The NYT, Atlantic, and TGC Give Evangelical Perspectives on Pro Life

I'm going to look at some more reactions from woke-adjacent evangelicals on the Dobbs decision. I didn't finish them all yesterday, and I think it would be important if you haven't seen yesterday's episode, you probably should go watch that.

I outlined, I think, the four ways or categorized the four ways that a lot of social justice-minded evangelicals are reacting to this whole overturning of Roe v. Wade. And to summarize, if they do react, which some of them are not, but if they do, generally they have to do so in such a way that they present themselves as politically neutral or politically moderate.

So they can't just in one breath say that it's good that abortion is not a constitutionally guaranteed right anymore, and we praise the decision. They have to, or they have had to over the last few days, in the same breath, in the same tweet, in the same post, in the same sermon, highlight other quote-unquote justice issues.

Or if they don't do that, they have to, at the very least, talk about how important it is for the church to do more for mothers and loving mothers. And of course, they don't really talk about fathers, but they talk about mothers and how it's so important right now to love mothers.

And they can't just let it hang out there that this is murder and that's now, that constitutional protection for it is gone, full stop. And so I think that this is a tactic to try to get the church, Christians, but it's not individual Christians so much as it is the institution, I think, of the church to get off point, to try to rearrange the whole purpose and the mission of the church into now rectifying disparities, equity, inclusion, diversity, making sure that the quote-unquote conditions that lead to abortion are rectified.

Well, what are those? Well, we're going to now put on all these progressive, secular glasses to figure that.

Out.

Well, it has to do with economics, it has to do with racial disparities, it has something to do with access to health care. And so we need to try to make sure that there's free daycare and more maternity leave, and we need to make sure that there's more access to health care and state-sponsored socialist health care would be preferable.

And we need to have, I mean, it opens the door for those things, and then it makes the church one of the instruments by which political progressives can use to support their goal. So it's easy to see on abortion how the church at least has a responsibility as an institution to uphold the law of God and that's part of disciple making.

But now we're getting outside the law of God into all these other issues and things that aren't even efforts or positions that are required for Christians to take in the law of God are now somehow being foisted upon Christians because if they're a member of a church, this is their responsibility, and it's a church as an institution's responsibility.

And so that's what we're seeing a lot of out there. Well, I have not read myself the Gospel Coalition article yet, but I had some messages this morning people saying, you got to look at this. So I decided I have read Karen Swallow Pryor's New York Times piece.

I've read or at least went through David French's piece in The Atlantic and then on his own blog. And I'll give you some excerpts from that and then we'll get into the Gospel Coalition piece, which I haven't read.

And you'll get my reactions in real time. Some people like that. Some people don't. But the other stuff I have gone through. So we're going to start here with something. This is maybe more minor. In fact, I'll just show you the screen.

Jules Woodson, Jules Woodson, one of the church to movement leaders, if you will. So someone who very much I think it was a Southern Baptist church, if I'm not mistaken, where she was abused. And I don't know really the full story, but she is one of the abuse survivors.

They'll use that term to describe her. The more social justice minded evangelicals, they tend to use that that language to describe people like her. And so she's she's got some influence in some poll.

But anyway, she made this people. This shocked a lot of people. They were like, wait a minute. Why would this person who is so against abuse and operating in Southern Baptist evangelical circles say this?

And here's what she said. She said, if you are a person who suddenly finds yourself with a need to go camping in another state, a state friendly towards camping, just know that I will happily drive you, support you and not talk about the camping trip to anyone ever.

And here's an article in our NPR News, Women of Faith, the church to movement shines a light on sex abuse and evangelicalism. And there's a picture of her right there. You know what she's talking about.

That was on the 25th. Kind of shocking. So it's basically saying she would drive you to get an abortion if if you needed an abortion. And so I think it's a few people I think have wondered who saw this.

