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The following message is delivered by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler-Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "Abortion, an open letter to both sides from a man in the middle." The scripture reading of the morning is from Paul's letter to the Christians at Rome, the 12th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 14. "Bless those who persecute you,

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bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be conceited. Repay no one evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to

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the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord. No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him drink, for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father,

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and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I step into this pulpit this morning with a heavy heart. In part, that is because I know that I am going to be attacked no matter what I say here in the next minutes. One lady, on reading the title of my message for today, and not having any knowledge whatever of its content, wrote to me and lumped me with the stupid, ignorant, violent,

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with those who are the cohorts of killers. She said that she would never fraternize with murderers. If I get that kind of mail before I speak, imagine what it's going to look like for the next 14 days. But I must address this theme because it is creating discord in the church, and no pastor who loves his people can sit idly by while people in his congregation refuse to speak to one another.

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And that is occurring within our own church. I speak then not to create discord, but rather to try to heal it. To stop the name-calling and the shoddy thinking, and to substitute instead mutual respect and serious Christian moral and ethical consideration. I would begin by pointing out that there are Christians in both the pro-life and the pro-choice camps on this question. I am

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personally acquainted with people who know and love the Lord Jesus Christ and stand at opposite poles on this point. I have always had a particular admiration for Christian missionaries. It seems to me that they make special sacrifices in their discipleship. They are oftentimes separated from their families. They live sometimes in very difficult conditions, and they are called upon

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to deal with hard subjects in a very delicate way. I admire the faith of missionaries, and I know missionaries who stand on both sides of this issue. To brand all then on either side as non-Christian is simply not true. Now at the same time that I say this, I must go on to say that there are Christians on both sides of this issue who have sometimes been unfair and knowingly or

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unknowingly dishonest. For example, when pro-life people used to advance their argument pictures of mutilated fetuses, but never show any pictures of the 500 women who die every day because they are unable to get legal abortions and must get illegal ones. Never show any pictures of women who have committed suicide rather than going full term. Never show any pictures of those who will spend

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the rest of their lives in institutions for the insane because they did go full term. To show one kind of photo without showing the other is simply unfair. On the pro-choice side, I would suggest that too many times these people try to compare the best with the worst. I'm sure you've been in the position as a Christian of having someone attack the church in this way. They pick out the

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worst example from the life of the church that they can discover, the most blatant hypocrite of whom they learn, and then they compare this horrible example with the noblest and finest person that they can find outside the church. Now that kind of a comparison is patently unjust. You don't compare the worst of one side with the best of the other. So when pro-choice people try

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to argue their position by stating that a fertilized egg is a full personality, at least that's what the pro-life people maintain, and then they hold over against this a beautiful born baby and say, "Can't you see the difference between the two?" That kind of argument is unfair. On the pro-life side, nothing is accomplished by blowing up birth control clinics. As a matter of

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fact, there is no need for any illegal behavior with regard to this question as long as there is legitimate legal recourse. Nothing is really accomplished by pouring hot tar on a clinic floor. And on the pro-choice side, it seems to me many times you folks are more concerned about federal law than you are about the law of God. As Christians, and I am speaking to Christians

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in both camps, your primary consideration is to be the law of God as it is revealed in Scripture and in the teachings of the church. Yet when I listen to some of you pro-choice people speak, it seems to me that you are much more anxious to defend the Constitution of the United States than you are the law of God. There seem to be some denominations,

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and unfortunately I would include our Presbyterian denomination among them, who are more ready to defend pluralism than they are what the Scriptures say to this very important matter. You know, the Africans have a saying that when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. Just so I would suggest that when these two sides fight and use some of the tactics to

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which I have alluded, logic, the priority of the spiritual over the temporal, and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, are often trampled. As I look at these two positions as a man in the middle, I see areas of weakness, or should I say areas in which there needs to be a lot more thinking on both sides of this

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question. Let me mention just four of those areas. Two, I direct to the pro-life side, and two, I direct to the pro-choice side. And remember, please, that I can only touch upon these issues. I cannot speak of any of them in detail. You pro-choice people, it seems to me, need to think much more seriously about the nature

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and the vulnerability of a fetus. I think everyone agrees today that a fertilized egg is a potential human being. A fertilized human egg is not a potential cat or dog or baboon. It is a potential human being. And human beings have a special and unique relationship to God, and it is this relationship to God which gives them their dignity.

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The dignity of a fetus does not lie in what that fetus may someday become. The dignity lies in the fact that it is made in the image of God, that God chose to become man and therefore lifted humankind to a level above every other life form. And it is simply unfair, or at least unthinking, to look at a fertilized egg, a fetus, and to treat it lightly as if

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it were not, in fact, something which bears the image of God. Some horrible things have happened in this country when people have made that mistake. I would remind you that slavery was defended for a long time in America on the grounds that blacks weren't human beings. They weren't made in the image of God. They weren't the

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children of God. They were property or animals or nothing more. There were those who maintained that position, and there were those who believed it and fought for it and died for it. And there are those who still believe that lie and who still seek to spread it. Beware whenever you deny the dignity that belongs to a child of God.

