Roughly 60% of Christians support making abortion legal.
The sole purpose of abortion is to end a pregnancy by killing a child.
Legal abortion codifies a woman’s control over her body.
Abortion is barbaric.
These statements are true.
So, what does this have to do with the Holy Spirit?
If you are not a Christian, you do not possess the Holy Spirit……you are in charge and you can do as you please.
Today’s post is for that majority of Christians……..who support abortion.
The Bible…….the owners manual for Christians…….teaches that to be a Christian, you must believe in Jesus Christ…….you must accept his divinity. It also teaches that when you do this, you receive the Holy Spirit who lives inside of you. It follows that pro-abortion Christians both promote abortion and possess the Holy Spirit. ⁰
And I have a hard time with that.
If this describes you, there are not many ways for you to reconcile this conundrum:
The Holy Spirit is OK with abortion. I find this to be inconceivable.
You do not possess the Holy Spirit……..you are not saved…….you are not a Christian. The long-term consequences of this are daunting. But, it leaves you in charge…….for now.
You possess the Holy Spirit…….but you ignore him. You allow your desires, your appetites, to drive your life. You drag out the Holy Spirit when you are in trouble; but, when he interferes with your appetites, you stuff him back into his box. On the surface, this is the best of both the spiritual world and the temporal world. In practice, you try to straddle the gap between two realities. And this works…….for now. I think that this path accounts for the vast majority of pro-abortion Christians. It accounts for a great many of my friends. It accounts for most of the people who sit beside me on Sunday morning.
But, I worry.
I don’t presume to know how Jesus feels about all of this.
Maybe Jesus is OK with part-time Christians. Maybe the time that we let the Holy Spirit of his box is enough for Jesus.
What I believe is this:
The more time that we spend listening to the Holy Spirit……….the more we include him in our decision-making………the better off we will be……..in both the temporal world and in the spiritual world. And…….this applies across the range of our decision-making. It goes way beyond abortion and politics.
I will try to give the Holy Spirit a bigger voice in the decisions that I will make today. I will do a better job of listening to the Holy Spirit.
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
Jesus promising the Holy Spirit, John 14:26, ESV
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”
Jesus, explaining the Holy Spirit, John 16:13, ESV