How many of these, quote unquote, abuse survivors that are being platformed, how many of them actually have a biblical ethic? How many of them actually know what the Bible teaches on ethics? And these are some of the people that we're having lecture us about how to rearrange our churches and denominations.

It's just a question because this driving someone to go get murdered or to murder someone else, not not exactly your not not exactly the poster child for good ethics right there. So that's that happened.

I want to talk about David French a little bit just because he's gotten a little I guess he's one of the exemplary or respected voices. If you I don't know what word to use. He's he's big on the evangelical left.

We'll put it that way. And he said this. Here's some just choice statements from him. This is from his article in The Atlantic. Of course, we're getting into secular papers here. The New York Times, The Atlantic.

I mean, do they really let real conservative evangelicals write for them? I mean, come on. No, they're not. So he said earlier this month, we learned that the end the abortion rate increased during Trump's presidency.

He was the first American president since Jimmy Carter ended his term with a higher abortion rate than when he began. This suggests that for the first time in decades, the cultural momentum is not on the pro-life side, that women are facing an increased sense of instability and uncertainty and that the best way for pro-life Americans to view the reversal of Roe is not as the beginning of the end of abortion in the United States, but rather as the end of the beginning of a long struggle to remake our nation into a culture that is far more hospitable to mother and child.

So and I could have brought you more clips from this. I mean, he he talks about how and it's been a while since I've debated this issue. But he but I remember this was a big thing I had to kind of argue against was the idea that before Roe v. Wade, there was more abortions than after, which is just not true.

And there's a lot of things today that aren't being taken into account as well that I think. In fact, I think Joseph Spurgeon talked about it, that a lot of abortions now with the medications available and stuff there, the chemical abortions are happening at early stages there.

So I don't know that we have a clear picture, but it really is irrelevant because it's not irrelevant in the grand scheme of fighting this issue, but irrelevant in the sense of whether or not the Dobbs decision is significant or not.

You would never say this about murder or rape or anything like stealing. Well, you just, you know, you know, stealing was, you know, more people stole before it was illegal or they were people raped when it when it was illegal to rape.

And so the legality of it doesn't have a bearing on it. I mean, you would think that's kind of seems ridiculous to me. Like what? But anyway, we do this with abortion. Not we, not me, but woke evangelicals tend to take the left's arguments and then try they try to hold on to left leftist assumptions while kind of remaining operational and conservative environments.

But David French makes this statement. Of course, some of the things I talked about last time are coming right out. If you remember what I talked about last time was that the reaction seemed to be silence, support for the Dobbs decision, but expressed disapproval towards conservatives, support for the Dobbs decision, but expressed concern for mothers and then using the Dobbs decision to gain Christian support for morally equivalent issues.

And so I think you see David French doing this here with where he says that that we have a long struggle of our nation into a culture. So that is far more hospitable to mother and child. So to mother, you know, he has to add that in there.

You know, what does that mean? What is it? Was it not hospitable to mothers? Was there was it that there was a war on mothers because you could just kill them with constitutional protection? No, there wasn't.

So so what does he mean by this? And so anyway, so then he goes into his blog post that he writes on the June 26, two days later, he says, we are slowly but surely emerging from a deadly pandemic. It's not that the disease has disappeared far from it, but the combination of mutations, vaccinations and prior infections is making it far less deadly.

You know, at every point in the pandemic, it was pro-life red America that loudly declared its bodily autonomy, disproportionately shunned even the slight inconvenience of a mask before the vaccine and then disproportionately rejected the vaccine when it miraculously appeared mere months after the pandemic.

Parts of pro-life red America move from skepticism to outright defiance. How dare you tell me what to do? This is my decision between me and my doctor. They trafficked in pseudoscience and bizarre conspiracy theories.

The cost was staggering. And because this is streaming on YouTube, I am making it a point not to give you commentary on this particular section here. I think you can guess at what my point is. But hopefully YouTube does not block the video just because I quoted David French here.

