Joseph Spurgeon Surveys the Anti-Abortion Movement

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have a guest with us today,

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Joseph Spurgeon, actually Pastor Joseph Spurgeon, I should say. And you can go check out some of his work.

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Sovereign King Church is the church. Sovereignkingchurch .com is where you can go to check out sermons and the blog and everything else.

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And then of course, there's also two books I wanna mention that Joseph Spurgeon has written for kids.

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One is called, It's Good to Be a Boy. One is called, It's Good to Be a Girl. And you can go get those on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

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And we wanna talk today, I wanna talk to Joseph Spurgeon because he has done a lot of work in the pro -life movement specifically.

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So we'll see where the conversation takes us. But I know today there's a debate that pops up every once in a while in the comment section on some of my videos between abolition and gradual approaches to ending abortion.

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So I wanna get Joseph Spurgeon's take on that as well as to hear about what's been effective at the abortion clinics to try to dissuade women from making this choice to go have their babies killed.

01:17

So Joseph, welcome to the program. Yeah, welcome. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.

01:23

Yeah, my pleasure. Absolutely. I did notice, I have to say up front, you're already, and your head's kind of blocking it now, but you had a big

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John Wayne thing, right? Yeah, right. Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway. That's actually my favorite

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John Wayne quote, but the Jesus and John Wayne vibes. I'm getting them. It's triggering me right now.

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So toxic masculine Christianity. Yeah, that quote,

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I use that. That's with me all the time. As a pastor, you know, when sometimes you sit down and you have to tell somebody something you know that they may not want to hear.

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I immediately think about this, or when I go to the abortion clinic. I can't imagine. And I think about this quote, and I think about Stonewall Jackson.

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You know, how are you brave? And God's fixed the time of my death. And I'm as safe in battle as I'm in bed.

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See, now you're really triggering people. Yeah. You're quoting Stonewall Jackson. You got a sword too.

02:16

I see the sword up there. Yeah. Is that a slingshot? I don't know what that is. It looks like a sword. Yeah, my son got me that for Christmas.

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Oh, nice, nice. Well, I want to talk about being brave a little bit, because this is a scary business.

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Going and confronting people that are making a decision to terminate the life of their child.

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I've seen some of your work for years now on social media. You're out there. You'll live stream it.

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I know you've even gone and confronted, I don't know if it was a library or somewhere where they were doing like a transgender story time hour.

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And that I think made local news. Am I correct? Yeah, yeah. We were able to actually, we got that shut down and they restarted it.

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But we got the initial thing because the drag queen group had put some kind of picture on their

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Facebook page with pornography and they had Photoshopped a child into it.

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They had Photoshopped like a child watching gay pornography. And so I took that to the little mayor and it shut down.

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They stopped that group from doing it. And then so they started doing it again, but in a different place and more of like a private location that it's a lot harder to stop, but yeah.

03:31

Well, you know, let me start this off by saying Russell Moore and a lot of the social justice activists that have been hanging around evangelicalism.

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And now some of them starting to leave evangelicalism. Surprise, surprise. They've tried to make a big deal about being prophetic, that they are prophetic voices.

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And really that seems to mean telling the church what they think the church needs to hear usually from the pages of the

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New York Times or Washington Post or some secular outlet, Houston Chronicle. And in my mind, you're someone who's actually, you had to say,

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John, who's a prophetic voice in evangelicalism? I said, well, you know, Joseph Spurgeon to me is a prophetic voice. He's going out and confronting the evils of our day.

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The prominent evils. You have a sense of proportion. You're not getting all bent out of shape about minutia.

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You're going to where there's actual real evil taking place in our backyards. And it's encouraging.

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In some ways it's convicting, I think for some of us. We don't know maybe where to start.

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How do you start doing that? So that's what I wanted to hopefully have you walk us through. How did you get in to confronting abortion clinics and people going into them?

04:41

Well, thank you. Thank you for your compliment there. I'd like to kind of start by saying what

04:47

I do is, and it's going to sound crazy, it's the easy part. Well, the visible part, like the going to the abortion clinic or these gay pride things.

