If I were in your shoes, and a new preacher comes to town and presumes to stand in this sacred place where the word of God has been so faithfully proclaimed by your pastor, I would want to know: Who are you?

Not your name. Not your address. Not your job. Not your education. But what do you stand for? What are you committed to? What’s your standard of truth? What’s your authority? What’s your aim in coming here? So let me begin with three statements about my commitments so that you can decide whether you want to lean in or not.

First, I come with a total allegiance and submission to the Bible — the Christian Scriptures — as our only infallible authority. This means I come to you with no authority except what I am able to see in the Scriptures, to savor in my own soul, and to show in the power of the Holy Spirit for your upbuilding. If you don’t see what I say in the Bible, don’t believe it just because I say it.

Second, my life mission statement is this: “I exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ” — which means I’m not in Oklahoma City and in this church willy-nilly, or aimlessly, or to tickle anybody’s ears. I am here on a mission. My aim in this message is to speak God’s word to you in the hope and the prayer that your passion for the supremacy of God in every area of your life will soar, with joy, through Jesus Christ.

Third, I am driven by a particular truth that became clear to me from Scripture about fifty-four years ago, when I was 22 years old. That truth has a profound and pervasive effect upon the way I think and feel about the glory of God and the joy of the human soul. That truth is this: God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him, especially through your suffering in the path of love.

In other words, when you experience the living God himself — not his precious gifts, but God himself — through his Son, Jesus Christ, as so satisfying to your soul that no suffering in your life can rob you of that satisfaction in God, you make him look great. And he is. I call that kind of joy “serious joy.” You can hear what I mean by “serious joy” in Paul’s phrase in 2 Corinthians 6:10: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”

So I invite you to look with me in the Scriptures at Hebrews 12:1–2, and what I hope to show is that this kind of joy is the spring of love — and I mean love for people, especially the kind of love that is very costly. The question I am trying to answer is: How can I (and how can you) be set free from selfishness so that, at any cost to myself, I will love other people in a way that makes Christ look great?

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

We’re not going to focus on everything in this text, but rather almost entirely on the words in verse two: “for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross.” But let’s at least get these words situated in the flow of thought so they don’t dangle in isolation.

The Life of Faith Is a Marathon

Chapter 11 celebrates the faith of Old Testament saints who, though they are dead, continue to speak (Hebrews 11:4); that is, their lives remain a living witness to us about the value of living by faith. So you can see at the beginning of the next chapter, in Hebrews 12:1, how the writer pictures us as running our own race with the lives of these saints, as it were, crying out to us, “You can do this! You can make it to the end! We finished our race in faith. You can finish yours. Don’t quit!”

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [all those witnessing stories from chapter 11], let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us . . .

In other words, life is a marathon. It’s not a 100-meter dash. It is long, and there are hills that make your muscles burn to the point where they are screaming at you, “You can’t finish this!” And all these witnesses are saying, “Yes, you can.” There may be hills and sleet and wind in your face, but the book of Hebrews was written to help us finish in faith and love.

What Helps Me Run Well?

Hebrews 12:1 also says, “Don’t run this marathon with an overcoat on, and don’t run this marathon with performance-enhancing drugs in your veins.” Do you see that in the middle of the verse? “. . . let us lay aside every weight, and sin . . .” We’re not stupid, and we don’t cheat. It’s stupid to wear an overcoat, and it’s cheating to use drugs — weights and sins.

I tried to raise four sons and one daughter in the Lord, and I recall numerous times that they wanted to do something I disapproved of. So they would sometimes ask, “What’s wrong with it?” With this text in my mind, I would say, “With your music, your movies, your parties, and your habits, don’t just ask, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Ask instead, ‘Does it help me run the race? Does it help me run with all my focus and energy and love for Jesus? Does it help me be the best Christ-exalting marathon runner I can be?’”

Don’t set your sights on the minimal standard of avoiding cheating. Set your sights on the maximal standard: How can I be the most devoted, Christ-exalting runner possible, with every weight removed?

So the main point of this text is: Run! Get rid all the sins you can. Get rid of all the weights and hindrances that you can. Take hold of the marathon of your life, and don’t just set the pitifully low standard of, “What’s against the rules?” But rather: “How can I train, and eat, and think, and dress to be the best runner possible? How can I live my life and finish my course with maximal, Christ-exalting faith?”

