“But we are bound to give thanks alway
to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the
beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and
belief of the truth: Whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of
the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” -2 Thessalonians 2: 13-14
When my daughter was 8 weeks old, I watched as her tiny heart
beat on the screen of that ultrasound machine for the first time. The first sign of life. A heartbeat.
As I watched, I realized that this new life was not something I owned, it
was not something that my wife owned; it was life that God owned. It was a gift from Him to us. He saw her before she was formed, he has chosen
her to salvation through sanctification
of the Spirit and belief of the truth; just like he has chosen you.
In the 1983 Templeton Address Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave the profound
speech “Men Have Forgotten God.” In this
he said: “The West has yet to experience
a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical
evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of
religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious
wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late
Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping
of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more
dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.” His words were true then, as much as they
were prophetic. The American culture we know
is reflective of the selfsame Roman culture that Paul wrote too. A people that worship and served the creature more than the creator. The “pursuit of happiness” has been perverted
into a pursuit of indulgence; a campaign of humanism that fights for the loudest
megaphone, so we can exalt ourselves and forget God. It has taken us off the narrow way, and into
the dark and depraved of path of idolatry.
Now, generations of Americans are being told that we are the lords of
our lives, and those whose lives are under are care. Even the innocent child and unborn baby are
offered up as sacrifices to our idolatry.
The desire to maintain this power, this lordship, has led us to depths
of sinfulness that would horrify those who have gone before us. We have
forgotten that God is “above all, through
all, and in you all.” That he is
Almighty. He is in control and he reigns and rules over all the universe;
how much more mortal man. We do not
possess our lives, nor the lives of those in our care; it is a gift. We do not play God, we do not get to decide
who lives or dies. My little girls’
heartbeat was not mine to take, nor my wife’s; it was given by God, it is God’s. A God who is merciful, loving, a God who made
her, saw her in her mother’s womb, and gave His Son to die for her sins so that
she could be saved and brought into full fellowship with Him. This is every man’s blood bought destiny
should they choose it. The Hebrew writer
ask’s “how shall we escape if we neglect
so great a salvation?” A salvation
that is built on yielding, on sacrifice, on surrender. If we destroy the innocent to advance our own
agenda, what chance do those who live on have?
What are we saying to our children when the lives of those who would
soon to be children are aborted for our own gain? Are the fires of Molech once again kindled in
the abortion clinics? The altars of Baal
built on the laws of our very own country?
Who are we to be so careless with a life that is not ours? These are but aftershock to the earthquake of
sinful carnality that registers in the human heart. Therefore, now more than ever the time has
come for the Christian to weep. To
fast. To pray. Not only for the loss of the unborn, but for
those that remain. For those who are
lost, broken, hurt, and led to believe that there is no God; or that they are
God.
God in heaven desires a relationship with you. Jesus Christ desires a relationship with
you. He wants to give you life, and life
eternal. He wants to bring you out of
sin and into sanctification. The fire of
Molech only takes, the fire of God gives.
God can change the heart, save the heart, and the little heartbeats.
