How to End the Greatest Massacre in History

It’s shocking to me that abortion is still an in-house debate in the church. In the abortion-saturated culture we live in, our moral compass fails to point true North. Our needle wiggles and wobbles back and forth, continually drawn to the magnetic pull of an ever-moving relativism.

This has inevitably led to the majority of us walking around in circles for more than 40 years while dark agendas and insidious plans have reshaped the nation around us. It’s time to become resolute on the most important and pressing matter facing this generation—abortion—and move decisively forward to see it end, to see adoption soar and to see human dignity restored as a primary national value and motivation.

We in the industry of life have been lulled into passivity by the industry of death for far too long, and this has brought with it a costly price. More than 55 million human lives have been lost and as many women and men left scarred and wounded. We have limited our discussions to the constraints of 1970s-era science and the red herring of hypothetical questions. When confronted with the most basic question of when life begins, we quietly shrugged our shoulders in insecurity.

Let’s answer this question decisively and put it behind us once and for all.

The Word Made Flesh

The Gospels that detail the virgin birth are thrilling, but I like how John starts the story. He echoes all the way back to Genesis with the opening words “In the beginning.” John tells a far more expansive story than the genealogy of Jesus. He picks up the language of Micah 5:2 and speaks of the one from ancient times.

Jesus, who pre-existed creation and authored it, now was about to insert Himself into it. The uncreated God was about to become human.

When precisely was that? This is an important point for the church to clearly understand and grapple with because it will lead us to a confident, logical and theologically sound position on abortion in all of its varied forms.

John says the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. This is the Incarnation. Our Savior is both fully God and fully man with no compromise to either. He experienced everything common to us, and I don’t think gestation was excluded.

The church must come to grips with the fact that the Word did not put on flesh at the nativity. Furthermore, it wasn’t at some indeterminate “stage of viability.” The Word was made flesh at the moment of conception, and the angel Gabriel showed up to declare it so. To believe anything else is to deny Jesus His humanity, which in effect would deny us a savior.

Have you ever thought about zygote Jesus? It melts the brain to try to comprehend God as a full-grown, 33-year-old man, much less contained in a clump of cells. Is the latter more difficult to accept than the former, though? This mystery of the ages is both baffling to the human mind and glorious to the human soul. We may not be able to fully understand it, but we can accept it and apply it. Life begins at conception—period. The most cutting-edge genetic science confirms this, and that fact is already being recognized in our courts.

Our Weighted Scales

In 2013, upon the 40-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I had a pivotal encounter in which God showed me scales used for weighing—the same kind used to represent justice. However, this image of scales was accompanied with intense emotion from the Lord because the weights on the scales were messed up.

Then the Lord drew my attention to Proverbs 11:1: “Dishonest scales are an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.” The Lord gave me the understanding that I was seeing our national weights—and that they have been tampered with. Roe v. Wade represents a distortion of our scales, and we have been left incapable of accurately weighing the value of human life.

I had never before seen abortion from this perspective. From a gut level, I understood God was done with the injustice of abortion, and that reality seriously impacted my heart.

Listening to History

To move forward on this issue, we must learn from history when human life has been devalued in other ages—and on that score, the injustice of abortion parallels that of slavery on almost every level.

What did the giants of the Christian faith come to understand when faced with that great injustice in their day?

Revivalist John Wesley’s final letter before he died, written to young parliamentarian William Wilberforce, the Amazing Grace hero, urged Wilberforce to go on in the strength of the Lord to end slavery not just in England, but also its most vile form in America.

In Thoughts Upon Slavery, Wesley warned of impending divine judgment because of slavery. “O think betimes!” he wrote, urging 18th-century society to end slavery sooner rather than later because divine retribution was at hand.

Can we hear Wesley’s warning to us now about abortion?

Charles Finney, the central revivalist in America’s second great awakening, married the message of abolition with the tent revival. In his lecture “Hindrances to Revival,” he boldly declared revival would be withheld or severely limited should the church take a wrong standing on the slavery issue. He too spoke of God’s timing and condemned the church’s silence on the matter. He wrote that God would continually drag the monster of slavery out of its horrid den and demand the church’s response, driving her to a decision.

I believe God is doing the same thing with us right now in the matter of abortion.

Beloved, do we want revival or not?

I believe God has another great awakening in store for this generation. I also believe it is the divine mandate of this generation to end abortion.

We must confront our apathy on this issue. Let’s become resolute on this now—without further delay—and go forward together in prayer and action. Let’s make the gears of hell grind hard on abortion.

End abortion. Send revival.
Amen.

Matt Lockett is director of Justice House of Prayer D.C. (jhopdc.com) and Bound4LIFE (bound4life.com).

Watch Matt Lockett explain Bound4LIFE’s vision for ending abortion in minority groups targeted by abortionists at lockett.charismamag.com