He Who Already Finished

Hebrews 12:2 now gives us perhaps the deepest answer to that question. You are going to face the hills, and cold, and wind, and the burning in your legs, and the thundering of your heart, and the thoughts of hopelessness about finishing — and you are going to face them like this:

. . . looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

You are going to look to Jesus as you run. And what you are going to focus on, as you look to him, is this: He too ran. His race was thirty-three years long. And it ended with a horrific gauntlet of opposition and suffering — namely, the unspeakable torture of the cross and the immeasurable shame of such a death. He ran it. He finished it.

Fueled by Joy

How did he do it? Mark the words in the middle of the second verse: “. . . for the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross, despising the shame . . .” And surely you will agree that the marathon Jesus ran was a marathon of love. The last few hours of that marathon, which he ran with nails in his hands and his feet, with a spear in his side, a crown of thorns on his head, were the greatest act of love that has ever been performed in the history of the world, because he was dying for our sins, not his own.

My question for my life — and your life — is: How can I run like this? How can I be set free from my selfishness so that, at any cost to myself, I will love other people in a way that makes this Christ look great? And the central answer of this verse is: the greatest act of love that was ever performed was performed “for the joy that was set before him.”

Hebrews 12:2 teaches us that Jesus was sustained through the cross and through the shame by the joy that he anticipated at the end of his marathon. That does not mean that there is no powerful sustaining experience of joy now, during the marathon itself.

And I say that because the book of Hebrews defines faith, by which we run the marathon, like this: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1). This means that the full, complete, all-satisfying, everlasting joy in God that we are hoping for at the end of our marathon becomes, in some measure, an experience right now. It happens by faith in the midst of our “cross,” in the midst of our “shame” — our marathon. That’s why it has such selfishness-killing, cross-bearing, shame-enduring power.

Glad to Sacrifice

What if someone says, “Doesn’t that turn the love of Christ at the cross into selfishness? If he was just seeking his own joy at the end of the race, was he loving us?” The answer is this: in being sustained through the cross by the joy at the end of his race, he’s not being selfish because selfishness is using other people to get your own happiness without any regard to theirs.

“Jesus didn’t pursue happiness at the expense of other people. He pursued happiness through dying for other people.”

But nobody calls it “selfishness” when you’re willing to die to include other people in your happiness. This joy, that Jesus hoped for and tasted and was sustained by at the end of his marathon, was precisely designed to be shared by everyone for whom he died. He didn’t pursue his happiness at the expense of other people. He pursued his happiness through dying for other people — to include them in it.

For you and me this means that in all the sufferings of our marathon, it is not selfish but loving to be sustained by the hope of everlasting joy in God, into which we are bringing as many people as we can. That’s what the marathon is for — joy in Christ, sustaining you through the sacrifices of love, making Christ look so satisfying that others want to go with you.

Every Christian’s Sustenance

Let’s ask this question: If this joy set before us — this spring, overflowing from the future back into the present — is so powerful in producing and supporting the sacrifices of love, and if this is not only the way Jesus was sustained in the greatest act of love, but the way we should be sustained in our acts of love, are there examples elsewhere in the book of Hebrews that would show us what this experience is like?

Yes, there are. I’ll show you two.

Christ, Our Abiding Joy

First, consider Hebrews 10:32–34. Listen for echoes of Hebrews 12:2: “for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross.”

Recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

Oklahoma City, where you live, and Minneapolis, where I live, need to see Christians like this more than anything. Some of them had been thrown into prison. The others had to decide whether to identify with them and risk the plundering of their property as fellow Christians or to go underground and save their own skin. Compassion — that is, sacrificial love (which corresponds here to Jesus’s cross and shame) — conquered fear, and they had compassion on those who were in prison.

How did that happen? How did they become people like that? How did they overcome their selfishness, their love for comfort and security? The answer is that joy streamed hope from the future back into the present and sustained and empowered them for love. Let’s read it in Hebrews 10:34:

For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property [How? Where did that costly compassion come from? The last part of the verse gives us the answer.], since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

“If this world is your treasure, you will not be able to love in a way that makes Christ look great.”

This was the joy that was set before them. They might lose their reputation. They might lose their houses. They might lose their positions. They might lose their lives. But those were not the spring of their joy. That was with Christ, in the future, streaming back into the present, by faith, making love possible.