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And think, too, about the vulnerability of the fetus. It is to me, strangely, very sad that the feminist movement has chosen to take the pro-choice side in this issue and to defend it so vigorously. If I understand feminism, feminism means that women don't believe that a man owns his daughter or owns his wife. They don't believe that a woman is anybody's

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property. If, for example, there was a law in this country which said that a husband and a husband alone could determine whether his wife could have an abortion or not, I am sure that the women of this land, those of a feminist orientation, would rise up in anger and I would rise up with them.

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But I would point out to you that if you feminists are concerned that no one be treated as a piece of property, then you need to apply that to the fetus that you are carrying within your body. You cannot treat it as a piece of property. Because it is in your body, you do not own it. It does not belong to you. It is a freely created spirit of God. You

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are the trustee of it and nothing more than that. We must not, then, tread so lightly upon the vulnerability of the fetus. And think of this, too. Because we have no certain knowledge of when a fetus becomes a human being—I'm not saying about when a fetus becomes potentially a human being.

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I'm not talking about when a fetus lives. I'm not talking about when it becomes human in its living. I'm talking about because we don't know the precise time at which that fetus becomes a personality, whether it is sometime before birth or even, as some people argue, sometime after birth, whichever it is.

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You need to ask yourself questions like this. If it is wrong to crush the head of a fetus in an act of abortion in the last third of a pregnancy, is it equally wrong one day before that last third begins? If it's okay to slay a little child that is just yet unborn, why is it murder to kill a little child afterwards? These questions, it seems to me, demand a

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lot more thought than the pro-choice side is giving them. Now you pro-life folks, it seems to me that you need to think a lot about the difference between the potential and the actual. If we grant that the fertilized egg is a potential human being, that as an acorn becomes an oak tree, so that fertilized egg will become a

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person. If we grant that, then I ask the question, what are the moral claims of the potential as over against the actual? Think of it like this. Suppose a woman uses an IUD. Now as you know, an IUD is not a contraceptive. It allows the egg to be fertilized. The potential human being comes into existence, but then the IUD causes that fertilized egg to be expelled.

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Are you prepared to defend the thesis that you would call a woman who wears an IUD the same thing that you would call a woman who walks into a public school and stabs to death the first child that she sees? That is a murderess. Here's a poor mother who has four children. She and her husband work 16 hours a day to

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keep their little family together. She wears an IUD because they simply cannot afford to have any more children. Are you ready to call her a murderess? Doesn't the potential have less moral claim there than the actual? Or think of this question in terms of spontaneous abortion. Between 25 and 33 percent of all pregnancies end with spontaneous abortion.

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That is, the body expels the fertilized egg for one reason or another. Now if you really believe that that fertilized egg is a potential person from the moment of its fertilization, then I would like to know why it is that in 32 years of ministry I have never been asked to perform a funeral service for such an aborted fertilized egg.

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And I don't know of any minister who ever has. Again, you see, it's a question of the worth of the potential as over against the actual. I had a lady say to me on one occasion, "Aren't you glad that your mother didn't abort you?" Now that, of course, assumes automatically that life is the most important thing there

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is, and the Bible does not altogether teach that. Noble souls like Elijah and Jeremiah and Job cursed the day on which they were born. But I turned the question back on this lady. I said to her, "Well, let me ask you a question in response. Are you glad that Hitler's mother did not abort him?"

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"Yes," she said, "I'm glad he was not aborted because abortion is murder." I said, "That sounds very strange. You are putting the value of one aborted baby above that of the 11 million people who died because of what Adolf Hitler did." "Well, I didn't think of it that way," she said. "No, no, I wish his mother would have

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aborted him." I said, "Well, if you take that position, then there would not have been any World War II, and your mother and father first met during that war and were married after that war, and if none of that had ever happened, then you would not have been born. Is that a moral

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tragedy?" If the Scriptures teach us anything, they teach us that we are to love others more than we love ourselves. Moses prays in the Old Testament that he be killed in order that his people might be saved. Paul prays the same thing in Romans. "Take away my life,

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that the lives of my brothers and sisters might be saved." And if they could pray that prayer, aren't there others who prayed that prayer? I know a man who sincerely says with all his heart that he wishes he would have been aborted because in the process of his birth, his mother, to everyone's surprise, died, leaving him and the four children who

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were born before him to grow up without a mother. My friends, it's not so easy. You've got to think more about this question of the moral claims of the potential as over against the actual. But let's go back to the pro-choice side. I would suggest that you folks need to think

