How Does The World Really Change?

The Need for Both Evangelism and Cultural Change

So, overarchingly, I agree with the need to evangelize and the need for true, lasting change to come from people having renewed hearts and minds, putting their faith in Jesus. What I want to clarify, though, is the question of, is it not a both and?

So, an example is Hamilton, it's about 40 minutes from here. A bunch of people were showing the abortion pictures. A girl walked by, she had an abortion scheduled for two days later. Her boyfriend says, that's what we're doing.

She says, those pictures are so effective, I can't do that to my child. Now, we were able to walk with her for a while, I was able to take her to an ultrasound, we were able to offer help and hope and share so much with her.

She had her baby, and then she died from ODing. She never put her faith in Jesus, she never accepted any of the truth that we could share with her. But isn't the fact that we were able to rescue her baby from having her baby's head chopped off part of the gospel, and part of renewing culture and bringing his kingdom.

And even though she didn't submit herself to Christ, she obeyed one of his commandments of not killing people. And that's where I understand that I don't think if we banned abortion today, that it would stick very long.

People would just go and have illegal abortions anyways. And we do have to reach culture. But again, isn't it a both and? Shouldn't we also be trying to convince people not to kill their children? Whether or not they love Jesus.

The Peripheral Benefits of Obedience to God

So there's gonna be peripheral benefits to obeying God, honoring God, glorifying God and culture and society. And what we have to do as Christians is propagate and communicate the gospel in such a way and the Lordship of Jesus Christ and God's law in such a way that those residual benefits begin to bless society and culture around us, cause fruit and stuff to grow outside of that.

And I would say, thank God that he strikes straight blows with crooked sticks. Because God strikes straight blows with crooked sticks, doesn't mean we ought to go looking around for crooked sticks to hit people with, right?

We should have consistency and maintain consistency as Christians around the Christian message, the gospel itself, and praise God for every single baby the pro-life movement has saved inconsistently.

But it's those inconsistencies, please listen, it's those inconsistencies that are preserving the failure of the pro-life movement. So what we ought to say is praise God for every baby saved through their inconsistencies.

But I don't believe that we need to be arguing as pro-lifers in legislation that you can kill the baby whose head is this far out, but not this far. That's an inconsistency that is maintaining the failure of the pro-life movement.

What we ought to say is praise God for every baby saved through the inconsistency. Praise God for every image bearer of God who sees that dead baby on the sign and turns away from the abortion mill. Praise God, praise God, praise God.

The Goal Is to Win the World to Christ

But ultimately, my goal is not just to stop abortion in a nation, my goal is to win this world to Christ. That's the ultimate goal. So yes and amen to every baby saved inconsistently, but we need to make sure we fight against those inconsistencies because our goal is to win the world.

Amen.

Thank you, Jeff.

Yep.