She doesn't understand what I'm saying.

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Every night before she goes to bed, I put my hand over her chest. I say, Susanna, God healed you.

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And you're with us because you're a gift from God. And every day, every day, I say, thank you

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God for doing this miracle. It was a miracle. There's no question. I know I'm a Baptist, I know

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I'm reformed. That was a miracle. Gone. It was gone completely.

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It was completely calcified. It's completely gone. That's a miracle. God healed her.

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But I'll tell you something. This thing has messed with my mind when I go back out to the clinic. I go out there now and every time

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I see a pregnant mom come in, I'm thinking that could be my baby.

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What did they tell her? Did they tell her that she wouldn't make the pregnancy?

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You know, the baby wouldn't live? Listen, if you're watching this on Facebook or whatever, and you're thinking about having an abortion because some doctor somewhere told you that there's no chance, trust

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God. Trust God and pray. Trust God.

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He can do it. And folks, listen, that's the reality.

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It was mentioned yesterday that maybe you need to find a baby that was saved. And I think that's great.

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But if you haven't had a baby saved out at the clinic, pastor, go to the nursery in your own church.

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Pick up a baby. Sit down with the baby in the nursery in a rocking chair or something.

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Let the people laugh at you or whatever. Who cares? Feed the baby. Just look at that baby.

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And remember what a miracle this is every single time. Every single time it's a miracle.

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And let that get down into your heart. And if you will let that happen, man, you could have some tears when you're out there pleading with people.

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We got a lot of people out there with thunder and fire thinking there's a second coming of Elijah. And that's cool.

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And I was that. But what we need is some Jeremiah's. And I know this about Jeremiah.

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He didn't just write the book of Jeremiah. He wrote the book of Lamentations. He was a weeping prophet. We need some people out there that believe so strongly that babies are murdered here.

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That when you go out there, you don't just yell and scream and that. But you plead and you weep.

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I was listening to Keith Green this morning. My eyes are dry. Oh, God help me.

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When I first got saved, my eyes were wet. My eyes have been dry for too long. But Susanna has helped me a great deal.

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Find a Susanna in your church. They are easy to love.

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And they are the other. And love worketh no ill to its neighbor.

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If we love them, we will stand for them. Let this thing, wherever this goes from here, let it be a movement of love.

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Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we love you. We pray that this would be truly a movement of love.

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Lord, I just pray that you would change our hearts, help us where our eyes are dry. Give us tears again.

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Help us to feel the reality and the weight of this. And help us to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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To love you first and foremost with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. To love the gospel and to proclaim it.