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They're easy because you're confronting people that you don't necessarily know. And so they're very visible.

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I mean, there's still a lot of, it takes some bravery. There's people that are going to hate you and yell at you and attack you.

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But I would argue that the real bravery comes with being able to confront those we care about and we love.

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Those who we actually have relationships with, with their sins. And so this is the easy part.

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It's harder to do that. So actually I would encourage people, maybe start with the easy part and then you can get up, work yourself up to the harder part, which is you're confronting, you're talking to family members, those you love about the truth.

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And so, but how I got started was, I was at seminary and I'm from West Virginia originally.

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So kind of a country place, not a lot of big cities. Louisville was the biggest city that I'd lived in.

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I had moved to Louisville, but there was no abortion clinics near us in West Virginia.

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So pro -life thing was a political thing or something you might post about on Facebook or something like that.

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It wasn't real in one sense to me. And then when

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I was at seminary, there was a young guy who I worked with his wife and he would come and we'd hang out.

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And so he was telling me that his church was going to an abortion clinic in Louisville. And when he told me, it was like the light bulb hit and it was like, what do you mean there's an abortion clinic here?

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And of course, why wouldn't I go with you? And so it was probably two weeks after I just had our firstborn child.

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So we just had a baby, my daughter Jasmine, she's nine years old now, will be nine on January 6th.

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So we're coming up pretty close to the anniversary of it. And I can remember heading out that morning, she didn't sleep much at night.

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So I was up a lot, but I remember holding her as a baby in my arms and then going down to this abortion clinic in Louisville.

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And I couldn't have been there five minutes when a woman came in yelling, I'm going to murder my baby and there's nothing you can effing do about it.

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And I mean, it was eyeopening, right? Cause you kind of hear from a lot of mainstream pro -life movement that women are all victims.

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And it's kind of like the pro -choice even make this argument that like, it's just a terrible choice and everybody's very, nobody really wants to do it and all that stuff.

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And so you're anticipating when you go down there to be very somber and like just low key, but no,

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I mean, we got down there and we were just standing there preaching. I mean, not even preaching, we're just praying and offering tracks.

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So it's not like we're down there with God hates fag signs and all that stuff, like trying to be wild in people's face.

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And here comes this woman and it just, it wrecks me. I don't know how to like reconcile holding my daughter in tiny little baby with a woman who was a mother coming in and just like, it was one of the most overtop, it's not like this all the time, but it was one of the most overtop things that just started with this woman and she was dancing and it broke me and broke my heart for children.

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And I think that from that point on, God used it to change my life in many ways.

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You know, in life when sometimes you give your conversion and then sometimes maybe you get converted to like a new theology and it almost feels like a new conversion.

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Like when I became a Calvinist, it was like, oh, now the cage stage thing. And then this was the thing that changed my life in that prior to this,

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I had kind of wanted to be a professor. I was kind of running from a little bit still from God's call to be a pastor.

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And for whatever reason, it just broke all that loose in me and made me realize that we have the gospel of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, that Jesus has risen from the dead and there are dead people all around us and nobody stands up to proclaim the truth of it anywhere.

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We get fighting about little things amongst each other when there's a dying world that needs the gospel, that needs the truth.

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And there's little babies that are dying and being murdered right downtown in a place where...

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I don't know if you've ever been to Louisville, but you have the Southern Baptist Seminary. It's the largest seminary in the world or at least the largest

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Baptist seminary in the world. And there are, I did a thing, there's like 273, 74

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Baptist churches in and around Louisville within driving distance of Louisville.

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And then you have a huge Catholic population, then you've got all the other churches. Point being is like in the middle of this city, surrounded with all these

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Christians is a place that murders over 3 ,000 babies a year.

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And there was hardly anybody out there. And it's like, we talk a lot about being pro -life, but how engaged are we in it?

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And the interesting thing though, is that over the years, what I would wanna say is that I've become convinced that the abortion clinics are actually on their way out and abortion is going to become a lot harder to fight.

