And, as many pro-lifers and conservatives feared, President Barack Obama is on track to becoming the most pro-abortion president in the history of the nation, starting first with the repeal of the Mexico City Policy, which prohibited funding for overseas abortion providers, and most recently with his plans to lift restrictions on taxpayer-funded research using embryonic stem cells.
Obama is also expected to eventually fulfil the promise he made to Planned Parenthood by signing the Freedom of Choice Act, which would abolish all restrictions and limitations on women in the United States to have an abortion prior to fetal viability, whether at the state or federal level, or after the point of viability when the life of the mother is endangered.
While most Americans can do little, if anything, to reverse today’s political and economic tides, there is much that can be done to change the cultural tide. And, as one prominent megachurch recently noted, real change doesn’t come from politicians and the changing of laws but from the Church and the changing of hearts.
“Everything else is going to burn up one day. Politics isn’t going to last. If I thought it was, I might be a politician,” Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, California, noted last week at an event for church leaders.
“Politics is always downstream from culture. If you want to influence culture, you have to change hearts. And, you can’t change a heart with a law,” he added.
While politicians and political groups are certainly an integral part of society and may be working tirelessly to get the nation back on track – financially and morally – Warren emphasised the impact that pastors and lay Christians can have on the nation.
“One church, you drop a pebble in a pond and it doesn’t make much of a ripple. But, if you take 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 churches and drop them, and guess what? You’re going to get a big reaction,” he said during a general session at the NEXT conference at Saddleback at the end of last month.
“Each of us doing our part we can see a major spiritual awakening in our nation and in our world if we would be available to God.”
Even in the face of a recession or amid what many pro-life groups are seeing as an “assault on life” from the nation’s capital, Warren reminded believers of the hands that God has given them to reach out.