If this world is your treasure, rather than the immeasurable pleasures of being with Christ forever, you will not be able to love in a way that makes Christ look great. But if Christ is the all-satisfying joy set before you, you will.

Christ, Our Future Reward

Here’s the second example, Hebrews 11:24–26 — a description of how Moses was able to choose the hard path of loving the people of Israel rather than staying in the comforts of Pharaoh’s palace.

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God [like Jesus chose the cross] than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. [There are sinful pleasures, but they’re not the ones we’re after because they are too short. They only last eighty years or so.] He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.

“Hoped-for joy in Christ sustains sacrifices of love that make Christ look so satisfying, others want to run with us.”

This was the joy set before him. More precious, more satisfying than all the treasures of Egypt was the reward of finishing his marathon with Israel through the wilderness — through the cross, the shame — and joining all those Old Testament witnesses in the presence of the Messiah.

Go Deep with Jesus

My conclusion from Hebrews 12, and 10, and 11, is that the meaning of the Christian life — our marathon — is hoped-for joy in Christ, streaming back into the present by faith, sustaining sacrifices of love that make Christ look so satisfying that others want to run with us.

And my concluding plea is: Get to know Jesus Christ. Go deep with Jesus until he is the supreme Treasure of your life and the all-satisfying joy set before you at the end of your marathon.

Go deep with the vastness of his wisdom, far greater than Solomon’s.
Go deep with the greatness of his power, upholding the universe with his word.
Go deep with his majesty, which is this very day above all governments and armies.
Go deep with the tenderness of his kindness, blessing children and everyone like them.
Go deep with the uniqueness of his words, for no one ever spoke like this man.
Go deep with the length of his patience, perfect toward all penitent sinners.
Go deep with the suffering of his love, even for enemies.
Go deep with his mercy, touching lepers, putting ears back on attacking soldiers.

Get to know him until he is the joy set before you at the end of your marathon. If he becomes that for you, three things will happen. (1) Your joy, even in the sufferings of this life, will overflow. (2) That joy will sustain a life of sacrificial love for others. (3) That joy-sustained love will make Jesus look like the all-satisfying Savior that he is.

Do you want to know an inside secret about sermons? You may have noticed it already. If you haven’t, you probably will from now on. Here’s the secret: Preachers often like to begin with an image, story, word, phrase, or Bible passage, and then return to it at the end of the sermon. Those bookends emphasize the preacher’s point, pushing it deeper into the hearts and minds of a congregation.

The biblical authors understood this. King David begins Psalm 103 with an exhortation to himself: “Bless the Lord, O my soul” (Psalm 103:1). He ends the psalm in exactly the same way: “Bless the Lord, O my soul!” (Psalm 103:22). This bracketing (the technical term is inclusion) underscores the point of the whole psalm. David urges his own soul to praise the Lord. Everything in between provides reasons for praising the Lord, as well as exhortations for all of heaven and earth to join in praise.

If the borders of a psalm may point toward its main emphasis, what about the beginning and end of the Bible as a whole? When we examine the bookends of Scripture, what do we find?

The End from the Beginning

Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God . . .” Before anything else existed — sunsets, seaweed, giraffes, algebra, lightning, tomatoes, laughter, supernovas, bubblegum, coffee — there was only the triune God, eternally happy within his triune self. Everything and everyone else came later.

At the other end of the canon, the close of Revelation describes an eternal future in which “the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3). Notice three truths about these bookends. First, God bestrides the Bible, vibrantly present at both the beginning and end. He’s the Alpha and Omega of the Scriptures, the first and the last. He never began to exist, nor will he ever cease to do so. He is absolute, unchanging reality. Of no one and nothing else is this true. Only God is present at both the beginning and end of the Bible.

Second, something important has changed from Genesis 1 to Revelation 21. At the very beginning of the Bible, God exists within the happy community of himself. At the very end of the Bible, he dwells with his people in a new creation. Where did those people and that place come from? God himself created and redeemed both the people and the place.

“The cry of God’s people is always for more of God.”

Third, it turns out that the story doesn’t end when the Bible does. It goes on and on and on, for eternity. The Bible’s penultimate verse is a cry from the heart: “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:20), which means that the Scriptures conclude on tiptoe, yearning toward a deeper, fuller, richer experience of the presence of Christ. God’s story is an eternal one. The cry of God’s people is always for more of God.

