Lila Rose Stands for Life And Activates Faith Leaders At Turning Point USA Pastor’s Summit
I don’t need to tell you all this, but pastors have a tough job. It’s not easy to lead, especially something as important as a church. But pastors have always had a tough job since the garden. Since we left the garden, our spiritual leaders have led in a broken and fallen world. And while our world has always struggled with sin, today we face unique and urgent challenges.
And the need for spiritual leadership and renewal is desperate. Each of you here became a pastor for a reason, or a pastor’s wife for a reason. You didn’t become a pastor for the sake of politics. You became a pastor to lead and feed a flock. But whether we like it or not, politics matter. And our great grandparents, pastors, our grandparents’ churches, these were leaders and institutions that existed in a broadly Christian culture.
That has changed, I think, about the fierce political fights of the 19th and early 20th century over discriminatory policies against Catholic parochial schools. Many Protestant politicians wanted to ensure that no government funding went towards the Catholic schools. But those Protestant, those Protestant politicians were not advocating for money to go towards private Protestant schools. They didn’t have to. At that point in time, the American public school system was largely a Protestant Christian school system.
Times have changed. Can you imagine when the big moral fight in our country was between Catholics and Protestants? That was it. That was the fight. Today’s great moral fight is very different. Today we are fighting over the very definition of right and wrong. Today, the fight, even among many Christians and in our larger society, is about whether it’s okay to kill a baby.
Up until the moment of birth and even after birth. It’s about whether it’s morally upright for two men or even three men to get married and then to adopt a baby. Today, morality that we took for granted a generation ago is up for debate. Our moral vision is clouded. We are living in a nation that is spiritually and culturally lost.
You see this every era presents opportune parties that are special and special challenges for Christians and society. If we are not actively fighting for moral renewal, we are contributing to moral decay. As God Himself says in Revelation, “I know your deeds. You are neither cold nor hot. How I wish you were one or the other. So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”
God is telling us you cannot be neutral. As pastors, you are leading people in a post-Christian culture. If you are pastoring as a society already knows what it means to be a Christian and what the moral law is, then you’ve already lost. Your job has never been harder, but it has never been more important. We are in a fallen world, we’re in a post-Christian America and we are finally in a post Roe v. Wade America.
And as pastors in our post-Christian and now post- Roe world, you need moral clarity. You are moral teachers, moral courage. You are moral leaders and sacrificial leadership. You must take blows for the sake of souls. In our post-Christian and relativistic culture, the truth is a magnet. Magnets repel what is incompatible. But they attract what is. The truth repels the bad and attracts the good.
The truth of the moral law–that there is an objective moral law that we don’t create as human beings, but were given to us by God as a gift from God–you see, the moral law is sweet. It’s a gift. As the psalmist says, “Oh how I love thy law. How sweet are Thy
Words to my taste Sweeter than honey in my mouth.
You see, the Psalmist is desperate for God’s law because he understands that only God’s law can bring us life. God’s law teaches us rightly ordered relationships with God and with each other. The Psalmist goes on to say, “My eyes stream with tears because men do not keep your law.”
Without the moral law, we not only lose our way, we destroy ourselves and others. Our society today is enslaved by lies. As Christ himself says, the truth will set you free. The truth is a magnet for souls, because our souls made by God yearn for it. So in our post-Christian culture of moral relativism, winning souls for Christ has to include teaching morality, right?
You cannot win a soul for Christ without teaching them how to live. And we do not know how to live without what? the moral law. Today’s moral confusion rears its ugly head in politics all the time. Most of the most intensely debated political questions of our day are not actually political questions at their root. They are moral questions.
The greatest moral questions of the day are not just being duked out in individual souls. They’re being duked out in school boards, in city halls, state legislators in the U.S. Congress, in the seat of the U.S. Supreme Court. People are desperate today for moral leadership and moral clarity. You are here…each of you are here because you understand that without moral clarity, our faith will be starved.
We will be like the seed sown by the sower that then is choked up by the weeds. In Matthew 22. Jesus tells the Pharisees the greatest commandment of God’s law. I know you all know this verse well. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.”
