Moving Sermon About A Miracle

Apologia Studios

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All right. Can you hear me? Good. Praise God. What an honor. What a privilege to be here and to see all that God's doing.

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Thank you all for being here. And I think I'll, rather than preaching a sermon sermon,

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I think I want to talk about how important this work is for all of us to be a part of. This is really kind of surreal for me to be seeing this because I wasn't planning on this ministry.

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It wasn't something that, you know, I said, hey, there's there's a good way to do ministry. Let's let's do that.

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Let's let's have other Christians vilify us and let's go to the hard places and let's have people yell at us and pull guns on us.

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And that'll that'll that'll be great. That sounds fun. Wasn't my plan. I just so you know where I came from.

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I think like many of us, I was a Christian. I was a pastor of a church plant out of a drug rehab.

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And of course, I would have said I'm pro -life. I did the annual pro -life sermon on Sanctity of Life Sunday, like most pro -life pastors do.

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Talk about the evil of abortion, whether the Christians at coffee shops, you know, in our Bible studies and those sorts of things.

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And I sort of thought at the time that the pro -life industry, that's the that's the

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Christian response to this. They're the ones that are fighting this fight and they're working to ultimately criminalize or abolish abortion.

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And so that's that's where I had this issue. I'd never gone to an abortion mill. I had never worked in that way to try to save lives.

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And what happened was I started to see in my feed, my

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Facebook feed, someone named Lisa Metzger. Now, I went to high school with a girl named

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Lisa Metzger. So I thought that's how I got connected to Lisa. I thought it was my old high school friend. And so that's how we're friends on Facebook.

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And I saw pictures of Lisa out in front of an abortion facility preaching the gospel. Then I would see random pictures pop up from Lisa where she was holding a baby.

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Or now she was at a hospital with a mother and a baby. And then I'd see another picture randomly come across my feed with her at a different hospital with a different mother and a different baby.

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So I started connecting the dots. And at the time I was hosting a radio program that was heard all over Arizona and also heard globally through what we put out online.

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And so I thought, hey, this would be great. You know, it's my old high school friend. We'll get her on and we'll talk about her ministry and how she's saving lives.

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So I contacted her through Facebook and I just said, hey, I see what you're doing. I'm very, very grateful for what you're doing.

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I think it'd be great to have you on Apology Radio to talk about what you're doing. And she agreed. So we set up the time.

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And so I went to the radio station the day she was supposed to be on. And a couple, I think, seconds before we were about to go live,

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I get her on. We can all hear her. And I said, hey, Lisa, it's great to talk to you. And I brought up us being in high school together.

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And she's like, what are you talking about? And I was like, well, you're Lisa Metzger. We went to high school together.

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She's like, no, I'm from this place. And I was like, you're not from Waldorf, Maryland? And she was like, no,

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I've never been there. And I thought to myself, well, then how in the world are we in each other's pages?

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She's like, I don't know. I never asked you to be a friend. And I'm not in the habit. I'm a married man with lots of children.

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I'm not in the habit of friending random women. And so to this day,

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Lisa nor I know how we ended up on each other's Facebook profile. The Lord did that.

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And so we had her on the radio program. And on this program, I'm talking to her. She's describing going out to preach the gospel at the abortion facilities.

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You know, Luke, my co -host, and my fellow pastor, and Joy were like in awe of this. And she's telling stories.

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And at some point during the interview, she says, yeah, we've been doing this for like 20 years. She says, yeah, and we've saved like 365.

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And I thought to myself, 365 babies over all these years of ministry.

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I was dumbfounded. You've saved that many children over all these years of ministry.

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And she said, yeah, last year. We were as a church, we were this young church.

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I was a chaplain at a drug rehab. This was a church. We were known as that drug church in Phoenix.

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Because everybody at our church was either on detoxification medicine. They'd come out of addiction to drugs and alcohol.

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Most of them were still in halfway houses. I mean, people like really loved the teaching of our church. But when they'd show up, they'd be like, yeah, this is great, but I won't be back.

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Like it was kind of a rough crowd. So, you know, young church, almost all new baby believers.

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I mean, the only children in the church were my kids. And Pastor Luke had had his first baby. And so we had this church of new believers who were passionate about Christ and their faith.

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And so we started thinking like, is this what we're supposed to do as well? And around that time, a film came out.

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My friend made, and it was called Babies Are Murdered Here. I was good friends with Marcus.

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He's the director of the film, the producer of the film. And so I actually got a link early through Dropbox to watch the film before he released it.

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Now, this is all taking place sort of at the same time. God's impressing this upon us. My friend makes this film,

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Babies Are Murdered Here. And in that film is a sermon from someone named

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Rusty Thomas. Rusty Thomas is a veteran in this. He's been preaching the gospel outside of abortion mills and being arrested for Jesus for doing this work for many, many years.

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He's been doing this for decades. He's a veteran. He's a hero. He's a giant in this. He's been outside of abortion facilities where they're incinerating the babies after they kill them.

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And the ashes of those dead babies are falling on his head while he's preaching the gospel into the abortion facility trying to save lives.

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Well, in this film, I drop my kids off at their co -op because we homeschool, which is what you should be doing.

