On June 24, 2022, where were you? Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news that Roe v. Wade had been overturned?
I must be honest with you, I never thought I would see that happen in my lifetime. I mean, I hoped it would be overturned but I didn’t actually see that coming. Roe was decided the year I was born, 1973. For almost 50 years now, we’ve been gleefully murdering babies in this country (and our tax dollars help pay for it).

I want to be very clear. I am very pro-life. I find it hideous, monstrous, and completely unthinkable to murder a child. But I also disagree with the death penalty and euthanasia and all other forms of the taking of life. Lest you want to argue with me about self-defense, I’m putting that in a separate category right now. Not only am I pro-life but I am also a firm proponent in “states rights.” I think the states should be able to decide for themselves (via the voters of that state) how they want to live their lives. I do not think the federal government has any business telling any of us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies, nor do they have the authority to tell individual states how they should and should not be doing business.

I have to also add this: If you claim to be a Christian and are “pro-choice,” may I humbly suggest that you re-evaluate your so-called faith? There is no room for murder in Christianity. Full stop. I’ve heard all the arguments. Murder is murder and has been expressly forbidden in Holy Scripture. And make no mistake; abortion is murder. It is not a “choice.” It is a human being that is being murdered at their most vulnerable.
If you ever questioned in your mind whether people who support abortion are Christians, just consider the question you are asking yourself. Look at what these bloodthirsty barbarians have done over the last fifty years. Since 1973, conservative estimates are that over 63 million abortions have been performed in the United States. If we have any brains, we know this number is higher because many of them go unreported. And that is just in the United States. This does not include the rest of the world.

May God have mercy on us.

Look at the reaction of the death mongers since the Supreme Court recently, and rightly, overturned Roe v. Wade. They are freaking out. These murderous barbarians hold sacrosanct the right for women to have their babies chopped into pieces, sucked out, dismembered and God only knows what else. They are so desperate to preserve their murder that our president (who claims to be a devout Catholic, which is a laughable claim at best) wants to have our legislators codify Roe so that access to abortion becomes a “right” under federal law.
Let’s be clear. The Constitution in no way affirms the right of someone to murder a child. You do not have that constitutional right in this country. You never have, despite the political wranglings of the Supreme Court back in the 70s, had the right to murder anyone.

But this ain’t over yet.
We have more praying to do.
We have more soul searching to do.
We have more repenting to do.
We have more loving to do as we love and wrap our arms around those women who have suffered because of the killing industry.
There is more to do. We cannot stop now.

The so-called culture wars have been a thing for a very long time. In the history of God’s people, the culture wars have been going on since the beginning. Our great enemy began this long ago when he lied to our first parents and manipulated the truth of what God had said to suit his own agenda. The culture of our enemy has always been lying, cheating, deception, manipulation, and death. He knew what would come of Adam and Eve’s sin. Later, God’s people would be given explicit guidelines for how they were to live their lives in faithfulness to God and in contrast to the world. As time went on, God’s people turned from their fidelity to God and embraced the culture of the people around them. All manner of evil ensued, and they were eventually punished by God.
Even after God graciously brought them out from exile and restored them (as a foreshadowing of what was to come in Christ), they still turned away again and embraced the world. They turned from the faith and began to look for success according to the world. That was their dream of a messiah. They wanted for their messiah to overthrow the world order and give them the kingdom they believed they had been promised, abundance and prominence and the death of their ”enemies.” They failed to see that their greatest enemy was the sin and death that plagued their souls and bodies.
Then the Lord Jesus was born, incarnate of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. He was no more well received by a people who had become lost and self-absorbed than we receive Him today. We are no different really. We have become like the culture of death, and the culture of ease and comfort that surrounds us. The enemy is still lying to us. He says, “Do you really have to live a holy life? Did God really say you have to do all these things? You don’t have to be the crazy Christian. It’s fine, just relax. It’s not like you’re killing people.”

Oh, but we are. And we are killing our own souls (and bodies) in the process. We have much work to do, brothers and sisters. The war rages on. We dare not give in now. While we rightly celebrate the overturning of the death manifesto, let us turn the gaze of our hearts inward. Have we embraced the culture of our day? Is there any real difference in our lives and the lives of those who pant so hard after the death of our children that they won’t stop at abortion!? No, the enemy has infected our education system, our entertainment industry, everything.