And the second is like it. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself on these two commandments depend all the law and all the prophets.” These two commandments are the cornerstone of God’s law. They are the sum of the moral law. If you love your neighbor as yourself, you don’t watch as they are being violently dismembered, turn torn limb from limb in pain.
If you love your neighbor as yourself, you don’t watch from the doorstep as they are being dragged away to death. You rescue them from being taken away to slaughter. You hold them back from the slaughter. The slaughter is all around us. Just three months ago, I got a call from an activist. She and a friend were sidewalk counseling outside of a D.C. abortion facility in Washington, D.C., a late term D.C. abortion facility.
They had been handed a box. The box was filled with the remains. The mangled remains of aborted children. These children hadn’t just been killed. They had been brutally tortured. They had been destroyed. You can’t look. It’s impossible to look at the images of these children without having mind-numbing grief. The activist named one of the little babies Harriet, a beautiful little girl, about 29 weeks old.
Old enough to survive outside the womb. Harriet died with her eyes open. Her neck had been cut. Her skull crushed. An illegal partial-birth abortion.
What did D.C. police do? Nothing. The butcher is still operating this day in D.C.. You see, we strive to love the Lord our God. But are we truly loving our preborn neighbors? Know the address of the abortion clinic near your church. Go and love your neighbors there because they need your help.
That’s why they went to the abortion clinic in the first place, for help. People come to your churches because they need help. The same reason they go to the abortion facility down the street. Have you ever considered that, that you are in direct competition when it comes to helping and loving your neighbor as the abortionist down the street?
If you were being taken away to death, what would you want someone else to do for you? Is what we are doing for them sufficient? Who are these very young children? My organization, Live Action, produced the most lifelike, medically accurate animation of human development in the womb. I want you to take a look. I want you to take a look and meet Baby Olivia.
This is Olivia. Though she is yet to greet the outside world. She has already completed an amazing journey.
This is the moment that life begins. A new human being has come into existence. At fertilization, her gender, ethnicity, hair color, eye color and countless traits are already determined. She begins to implant in the uterus about one week after fertilization. Her cells organize into what we call an embryo. At three weeks and one day, Just 22 days after fertilization, Olivia’s heartbeat can be detected.
The buds of her arms and legs appear by four weeks. She begins to move between five and six weeks with both spontaneous and reflexive movements. At six weeks from fertilization, her brain activity can be recorded and bone formation begins.
She can bring her hands together at seven and a half weeks and separate fingers and toes emerge. She can also begin to hiccup. At the beginning of the ninth week, Olivia will have grown from a single cell into nearly 1 billion cells, and she is now called a fetus. She will suck her thumb and swallow, grasp an object, touch her face, sigh, and stretch.
At 11 weeks, she is playing in the womb, moving her body and exploring her environment. Her taste bud cells have matured by week 12, but are still scattered throughout her mouth. Her mother will first sense Olivia’s movements between 14 and 18 weeks, an event called quickening. Beginning at 18 weeks, ultrasounds show speaking movements in her voice box.
Around 20 weeks, with a lot of help, babies have survived outside the womb. At 27 weeks, her eyes are responding to light. She can recognize her parents’ voices and will even recognize lullabies and stories. Olivia has gone on an amazing journey during these last nine months. She will soon signal to her mother that it is time for delivery and greets the outside world.
That beautiful child that you just saw, that child is your neighbor. They are as much our neighbor as the babies and toddlers that are playing in our church nurseries on Sunday morning. The only difference between these born children and the preborn child is that the preborn child has no legal status. And because they have no legal status, thousands of them every single day are killed, are murdered in the most barbaric ways imaginable, torn into pieces, suffocated to death.
Mother Teresa says “In a nation where a mother can kill her own child, what is left? But for you and for I to kill one another?” We as a society, as a culture, as a church, we have no moral clarity if we permit the intentional killing of our youngest children, what is left but for us to brutalize one another?
If the womb is the most violent place in America, then no one is safe. You have moral clarity. What’s needed next is moral courage. There is a vacuum. There is a vacuum of leadership in our communities from coast to coast. You know this. A vacuum of leadership in our entire nation. You need to lead your congregations so our congregations can lead the country. We need to teach Christians so that they can lead themselves to leave their homes and then to lead their communities. When I first started in this work, I was actually a teenager.