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Shameless plug. And so I drop them off and I get the link. And so I'm in the parking lot of this church.

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And I just say, I can't wait. I've got to watch this film. And so I'm watching the film in my car. And then

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Rusty Thomas comes on in this film. He didn't even know he was being filmed for this movie. He found out when the movie came out that he was in a movie.

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And so I'm in the car. And he's preaching a sermon. And it's all about Christ and the gospel.

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And it's blood guiltiness and all these things. And I'm in the car. And I'm telling you guys, if anybody had seen me, they must have thought something was really, really wrong with me.

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I'm in the car sobbing. I am just weeping in the car by myself.

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I'm just like covered in tears. And I'm just pouring out. I can't even breathe. No sermon has ever affected me like that, ever.

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And it challenged me to my core, so much so I said to Marcus, I said, Marcus, you've got to let us premiere this at our church.

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We'll do it on Sunday. So we premiered Babies Are Murdered Here at Apologia Church when it first came out.

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And my church was broken. I mean, thoroughly broken by this.

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If you haven't seen it, you should see it. It's free on YouTube. And so we're this young church.

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We don't know what we're doing. But here's what we know. The problem here at the abortion facility is it's a spiritual problem.

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It's not merely a problem of legislation. This is a problem of the heart. This is sin. This is fallenness on full display.

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This is rebellion. The only answer is the gospel. You're not going to solve this problem through the neutral position of the pro -life industry.

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You're not going to solve this problem by merely appealing to the scientific fact that what's in the womb is fully human from conception.

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It can't be disputed. Pro -aborts don't even try to dispute that anymore at the highest level. They're like, yeah, we know it's fully human.

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We still believe you should be able to kill it if you want. We knew that this was an issue of the gospel. And lo and behold, there's all these abortion facilities around us where they're killing babies every single day.

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We have to go. And so as a church, we decided let's go. We don't know what we're doing. I know the problem, sin.

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I know the solution, Jesus. And I know we want to save these babies and rescue them. So we were this small church.

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We didn't have any money to speak of at all. And so we thought we'll go there and we'll tell these women we'll adopt your baby.

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Don't kill your baby. We'll adopt your baby. We'll pay for everything. We didn't even know how it was going to happen except to say we know that God will provide.

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And so we went out there with three things. One, we told the truth. We're going to tell the truth out there.

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Mom, please don't murder your child. We called them mothers because that's what they are.

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We said, Mom, please don't murder your child today. We tried to bring the law of God to their hearts so they'd be challenged by it.

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And then the second thing we had to say is we tell them about Christ, that there's forgiveness in Christ. You can turn from your sin.

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You can believe in Jesus. You can be forgiven of all your sin. And the third thing we had to say was we'll help you. We'll give you anything you need.

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What do you need? A place to stay? Do you need food? Do you need money? We don't know where we're going to get it, but we'll get it to you.

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We'll sacrifice everything for the sake of your child. We said we'll adopt your baby. So we knew those three things.

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And the very first day we went to an abortion mill as a church, there was only literally four of us.

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We go to the abortion mill, Planned Parenthood and Phoenix, and within two hours we walked away with two mothers and saved two children the very first day.

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So what started to happen was we were going to the abortion mills regularly. We started going to preach the gospel, offer help and hope to the mothers, and we were saving babies.

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And at the same time I had our radio program, Apology Radio, so we would just announce it on the radio program.

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We would do our show. We'd say, hey, by the way, we went to the abortion mill on Saturday. We saved two babies. Hey, by the way, this week we saved another baby.

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Hey, we saved three babies this week. Hey, twins were saved this week. And what happened was as other people who were listening to this,

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Christians started saying, hey, wait a minute. We know the gospel. We want to save these children. We're going to go too.

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So other churches started going out. They started saving lives. And it was really amazing because at this time, just so you know how far we've come, there are giants of the faith that the world will almost never even know their names.

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Much better godly men and women than I will ever be who have been fighting this battle as heroes long before anybody thought that this was cool.

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But we started this. We started actually saying, hey, God gave us all this technology, all these cameras, and gave us this massive platform.

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Let's just start turning the camera on outside the abortion facility, and let's go out there, preach the gospel, leave the camera on.

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We started having like 20 ,000 people in an hour watching this thing live. And we were getting attacked by so many professing believers.

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The battles, Justin, the battles we had to fight early on were astonishing to me.

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We're going out there to preach the gospel, to save babies, and we had professing believers who were saying, guys, guys, guys, that's too rough.

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I mean, you're calling it murder. You're going out to the abortion facility. That's not the way to do this. You need to love these women.

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I said, well, this is what we're doing. Isn't that obvious? I love them and their kids. I know you need to be more loving.

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This is not the way to do this. You need to be doing this in different ways. This isn't effective. And then over time what started to happen is we started to get pictures like you saw up here.

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We started being able to hold these babies in our arms, taking pictures with these babies. And so what

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I started to do is when people were actually saying, you shouldn't be doing this, you shouldn't go to the abortion facility, you shouldn't be doing this there, it's too sharp edged, you shouldn't be doing that, we just started putting a picture up under their comment.

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Here's a baby. Here's a save. Oh, here's another save. Here's twins born last week.