The war rages on.
The struggle begins within us.
We dare not shirk our duty.
Do not give in now.
​It’s not over yet.

Recently, I read some statements by an Orthodox Church leader here in America. I won’t use his name but suffice it to say, he is a prominent hierarch within the Orthodox Church. His comments took place at the March for Life in 2022. Now I know that some will say, “He was at the March, what else do you want? He’s supporting the anti-abortion agenda.” Is he?
He made the statement that, “We affirm the gift and sanctity of life – all life, born and unborn. As Christians we confess that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God.  Every life is worthy of our prayer and our protection, whether in the womb, or in the world. We are all responsible for the well-being of children. We are their “keepers,” and cannot shirk from our accountability for their welfare.”
Sounds good, doesn’t it? But then, he made his next statement, “At the same time, we also affirm our respect for the autonomy of women.”

Umm…I’m confused.

Then he went on, later, to say, “By His incarnation, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ assumed human nature, through His conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary. She freely chose to bring Him into the world, and God respected her freedom.”

Now I’m even more confused. On the one hand, he says that Orthodox Christians affirm the sanctity of life but on the other hand, we affirm the “autonomy” of women and that God “respected” the freedom of the Holy Virgin to freely bring the Christ into the world.
Do you see the problem here? This is double speak. This is the same sort of ambiguity and nonsense that we hear out of the Vatican. This is trying to have it both ways; this is trying to please the world. What should have been said is that abortion is murder, and the Church has always condemned murder in any form and has always condemned abortion. Full stop.

The West is doomed, my friends. As a Western man, I don’t say that lightly. My family and I live in the West. But I believe this with all my heart. The West is doomed; our culture, such as it is, has and is disintegrating around us. We live in a culture of death and depravity. That should make us who call ourselves Christians ask some questions. Which culture are we part of? Are we part of the culture of Life or death? We need to examine our lives and the fruits thereof to be able to answer that question. We need to examine our hearts, our passions, our desires, what we fill our minds with. We need to fall on our faces before God and ask Him to show us where we have fallen away and repent.
Another thing that has recently happened that bears on this is the recent “leak” of Supreme Court documents on this issue of Roe v. Wade. It’s interesting that this has happened during the holiest time of the year for the Church. We are in the Paschal season. This is the time when we Christians celebrate Jesus’ triumph over death and Hell. He rose from the dead in order that we may embrace His Life and follow Him in resurrection, that we may be conformed to His image (Romans 8:29). If we have been baptized into Christ, the Apostle tells us, we take part in His death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-11). This is Life, the divine Life that we, by grace may participate in!
Yet, our Western culture so strongly clings to its godless ideology of “choice” and “freedom” that we celebrate a woman’s “right” to murder her unborn child. Our culture clings so closely to death that we demonize the Russian president for what is happening in Ukraine without ourselves repenting of the many times our military has murdered innocent civilians and invaded sovereign countries willy-nilly for made up reasons. We have dropped bombs on a sovereign country every day (just about) for the last almost 20 years, but we stand on our moral high horse and lecture everyone else about morality. Meanwhile, we fail to account for the millions of children that we have murdered in abortion clinics and applaud the “freedom to choose” and “reproductive rights.”

Shame on our government. Shame on our culture. Shame on us who claim the name of God and embrace death. If you claim to be a Christian and support the “right to choose,” you either need to repent or stop calling yourself a Christian.
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Long ago, God told His people that they had to make a choice and today, He calls out to us the same,
“Behold, I have set before thee this day life and death, good and evil. If thou wilt hearken to the commands of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to love the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his ordinances, and his judgments; then ye shall live, and shall be many in number, and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all the land into which thou goest to inherit it. But if thy heart change, and thou wilt not hearken, and thou shalt go astray and worship other gods, and serve them, I declare to you this day, that ye shall utterly perish, and ye shall by no means live long upon the land, into which ye go over Jordan to inherit it. I call both heaven and earth to witness this day against you, I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: choose thou life, that thou and thy seed may live; to love the Lord thy God, to hearken to his voice, and cleave to him:” (Deuteronomy 30:15-20a, LXX)

The choice is before us, brothers and sisters.
We cannot be silent.
We cannot go along to get along.
We must choose.
Life or death, blessing or curse.
Choose.