I don't think it will, but this is what David French is comparing abortion to. Yes, that's right. The Americans, the evangelicals who were skeptical about the treatment for the disease, the state sanctioned treatment.

Then we have in the face of that wave of death, a wave of death created by a staggering amount of Christian fear, disinformation and defiance. Millions of the same people who created that culture now loudly demand that other people sacrifice for life.

Yeah, yeah, that's pro that's a pro-life issue right there. Yep. Just like abortion. So a bunch of hypocrites, those evangelical hypocrites who are so rejoicing at the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But look at how many people they killed with their fear, disinformation and defiance.

It makes you sick that someone like this even gets a platform. This is a guy who goes and lectures at Southern Seminary. It makes you sick to your stomach. Then you have Karen Swallow Pryor in the New York Times.

She prayed and protested to end Roe. What comes next? And here's what she says. I understand that feeling, that feeling of dread. She opens the article with this. As a pro-life advocate, I lament with those who feel they have lost a basic human right as well as moral agency and hope for the future.

But for me, it is Roe that brought these losses. Roe stripped from the prenatal child the right to continue to live and grow and safe and free from intentional harm. If you believe, as I do, that abortion unjustly ends the life of a being that is fully human, a life that exists independently of the will of the mother, is self-organizing and unique, developing yet complete in itself, then you understand Roe not as a ruling that liberates, but as one that dehumanizes first the fetus, then the rest of us.

Right. So this is in the New York Times. So, hey, liberals, look, look at it this way. This is just the beginning of dehumanizing all kinds of people. And I understand that feeling of dread you have. I just understand it.

If you're evil, I understand it, I guess. OK, here's how she closes it. Accordingly, in a recent Times Opinion essay, Patrick Brown acknowledged the need for a broader vision of policy than just prohibiting access to abortion.

A post-Roe world, he wrote, is one that compels a greater claim on public resources to support expectant mothers and demands that we take seriously the challenges that women and families experience not only during and immediately after pregnancy, but also in the years that follow.

The conservative think tank where Mr. Brown is a fellow, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has developed a robust, holistic life and family initiative aimed at protecting the lives of prenatal children and offering concrete support to the families in which they were born.

California's Catholic bishops has also outlined a commitment to support women, children and families. And the ERLC of the Southern Baptist has included its 2022 public policy agenda, a range of issues beyond its ongoing focus on abortion, including alleviating hunger and strengthening low income families.

We can do better than asking women and men to choose between their children and themselves. I see the overturning of Roe as the first step in getting there. Then to make abortion unthinkable, we must make it unwanted.

Look, let me let me just tell you in the most delicate way I possibly can. One, this is kind of a joke, but it's kind of it's the more I thought about it, I'm like, it's kind of not. So I even made a meme that I don't think I can show probably with the YouTube regulations here.

I'm going to do as best as I can to describe this. So the ERLC wants to make abortion unimaginable, unthinkable. That's that's the buzz word. It's unthinkable. Make abortion unthinkable. So one of the things that would cause it to be unthinkable is if you never got pregnant.

Now, there's a certain treatment for a certain disease that has now been proven to seriously hamper efforts at getting pregnant. And I'm not saying that that's like what they're thinking in the back of their head, but I was thinking of all the possibilities for, OK, if you make abortion unimaginable, well, what's one way to accomplish that?

If everyone's sterile, that would be way right now. They're not saying that. They're not saying they want to forced sterility or anything. But I'm like, you have to have it. You can't just make your movement, make abortion unimaginable.

That can't be the movement, because what you end up doing is. Things things like that could lead to that outcome, if that's the only outcome you want. Things like and this is, I think, where they're coming from more things like socialist policies that reduce the economic burden.

Right. That'll make it unthinkable. We see what happens when you go down that great society path. We've already gotten a taste of that. You incentivize out of wedlock births. You get more of them and you get the breakdown of the family.