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You see, that tells the whole story when you put flesh on it. This isn't theory. They're murdering children. And when the church goes to preach the gospel and to lay their lives down,

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God saves children from death. And so what happened was we started actually now getting to a place where people weren't saying anything anymore.

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They weren't challenging it anymore because you can't speak against the fruit of this ministry. Look at all these lives that are being saved.

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And my question is this. Is it worth your entire life to go out to that place of death every single day to plead for the lives of these children to save even one life from death?

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Yes. And that's what we said as a church. We said if we spent our entire lives doing this ministry, preaching the gospel out there in the 120 -degree

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Arizona desert heat to save even one life, this was a ministry well spent and well lived.

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So what happened was we started experiencing these very, yes, praise God for that. We started experiencing like, you know, these really rough moments because, you know, being at the abortion mill, they're murdering children inside there.

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They're severing their heads from their bodies. They're disemboweling them. They're decapitating, pulling their arms and legs off their body.

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It's a bloody, bloody industry. They're murdering them. It is not a nice place to be. When you go out there, it is traumatizing on you.

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I think most of the people that come with us and say I want to go, I tell them I just want to warn you ahead of time that your first couple of times are going to be very hard for you to handle.

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Just be prepared for the traumatic experience for you to finally have your eyes peeled back to realize, oh, this is real, right?

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It's not just theory. This isn't just conceptual. They're murdering children there, and so it is a traumatizing thing, but it's also glorious.

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So one of the really cool saves we experienced first is go to the abortion mill in Glendale. It's a rough one, but you can get closer to the women so you're not having to sort of like raise your voice so they hear you.

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You can just plead with them and talk with them. So this day there was an atheist that dropped off a girl at the abortion mill, and he decided to stick around to argue with my church body that was out there.

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Now, I love atheists. And so I pull up, and I see he's wearing out our team out there because he's a really vocal, just firebrand atheist and just argumentative and everything.

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And so I go up to the team that's arguing with him, and so I sort of step in, and I kind of just started evangelizing him and providing a defense for the gospel.

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And so he's saying things, and I'm taking his legs off, and he's saying things, and I'm taking his legs off, and now he's getting very frustrated.

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And there was a man there, a friend of mine named Justin. He was there all day long. It's very hot outside.

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He was worn out by this atheist and, of course, all the circumstances. So Justin is so worn out that he decides to walk to the front of the abortion mill, and he's standing in front of the abortion mill, and he feels like, what's the point of this?

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This is awful. This ministry is terrible. This is such a burden. We haven't saved any babies today.

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They probably brought in 15 babies to be killed today, and he's just struggling and struggling. And so he stands outside by his lonesome just to sit there and sulk for a minute because the atheist was wearing him out.

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He decided to walk to the front of the building where the lobby was, and he's holding the sign, and the sign says,

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Please don't hurt your baby. We'll help you. Now because in God's providence this atheist was there causing problems for us, keeping everyone occupied on this side,

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Justin decided to walk to the front to sulk and just be a sad sap for a few minutes, holding a sign,

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Please don't hurt your baby. We'll help you. But little did he know that inside the abortion facility at that time was a man who had his wife now back in pre -op.

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She was about to go through the surgical abortion. She was already back on the table, and he,

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Chris, was inside looking outside the window, and he was praying. At that very moment he was praying.

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He said, God, if you want me to stop this, show me a sign.

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And here comes Justin. So Justin walks to the front with the sign and places it down right in front of the window.

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Please don't hurt your baby. We'll help you. And so Chris goes, Okay. But it wasn't enough, so Chris decides to throw out another one at God.

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He says, All right, Lord, if you want me to stop this, let that man right there be the owner of, and by the way, at this time and where this is located, there are dozens of cars out in the front and across the street and down the road.

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He picks a random car. He says, Lord, let that man be the owner of that van down that way.

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And so Chris takes a beeline towards Justin, walks out the front door, walks up to him, and he says,

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Sir, he says, Are you the owner of that van down there? And Justin, sulking, looks up at him and says,

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That van down there? He goes, Yeah. He goes, Yeah, that's my van. And Chris goes,

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Oh, my goodness. I prayed a prayer. God, show me a sign. You showed it. Then I said, Let it be that van, and it's your van.

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And Justin goes, Get in there and get your baby right now. So Chris goes inside the

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Planned Parenthood in Glendale. He runs into the front. The woman there is the receptionist. He says, Open the door right now. Let me get my wife.

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And she's like, No, sir, you can't do it. You can't do it. And he says, If you don't open that door right now, I'm kicking the door down. And the woman goes,

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Okay, and she opens the door. He runs back there. He pulls Tina, his wife, off the table at pre -op, pulls her outside, drags her out.

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Both Chris and Tina run out of the abortion facility, both in tears, to the arms of a huddle of Christians standing there waiting for them.

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They took Chris and Tina that day home, and that week churches gathered together and provided funding to get

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Chris' business back online so they could pay for his business. He had a bunch of stuff stolen, his trailer and all of his tools, so he couldn't work, which is one of the reasons they thought they needed to kill their next child.

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And so we paid for him to start his business again. We gave them new furniture for their home. We gave them a baby shower.

