This week the US Senate stopped a bill which would have moved us towards defunding Planned Parenthood. The pro-life cause fell 7 votes short. Though saddened that it did not hit the 60 votes needed, it was wonderful to see it much closer than it was four years ago. I, and many others, immediately thought of William Wilberforce and his forty-six year quest to end slavery.

I think the comparison is fitting. We need many modern day Wilberforce’s who will not quit into this dehumanizing industry is shut down for good. When the final vote was cast on Monday I couldn’t help but think about the scene in Amazing Grace when Wilberforce led folks through what actually happens on a slave ship. It turned the tide. Yesterday I attempted to stomach those Planned Parenthood videos. I believe these and ministries like Abort73 are valuable because, like Wilberforce’s slave ship demonstration, they don’t allow us to think in terms of statistics and ideologies. Instead we see the practice in all its ugliness.

Though there is a growing movement of showing the graphic nature of abortion, I find such a thing largely missing inside the walls of our churches. Wilberforce’s slave ship is missing. One of the chief reasons is because of the graphic nature of the videos—we don’t want to expose children to such a thing before they know how to handle it. Likewise, there are those among us who don’t need to see graphic videos to know that abortion is wrong. But there is another reason why we often don’t show these videos—and it’s a reason I think needs to go. We have a tendency in our churches to talk about abortion with statistics and ideologies without walking them through Wilberforce’s slave ship because we don’t want folks who have had an abortion to have to relive the horrors of their previous sin.

This would be like saying in Wilberforce’s day, “We don’t want to show the horrors of slave ships because we don’t want to offend and further wound those who might have been slave captains. Jesus forgives them and so we don’t want to bring those terrible things to memory.”

And I get this. I really do. Whenever I’ve spoken on issues like abortion there is something in me that wants to keep it in the realm of statistics and philosophies. Part of me wants to shy away from calling abortion what it really is; namely, murder of an unborn child. I think this is a temptation for me because I know the percentages. I know that someone likely had an abortion, and I don’t want them to feel unforgiven or to leave feeling somehow “less-than”. I’m sensitive to this because I’ve been there. I’ve left a service or a lecture feeling “less-than” because of sin from my past.

But you know what—every single time this has happened, even when the preacher botched grace, I’ve been met with the unrelenting mercy of Jesus. And when I look back upon my sin I don’t want to coddle it. I don’t want to pretend like it isn’t there and that it isn’t/wasn’t ugly. I want to see it laid bare and crucified. And I want to use the sight of my idolatrous immorality—in all its ugliness—as another reason to fly to Jesus.

I think a former slave captain shares my sentiment. Likely one of the sins Newton had in mind was his past work as a slave captain when he said this:

I think those are the sweetest moments in this life, when we have the clearest sense of our own sins, provided the sense of our acceptance in the Beloved is proportionally clear, and we feel the consolations of his love, notwithstanding all our transgressions. When we arrive in glory, unbelief and fear will cease forever: our nearness to God, and communion with him, will be unspeakably beyond what we can now conceive. Therefore the remembrance of our sins will be no abatement of our bliss, but rather the contrary.

In other words if we’ve really come to grips with what Christ has done for us, then we the remembrance of our sins will not be a cause for despair. Instead the remembrance of our sin will be a means to joy. We’ll feel the weight of our sin, yes. We’ll weep at our past ignorance. We might even be haunted, as Newton was, by the ghosts of former slaves (or the though of our aborted child). But even this will be no match for the super-abounding grace of Jesus.

Perhaps we are tempted to dock Wilberforce’s ship because we aren’t fully confident of the healing power of the gospel. You can preach grace and forgiveness and mercy aboard the ship of your darkest sin. And at the same time you can expose the horrors and stench of the dehumanizing industry.

Photo source: here