And when you get the breakdown of a family, you get more in violence and you have more taxes. You got to pay for the police. But then the police are vilified. So your cities burn up and you have people move out of the cities and it destroys your it destroys everything.

It's just it's horrible. If that's what making abortion unthinkable is, we got to change all these conditions, change the conditions that lead to it. And the assumption is the conditions that lead to it are poverty, racial injustice or racial disparities, you know, chauvinism, misogyny.

If these are the things that you think lead to abortion. Then and you do you have government policies now to rectify these things, you're just going to create more of a problem than you did before. And I think you notice they're not ever giving a clear vision for what that means to make abortion unthinkable.

That's why I said that's why I kind of spoofed. I have a way we can make it unthinkable if everyone's sterile, that that's a spoof, but they're not putting any meat on the bones. They're just hint hinting at different things.

They need to put some meat on the bones to tell you what they mean by that, because that is a terrible tagline. Make abortion illegal, make murder illegal. Make make murder unthinkable. Would that make sense?

Make rape unthinkable. I guess if everyone's a Christian, wouldn't that be the first step? Share the gospel, which she doesn't really do in The New York Times article. Share the gospel. And it's unthinkable, I guess, if everyone's a Christian and they don't want to disobey the law of God.

You're always going to have evil in this world. We can't aim for these utopian schemes. We have to aim for reality. We want our laws to match the law of God. OK, knowing that there's going to be criminals.

And that's why the government's there is to punish them. There's always going to be people who think about doing evil things. You're never going to get away from it. There's always going to be people that want to do murders and stuff.

And with the society going in a post-Christian direction, more and more and more, more secularized direction, you're going to have more of that. More people thinking these things. You the only way that if you want to try to combat it at the heart level, it starts with aggressive Christian evangelism and discipleship.

And I mean, aggressive. I mean, you actually go out there and do it. So I don't I don't like this strategy. I don't get this strategy. It's way too vague. It's way. And I think it's just it's designed to take the winds out of, I think, the true pro-life, the true anti-abortion people sales, because your goal now is not making murder illegal.

Your goal is now so broadened into this soup of who knows what, that everyone can jump on board. And you don't even have a definition for what pro-life is anymore. No one really knows. You've just infiltrated your movement with a bunch of socialists who say that that's the key to real pro-life reform.

Let's keep it simple and let's keep it according to the law of God. That's the main thing, the law of God. What does the law of God say? Thou shalt not murder. We are on, you know, I understand the feeling of dread that people have who want to murder.

No, that's ridiculous. I this is just the beginning of the holistic. In addition to stopping murder, we're going to try to feed people and say, OK, yeah, go do that. Go do that in those groups. Don't make that.

Don't hitch that to the same wagon. It's not the same. It's the state's role to states to bear the sword, to punish people who would murder, not to sanction it, but to punish people who do it. And if you want the church and really the Christians really more accurately, you want Christians to go feed people and they need to engage in charity and stuff, go do it.

Don't link the two as if they're the same thing. They're not the same thing. And one of the problems that we're doing is merging these things. We're confusing the role of the state with the role of the church and the role of individuals and the role of family even.

And we cannot do this because what happens is the state ends up running the whole show when you start going down that road. You can't just now give to the state now all of the power to to support the families.

Now part of that's a political thing, just like overturning Roe. It can't be. It's dangerous. And that's what we're doing. We're going down that path. Here's Karen Swallow Pryor with Ed Stetzer. And they talk about she is just a little clip.

And it just it seems so convoluted. That's why I want to play it. I'm like, what does this even mean? What does this even mean? Churches need to start doing poetry to figure out what human life can be.

How about just we have the law of God. Humans are made in the image of God. We protect life. And we're just going to hold up that standard as the law of God. That's a part of our discipleship. We just teach people that's the law of God.

When you vote, vote according to the law of God. But this esoteric, vague stuff, where is this going? Give me a concrete example.