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And now Carmelo is alive and well and with us today. That's one story because Christians, like this ministry, sacrificed everything to be out there on that sidewalk, to preach the gospel, to tell the truth, and to offer help and hope and love to these mothers and fathers.

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That story can be multiplied literally now because of what happened through God's work and us extending out to ministries like this thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times.

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I mean, there's times you've been out at the abortion mill, you're out there by yourself, you think, this isn't effective, what am

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I doing here? This is a horrible experience. You just stand there by yourself with a sign, and then all of a sudden a pregnant woman comes walking up to you with a big old belly.

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She's like, sir, I just wanted you to know that you were out here about four months ago with your signs.

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I went in for my appointment, but I heard what you were saying, and God used that to change my mind, and I wanted you to know that I'm two weeks away from delivery, and I wanted to thank you.

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That happens often, often. So many stories could be shared, but you've seen some of these stories tonight.

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Man, if that doesn't move you to give to this ministry, I do not know what will. Some of you can't stand outside the abortion mill.

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Providentially, you're hindered. Maybe it's work, maybe it's health, maybe it's age, those sorts of things. It's okay. If you need to be there, you need to be there.

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If you're questioning, like, can I? I think you need to trust the Lord, and if you feel compelled, the Lord's leading you, then you need to go.

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Some of you are providentially hindered. It's okay. You know what you can do. You can pay for it. Is that wrong to suggest that?

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Sometimes you can't go out there with your hands and feet, but you can go out there, and you can fund all of this. These babies are alive today.

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The truth is, those babies are alive today because some Christians who love the

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Lord and are a part of this together with the body gave up for their lives.

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They gave up money, time, talent. They sacrificed so they could be alive today.

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That's the truth of these ministries. You know, this extends because believers were faithful to God.

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They went out there, preached the gospel. It led to us being challenged, so we went out, which led out to other churches being challenged like this to go out and to save lives.

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This is all to God's glory. It's all His work, and I want to say specifically what makes this unique. Please hear this.

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What makes this unique is that this is a work of the church. This is not a neutral, pro -life industry thing.

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This is the church of the living God going out to preach the truth to mothers and fathers, laying their lives down for others.

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Through the work of End Abortion Now, we've been able to offer free training, free resources, everything we could possibly give away to churches to go out and to do what we're doing, what we've been doing.

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We've been able to raise up about 700 churches globally to do this specific work that are saving thousands and thousands of lives.

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But listen, I want to just say this as an extension. This isn't in any way to point you to EAN right now because the focus right now is on this team, but just to show you the fruit of faithful ministry.

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Because this is a work of the church and not a neutral, pro -life industry organization, we've been able this year, be encouraged by this.

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I never thought that I'd be a part of something like this. We've been able to this year, by May, have bills of abolition and criminalization go into four different states.

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Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina. I just got word we have two more.

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North Carolina and Pennsylvania. And these are not the result of a neutral, pro -life industry.

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The pro -life industry has actually been fighting against these bills, believe it or not. If you don't understand why that is,

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I encourage you to listen to some of our content. You can hear exactly why. But I want to encourage you with this.

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What's happening at the abortion mill saving lives is happening because the church is getting out there, sacrificing everything for the sake of these children, and they're saving lives through the truth of God's word and his gospel.

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What's happening at the legislatures now across the country is happening because Christians are bringing the word of God to legislators and saying,

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God commands you to establish justice. This is the image of God. You shall not murder.

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You must establish justice now, not later, right now. Make it a criminal act.

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Abolish it. The church is doing this, brothers and sisters. And I thought, you know, coming to something like this, we have so much content online.

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You can go listen to it. I encourage you to do so, to listen to the sermons, unpacking the biblical rationale for doing this sort of work.

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Of course, you go to Isaiah chapter 1. God tells his people that he rejects their worship. He doesn't even want it.

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He is wearied by it. It is a burden to him. The covenant people of God doing all the religious things, doing all the worship things, looking so very

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Christian. He says, I don't want any of your worship. Why? Because your hands are filled with blood.

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And he says, cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression.

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Bring justice to the fatherless. That's in Isaiah chapter 1. God says,

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I don't want your worship. Why? Because of your guilt and your sin and your blood -filled hands.

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And this is what you must do. Cease doing the evil. Correct the oppression and establish justice.

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Bring justice to the fatherless. And if you haven't caught it yet, all of these children being murdered through abortion are, by definition, fatherless children.

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Abandoned by their fathers in some degree. And God commands us as believers not to merely have an external shell of worship and religious experience, but to actually be concerned with justice.

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To do something about it. Correct it. By the way, in the famous passage, Isaiah 1 is the famous passage where it says,

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Come, let us reason together, says the Lord, though your sins are as scarlet as to be white as snow. Did you know that that particular famous verse for Christians about God's amazing forgiveness comes on the heels of that discussion of Him not wanting their worship because of their sin?

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And He tells them to establish justice, to correct oppression. We need to think comprehensively as Christians.

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And of course, again, I could bring you to all the texts that show you the biblical justification to do this work.

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The fact that we are commanded to do this work. To hold back those who are being led to the slaughter.