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If you want, I can unpack that for a second, but... Yeah, I'm curious to find out what you mean by that. So they're gonna be doing it in places other than the clinics then, or?

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Yeah, so getting to that, you mentioned about, there's like differences on tactics or even philosophy on how to end pro -life or abolition and all that stuff.

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And so one of the things that we've been successful at, if you wanna call it that, is fighting abortion on the upper ages of the pregnancy.

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So 20 -week bans and those kinds of things.

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Things that tend to, well, they're actually lower number of abortions that happen after 20 weeks.

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The majority of abortions happen around eight weeks, eight, nine, 10 weeks, somewhere like that. But we've been very good at shutting those higher things down.

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And you see the recent court case, as a Supreme Court, we're dealing with a heartbeat things and a lot of states have actually begun to be rid of abortion clinics or down to just very few.

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Kentucky has, at one point, Kentucky only had one. And then now it's got two.

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It's still primarily just the one. We have a lot of states that just have one abortion clinic, but it doesn't mean the abortion numbers are actually declining in the way that we think.

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So you also see a lot of pro -life people will argue that the numbers are declining of abortions.

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Right, I've seen this all the time. Yeah, that we've been successful in the movement, even if we haven't made it illegal, that at least there's less women having abortions.

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Yeah, but this is a misleading number because it leaves out, actually, it leaves out abortions that are chemical abortions and then leaves out the, which is where the abortion's going.

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So the idea of surgery, where you're going in and you're chopping up a baby, which is gruesome and it's terrible, and I'm glad to get rid of it, it's on its way out because,

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I think it's the, what is the FDA or whatever, whoever one of the regulative agencies just recently announced that you can purchase now abortion pills from online or anywhere.

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So abortion is going to the point where you don't have to go to the clinic to do it, you do it in your home.

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You can call them. That's sobering. Do what? That's sobering. I didn't realize. So I was,

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I guess, buying some of that. I thought that there was more momentum. And it does seem to be there is some momentum in the pro -life movement, but that there was sort of a, not a,

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I guess a shame, for lack of a better word, a stigma attached to someone who would go to an abortion clinic.

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And I kind of thought that this was a good thing that some of that morality was being, even as other, it didn't make sense to me because so many other things are getting worse.

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You know, why would that one thing be getting better? But maybe if what you're saying is true, it's just going underground.

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It's not as prominent, which is sobering for me to think about that. Yeah. You know, praise

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God that it is getting, you know, I want all the abortion clinics shut down. I would like them to be shut down in the name of Jesus and the abortion doctors arrested and tried for murder for what they've been doing.

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But, and this is the thing, this might be the reason why the church is not fighting abortion, even at the clinics as the way it should, is because we are, like the morning after pill ends up, it has the, it can kill and murder babies.

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And so you have a lot of people in churches who wouldn't dare go to the abortion clinic, but they'll go to get a morning after pill or they'll do something like an

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IUD or the hormonal birth control pill, which has the potential to cause abortions.

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And so we've been doing some research here and this has been on my mind and a lot of the people in my presbytery.

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And we're looking, you know, we usually think of the number of abortions at 60 million babies.

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And we're thinking that's surgical abortions in the United States. But, and this is the sobering part, is it's more likely to be billions.

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Billions of babies have been murdered in our country and around the world. And in like the last 50 years.

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And so we're talking even a number to hard to get your mind around. And I wanna, the reason

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I'm bringing this up and we'll kind of get back to how do you get involved in abortion thing is that I think it's gonna have to start with us repenting of our callousness about children, about how we think about families.

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You know, one of the reasons I wrote these books about it's good to be a boy and good to be a girl all came from the abortion battle.

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And that, you know, feminism and effeminate men are the source of abortion.

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You so many times we were actually at the abortion clinic, we will see a woman come leading the way with a man just slowly behind her.

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And it's like the role reversal at the same time, men effeminate men, men who are not gonna be responsible.

