As I mentioned earlier, I read John Piper’s, “Brothers, we are NOT Professionals” every January. Today’s reading is, “Brothers, Blow the Trumpet for the Unborn.” Piper closes this chapter by suggesting five things pastors should call their local churches to do in regards to standing for life and against abortion:
First, submit yourselves to God. Draw near to Him. Live by the power of His grace. Let Him shape your desires rather than the world and the feisty, self-centered temperament of our culture. Let your life and your mouth bear witness to the real delights of knowing and trusting and obeying and being shaped and guided by the Creator of all things who loved us and gave Himself for us. Be a Christian – and a visible and audible one. The world needs you so badly. Second, pray earnestly and regularly for awakening in the churches that will spill over in citywide and nationwide and worldwide evangelization of the lost and reformation of the life of the church. Third, use your imagination to see what abortion really is! Fight against the kind of social stupor that gripped Nazi Germany, the feeling that the problem is so huge and so horrendous and so out of our control that it just can’t be wrong. Use your imagination to see and feel what is really happening behind those sterile clinic doors. The children will not be saved, and God’s work will not be reverenced without an act of sustained sympathetic imagination. Otherwise it is out of sight and out of mind – just like Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Auschwitz. It just couldn’t be happening. And so we act as if it isn’t…Fourth, support alternatives to abortion with your money and time and prayers. Find out about concrete opportunities that are available in our region for all kinds of involvment. Even better, create new pro-life ministries. Let’s be a church of dreamers and entrpreneurs for justice. Finally, use your democratic privileges of free speech and representation and demonstration to press for legal protection for the unborn…
I hope these five suggestions have moved you to think and act on behalf of the unborn. Submit yourself to God, pray earnestly, use your imagination to see what abortion really is, support alternatives to abortion with your money, time and prayers, and finally, use your democratic privileges to fight abortion.