Story Beneath Every Story

The implication of all this is that the Bible is not ultimately our story but God’s. God himself is the main character — and also the author who dictates the action. The Bible tells primarily of God’s works, ways, and words.

Yes, there are lots of secondary characters and interesting subplots. We learn about the material creation, including the abundance and variety of plant and animal life that fills the world. We read fascinating accounts of Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Nehemiah, Peter, Paul, and hundreds of others, who make big mistakes and accomplish great things. The Bible bursts with stories of human frailty, rebellion, intrigue, love, courage, and tragedy. But none of those stories is the main one. None of those characters is the hero.

The overarching story line of the Bible is the story of God — the only one present at both the beginning and the end. Everyone (and everything) else is there in the story as an invited guest, beyond their deserving. All the complexities of human existence, and the vast lifespans of galaxies, exist within the eternal story of God.

Overlooking the Lead Role

It may seem blindingly obvious to claim that the Bible is mainly the story of God, but how easy it is to miss. Years ago, a famous Bible scholar wrote an article called “The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology.” In it, he argued that God himself was the neglected factor! God’s presence was so often assumed by those committed to studying the Scriptures with care and rigor that it was largely overlooked. Yes, this actually happens.

On a more everyday level, many of us could honestly admit that we commonly place ourselves at the center of the stories we inhabit. When we grant God a place (all too often we forget him entirely), it’s to notice how he fits in around our own story. We may be mystified or angry or sad that he hasn’t intervened more frequently. Or we may be genuinely grateful for what he’s done. But at the deepest level, we’ve flipped the script: God inhabits our stories, rather than the other way around. Maybe God-centeredness isn’t so obvious as we thought.

Our tendency to minimize and marginalize God is sometimes evident in our approach to the great Bible bookends of Genesis and Revelation. Both are battlegrounds for fights about how and when exactly God created, as well as the timetable of events for his return. These questions are not unimportant. But sadly, they’ve sometimes overshadowed God himself. Our fascination with how God has acted (or will act) has too often led to gross neglect of the central truth that he has acted at all — and what that says about him.

Even a brief look at Genesis and Revelation (which is all we have space for here) shows that these two great books tell the story of God.

At the Center of the Beginning

In Genesis, all things are from and for God. He’s the originator of all, and he’s the first enjoyer of all. He creates by speaking everything into existence. That means all else is derivative and has its source in him. Even as he creates, he observes and appreciates what he makes. Over and over, he sees that his creation is good (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25), even “very good” (1:31). We get the sense that he’s really enjoying this. All things are from him and for him.

Moreover, humankind, the pinnacle of this “very good” creation, exists to display his worth. God’s creation of men and women in his image, after his likeness (Genesis 1:26), suggests that their vocation is to image him forth to the rest of the world, serving as agents of his rule. His command to be “fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) demonstrates that their display of his worth isn’t meant to be merely local but rather global. And God is doggedly persistent in his project of blessing all mankind and displaying his worth everywhere. He doesn’t allow the rebellion of Adam and Eve to derail his project but persists in working with humanity. After the catastrophic judgment of the flood, he starts over with Noah’s family. Following the proud self-assertion of the nations (Genesis 11), he calls Abram to serve as a conduit of divine blessing for “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3).

Throughout Genesis, God is the sovereign planner, the persistent initiator, and the main actor. He’s the one who sends the flood, calls Abram, blesses Abram, renews his covenant promises to Isaac and Jacob, and sends Joseph ahead into Egypt to preserve his people (Genesis 45:7; 50:20). He writes the story and moves it forward at every step.

God is also the sweetest blessing, the ultimate treasure, of his people. After Adam and Eve’s rebellion, their greatest punishment is exile from God’s presence (Genesis 3:22–24). More precious even than the blessing of land and offspring is God’s promise to Abram “to be God to you and to your offspring after you” and his promise regarding Abram’s descendants that “I will be their God” (Genesis 17:7–8).

Genesis is a profoundly God-centered book. In it, all things are from, through, and to God.

At the Center of the End

The seven blessings scattered throughout Revelation (the first in 1:3 and the last in 22:14) show that the main purpose of this book is not to satisfy end-time curiosity or to solve apocalyptic puzzles, but to bring divine blessing to God’s suffering people. God means to give grace, as is evident in 1:4 (“Grace to you”) and 22:21 (“The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all”).