Karen, what do you see the biggest need right now that the church can meet now that Roe has been overturned?

Well, let me take a verse from the Bible and just kind of take it literally for a moment. Without a vision, the people perish. And the unborn children that are perishing are perishing not just because of the laws of the land, but also because the people who are making these decisions don't have a vision for what that life might bring them.

The church needs to tap into not just literal poetry, but the poetry of the imagination to set forth visions and stories and songs and narratives and paintings and film and literature that allow people to see just how beautiful life is and how many promises can be unleashed when we allow lives to live and we share our lives with one another rather than being motivated by fear or greed or just a lack of vision.

The church is the place where we can allow these visions to flourish so that human lives can flourish.

Okay.

So now that we've seen this, we've talked about Karen Swallow Pryor and David French. Let's talk about this Gospel Coalition article that I haven't read yet. We'll read it together and I'll tell you what maybe some takeaways might be for this.

We'll start at the beginning here. It's by someone named Andy Jones. I'm not exactly sure. Well, let's click on it. I don't know who Andy Jones is. Andy Jones is an ordained teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.

He's founding and managing director of Roundtree, a marketing agency serving Christian orgs. I have no clue what Roundtree is.

All right.

So he writes this article that it's three ways to sympathize with women considering an abortion. Do we even need to read this article? Would you read an article that says three ways to sympathize with Nazi concentration camp guards considering killing Jews?

Well, that's highly offensive, John. How can you ever say that? Yeah, exactly. That's how I feel when I read this.

Are you serious? Are you serious?

We preach the law to anyone who's contemplating breaking God's law. We tell them that that's wrong. There may be other circumstances in their life, sinful things that lead to sin. That's what happens.

Sin leads to sin. That is true for murderers that aren't killing babies, but killing, you know, murder as we, as even the left would consider murder to be. Someone who just murders someone. There's probably sins in their life that have led to that.

There are circumstances. Yeah, we can talk to them. We can talk to them about some of the ways in which they've been victims of other people's sins. We never soften though, considering we don't soften those circumstances and blame the circumstances for considering breaking God's law in this way.

The circumstances aren't what's doing this. It's people making a choice to disobey God and going against their conscience. My wife, Leah, and I serve as volunteers at a local pregnancy center. I serve as the board of directors and Leah conducts intake counseling with women in crisis.

In these roles, we've had a front seat to hear the stories of women who are considering an abortion. These seats have cultivated in us a new appreciation for Hebrews 4 .15, which says, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who is in every aspect has been tempted as we are yet without sin.

This passage doesn't say Jesus approves of our weaknesses, overlooks our weaknesses, or blames us for our weaknesses. Rather, he just sympathizes with our weaknesses. Jesus knows what it's like to be tempted to fix your circumstances through quick decisions.

He endured emotional stress from a looming crisis. He knows what it's like to be abandoned. Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses and it's crucial to know his sympathy before making a decision that is sinful, destructive, and counter to his purpose.

Now that SCOTUS has struck down Roe, access to abortion clinics could require travel across state lines and visits to local pregnancy centers may increase. Though the ruling will change how women access abortion, it won't change the reality of unplanned pregnancies and women who need our help and sympathy.

Like Christ, the church must be able to sympathize with the weakness of abortion-minded women if we're going to walk with them towards life-giving decisions. What can Hebrews 4 .15 teach us about sympathizing with women considering an abortion?

Here are three encouragements. Number one, we can sympathize with complicating circumstances. As Christ died, he pleaded with his father, forgive them for they do not know what they do. Jesus prayed for the very people who drove the nails into his hands.

Amid horrific pain, he recognized that the Roman soldiers did not act in a vacuum. They were following commands from superiors doing a job to provide for their families under the influence of the crowds.

Those factors didn't make the soldiers' actions innocent, but they did draw forth the Savior's sympathy. When Christians support a mother through an unplanned pregnancy, we must also acknowledge that she's not acting in a vacuum.

