To purchase the entire DVD set of the Summit Lecture Series, visit summit.org.
The good news of all of life, including within the Pro-Choice/Pro-Life debate is this: The same God who had the right to judge us for our rebellion (sin against His will), turns around and offers to adopt us into His family as His dearly loved children because of what Jesus did.
And if your trust is in Jesus as your Savior, then you don’t have to live with the dread of condemnation. If you have had an experience with abortion, you don’t need an excuse. What you need is an exchange: Christ’s righteousness for your sinfulness.
And the Bible is very clear that God will give us that exchange. That’s what belief in Jesus does.
With that good news in mind, let us also not forget that abortion is the ending of an innocent person’s life. There’s no way around it. It’s a difficult and uncomfortable truth for some, but it’s truth nonetheless.
What we do with that truth will impact each and every one of us.
One last story:
In 1955, an African American boy who was fourteen at the time visited his cousins in Money, Mississippi. When he got to his cousin’s house, Emmett Till, Jr. began to brag about his two white girlfriends back in Chicago to his cousins. After hearing this, his cousins dared him to go talk to a white girl in Money, Mississippi. They warned him, “We don’t speak to white girls down here.”
Emmett simply replied, “I do. I’ve got two white girlfriends back home.”
You see, in certain parts of the South, in the early 50’s, black men did not even make eye contact with white women, let alone speak to them.
But Emmett wasn’t afraid and took the dare.
That afternoon, they went into Bryant’s Grocery Store. Emmett walked up to the counter, purchased a piece of gum from a 21-year-old married white woman, flashed her a great big smile, and very innocently but flirtatiously said, “Thanks, Babe.”
Not a big deal by today’s standards, but a HUGE deal in 1955 Money, Mississippi.
Sure enough, two nights later, at gunpoint, Emmett was taken from his uncle’s home, where he was staying, by the woman’s husband and another man. They drove him outside of town, and after savagely beating him for several hours, they finished him with a single shot to the head.
When the Sheriff found Emmett’s body in a nearby riverbed, Emmett was beaten beyond all recognition. They put what was left of Emmett in a coffin, and sent it back to his mother in Chicago along with a note that said not to look inside, she would not like what she would see.
When Mimi Till, Emmett’s mother, got the body, the local newspaper staff gathered around her and asked her what she was going to do.
She said, “We’re going to have a funeral for my boy, Emmett.”
And the press went ballistic!
“You can’t do that! Don’t you know how upsetting people will find this?!”
Mimi said, “I know they won’t like it. I know they’ll be upset by it. But I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.”
Pictures of Emmett Till’s body were published nationally in Jet Magazine and helped launch the Civil Rights Movement throughout the country.
Three months later, a woman named Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus when she was ordered to do so. In her memoirs, Rosa said that she couldn’t get the picture of that boy out of her head, which gave her the courage to stand her ground.
This is why it is important to show the world images of actual aborted babies. Not to emotionally beat people up, but because I am convinced that if Pro-Life Christians don’t lovingly and truthfully “open the casket” on abortion, our nation will continue to tolerate an injustice it never has to look at.
But at the same time we open that casket, we open the truth of God’s Word: that sinners can be reconciled to their Savior, because Jesus died in their place and took the wrath they deserved.
We offer truth. And we offer hope.