I was blessed to be raised by Christian parents who taught me to love life, to love the Lord. I was blessed to have seven siblings that taught me the value of life. I was blessed to be raised in a Christian church that taught me to love Jesus. I loved Jesus. I was taught the Bible. I was taught about Christ.
But in that faith community, growing up, I was not educated on abortion. And it was by God’s providence that I would find out about abortion from a book in my parents home. The moral clarity that that book unlocked in me would inspire my moral courage. I knew from a young age that I had to do something to save lives.
My moral clarity gave me the moral courage to go on and start Live Action as a teenager. Looking back, looking back, I wish that what I had learned in that book, I had learned at my church. In fact, I had no memory for my entire childhood and adolescence of abortion ever being discussed at church. And it wasn’t until I was 19 years old and I was going to have a meeting with my senior pastor that I would even have a discussion about abortion.
I was home from college for the summer, and if he didn’t remember me from the pews, he may have remembered me from Fox News talking about my undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles. Going into my meeting with my pastor, my senior pastor, I was very hopeful. I was hopeful that we could make some real progress and perhaps make my church a model for California and for the rest of the country.
I hoped that my pastor would speak more about the evil of abortion and that he would have a full time, a full time pro-life ministry at the church that provided post-abortion help for those struggling in the pews, that was active in serving pregnant mothers and struggling families, and that kept a vigil at the local abortion clinic. So I had some pretty high hopes.
Our conversation began with my pastor explaining to me how passionate he was about human rights. He even shared that if he wished that if he had been alive during the time of slavery, that he would have had the courage to speak up and condemn slavery from the pulpit. I was inspired by that, to condemn slavery from the pulpit, especially in the deep pre-Civil War South brought serious repercussions.
The repercussions were dire for those pastors. Some of them were even threatened. Their lives were even threatened. Speaking out required clarity and courage. Then my pastor said that he agreed with me that abortion was the human rights issue of the day. He agreed with me and he actually thanked me for my work. So I saw my opening. I said, Pastor, would you be willing to speak about this on Sunday morning?
He answered, “Well, you know, well, my approach as a pastor is I have to be mindful of the stories of the people in my pews. And so, you know, I don’t like to take a hammer. I like to take a chisel.” There wasn’t even a chisel. He then invited me, me, a 19 year old college student, to come on a Wednesday night to give an address to his congregation.
Whoever wanted to show up on a Wednesday night. I don’t tell this story to say that my pastor was a bad guy. He wasn’t. He was a deeply loving and good man with the best of intentions. He had moral clarity that abortion was wrong. He had the moral clarity, but perhaps lacked the moral vision and was afraid of how he would be perceived.
You just heard a cautionary tale. So what does moral courage and sacrificial leadership look like in the face of daunting challenges? Because you are facing them. Let’s look to Moses in the story of Exodus. Fan favorite. Moses, who had many moments of cowardice and indecision. Moses was another patriarch who, as we know, wrestled with God. He was 100% confident that he didn’t have the tools or the skills to accomplish all that God was calling him toward. Moses was wrong. He did. The story of Moses calls us towards ambitious conviction of moral leadership to lead our nation and to end abortion right. In Exodus Chapter seven. Moses describes his conversation with God and the leadership instructions that he received to complete the seemingly impossible task that he had been given.
I’m sure that the instructions were a tough pill to swallow the first time that he received them. Moses does miracles. God sends horrific plagues to smite the Egyptians and hammer the point home. Pharaoh is supposed to release the people from bondage and into freedom. That’s the command. So after enduring the Nile being turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, dead livestock, boils, hail, and the locusts.
A lot of the Egyptians had finally had enough. Exodus chapter ten, starting in verse seven, reads, “Then Pharaoh’s servant said to him, How long shall o this man be a snare to us? Let the men go. That they may serve the Lord their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined? So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh, and he said to them, Pharaoh said, Go serve the Lord your God. But which ones are to go? Moses said, We will go with our young and our old. We will go with our sons and daughters and with our flocks and herds, for we must hold a feast to the Lord. But Pharaoh said to them, The Lord be with you. If I ever let you and your little ones go, Look, you have some evil purpose in mind. No, go the men among you and go serve the Lord for that’s what you’re asking. And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.”