“God’s blessing is not a gift that is separable from himself. Rather, the blessing of God is God.”

Importantly, God’s blessing is not a gift that is separable from himself. Rather, the blessing of God is God. In the new creation, he will “dwell” with his people (Revelation 21:3), a promise that recalls his presence among Israel in the tabernacle. In fact, the description of the new Jerusalem as a perfect golden cube (Revelation 21:15–21) nods to the Most Holy Place in the temple, suggesting that in the new creation God’s people will enjoy his immediate presence, as only the high priest was permitted to do (and that only once a year).

In the new world, his people will see his face (Revelation 22:4), a staggering privilege not even Moses was permitted. The long and painful story of exile from God’s presence that began after Adam and Eve’s sin and banishment from the garden, and continued through Israel’s exile from the promised land, will finally end. God’s people will enjoy his perfect presence in the new creation and will never again be sent away.

Meanwhile, as God’s people await this promised future, Revelation steadies them by insisting that nothing happens by chance, but rather all things occur by God’s sovereign plan. The book is “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place” (Revelation 1:1). That key word must expresses divine necessity. The book ends with the reminder that “the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place” (Revelation 22:6). It must take place because God has willed it. His sovereign control brings steady comfort and strength in the present.

Revelation is radically God-centered. The sovereign God ordains the ways of the world. The glorious, triune God is the aim and treasure of his people. His throne is set in the midst of worshiping angels and humans (Revelation 4–5).

Joys of a God-Centered World

The God-centeredness of the Bible’s bookends suggests that the whole Bible is, in fact, focused on God and meant to tell his story. And this is very good news for us. When we live for ourselves, life doesn’t go well. But when we live for him, we’re living along the grain of the universe, as he designed things to function. We therefore experience true, deep, lasting joy. When John the Baptist heard that Jesus was growing in prominence, he said, “This joy of mine is now complete” (John 3:29). John was happiest serving as the spotlight operator, shining his light on the one true star of the show.

The biographer Arnold Dallimore records a story about Charles Spurgeon, in whose day streetlights were gas-lit. Each had to be lit individually. One night, Spurgeon observed a line of streetlights being lit that went right up a hill, from its foot to the summit. He later described that moment:

I did not see the lamplighter. I do not know his name, nor his age, nor his residence; but I saw the lights which he had kindled, and these remained when he himself had gone his way. As I rode along I thought to myself, “How earnestly do I wish that my life may be spent in lighting one soul after another with the sacred flame of eternal life! I would myself be as much as possible unseen while at my work, and would vanish into eternal brilliance above when my work is done.” (Spurgeon, 162)

Let’s allow our joy to swell as we live within the one great story of the one true God.

Thirty-five years ago, as I was pastoring a small church in Boston and seeing the temptations and struggles facing my people, I felt an urgent need to gather the church and openly address the topic of abortion. What is it? What in the Bible ought to inform our views? How should we respond? By God’s grace, the gathering proved exceedingly helpful.

Yet now, in this post-Roe era, addressing abortion in the context of the church seems more urgent than ever before. Indeed, I’m convinced pastoral leadership is one of the greatest needs in today’s pro-life movement. Let me explain why — and along the way, let me also commend a book that models such leadership remarkably well.

Back to the States

Instead of ending the battle decisively by affirming the equal rights of all people, born and unborn, the Dobbs decision turned the moral question of abortion back to the people for each state to decide. The Supreme Court could have — and in my view, should have — abolished abortion with the same logic and under the same amendment that abolished slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment declares that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” If the unborn are human, then they are persons, with God-given rights that cannot be justly denied or passively accepted when denied. It falls to us to “defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:9).

In our nation, however, the just powers of the government derive from the consent of the governed. The court most likely believed that by defining abortion as a moral question and turning it back to the states, they had gone as far as they could to maintain the “consent” of the governed.

Urgent Times

Of the seven states that have voted on the question already, all seven decided to expand abortion rights. Last fall, the citizens of Ohio voted overwhelmingly to amend the state constitution to secure abortion rights. In our form of government, that decision represents as permanent a loss for the cause of life as is possible.

Pro-life advocates like myself feel a sense of urgency — but abortion advocates do too. They have put unlimited abortion on the 2024 ballot in eleven more states. True, they have a few thousand pesky pro-life voices to contend with.

