Pray to God for deliverance from the wicked. Pray for Godly laws without partiality. Pray for salvation of the wicked and revival of the church. Proclaim His glorious name and work to all ends of the Earth. He has by Himself purged our sins, He has saved to the uttermost those that should be saved, we must call upon Him in faith, pray to Him for help, and proclaim His glory to all ends of the earth. Prepare for God to give us the good desire of our heart.

Open your mouth for the speechless, in the cause of all who are appointed to die. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31:8-9 NKJV
Sunday, January 22, 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the legalization of abortion nationwide through the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since that terrible date, at least 70,000,000 babies in the United States, more than 18% of all children, have been murdered in the womb. While the CDC and pro-abortion groups show a decline in abortion over time, states including CA, NH, and MD do not report their numbers and abortions through the pill are not all reported (1). Through unreported methods and unreporting states, the number of abortions is almost certainly much higher than the CDC data indicates.
If the U.S. data were not tragic enough, the worldwide practice of abortion paints an even darker picture. Pro-death Guttmacher.org reports that 73,000,000 abortions take place worldwide every year. That number equates to approximately 40% of all children being murdered before they reach birth.
On June 24, 2022 the Supreme Court in a landmark decision overturned Roe vs. Wade in this manner – they turned the question of abortion back to the states. While many Christians and pro-life groups celebrated the outcome, the way the order was written evidenced just how far our country has abandoned any type of Biblical worldview it may have had when it was founded. The court deliberately refused to recognize the baby in the womb as a person protected by God and/or the Constitution.
The 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says the following:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…
The Supreme Court ignored the 5th amendment and refused to say the little child in the womb of his mother at any stage, let alone conception/fertilization where God creates life, is a person protected by the 5th amendment. (The full Supreme Court opinion can be read here.)
Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.
The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” (page 1; page 14)
Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion perhaps summarized the “conservative” court justices when he wrote:
Abortion is a profoundly difficult and contentious issue because it presents an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of a pregnant woman who seeks an abortion and the interests in protecting fetal life… On the question of abortion, the Constitution is therefore neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral and leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress – like the numerous other difficult questions of American social and economic policy that the Constitution does not address. (Page 124)
When it comes to crimes and great evils such as murder, the interests of the criminal and murderer are always (or almost always) in conflict with the victim(s) of the crime. Conflict between the perpetrator of evil and the victim is the very nature of crime. It is because of this conflict that there are laws with governments and police to protect potential victims when this conflict is acted upon by the criminal. Rather than reiterate the right of the baby in the womb to due process of the law before being executed by his mother, father, and their doctor (so called), one of the most conservative justices defended the evil of abortion by acting as if the constitution was neutral regarding the taking of an innocent child’s life and life in general.
The whole scope of the Constitution, highlighted in the 5th amendment is exactly the opposite – it is entirely concerned about life, so much so, that it is written to protect our freedoms while we live. Under such an argument as Kavanaugh’s there would seemingly be no reason states could not vote to allow abortion proponents, under the euphemism of reproductive rights, to have a conflict with Bible believing Christians, and simply eradicate them by majority vote.
The effect of the so-called Supreme Court victory, is that 2-6% fewer surgical abortions are taking place. However, that estimate includes Texas with nearly a 99% decline in abortion while it does not include the abortion tourism states of CA and MD. It is likely the real change post June 24, 2022 is no decline or even an increase as widespread publicity has been put on the issue. With victories like that, what would a loss look like?
Georgia
In my home state of Georgia, the law recognizes an unborn child in the following way:
A member of the species homo sapiens at any stage of development who is carried in the womb. A person commits the offense of feticide if he or she willfully and without legal justification causes the death of an unborn child by any injury to the mother of such child, which would be murder if it resulted in the death of such mother, or if he or she when in the commission of a felony, causes the death of an unborn child. A person convicted of the offense of feticide shall be punished by imprisonment for life.” § 16-5-80. Feticide; Voluntary Manslaughter of an Unborn Child
This seems like a godly law. Until this point it is. Unborn child murder is feticide. To kill any child at any stage in the womb from fertilization to birth will be treated as if a full grown adult were murdered. But the law does not stop there. It continues in section “f”.
Nothing in this Code section shall be construed to permit the prosecution of: 1) Any person for conduct relating to an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman, or person authorized by law to act on her behalf, has been obtained or for which such consent is implied by law; 2) any person for any medical treatment of the pregnant woman or her unborn child; or 3) any woman with respect to her unborn child. § 16-5-80. Feticide; Voluntary Manslaughter of an Unborn Child
The law we celebrate as equal for all and upon all is not equal for unborn children. It discriminates against the youngest members of society. It is partial and unjust. Everyone who kills an unborn child is guilty of feticide except the mother and her doctor. Similar logic was used to justify slavery in generations past. The letter of the law condemns murder and gets around it for abortion by stating that fathers, mothers, and doctors (so-called) will not be prosecuted for child murder.
The Lord has much to say about partiality of the law:
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe. He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. Therefore love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Deuteronomy 10:17-19 NKJV
Diverse weights and diverse measures, they are both alike, an abomination to the Lord. Proverbs 20:10 NKJV
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The PCA is not rotten, not given over to unbelief. But the denomination, now almost 50 years old, has serious problems. And many within the PCA don’t want to wait until it’s too late, and so they consider their options. 