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They love that because they can have sex and then have this woman take the lead and act like, well,

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I can't do anything about it. And so you have this part of the thing that we have to start with before you ever think about even going to an abortion clinic or anything is we have to repent of ourselves of where we've adopted feminism, where our men have been effeminate and soft and too afraid to lead and where we just despise children.

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And so many Christians have despised children. And that comes out in the fact that we're willing to do things like IUDs.

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So that's a form of birth control, but it doesn't just stop conception, which is when the egg is fertilized, but it actually can stop the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, which that's an abortion.

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It causes an abortion. And so, so many Christians are engaged in these things without thinking about it, because pastors and elders haven't taught on it.

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The church hasn't taught on it. We've adopted so many things from the culture wholesale. And so, you know, there's like this,

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I think what you want to say, like the progressive liberal want to say, we got to be a whole pro -life, but what's the -

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Holistic, yeah, yeah. Well, I agree with the term. I think we have to be holistic pro -life.

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And that starts with loving children and actually loving motherhood.

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And the church has a whole lot to repent in regards to that. So three things that come to mind as you're talking about this, because, you know,

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I've been kind of on the forefront of being critical of the notion that Christians are all complicit in systemic oppression of some kind.

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Racism is usually the one used. It could change though. It's, you know, with the Me Too movement and other things, it depends what year we're talking, but the church is the scourge of, you know, every problem comes back to the church.

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And I've been very forward with saying, look, you know, the Bible clearly teaches you're responsible for your own sin.

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Something though that I realized, and it's very much along the line with what you're saying more so last year, is that there's a whole lot of people going to church and even solid churches that are doing these things.

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And I live in Lynchburg, Virginia, right? So you're talking about Louisville being very Christianized. I think Lynchburg's like the buckle of the

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Bible belt. You got Liberty University and largest Christian university, churches everywhere. And the local like crisis pregnancy center, basically their business, if you don't, maybe they don't wanna call it a business, but their operations are, the way that they run is people coming in who are students at Liberty University from churches, local churches.

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Those are the people coming in, usually sometimes with their parents' blessing, usually their mother, the mother's with them.

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You know, you're a student, you can't take this responsibility right now. And it's a stigma. We don't want anyone to know that this ever happened.

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And that just boggled my mind that that was the majority of what they were doing. And of course, there was years ago,

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I had a public debate on abortion at a secular campus. I represented the

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Christian group, we had an atheist group represent the other side. The prominent Christian group on campus decided specifically to schedule a fun night for campus outreach on that particular night to draw people away from the abortion debate.

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So there's been little things like this that have come up and I thought, wait a minute, hold on. Why is this?

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I know as Christians we're pro -life, but I'm wondering, and maybe this will open up a new door for our conversation, like how many people that call themselves pro -life, they're not really pro -life.

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So could you explain to me, like what would be a definition? What's pro -life to you when you think about that?

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Yeah, you just said you want to be holistically pro -life, but like, do you see what

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I'm seeing? That there's Christians who like have that, that they can sign a sheet of paper saying they're pro -life, but the way they function and live, it just doesn't seem like it.

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Yeah. You know, and I'm with you. I think, you know, I don't like the idea of the church as the scourge of everything and constantly bashing the church.

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So, but I think pastors and elders, we've, if we're not careful, have relegated pro -life to, you know, to a term.

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Like it's a position that you hold. It's a political position that you hold. Right. Whether as thinking of it as a calling from God as Christians.

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And so it's holistic, I think, but not in the way the liberals want to say it.

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Yeah, not smoking and nuclear proliferation and save the whales, right? Yeah, they're trying to get you actually to avoid thinking about the slaughter of children.

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What I mean by holistic is, I mean, we have to recapture and think about how does the issue of life and a love of children, children as a blessing and of motherhood and all the things that the church in the past has really exalted and lifted up because God created it and established it.

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What's good in the Bible. And so I think part of the reason that there's this disconnect that you're mentioning is because it is a political issue.