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more about the practical results of the position you've decided to take. Let me ask you to questions. Is it ever right to lie? Is it ever right to steal? Now if you think for a moment, you're going to answer both of those questions, yes. If some maniac breaks into your house one night with a bloody hatchet in his hand and wants to know where your children

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are so that he can hack them to death, and you know they're sleeping upstairs in bed, but you tell him that they've gone away for the weekend, that kind of lie is certainly morally defensible. Or if your children are starving to death, and over here are great stuffs of food that are not being used but do not belong to you, for you to steal some

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of that food in order that your children might live is certainly not an immoral thing to do. We understand that there are exceptions to the moral code. But we do not make those exceptions into the moral code. To affirm an exception does not mean that you institutionalize it. Prior to 1973 in this country, if a woman needed an abortion, the tragic circumstances

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required it, she could in most instances get one. Then came Roe versus Wade. And what has happened? It has institutionalized the exception. Now we're at the very taproot of this whole question now, because you see, what is being maintained is that what we used to say was okay sometimes, but not most of the time, we're now saying is okay at any time. And

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that's the reason that one and a half million children were aborted in this country last year, that one out of every three pregnancies ended in abortion, that 40,000 fetuses are aborted every single day. Sweden has the most liberal laws on abortion in the world. But the Swedish government has just announced that they're not going to make their laws

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any more liberal, and they're thinking of tightening them up. And what is the reason they give? Because, they say, abortion is becoming nothing more than a contraceptive device for a lot of people. And that is the real problem that you pro-choice people face. Think about it. Why is it, for example, that more abortion clinics do not give information

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about adoption? The United States Department of Health and Human Services has recently determined that only 40% of the abortion clinics in America give any counsel with regard to adoption to people who come through their doors. And more than half of the information which those clinics give out is wrong. Just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported

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that there are a million families in this country that want to adopt children, that want to adopt children so much that they are adopting children of other races. They are adopting children who have dreadful diseases, spina bifida, or problems like Down's Syndrome. Those kinds of children, people want to adopt them and to care for them. So why aren't

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you pro-choice people working more aggressively to get this word out? Why aren't you expending some efforts to encourage speedier adoption procedures in this country? Why aren't you insisting that the government put more staff to work on this question, finding homes for these children? Why is it, if you believe what you believe, that you are not promoting

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chastity outside of marriage? That you are not promoting the consistent use of contraceptives? That you are not promoting sex education in the churches and in the schools? What is not your intention that an abortion become nothing more than a contraceptive device? What is not your intention has in fact happened. And what are you going to do about it? There are

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some abortion clinics that are doing the very things that I've suggested, but very few of them. And here's a mission for you PC people to undertake. And one last word to the pro-life side. I deeply and earnestly wish that you would reject the misuse of scripture, which is so often the case in your presentations. In all of

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my ministry, I have never seen the scriptures as abused at the hands of any believing Christians. As some believing Christians have abused them with regard to abortion. There's only one place in the Bible where the loss of a baby before it is born is discussed. Now there are many places in the Bible where dietary rules are talked about and dress regulations

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and language rules and property laws are discussed. But there's only one place where the death of a child while it is still in its mother's womb is discussed. That's in Exodus chapter 21. Let me read it to you. It says, "If two men fight and hurt a woman with child so that her child departs from her, he shall be punished according as the woman's husband shall lay

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upon him, and he shall pay as the judges determine." Now notice in the first place, this is not an abortion, it's an accident. In the second place, the decision as to the worth of the fetus is made by the man. This is a blatantly chauvinist law. And in the third place, the Bible's Old Testament legal regulations are built upon the lex talionis. An eye for an

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eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a life for a life. But what is the punishment that comes to this man who leads a woman to lose her child before that child is normally and naturally born? He is given a fine. If that unborn fetus was thought of as a person, if this was looked upon as an act of murder, then he would have

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been put to death. And you know, when you start picking out certain rules and regulations from the Old Testament, be honest about what you're doing. In that same list of rules from which this rule concerning abortion is so frequently drawn, in that same list, there is a rule that talks about how you are to treat your slaves. Do we believe in slavery?

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There is a rule that says that if you seduce a virgin, you must marry her. Do we want to make shotgun weddings the law of the land? There is a rule that says that all those who worship false gods shall be put to death. That's going to make it very bloody in America because there are now more Muslims in America than there are Episcopalians. There's a law

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in that same list that says you may loan people money, but you may collect no interest. How does that strike you Presbyterians? There's a rule in that list that says if a child curses its mother or father, it shall die. There's a rule in that list which says if a child strikes its mother or father, it shall be put to death. Now, you can't pick out just

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the rules from these lists that satisfy your position and ignore all the rest. The fact is the Old Testament and the New Testament do not discuss abortion per se. And when they talk about anything that's closely related to it, they speak of it in terms of cultural customs that are more than 2,000 years old. And I would remind you that that Old Testament

