Chuck Foreman – Teaching Pastor

Loving God with all our mind is part of the greatest commandment (Mark 12:30). Solomon urges us to get wisdom at all costs. James tells us to ask God for wisdom. In a world where we are pressured to adopt the latest trend in public opinion, it’s easy to stop using our minds. But our society needs people who think clearly and can analyze the issues we face with wisdom. Perhaps more than at any other time, our society and our world needs us to Be Wise.

I’ve been thinking…about life…about when it begins…about our views of its sanctity, or not—and I’ve wondered, given our current views and accepted practices in dealing with unwanted pregnancies, what would the survival chances have been for a couple of key babies in history had they been conceived in this century?  Their mothers were…

…not supposed to be having children at their respective ages. One was an elderly woman way beyond her child bearing years. Her husband couldn’t, didn’t really want to believe his old wife was pregnant—so much so that he couldn’t even talk about it for her entire pregnancy. No doubt if this woman had become pregnant in our day, in our society, her doctors, fearing a myriad of probable birth defects, would have advised her to “alter the course of her pregnancy.” But had she done so, Elizabeth and her husband, Zechariah, would have aborted a baby boy who grew to become the greatest man ever born to a woman, according to his second cousin, another great man. They would have aborted John the Baptizer.

The other was a young woman, well, she was actually probably still a girl by any standard. She was a teenager and she wasn’t even married yet. Her community was very conservative and her pregnancy was considered an immoral embarrassment. Her name was Mary. Her baby boy changed the world. But if he had been conceived in our day, in our society, the odds of him ever even being born would not have been in his favor. We would likely have killed Jesus.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “But many did try to kill him, like Herod, or the Pharisees, but God protected him until it was his time.” But my point is not about what God did or would do. My point is about what we would do, or try to do. The very likelihood of any unborn human to have his/her life terminated by his/her own kind, describes the savage depths to which we have sunk as modern human beings. What are we thinking? Perhaps that is precisely the problem. We aren’t.