A mother may not have money to support the child living in her car, the woman is unable to imagine the backseat of her sedan as a baby's in a nursery. She may have endured physical abuse from the biological father.

Okay, so it's going through all the circumstances. She may have a nervous teenager, fearful of disapproval. Christians must sympathize with these factors and consider what tangible support a mother may need, housing, financial assistance, or help navigating the healthcare system to make life-giving decisions.

I'm going to write now, let's go to the Gospel Coalition. And let me just, please let there be an article here that is on the front page celebrating. Okay, so they have Scott, Scott Klusendorf, at least, writing something.

Whole life objection, objectives, the harm, the pro-life cause. Okay, I'm not going to read that right now. Yeah, let's not. Scott Klusendorf, I would say, generally, I would think would be pretty good on this stuff.

So let's just assume this is a great article. So at least they have that. But this is their other article on this. And this is, it's just, it's a, again, the note that's being struck here is strange to me.

At the time that it's being struck, because right now, in the wake of this decision, you'd think the emphasis is, how can we get this? What's the strategy? What's the plan? How do we make this illegal in all the states?

I'm not seeing that from, and this is a parachurch, sort of, this isn't, this isn't a church. This is, they do delve into political things, but I'm not seeing the political angle that seems to be absent from this.

And, or the how to uphold the law of God in all the states seems to be absent. It's immediately, the focus is all on the people, most, who the vast majority have made sinful decisions to wind up in these predicaments.

I understand some have been raped. I get that. But that's a lot. That's most, the vast majority. And the knee jerk is to try to somehow accommodate them. So the people who would have possibly murdered their children, if this was still in effect in some states, now we need to step up our game and provide for them all these things.

Now, I think we should, as a way, as charity and as Christians, that's part of who we are. It doesn't mean that there's a, it's not like what Tim Keller says about obligations, that, you know, we have an obligation to give the poor as much as we can possibly give away, that there's this sort of, this obligation that they have on us.

We make decisions with the money that God has entrusted to us. It's his money, ultimately. We steward it well. And we get involved with things that match our area and our strengths and weaknesses and gifts and all of those kinds of things.

It's not all gonna look the same for everyone, which is fine. Some people are gonna wind up in this kind of ministry. But there is placing, I think, a big burden on the church, that this is somehow the church's, that the church is now, Christians must sympathize with these factors.

You have to have sympathy for these things, all these factors. And I'm thinking in this, and now, not only must you sympathize, but that sympathy must look like a tangible support, that money. So it's housing, financial assistance, help navigating the healthcare system.

Christians must do this. But in this whole thing, you don't find at the root of this is, you know what, there's a sinful decision being made here somewhere. There is, so yeah, you got yourself into a sinful predicament, or someone got you into a sinful predicament.

That's the result of sin. And it's not like the Old Testament law, actually, especially, I know people don't like bringing that up, but it actually does provide case laws for dealing with this kind of thing.

It does.

Even for the men who would, the person who actually did the rape, if it is in that small percentage that's rape, they should be responsible for the financial assistance now. But there is no plan, there is no talk of how do we prosecute these people?

How do we make them responsible for these things and protect the people they victimized? There's none of that. It's literally, don't even think about maybe the sin that led to this, the decision that even in the vast majority of cases, the mother's making too, to have that relationship outside of the bonds of marriage.

And let's forget about that, kind of, we're not gonna emphasize that, and we'll just talk about downstream, kind of how hard it is, the circumstances now. I would think that the emphasis would be more along the lines of, let's restore an anti-abortion, pro-life, but just Christian sense of sexual ethics.

You're not seeing that. Is that a curiosity to people? I haven't seen like any of that. The conditions that lead to this. Well, what are the conditions? Oh, you have people that are doing things that they shouldn't be doing outside the bonds of wedlock.