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God commands us as His people to do that. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

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These pre -born children are our neighbors. They're in God's image.

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And God commands us to stand in the way. And of course, it is only the gospel that's the power of God for salvation.

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So that must be at the very front of this movement. It's the gospel. It's the gospel. But again,

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I didn't want to do something that merely just explained all the biblical justification for doing this work.

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I think you probably already feel the weight of it. So I wanted to put flesh on this. And I'll finish with this story because it's powerful.

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And I never saw it coming. And it's the story of my adopted son, Augustine. He's a year and a half old now.

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And he's the most beautiful little boy I've ever seen in my entire life. He is glorious and amazing.

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And his story about getting to us is miraculous, actually. So it was actually during the last

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End Abortion Now conference. That's when all this happened for me. By the way, if you don't know this, one of the sad things about going to the abortion mill is when you go to the abortion mill, we thought that if you go to the abortion mill, you preach the gospel, and you say,

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I'll adopt your baby, we thought we were just going to have a church full of adopted babies. And by the way, we're still ready for that.

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The problem is that the heart is desperately sinful.

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And so we'll go to the abortion mill, and we'll say, Mom, we'll adopt your baby. Please don't murder your child. The mothers will turn around and say to us, and this is probably something you've experienced as well,

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I couldn't give my baby up for adoption. And then they'll go inside, and they'll murder their child. So we unfortunately don't have a lot of stories of adoptions outside the abortion mill.

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They do actually happen. But this particular week of our last End Abortion Now conference, we got word.

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It was really weird. We had three mothers come to Apologia Church, or word got to us about these mothers saying that they had babies in the womb at the moment and that they needed people to adopt these babies.

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Three separate mothers, three separate babies, and it all happened during the End Abortion Now conference. It was an extremely busy week for me because I have the conference.

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We're so busy. I'm a pastor of a church, and so so much is going on. I didn't really have a lot of time to think about it, but of course, take it seriously.

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Let's connect them to our church body, and let's get these babies adopted. Well, one of the babies that came to us, she had

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Down syndrome. And so my wife, we have four natural children, by the way, and two are grown.

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I've got three grandchildren. My wife said, well, maybe we're supposed to adopt one of these babies.

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How about this little girl with Down syndrome? And of course, I said, I'll do anything God says to do it.

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If we have to adopt this baby, let's adopt this baby. Let's do it. But we needed to ask our family, is this

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OK with you? Because having a child with Down syndrome is a commitment for the entire family. I can't just force this on everybody and say, you just do this.

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We need to make sure everybody is in this together and our hearts are knit together in this. What was really interesting was that my daughter, she has such a good heart.

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She's so amazing. If something wasn't sitting right with her, she's like, I don't know. I don't know about this one.

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I don't know. And so we said, OK, well, all right. Well, if that's where we're at, we'll just see what

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God does. Maybe another family in our church will adopt this little girl. And so this is where the story gets weird.

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So there was a little boy in one of the wombs of these mothers. And he had the worst stage of spina bifida on the spectrum.

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There's four different sort of stages or a spectrum. And the fourth is the worst. Well, what we learned was that through multiple ultrasounds and neurological exams in the womb and all these things, this little boy had the worst.

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On the worst side of the spectrum, he had the best case of the worst scenario. He was in that stage four over there.

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It's the kind of case of spina bifida where you could be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.

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You could have severe neurological issues. You could be essentially in a wheelchair not fully functioning for the rest of your life.

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Now, mind you, get this. This is where the story's weird. My wife had just said, Candy had just said, about three months prior to this, we were always open to adoption.

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We're like, yes, yes, and amen. My wife had suddenly shifted. About three months before this, she said,

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I think I'm good. I said, what do you mean? I mean, I'll adopt if God wants us to, but we have four beautiful children.

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We have three grandchildren. I think I'm just good with being a grandma and loving the kids we have.

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I don't think we necessarily have to pursue that, but I think I'm happy. I'm content with where we're at.

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I said, well, that's different. Okay, all right, and now we get word that there's a little boy with the worst stage of spina bifida in one of the wombs of these mothers, and my wife comes to me and she says,

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I think that's our son. Now, mind you, I'm kind of busy at the moment, and I thought, okay, of course

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I'll do whatever God says, but babe, are you sure? I mean, are you sure?

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I thought you were content, and maybe there's another family in our church that this actually fits their family better.

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I'm a full -time pastor, and our ministries are busy. I manage multiple ministries. I'm traveling a lot to make sure we're raising up churches.

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Are you sure? And she's like, I think this is our son. And it was such a shock to me because I wasn't prepared for this overwhelming thing to just come right at you, and I had so much selfishness still in my heart.

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And so she reveals to me, by the way, we have to make a decision on him before next

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Thursday or he goes into the hands of the state. So now we're on a time crunch.

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We've got less than a week now to make a decision about this boy in the womb who has the worst case of spina bifida, and I have to preach in the morning at the conference.

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Now, what I didn't know, what I didn't know was that the next morning at the conference, my wife and a sister in Christ at our church named

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Desi decided to pray at the conference that I'm supposed to speak at.

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Lord, place a burden on the father of this child.