If there is one data point that highlights the urgent need for church leaders to address abortion, it is this: exit polls in Ohio showed that, among those who identified as believing that “life begins at conception,” 30 percent voted for the abortion-rights amendment. That kind of moral befuddlement exists when Christians are not clear on what they believe and how to live it out. Which brings me to the online book Abortion and the Church.

Exposing Works of Darkness

This book was written by a committee of pastors and elders of the Evangel Presbytery. I commend it to those looking to lead well on abortion for two main reasons.

First, the book’s explanation of medical issues (based on published research), along with the historical developments surrounding them, is exceptional. Second, the fact that the book was written not by pro-life activists like me, but by trusted and authorized pastors, makes it especially commendable as an example for Christian leaders. The result is a serious book about the assault on the sanctity of human life in our time, all communicated in the voice of local-church overseers. The book calls for repentance at times and forbearance at other times; it warns and summons, condemns and offers grace.

I admit that some parts of the book give me pause. But the confusion of some pastors on the great bioethical abominations of our times alarms me far more. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness,” the apostle Paul says, “but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5:11). If you are looking for an example of what such exposing looks like, I recommend Abortion and the Church. These pastors expose the multifaceted war against the intrinsic, equal, exceptional, and eternal value of human life today, and strive to help the church to do bioethics — to weigh right and wrong (ethics) in matters of human life (bio). They call us to know the will of God and to take no part in the works of darkness, no matter how hidden.

Pastoral Bioethics

More broadly, this generation faces extraordinary choices regarding birth control, chemical and surgical abortion, and infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). We need accurate explanations as to the treatment processes and associated risks. Often, the ethical issues involved are not only avoided by the abortion and infertility industry; they are also hidden. Moreover, people willing to pay large sums to get rid of a baby or to obtain a baby usually do not ask many ethical questions. The result is a conspiracy of silence in the destruction of the unborn.

Consider a few of the many questions needing thoughtful pastoral answers. Is abortion really just one issue among many in our day, or is it a preeminent moral crisis? Do intrauterine devices (IUD) and hormonal contraception ever work to prevent an embryo (a human being in the first few days of life) from implanting safely in the womb? What in the Bible should inform my desire to avoid children?

Is IVF a God-pleasing response to the pain of my infertility, or is it morally wrong? What happens to all those human embryos that are created in the IVF process and left frozen in the fridge? If vaccines are produced from unborn babies’ body parts, do I share in the guilt by getting the vaccine? Should a church split over differences of opinion here? In these self-expressive times, when feelings often replace moral truth, and when so many in society say yes, when does God say no?

Pastors and other church leaders who address such questions serve their people well.

What Normal Christians Need

Fifty years of legal and accessible abortion have led to hundreds of books and thousands of articles on the injustice of abortion and on natural rights, pro-life apologetics, crisis intervention, law, and more. I have written four books myself. So, what could another book possibly say to add to our understanding of these matters? After reading Abortion and the Church, I realized that this is the wrong question.

What these pastors understand is that their people, those under their care as overseers, need to hear from them far more than from someone like me. It matters who says what! For most Christians, the most influential voices are still the known and trusted leaders appointed to oversee the body of Christ. If the average Christian were to speak, I suspect he would sound like this: “You are the leader I have chosen to submit my soul to week after week. I trust your judgment more than others’. What do you think? What are the deeds of darkness in these times that we ought to take no part in?”

Unsettling Assumptions

Right before I started seminary in 1978, I got married. Almost as if it were required for newlyweds, my wife and I decided she would start using “the pill.” A few weeks into married life and biblical studies, however, my wife started asking questions. “Why are we doing this? What does God think about contraception? And by the way, I feel different. What are the side effects of the pill?”

I was shocked. In my young Christian life, I earnestly desired to bring Christ into every part of my life. I was training myself to ask of every topic, “What in the Bible ought to shape my views and actions on the matter?” But when it came to contraception, we started using the pill without asking a single question. I was conformed to this world’s expectations for newlyweds without a contrarian consideration. My wife’s troubled conscience and health questions stirred me. What did I do? I turned to the pastors in my church, whom I trusted for advice. “What do you say? Can you help me think this through from God’s perspective?”

Pastor, you may not feel all that influential. Your platform may be small. But you are a trusted authority to those under your care. Find solid texts. Prepare your thoughts prayerfully. Muster some courage. And rise up in these urgent times to teach on abortion and the church.