That's the most driving factor in this. So what should we do? Should we uphold marriage? Should we strengthen marriage? Should we have penalties for these kinds of things? Should we especially punish rapists, harsher penalties for that?

There's no talk of any of this. So I'm just looking at what's not being said, and I just think it's telling. So Christians must sympathize with that. That's what we have to do now. We can sympathize with weakness despite the associated shame.

Jesus was a friend to people with shameful stories. So he talks about women in adultery, women plagued with bleeding, man whose appearance drove people away. Crucifixion was a humiliating form of execution.

Jesus broke vicious cycles of shame and isolation. Telling friends and family about a pregnancy should be one of the most exciting and memorable moments in a woman's life. But for many women, it's isolating.

They go to pregnancy center because of the anonymity it offers. These women don't want to tell people close to them because of the shame. They're considering abortion as a way to ensure the story never gets out.

Shame never leads to good decisions, but by showing sympathy, Christians can help mothers express their sense of shame while also encountering the one who bore our shame. Now, I think there's truth to this.

The thing is though, shame is not... What does he say about shame here? Shame never leads to good decisions. Actually, it does sometimes. I'm sorry to say this almost, but shame, I know it's viewed as such...

No one should ever be shameful. You shouldn't be shameful of your orientation. You shouldn't be shameful of any of who you are.

Guess what?

There's sin that you have and you should be ashamed of that. And there should be a standard in society that shames people who engage in evil things. And it should be a barrier to them. It should be a deterrent from them doing those things.

That's how shame should work. And guess what? It does work in our society now. It's just working in the wrong direction. So people are ashamed if they have Christian ethics. People are ashamed if they love their country or their region too much.

People are ashamed if they uphold a biblical sexual ethic because shame is running in the wrong direction. So I say, don't be ashamed of those things.

Just say it.

The left used to say it loud, say it proud. Just be honest with what the truth is, what the law of God states. Don't be ashamed. And guess what? People who are against the law of God should be ashamed.

And that should hopefully be a deterrent. So I think he's wrong fundamentally about the way shame works. But absolutely, people who are ashamed, we should be able to tell them there's forgiveness that there's in Christ.

But that doesn't take away... Even that doesn't always... So as a Christian, someone whose Christ has taken away my sins, if I do something, let's say if I said something harsh to my wife and someone heard it, I'd be ashamed.

I would be.

And I think that would be right for me to be ashamed. Not to wallow in it, but like, man, I should be more ashamed that the Lord saw it. But anyway, shame is a natural thing and there's nothing necessarily wrong with shame in and of itself.

We can sympathize because Christ has shown us sympathy. Jesus showed us sympathy despite his disciples' imperfections, Peter's temper, Thomas' skepticism, James and John's unchecked ambition. He didn't have to look far to find people driven by motives of pursuing wrong goals.

Similarly, church leaders must see there are people in our pews who have had an abortion or considering one.

Wait, whoa, what?

Hold on.

Did he just...

Okay, so Peter's temper and Thomas' skepticism. Thomas' skepticism, very similar to women killing children or abortionists killing children. You ever notice there's never like an article or a tweet about like, we need to love the abortionists.

It's like, there's no love for them. It's always the mother in the situation. Or the father usually. All right, so it says, who have had an abortion or considering one or will consider one in the future.

We must speak and walk patiently with sheep under our care. Knowing our high priest Jesus has shown us sympathy. Jesus met us in our shame and regret sorrow. He's given us forgiveness and healing. There's one correct way for churches, one correct way for churches to speak about the evil of abortion, with tears.

We want people to know abortion is wrong in God's sight but we also want every woman considering an abortion to know that the church is a place where forgiveness and sympathy are found as we identify with what women feel as they consider abortion.

We'll have the opportunity to introduce them to our sympathetic savior, who is the Lord and giver of life. And by the way, that's, I mean, I did. I was, I can't remember if I cried or I was very close to it.