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Make it a burden that is inescapable. Make it an overwhelming burden on the father of this child so that we know who it is.

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And about halfway through Saturday, I'm getting ready to go preach. All of a sudden, I feel like my heart is in my gut.

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I feel like this weight on me that I can't shake.

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And I remember that Pastor Luke came to me and he said, hey, you ready to preach? You ready to go? Like, you know, rah, rah?

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You got this, Pastor Jeff? Good? And I said, no. He said, what's wrong?

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I said, I don't know. I don't know what's wrong. And he said, well, are you okay? I said, I have no idea.

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Pray for me. I have no idea what's wrong with me. And so then Pastor Zach comes a little longer and he says, hey, you ready to preach?

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Ready to go? I said, I don't know what's wrong with me. Pray for me. I feel overwhelmed right now.

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He's like, what's wrong? I said, I don't even know. Now, I didn't know that Desi and my wife had prayed this malicious prayer.

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So if you watch the sermon from there, you'll see, and Pastor James White, he's my fellow elder, he was watching it live, and he said,

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I was like, what's wrong with Jeff? I was like, I don't know. I start to preach the sermon for the

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End Abortion Now Conference, and if you watch it, I can't even speak. I'm just weeping, sobbing.

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Because I realized I was reading a text about Isaiah 1, and I'm trying to give it to the people of God about establish justice, bring justice to the fatherless, correct oppression.

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I'm reading this passage, trying to convince other Christians to do this work, all the while dealing with the hypocrisy in my own heart, that I am limiting what

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God is doing here, and I'm not actually ready to adopt a little boy with the worst case of spina bifida.

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So I'm so selfish. And so, that night, my wife says to me, what was wrong with you?

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I said, I don't know. And so I said, just pray with me.

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And so I actually left the house that night, went to a parking lot by myself, and I just prayed. God, I don't know what you're doing right now.

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I don't know what's wrong with me. And Lord, if it has anything to do with this little boy, God, here's what

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I need from you. Show me that I'm his father. Speak to me through your people that I'm his dad.

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It's me. Make your people tell me that it's me. And change my heart.

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And so, we go the next day to church. We had a gathering of families who were ready to adopt any of these babies, and we had a meeting with the families.

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Now, mind you, I'm still like, no, it's not me. I'm not his father. It's gotta be someone else.

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And so we have a meeting with all his families, and all his families are so wonderful. They're like, two of these moms had babies in their bellies they're about to give birth, and they're like, we'll adopt them.

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I'm like, you guys are nuts. And we had another family that already has a daughter with spina bifida.

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She has to get physical training and things every week to this day. They have multiple children.

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And so, Desi's there, and Desi says, yeah, our family could take one of these babies. We would, and here's how we could do it.

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Here's the pros. Here's the cons. And all of a sudden, she stops cold, and she looks over at me, and she says, but I think

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I have to tell you, I think this is your son. And so my heart just sinks, and I think, oh, is this

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God speaking? So that night, we leave church. Now, I'm telling you the truth before God.

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You can ask Him when we all get there. We leave church, and the only people in the car is me,

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Candy, and my two children in the car. We're going home from church. This is the only time this conversation took place.

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Nobody heard this conversation. We didn't tweet it. We didn't text it. It's just us.

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It's nighttime, about nine o 'clock at night. We're going home, and all of a sudden, the conversation starts happening.

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Now, mind you, my wife has prayed, Lord, if he's our son, change our daughter's heart immediately to take him.

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So she turns around to my daughter, and she says, how do you feel about adopting this little boy? And my daughter, who that very week was like,

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I don't know if I can handle, I don't know if this is, for us, with this little boy with the worst stage of spina bifida, my daughter says, oh yeah, let's do it.

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My wife looks over at me because she had prayed that prayer in front of me. Lord, change her heart completely. I look,

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I'm driving, and I'm like, you know. So we start to have a conversation in the car, and the conversation in the car is, well, what would we name him?

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And this is the first time I opened my mouth about it. I don't know where it came from.

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It just came up in my mind at that moment. I said, well, I would want to call him

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Augustine. And my wife says to me, well, you know, people would call him August.

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And I said, yeah, I like that. And then we kind of came to our senses, and we said, well, wait a second.

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We maybe shouldn't have this conversation right now because we're going to get emotionally attached. We haven't made a decision yet. Maybe we'll just stop.

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Let's stop. Let's stop having this conversation because we're not there yet. Let's just continue to pray. That's the only time that conversation took place, and I have never said that name out loud like that about I want my son to be called this.

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It never happened before. So we go to bed that night, Sunday night, and we pray that night.

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Lord, make it clear to us that I'm his father, and do it through your people.

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Make them tell us. The next morning, 8 a .m., I wake up to my wife creepily sitting on the bed next to me staring at me.

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She never does that. I wake up to her sitting on the edge of the bed looking at me.

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So I'm rubbing my eyes, and she said, you want me to share some stuff with you?

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I said, okay, and I'm like, you know, can I come in too? And she says, I've been receiving texts this morning from Christians that we didn't even know knew about this, and they start sending my wife texts saying, hey,

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I just needed you to know I was praying about this, and I felt like I had to tell you that he's your son.