When our leaders are committed to evil ends, we must be relentless in pursuit of authentic justice. Right? Relentless. After Pharaoh’s offer for Moses to just take the men. God sends the plague of darkness. Then Exodus chapter ten, verse 24. “Then Pharaoh called Moses and said, Go serve the Lord. Your little ones may also go with you. Just let your flocks and your herds remain behind. But Moses said, You must also let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God. Our livestock also must go with us. Not a hoof shall be left behind. For we must take of them to serve the Lord our God.”
Pharaoh refused. Then God sent the 10th and final plague, the Angel of Death. Then, the Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, “Up. Go out from among my people. Both you and all the people of Israel. Go serve the Lord. As you have said, Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, be gone and bless me also.”
Moses got everyone out. He refused to compromise on what could not be compromised. While God is calling out all the Israelites. Pharaoh offers Moses what seems like could be a workable solution. He says, freedom for the men. You can have freedom for the men. But Pharaoh says that you must leave the women and children behind. Pharaoh’s saying that that he must leave their future behind.
Moses says they cannot leave without all that God has promised them. He is so steadfast in his resolve that he says not a hoof shall be left behind. Moses is a beacon of moral courage and strength to us today, right now, because he sought justice for his people, not from his own will, surely not from his own skill, but through trust in action, in service of the providence of our almighty God.
Moses walked away from what could be seen as two decent compromises because he had a higher calling and because he served God. Friends, we cannot compromise for our youngest brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters, our youngest grandchildren and great grandchildren. We cannot compromise our future. They are our future. We cannot save those who are viable outside the womb and then leave the rest.
We cannot save those who feel pain and then leave the rest. We cannot save just those with a heartbeat and then say, It’s okay. Leave the rest. We must save every child.
That should not be political. I’m sure when Moses was rejecting the compromises offered by Pharaoh, there were some folks in his community, maybe on his Facebook page, on his comment section who were grumbling, who were saying, “Moses, why can’t you just take a compromise and get us out of here?” But Moses had moral clarity of what God was asking of him.
And Moses had moral courage to do what God was asking of him. And Moses was willing to be scorned. Your moral clarity is needed. Your moral courage is needed. Your sacrificial leadership is needed. Be willing to lose people for the sake of souls.
Remember that magnet? Truth is a magnet. And sometimes truth repels. Just like it attracts when you speak the truth to your congregation, you may lose people. In fact, I’m going to go even further. I guarantee you that you will lose some people. But I can also guarantee you this. In our post-Christian culture, it is only the truth that saves.
It is only the truth that sets free. The truth is a magnet. You will receive backlash. I know many of you already have, maybe even for being here in the first place. There are people here already. There are people already that don’t like you. It’s especially painful when you’re disliked. It’s the worst. The best pastors that I know are actually pastors who became pastors because they love people and they love God.
They have a deep love for people. And to be disliked, for someone who has a deep love for people to be disliked by the very people he loves, is painful. But you can’t truly love someone if you’re not willing to tell them the truth. And sometimes the truth hurts. You see, there are millions of people who are yearning for the truth and the deep meaning that is accompanied by that truth.
If you stand for what is right, even when it is antithetical in our broken society, you and your church will come out stronger than you can imagine. You will. Remember the truth sets people free. Christ promises us this. I’m not telling you that you should make Sunday a political rally. Sunday service your political rally. It shouldn’t be. But Jesus, taught us how to live.
He formed his followers and he calls us as believers and leaders to form the flock to train them, to equip them to change and lead society. Proverbs 24:10 reminds us. “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small. Rescue those who are being taken away to death and turn back those who are stumbling to slaughter.”
That’s not a suggestion. That’s a command. Pastors, your job has never been harder, but it’s never been more important. We need you to be strong and to show Christ’s character in your actions. We need your moral clarity. We need your moral courage. We need your sacrificial leadership. Your willingness to take blows for the sake of souls. Be the magnet of truth in your community.
Thank you.