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And for many churches, we give it over to the Roman Catholics. And so the

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Roman Catholics have led the charge on being pro -life. You know, there was a point in which the

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Southern Baptist Convention, for example, made resolutions that were pro -choice back in the 70s.

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So when Roe v. Wade hit, the Protestants were not very, there were not very many to be found.

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So because of that, the Roman Catholics led the charge and they did some good work, but because of that as we've kind of handed it over to them.

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And so it's either a political issue or it's some kind of thing just for certain people, but it's not for everybody in the church to be thinking about.

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It's not on how everybody thinks. And so what

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I'm trying to, the whole reason I'm bringing all this up is I want people to go to the abortion clinics and I want people to do that work, but that's like one 10th of the work that has to be done in abortion.

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And much of the work to end abortion is us having families, having children, raising them in the fear and admonition of the

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Lord and teaching others to do that, teaching others to just treasure motherhood.

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It's a blessing. I mean, it's one of the most amazing things. It's the closest a human being ever gets to copying

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God in creation. I mean, it's the closest we get to ex nihilo.

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I can't even say the word. Help me say it. Ex nihilo, yeah. Yeah, thank you. That's the closest we get to that.

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I mean, obviously we're not doing that. That's the closest we get is a new child. And I think if we can get the

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Christians and the different churches, different denominations to begin to recapture that, then when you think about somebody slaughtering a baby, then it just doesn't compute.

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It's the whole thing, right? I held the baby and I see somebody slaughtering the baby. You just can't compute it and you can't allow it to continue.

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To ask you maybe to be even more specific on this, do you see maybe this unspoken priority of having less kids than we did in the past to be part of this whole equation?

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Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah, I mean, there's this idea, I got my one, my two and I'm done or whatever.

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Right. And one or two, three, and I'm done. A lot of times people stop, right, as they're getting good at something.

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I realized that for myself. When I first got married, I had that mindset.

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We'll have one or two, maybe three. And then, but I realized we were getting good actually. And it's not like it's a competition.

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Everybody's gotta go out and have as many kids as they possibly can. But there has to be a recapturing of the mindset that children are a blessing from the

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Lord. That we have to think that the same mindset that would want to artificially or take the matters of pregnancy in our own hands is often the same kind of mindset that leads to abortion.

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You know, in church history, the church has often talked about abortion and birth control almost at the same exact, in the same exact way.

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If you read through church history, I can give you quotes after quotes of the way they saw birth control as murder.

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Now, some would say, you know, maybe they didn't have the scientific knowledge, but they did grasp that there's something about the mindset of wanting to stop a human being from coming into existence.

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In particular, when you are doing the very act that creates it, it's maybe downstream, but it's somewhere in the continuum of murder.

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It's somewhere of stopping life and not appreciation of life. And so, I just wonder and think that until we capture a love for children, a love and a re, what do you wanna say?

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A view again that the marriage bed and sexual activity is, the end of it is procreation, that that is one of the reasons

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God created marriage. I think when we recapture this and exalt it, it can't help but then lead to us wanting to put an end to the slaughter of children and also would stop us from doing it.

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What do you make of, go ahead, sorry. No, no, you go ahead. I was gonna switch it a little. I was gonna ask you about the debate between so -called abolitionists and then so -called,

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I don't know what they call themselves actually. Just for life, okay. So, I've been in settings where someone will come up and say, like at a

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Christian conference, I'm an abolitionist and I'm protesting John MacArthur, right? At the Shepherds Conference.

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And I'm like, why are you here? Like, why aren't you at the abortion clinic? And it just, I've wondered like, what's this about?

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And then though, I mean, there's other abolitionists who use that term, who seem just, I don't know, there's different, there's a spectrum and I don't,

27:43

I'm not versed enough to know what that spectrum is. So I'm hoping you can give us a little bit of a lay of the land of like, okay, what's the difference between these groups?

27:50

The abolitionists, it seems like to me more often than not will really like to bash the pro -life people. What's that about?

27:59

Yeah, I think you can narrow it down even to the idea of incrementalism versus immediatism.

