I greatly appreciate the fact that each year, around the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, Matt Chandler takes a morning to preach on the sin of abortion to his congregation. As John Piper has noted with concern, it’s a topic that many pastors of Chandler’s generation are afraid to touch with a 10-foot pole. Chandler tackles it head-on with conviction and grace. But apparently, even though he’s been doing this for a few years now, the rest of the world is only just recently learning about it. His latest abortion sermon has gone viral, and news outlets are picking it up with headlines like “‘Abortion is Murder,’ Megachurch Pastor Tells Congregation in Sunday Sermon.” Or my favorite, from a liberal rag, “Anti-abortion Texas pastor shames rape victims as worse than Hitler.” Man, I just love out-of-context, deceptive quote-splicing, don’t you?
At any rate, I’ve embedded the whole sermon here and marked off the clip that most people are talking about. I could critique a few things about the sermon as a whole, including the predictably disappointing comparisons to the Civil Rights movement, but I’ll forgive it for the hard-hitting way he dealt with the abortion issue. I was also intrigued to see how he directly addressed those in the pews who had participated in this particular sin. You can read the transcript here.
“I need to, with all the boldness that the Holy Spirit will grant me, tell everyone in this room that abortion is murder... It is a brutal horrific, disgusting practice. And many of us are guilty. But most of us are indifferent.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In