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Children are a blessing...

By Scott Tibbs, May 13, 2013

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. -- Psalm 127:3

One of the biggest challenges the pro-life movement has as it attempts to reduce (and eventually criminalize) abortion is the popular view that children are not a blessing from the Lord (as God tells us in His Word) but that they are a burden, a hindrance and maybe even a curse. Barack Obama famously said a few years ago that if his daughters "make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby." A new life is not a precious thing, but a punishment.

There are certainly other problems we have to deal with - one them being that a lot of people simply do not know what abortion really is - but even that is less of an issue than the basic orientation of our culture against children. We see this in our pop culture and our Internet memes, and we see it in our political debates. We see it from feminists who argue that unless women have the right to kill their children they cannot have the same rights as men.

Children do bring challenges. Waking up at 3:00 am to change and feed a baby can play havoc with your body and sleep schedule - something I became very familiar with 15 months ago. The child needs to be fed, cared for, changed and dressed, and taken to the doctor. No one is saying it is all hugs and laughs. Furthermore, undisciplined children can indeed be a burden - though well-trained children are a joy to be around.

But the basic problem is that we are trying to stop the termination of an innocent life when all of American culture is telling us that babies are bad. We hear a never ending drumbeat of claims that babies are bad for our independence and our quality of life, they are bad for the environment and they are bad for the economy. As long as we're fighting a culture oriented toward hedonism, we are not getting to the root of our problem.

The solution, as usual, is with the church - because the church is the problem. The church has said that the God we supposedly worship is a liar and our post-Christian culture is telling us the truth. We need to reject the teachings of these false prophets and demand our shepherds be faithful to God and His Word.