28:06

And so what we mean, let me define those terms. Incrementalism is that in order to end abortion, we are going to go into the system as it is and work within the system.

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Usually with the goal to overturning Roe v. Wade. And we'll put forth laws and bills that will incrementally chip away at abortion.

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So we'll put a heartbeat bill or we'll do 20 week ban. Or some of the incremental bills have been like, that's if you murder your baby, you have to bury your baby.

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And all kinds of just ways of regulating abortion. And it's kind of taking a tool out of the leftist handbook in one sense.

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And that if they don't want something to exist, they regulate it out of existence. And so that's kind of the pro -life way

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I've been doing it. It's very catered to a view of the

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Supreme Court as the ultimate arbitrator of all that's legal in our country and what is to be law.

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And so it's the constant trying to get to the right justices. And along with that, you often have, and like I said, it's led by Roman Catholics.

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So often what you have in that pro -life is a view that the women are victims, maybe even on the same level as the child being a victim.

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So a woman who comes in and pays somebody to murder her baby is a victim. Either she doesn't know what she's doing, maybe she's ignorant to it because she's been lied to by the media and all that stuff.

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And so the people who are primarily responsible for abortion and this kind of pro -life view is the abortion doctor and culture.

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And because of that, they'll shy away from calling women who get abortions murderers.

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And so it's kind of, that's the pro -life kind of view.

30:20

And that was very broad. So I'm sure somebody would come in and try to correct me. And I'm sure, you know how it is.

30:26

There's always - We don't have time. We don't have an hour to, yeah, talk about all the various different, so that's a basic, that's the pro -life view.

30:32

Okay. So the abolition view is like, no, God's law says that abortion is murder.

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That it is a crime against God and that it ought to be punished as murder.

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And therefore any law that says that any law that ends with you can therefore murder your baby is an unjust law.

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And so if a 20 week bill gets passed and it stops abortion at 20 weeks, the abolitionist side would say that was an unjust law because it still ended with you can murder your baby 20 weeks and younger.

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And so there, it's a little bit of an argument over how do we go about ending abortion.

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Another aspect of abolition is it tends to be very state rights, state locally focused in that the states and the lesser magistrates need to stand up to the

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Supreme Court and just simply say, we're ending abortion. We don't recognize you. Yeah, you don't have that. We're not recognizing you on this and encouraging the states to just nullify the

31:46

Supreme Court. It basically, the argument is if Colorado can say, bye -bye to the federal government over marijuana, isn't life and protection of children so much more.

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And so the abolitionist argument is that we have to stand primarily on God's law about what should be good laws, what counts as just, and we need to end abortion instead of regulating it.

32:19

So. Yeah, okay, so as I'm listening to this, I mean, I would think that I would be more on the abolition side than as you described it, but we can, and I assume,

32:31

I don't put words in your mouth, but you would say, right, some of the gains by the pro -life movement, if they're,

32:37

I don't know if you recognize that there's been gains, but things like even having Care Net, like centers for, clinics for having women come in to assist them with the pregnancy, the showing them, hey, there's a baby in there, we have an ultrasound.

32:53

I mean, these kinds of things, we can rejoice in those kinds of things, even though they've kind of come more from the pro -life movement side, right?

33:02

Yeah, this will lose me street cred with abolitionists, but yeah, I think there's - Okay, sorry, I didn't mean to lose you street cred.

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It's okay. I rejoice that anytime a baby's saved, right, anytime.

33:17

I do think, though, that there's consequences to not doing the right thing the right way.

33:26

And there's consequences to regulating abortion because as I said, it's moving to that off the grid kind of deal.

33:35

It's moving to younger and younger to chemicals where they will mail you the pill and you take a pill and then a few hours later, you take another pill, then you have a stillbirth and you do that at home.

33:48

So there's, nobody knows. And that's one of the consequences of the heartbeat bill or the 20 week bill is that it moves, younger and younger, and it becomes harder and harder to fight because at 20 weeks, we can all pull out the abortion pictures that we use of the baby being slaughtered and it's gruesome and it moves your heart and God uses it.