It is no secret that the Presbyterian Church in America is in turmoil. No one denies the existence of conflict and consternation. Though some consider the strife to be unjustified, even they do not believe the strife will soon cease or be easily resolved.
Let’s cut to the chase and say the quiet part out loud: There may come a time when the Presbyterian Church in America needs to split. But until that time comes it should not splinter.
Let’s consider the conflict, which is not altogether new and which has no single source. Presbyters with a historical bent may point to the diversity present in the PCA’s founding generation in 1973 and the decade that followed—a mixed multitude of seriously confessional Presbyterians, broad evangelicals, half-recovered quasi-Baptists, ill-taught presbyterian traditionalists, cultural conservatives troubled by the tumultuous 1960s, and Lost Cause Southerners. With such diversity of conviction, understanding, and affinity, is the current conflict any surprise? Having run this taxonomy by a diverse group of PCA folk, I am prepared to assert that the categories are largely correct; only the percentage distribution is in question.
Of course, the distinctions were (and are) not neat and tidy… there was a mixture within the mixture. And it’s impossible to understand and quantify individual Presbyterians who may not even have understood themselves. Nevertheless, many who love the PCA have spent a lot of time trying to describe the PCA in the interest of understanding, improving and preserving the denomination.
Retired pastor Tim Keller of Big Apple fame took a well-researched and thoughtful stab at explanatory categorization in 2010. Keller admitted at the outset that “This ‘big tent’ approach… sets the PCA up for conflict.” He largely employed and approved of church historian George Marsden’s “doctrinalist, pietistic and culturalist” breakdown. [1] Keller’s prescription for unity was maintaining a symbiotic balance between the three camps or “impulses”:
“The main way we could actually forge greater unity between ourselves is by letting some of the other branches’ emphases and strengths color, flavor, and affect our own approaches to doing ministry.”
Keller penned his diagnostic in 2010, the year the contentious and quietly revolutionary Strategic Plan was approved by the PCA General Assembly. The plan had been years in the making and before some of its more controversial corners of verbiage were rounded off it called for theological “safe places” where edgy things could be discussed without fear and for “more seats at the table” for women, minorities, and internationals. This plan seemed to predict the PCA racial reconciliation and women-in-ministry reports and movements that came in the second decade of the 21st century. What the plan did not predict was a little parachurch conference and concept that rocked the PCA like nothing that had come before: Revoice and “Side B gay Christianity.” If balance between doctrinalists, pietists and culturalists was ever possible, the 2018 Revoice Conference (and its PCA connections) wrecked whatever near-equilibrium or peace that had been achieved.
It has been difficult for many ordinary PCA members and officers to understand why the Revoice/Side B movement has become a must-have or a must-tolerate issue for some in the PCA—mostly pastors of the “missional” or city church kind. According to the Keller-Marsden model, it could be that those who want to reach the culture of cities (often dominated by homosexual-friendly artists, politicians, and elites) see Revoice/Side B as not only helpful but essential. The doctrinalists find much in, well, the doctrine of the Bible and the Westminster Standards to make them wary of if not hostile to the innovations. The pietists love conversion stories and may even appreciate “new measures,” but many are still ambivalent about the propriety of same-sex-attracted officers in the PCA. Maybe it all seems a bit sudden, out of the blue. Or left field.
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The perpetual state of double-mindedness is at odds with the Christian faith. These are two different realms, so to speak, that never intersect. In short, double-mindedness is sin, and sin that needs to be put to death quickly, lest the genuineness of our faith is tested and found altogether absent. It is here that the intersect of faith and works comes into play. It is not that our works save us—but that a genuine faith will produce such works that prove that we are genuinely in Christ. 