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culture that we're talking about also permitted polygamy and approved of prostitution. Sometimes pro-life people will come and say, "Well, what about those verses in the Bible where it talks about how God already knows us when we are in the womb?" Well, there are such places, but let's look at one of them. Take Psalm 139, verse 15. It says there that God

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knows us as we are being knit together in our mother's wombs. But it also says that God knows us while we are still part of the earth. That is, that mud has not yet come up in plants and into the bodies of animals that eat those plants or the bodies of other animals which in turn feed our parents, which in turn feeds the fetus that is going to be

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born and become a person. And if you're consistent, that means you never want to dig a hole because you might upset somebody's chemical balance by doing so. References to God's knowing us in the womb are references to God's foreknowledge and providence, two of the grandest doctrines of the faith. They are not discussions on the biological nature of a fetus. I'm not

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calling upon you to ignore the scriptures. But when you study the scriptures, notice that the primary note sounded in scripture, and if there's any note you want to echo, this is it, is reverence for life. And if you believe in reverence for life, then why don't we hear you speaking out against capital punishment, which is built upon some of these

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laws ripped out of context from the Old Testament? Remember, our Lord Jesus was only confronted by one capital case in his recorded ministry. That's when the woman who was brought before him who was taken in adultery under the law of that day, she could be capitally punished. She could be executed. And Jesus stopped it. If you're really reverent about life, why

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don't we hear you talking about the 40,000 babies that die every day in the world? The 14.5 million babies that die every year in the world from starvation? Not because there's not enough food to go around. As a matter of fact, there's more than enough food to go around. But because of a laissez-faire economic attitude and because of serious problems

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of distribution, if you're really serious about reverence for life, why aren't you dealing with that, which takes a lot more lives than that to which you're giving so much concern? Why are you silent on so many issues while you ardently defend ancient tribal customs? A pro-life person said to me early this last week, "As far as those Iraqis are concerned,

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we ought to just go in there and nuke them." Is that reverence for life? Well, our time is gone. And of course, there are many questions we haven't touched. We haven't really talked about when a fetus becomes a person. There's new information in the area of brain waves and psychological imprinting that comes to bear here. We haven't talked about whether

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it's correct to try to legislate morality or not. We haven't talked about government interference into private lives. We have not talked about pregnancies as a result of rape. We have not talked about the effect of pregnancies on mothers. We have not talked about the political implications of these questions. Here are two people running to be the governor of a

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state, and to be the governor of a state, they may have to make a thousand different decisions. Is it morally right to choose which one you will vote for on the basis of their position on just one of the thousand issues that they will confront in the terms of their four years in office? I've only looked at four issues, two serious questions for pro-choice

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people and two serious questions for pro-life people. I'm trying to encourage conversation, not conflict. None of us have all the answers. All of us have much to learn. So I'm pleading for that obedience to which Paul calls the Romans, who were engaged in certain theological and practical Christian debates. He says, "Bless one another. Don't curse one another."

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He says, "Live in harmony." He says, "Be fair. Live in peace with one another. Don't be conceited with regard to your own wisdom. And don't try to overcome evil by being more evil. Overcome evil with good." My friends, no matter how you define it, abortion is not the unforgivable sin. And if God can forgive that sin, then each and every one of us ought to be able

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to forgive it. And that's what I'm pleading for. More light and less heat. Some compassion. Some confession and repentance. Some forgiveness. By the way, that lady who wrote me and told me I was stupid, ignorant, violent, and a friend of killers, I called her on the phone to ask for permission to quote her in my message today. She wasn't home, so I left my question

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on her machine. She called back to give me the answer, but I wasn't here, and so she left the message with my secretary, and she said it was okay to quote her. But then she must have thought more about the subject, because she sat down and she wrote me another letter, twice as long as the first one. And in this letter she said things like this.

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I guard lest I lose my submissiveness to Christ. I don't attack people. I try to educate them. I don't hate anyone, and I try not to be bitter or shriveled, and I pray for those with whom I disagree. She says in her letter that she still won't socialize with people who are on the pro-choice side, which puts her in a tough position because Jesus did not hesitate

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to fellowship with sinners, but nobody's perfect. Her second letter, with the exception of that willingness to meet with sinners, is much in the spirit of Paul. That means it's much in the spirit of Christ, and that is all that this pastor is asking for. And so, my dear community, whoever you are, if you're here today, God bless you, and God bless us all.

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Let us pray. Oh, Father God, we feel so small when set up against the great issues of life. In our moments of truth, we stand before thee with many more questions than we have answers. May the humility which we show before thee be the humility we show to one another. May we, by your Spirit, together be led to a clear understanding of what is right and what is

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wrong, and then by thy Spirit grant that we might think, speak, and do only the right and never the wrong. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]