34:17

When you're talking about a five week old baby or even happening at conception, pictures are not useful.

34:28

You're not able to stand outside an abortion clinic. So there's just, there is consequences to a regulative view, like you're regulating it, it's gonna get harder and harder.

34:41

Whereas there's also consequences obviously to an abolition view of saying, we're ending it, it's done and we're saying no to the federal government and consequences obviously are what's the federal government going to do and what comes from that.

34:58

But which one is being most faithful to the Lord, I think is the answer we have to, the question we have to answer, right?

35:06

It's not just the consequences, which one? And that's where the debate lies. Well, there's no question it's murder.

35:15

How does someone get involved in, their heart's pricked, they wanna go help save babies, let's say specifically.

35:22

So I'm not just talking about cultivating their own family and a culture that values life, but they really want to go out and do kind of what you're doing.

35:29

What kind of advice do you have? Yeah. And what success, and I'll add, what success stories can you give us from you going out and hey, woman decided,

35:39

I'm not gonna do it because of what you told me. Yeah, so I think you start with, like I said, get your own house in order.

35:46

And then I would go talk to your pastor and elders and have them see if you're qualified to be this kind of person that can go and preach or is your church willing to back you?

36:02

It could be that you're in a bad church and you need to leave your church and go somewhere else. And you're at a church that has no care for children and those things.

36:10

That could be a thing. But it is also an important thing because I think people can get excited about this thing.

36:16

And then you get cage staged. And then you go and you're doing something like you're not only going to the abortion clinic, now you're at G3 and you're protesting

36:28

G3 or going to churches and protesting that. Because what happens is there's a temptation to go and get in this battle.

36:36

And you look around, not other Christians are involved and you get bitter. And you think, where's everybody at?

36:41

And where's the church? So I would encourage anybody, start with your church. Start with, will your church support you?

36:49

Do they have some kind of character reason why you're not the right person to be doing it? Are they a kind of church that will say, we want to get involved in that and let's get this guy to lead it because you're not quite ready yet.

37:01

So that's one thing to see what your church considers. If you go to your church and they're like, no, we're not touching that with a 10 foot pole and you can't do it either.

37:11

Well, then that's a sign about what your church is at. But having got the go ahead from your pastor, then

37:17

I think the simple thing is, look, are there already Christians going down there? Are, where's it at near you?

37:25

And then you go down and you have to be determined to love the people that are going in and to love children.

37:33

I, to my own shame, have many times have gone down without that love in my heart.

37:40

And I can tell the difference between when I go down motivated by love and then when I go down, maybe just without having thought and having prayed about it and encouraged myself.

37:52

One, I'll go down and the temptation is to go down and you'll, maybe there'll be like, there's sometimes called death squirts.

37:58

We call them death squirts. They're pro -choice people there trying to stop you from preaching the gospel or, and the temptation is to go down there and just try to trigger people on that kind of thing, which is easy to do.

38:09

And that's not what God calls us to. So start with prayer, praying

38:15

God gives you a heart of love. And then you go, and then I, I think it's just a simple matter of just being there, just showing up.

38:23

And so that leads me to the success stories that we've had. We did a national event a few years ago where we had probably about five or 600

38:33

Christians come outside the abortion mill in Louisville. And we just showed up.

38:40

We would sing, we would sing. We added some speakers there, set up some music. We had children with us singing and reciting scripture.

38:47

We had people walking up and down the sidewalk with signs. Some just standing there and praying, but we had probably about 500 people.

38:56

And that week that we were there, when the church just showed up, there were only three people that went in the whole week to get an abortion.

39:05

Wow. This is a place that usually does around a hundred. So that's a hundred is like two or three kindergarten classes worth of kids.

39:15

And so there were only three that went in the whole week. Many days, there was nobody that went in.

39:22

And Planned Parenthood did a study actually. They did a study for people to see what happens to people who miss their appointment and what they discovered for a person who misses their appointment for an abortion for any reason.