It is interesting, to say the least, that the term for “double-minded” only appears twice in Scripture, and both within the letter of James. The first occurrence deals with those who are subjected to various trials (see James 1:2-8). The point of James in this section is to encourage the faint-hearted in recognizing the purpose of such trials. Trials are akin to the testing of the genuineness of one’s faith (v.2), but what such trials produce is endurance—that quality every true Christian must have to reach the finish line and inherit the glories to come. Endurance itself produces a Christian who is “…perfect and complete, lacking in nothing,” indicating that the result is a mature Christian who comports themselves under trials in such a way that they actually grow in their faith, rather than move backwards.

It is in light of these trials that James then makes the statement in vv. 5-8, “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. For that man ought not to expect that he will receive anything from the Lord, being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.” Thus, if one is lacking the wisdom to navigate through trials, he is to simply ask the Lord with a heart of submission and faith. The doubter, as James calls him, will receive no wisdom, but will remain as one who is continually at odds within himself.

The extent of this double-mindedness though is not in part, but in full. Note that James says he will be unstable in all his ways. In much the same way then, the portrait of the double-minded man that James gives us is a rather bleak one. The Greek term he uses to speak of this man’s instability is ἀκατάστατος, which speaks of a never-ending state of restlessness and turmoil. He is, in other words, the epitome of what it means to be confused in all his faculties.

In intent, motive, thought, desire, speech, and deed, and in both his character and feelings—he is always hovering between two worlds. The state of his soul is never at peace, and he never truly learns to trust in God and His promises. Like the Israelites of old who straddled the fence between worship of Baal and Yahweh, he continually wavers between two opinions. He is quite literally unable to make up his mind between what is good and true, and what is evil and false. In short, his doubts render his faith nearly useless in the midst of his trials.

James is quite clear in what he is stating here: the man who is unstable in all of his ways will not come to find the wisdom which comes from above, which is “…first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy” (Ja. 3:8). His instability becomes a detriment to his maturity in the faith, yet ultimately, produces one who will fail under the tutelage of trials. In a very real sense, the implicit warning being given is that the double-minded man may just turn out to be the man who will not endure to the end.
This is particularly why James picks back up on this reality in v. 12 by saying, “Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial; for once he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.” It should be relatively clear to the reader to understand that if one is double-minded and unstable in all his ways, and he perpetually remains in such a state, there is cause for real concern over the state of his soul. If trials produce endurance, and endurance produces a mature Christian who perseveres to the end—one who lacks such qualities may indeed prove to be of the seed which falls on rocky ground who falls away when trouble and persecution comes, or the seed which becomes choked out by the thorns of the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth (Matt. 13:20-21).

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