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So she tells me that, and I'm like, oh, is this God speaking? And then

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Desi sends a text to Candy. This is the Desi who prayed the malicious prayer with my wife, and she sends a text at like 7 or 8 in the morning that says, hey, just so you guys know,

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I'm praying for you guys today and seeking the Lord together with you. We were all fasting together to see what the

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Lord was going to say, and she said, hey, by the way, she said, I was praying, and I think you should name him

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August. Now Candy tells me this as I'm just waking up, and my eyes fill with tears, and I almost lost it.

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So I decide to get up immediately, and I literally drove out to the desert, which isn't hard to do in Arizona.

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It's like five minutes away. I drove out to the desert, and I ended up there about two hours just praying, and it was another example.

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I guess I cry a lot because I'm just in the desert on my knees in the dirt, and I'm weeping.

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If anybody had seen me, they honestly would have probably thought I was a madman. It was the most amazing, intimate experience

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I've ever had with God in my life, where God just exposed my own selfishness and my inconsistencies, and it really brought me to a place of repentance.

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I was telling everybody, hey, you need to lay your lives down for these children. You need to give everything up for them, and here was an opportunity

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God's presenting to me where it's going to be the hardest of the hard, and are you willing to give everything up for this image bearer?

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It was really personal sin I was dealing with, and so I left that place repentant.

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Now, more miracles happened that day. I don't have time to tell you about now, but they would blow your mind.

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I get home. I tell my wife. I believe that it's us, and so we told the birth mom we'll adopt him, and about a month later, we had the appointment to be at the hospital

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December 13th, 2019. This was the day. Hear me on this.

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This was the day where they had to do a C -section to get him out of his mother because it's the worst stage of spina bifida, and the deal was it's about two to six weeks of surgeries, and the neurological team was on standby.

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The surgical team was on standby. Months of ultrasounds and all of the confirmation. I have the pictures of the hole in his spine and the ultrasounds.

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I have the diagnosis sheets. It is not maybe he has spina bifida. You can see it.

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It's confirmed. He has the worst case of spina bifida. It is bad. They said he's gonna have to have a brain shunt.

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It's two to six weeks of surgeries. You're gonna be at the hospital and you will not be able to touch him. They're gonna take him out and place him immediately on his belly because they can't burst the membrane on his back.

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They gotta take him to the NICU, the intensive care unit. He's gotta go to surgery. You can be there between two to six weeks.

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This was during Christmas. I don't know how you feel about Christmas, but I like it a lot. It's like our favorite time as a family.

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It was a difficult thing, but we're fully invested. So December 13th, the day of the

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C -section comes. Mind you, what's happened before this is we put the word out to Christians around the world.

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We're adopting a boy with spina bifida. It's about $30 ,000 for the adoption process. I put that video up at 7 p .m.

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at night. By 7 a .m., it was 100 % funded. God was in this from start to finish, and December 13th, we're going to the hospital expecting to only see this little boy through glass for two to six weeks.

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So we go to the hospital. C -section is about to happen, and there's a woman in the back with the birth mom named

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Tabitha. Tabitha's a Christian like you and I. She loves Jesus. If you met her on the street, you wouldn't know she's a

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Christian. Her story is absolutely incredible. God saved her out of lesbianism and a lesbian lifestyle for decades of her life.

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Turned her to Christ. She's a tattoo artist. She's all tatted up. You would not think she's a Christian, but she's a better Christian than most of us.

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She saved my son's life because the birth mom found out at five months that she was pregnant with August, and she made an appointment to kill him.

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She was addicted to drugs. I won't go into all the details, but she used the entire time of the pregnancy.

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Five months, she discovered she was pregnant with August, and she made an appointment to kill him. In God's providence, she ran into Tabitha, an old friend who loves

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Jesus. When she heard what the birth mom was about to go and do to kill

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August, Tabitha said, no, you're not. You are not murdering him.

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That's what she said. You're not murdering him. She says, you can live with me. I will pay all your expenses.

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I will feed you. You will have no cost. We're going to find a family, a Christian family, to adopt him.

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After that, she discovered when she went to the doctor after that that he had the worst case of spina bifida.

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So she then said to Tabitha, now I really have to do this. Nobody's going to want a little boy with spina bifida.

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Tabitha said, you will not murder him. God is going to find the parents of this boy,

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I promise. And so Tabitha was that Christian who stopped him from being murdered at an abortion mill.

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Now December 13th, Tabitha's back in the operating room with the birth mom.

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Candy and I are waiting and Candy says, well we have some time. Do you want to get some coffee? I said, sure.

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And so we go to get some coffee and as we're leaving, this was amazing, as we're leaving, Candy says to me, babe, are you ready?

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I said, ready for what? She said, this could be much worse than any of us think.

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Are you ready for this? And I said, babe, I already know he's my son. I'm ready for everything.

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I don't care how bad it is. He's ours. I said, but are you ready?

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She was like, what do you mean, am I ready? I said, are you ready for God to heal him?

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Now listen, by the way, don't think I'm super spiritual. I don't know where that came from. I don't.

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Because of course I want to trust God for healing, but I don't know where that came from. Because we were ready for the worst.