39:34

Doesn't matter what the reason was. It's somewhere like 80 to 90 % not going back.

39:40

Wow. Wow. Yeah. So you saved over 90 babies.

39:47

Yeah. That's about 90 babies. And we noticed that there wasn't like a surge the next week.

39:52

And so I say that to say, sometimes just showing up and standing there, just God uses that.

39:59

Well, we'll have like stories that people will come back later and you didn't even know. And they'll be like, you guys were just standing there and I couldn't go in.

40:09

We didn't even see them. You know what I mean? And so just standing there, being a body that says, somebody is opposed to this and somebody will help you.

40:19

Wow. That's really, that's awesome. And I did not know that. That's an amazing statistic.

40:26

So if you, just being a preventative measure there to try to show someone that, hey,

40:31

I'm gonna reinforce what your conscience is already telling you, it can go a long way. I appreciate it.

40:38

Anything you wanna add? Cause I mean, this has been so helpful, I think already. Yeah. I just wanna encourage, you know, anybody that's excited about this or wants to get involved.

40:47

I mean, I think you can. I think there's lots of resources. Some of the people, like there's a woman named

40:53

Patty Smith who's been involved and very, very helpful. If you look her up, she has tracks.

41:00

She can be very helpful to you and encouraging you. She's got some videos on YouTube and stuff about how to go about to the abortion clinic.

41:10

You know, Jeff Durbin and Apologia have been very helpful. They have end abortion now.

41:16

And I don't, I'm assuming they're still doing this, but they've been partnering with churches. So like, if you can get your church involved, they'll send your church signs and equipment and stuff to get involved in going to the abortion clinic.

41:32

And then obviously, if you have any other questions about it, you can contact me and - Yeah, how do people do that?

41:38

How would they connect with you the easiest way? I think the easiest way is probably just through Facebook. That's where I'm most active on social media.

41:46

And so you can send me a Facebook message. Joseph Spurgeon on Facebook, okay. Yep, Joseph Spurgeon. You can go to our church website, you know, sovereignkingchurch .com.

41:55

And you can contact us through there. You can even, here's my email.

42:03

It's thesovereingkingchurchatgmail .com. All right. There's another way. So if you wanted to email me.

42:09

Excellent. And we would be glad and love to help you get involved.

42:15

And you're - Oh, go ahead, sorry. I was just gonna, I wanted to say one more thing. And that is, I already mentioned prayer, but I can't mention it enough.

42:23

Be prayed up. That when you do get involved in this kind of a battle, you're actually, you're touching

42:30

Satan's sacrament, in my view. And it's one of those things, this is one of the areas in life where the battle is the clearest, where the lines are the clearest.

42:43

Yes. Where there's evil and there's good. And because of that, Satan will not let you go unmolested.

42:49

Every person I know that has gotten involved in the abortion battle has faced persecution in some way.

42:57

Whether it's from family who don't understand, friends who don't understand, even some of their churches have not supported people as they ought to.

43:09

And you have the media that lie. Some of my elders and I sat in a federal court in a case that had nothing to do with us and still heard somebody get up and slander us as if we were terrorists.

43:23

Wow. And so be prepared to be called a terrorist, a white nationalist, prepared to be called Nazis and every other thing that you can think of.

43:31

But remember what Jesus said. That's right. Blessed are those who are persecuted. So. That's right. Much blessings.

43:37

Well, hey, God bless you, Joseph. And again, if someone wants to get in contact, it's facebook .com

43:43

forward slash Joseph Spurgeon. It's about as easy as it gets. And then sovereignkingchurch .com

43:49

and you can go on Amazon to get it's good to be a boy and it's good to be a girl, which written for younger children and God bless you, brother, in everything you're doing.

44:00

And I just hope it's a good year full of God's blessing for you. And you see just more success like you just talked to us about at the clinic in Louisville.

44:09

I don't know if, is that where you're still going is Louisville or is it a local? Yeah, yeah. Our church is in Southern Indiana, but we're like five minutes from Louisville.