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He's being taken out of the body right now and I said, are you ready for God to heal him? And she said, the natural

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Christian response, of course I'm ready. God can do whatever he wants, right? And so we end up going to the hospital and we're texting

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Tabitha, how are things going? Is everything okay? And Tabitha won't respond. And then

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Tabitha finally responds and says, are you guys ready? I'll come get you. Tabitha comes out and she has this very solemn look on her face.

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She looked horrible. And Candy and I looked at each other, we thought to ourselves, it's worse than we thought.

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And Tabitha just says, come with me. And so Candy and I look at each other and we're just like holding hands.

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We're going to trust God, it's going to be okay. Let's go to the NICU. So Tabitha takes us through this long hallway and weirdly, we're not going to the

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NICU, which immediately struck me as, why aren't we going to the NICU? And she turns and now we're going into the post -op room with the birth mom.

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And I think to myself, we're not supposed to be going there. This is supposed to be awful. We're supposed to be going over there. And so she pulls us into the post -op room and I see his birth mother laying there with a nurse standing next to her.

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They're both looking at the door and Augustine is laying on her chest and it's not computing for me.

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I'm thinking to myself, why is this happening? We're supposed to be at the NICU looking through glass.

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Why is she holding him on her chest? This isn't supposed to be happening. And then all of a sudden, the memories are foggy, guys.

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All of a sudden, shouts erupted in the post -op room.

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And the nurse and everyone starts yelling, he's healed! So it's absolute chaos in the post -op room.

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The nurse is crying. The mom is crying. Tabitha's crying.

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I'm on my knees, bawling my eyes out. My wife, I think, was speaking in tongues.

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She's screaming and yelling. It was just chaos. And the nurse, she can't help herself.

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She takes August and she just rolls him into the thing and she's rolling off the thing and she keeps flipping him over to show us he's completely healed.

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There's nothing. His back is sealed up. He's the most beautiful thing God's ever made. And the doctors are astonished.

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They're literally in the hallway, out loud saying, this can't be explained. This is unexplainable.

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This can't be explained. The doctors were coming in for the next two days. They kept coming in to double check. They were like, is he really?

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And so they would come in. I have it on video. He comes in, he flips him over. He's like, yep, he's perfectly healthy. He said, do you have another baby in there?

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God healed Augustine. He is so awesome. He is beautiful and amazing.

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But I wanted to put flesh on this with that story of Augustine because Augustine was going to be killed twice by his mother.

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And it was a Christian who stood in the way and told the truth.

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She didn't pull any punches. She sacrificed everything. My son's alive today because a believer sacrificed her life, her money, her goods, her time to save my son's life.

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And she told the truth. These stories, this isn't, like I say, it's not theory.

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It's not conceptual only. This is real. This is flesh and blood. My son is the greatest gift in my life.

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And he's alive today because a believer sacrificed everything for his good and for his life.

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Like, look, we're always in life on a razor's edge, right?

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It's like one move to the left or to the right changes everything. If Tabitha wasn't there to stop her from that appointment to go kill him, if she didn't tell the truth, if she didn't give up her goods, if she didn't open her house, if she wasn't preaching the gospel,

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Augustine would be dead. And that's his name, Augustine. And every one of these babies being murdered every single day in our states and nations,

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God knows their names. But each and every one is as valuable before God as Augustine.

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Augustine was given mercy and grace. He was given something that, let's face it, so many of these babies every single day in our country are not given.

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And he was given it because a Christian gave up everything for him. This is real flesh and blood.

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These are real human beings. And I want to challenge you to not merely let this be a motivational speech or an emotionally charging story.

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I want to challenge you where you sit. Don't tell me that you believe that this is the image of God and that it's murder and not do anything about it.

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You have to. We're accountable. We know what they're doing.

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We know what this is. We know where it's taking place. You know, we're all part of the body.

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We all have different parts to play. Some of you are going to be out there standing on that sidewalk preaching the gospel, fighting for their lives there.

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And some of you guys are going to be at home praying for this team, spreading the word, telling the truth, standing up boldly for this where you're at and giving towards this work.

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You know, people oftentimes look at a ministry like, say,

52:15

Apologia and a ministry like Apologia gives birth to other ministries like this that change the world.

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You know, you might see a guy like me and say, oh, it's because of him. It's because of what he's doing. I don't,

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I honestly, I don't matter that much in the scheme of things. Trust me, that's not just an effort to be self -debasing.

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It's just the truth. God can speak through the mouth of an ass. That's a biblical word, by the way.

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Calm down. The truth is, you want to know something?

52:53

I haven't said this publicly before, but let me go ahead and say it. The entire reason our church exists and all the ministries exist that happen with Apologia, all these babies have been saved, do you know that there's about three people, you don't know their names, nobody ever will know their names.

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The only reason that these ministries exist is because of three silent

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Christians that funded Apologia from the very start when we were just a tiny church of drug addicts.

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Apologia Studios didn't come from me. It came from a Christian who had money as his gift to start these ministries.

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All the ministries that exist that you see through me that led to this one, they exist because of three

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Christians. You will never know their names. God does. None of this exists without them.

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They, in my mind, are the real heroes. And God will never neglect the reward for their faithfulness.