When “Love” Is the Problem and Not the Answer

This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.

Hello friends. I’m bothered by a word that you might think shouldn’t bother me, but I am bothered by it. Welcome to the Case for Life Show. We’re glad to have you with us. And today we’re going to talk about love. Now, not love in the sense that you think, but love in a sense that distorts biblical and clear moral thinking. Because what we’re seeing today is a lot of people using love as a way to avoid either having hard discussions about moral truths or more insidu insiduously people using love as an excuse to affirm what we know is clearly wrong.

In other words, they’re using the word love to cover over what is clear moral reasoning so they can advocate for a behavior they want. And the sad news is a lot of our own pastors are fallen for this. And I’ll give you a couple of examples here in just a moment. We’re glad you’re with us today. I want to remind you if you’ve not already looked at our pro-life 101 course we offer that within one week will equip you to make a case for the pro-life view.

I encourage you to visit our sites and do that. Also encourage you to take a look at Life Training Institute, our show’s primary sponsor. Life Training Institute now for 21 years, it’s hard to believe it, but yeah, we’re now 21 years old, has been putting effective and persuasive pro-life apologetics content before audiences worldwide. And I would encourage you to take a look at their site to get information on how you might use one of our speakers to help you make a case for life where you live to maybe your group, maybe your pregnancy center, your school.

We can send a speaker to help you do that. All right. Why am I bothered by this word love? I mean, doesn’t the Bible make love the primary virtue we ought to pursue? Well, you might say I woke up today in a bad mood. And I woke up in a bad mood because I read an editorial in the local secular paper here in the town I live written by a pastor of a Baptist church nearby. This is a church that actually is right across the street from the one I attend.

And this particular pastor is taking issue with a good friend of mine, Pastor John Crotz, who had recently published a very well-argued pro-life editorial in this same paper. And this particular editorial apparently caught the eye of this pastor of the church I’m referencing. And he decided to try to refute what my friend John Crotz had written. But here’s the thing, he didn’t refute anything John argued. There’s no real reason given why my friend John was wrong to write what he did on abortion.

Rather, what this pastor does is say, you know, it’s one thing to advocate for your issue, but the Bible gives a more excellent way. It tells us to love. And I’m just going to read a little bit of what he says here. He says this. If all human life does have dignity, then our votes must also take into consideration all human life in addition to the unborn, as my friend John mentions. Well, here’s what this pastor right out of the gate is trying to do.

He says, “If you’re going to call yourself pro-life and if you’re going to preach that all humans have intrinsic dignity because they bear the image of God, then you got to do that for all life.” Okay, I agree. But what this pastor is basically saying is, “My friend John was wrong to focus on the issue of abortion while ignoring all these other life issues like treatment of immigrants, treatment of refugees, our border policy. Are we working to see that women are dignified through equal pay?

These kinds of things. So, he wants to put a whole bunch of issues together in a stew of moral equivalency and make it sound like my friend John is being too narrow in his focus. Well, let me make a couple of observations here. First of all, of course, abortion isn’t the only issue any more than slavery was the only issue in 1860 or the killing of Jews was the only issue in 1940. But both were the dominant moral evils of their day.

And it was right for Christians to focus on those issues and work at eradicating them. So there’s nothing wrong with picking what is a major moral problem and deciding you’re going to devote your resources to that. Now I would ask this pastor this. I would say what moral issue eclipses intentionally killing 1 million innocent human beings a year within our own borders. And often what I hear is, well, why aren’t we devoting equal efforts to treating hunger in Bangladesh and we’ve got all kinds of starving kids over in India?

Why are we only focused on the unborn? If we really care about human life and human dignity, why Jesus cared about all marginal people, all marginalized people, not just some. And this is the typical response we get when we try to focus on the moral evil of abortion. People want to create this great big stew of equivalence and say, “Well, all these issues are equal, and if you’re really pro-life, why, you’d be doing equal effort on all these other issues.” And we’ve talked about this on this program before, but again, what moral evil is there out there than our own government up until recently morally sanctioning and funding the intentional killing of innocent human beings.

It’s true. We can’t stop injustice in other countries. It’s not going to work for us to go over to Bangladesh and say, “Why aren’t you doing a better job feeding your own people?” or decide we’re going to go to India and say, “How come you’re not doing a better job lowering infant mortality rates?” That’s the responsibility of those governments. But we can and ought to stop injustice in our own nation, within our own borders. The United States government does have the power and the authority to curtail the intentional killing of innocent human beings within its own borders, and we ought to do that.

Now, of course, what this pastor wants to do is suggest that not letting someone in through our borders is morally equivalent to intentionally killing them. Well, that’s just nonsense. I mean, is there a moral difference between shooting someone at the border and saying, “You’re not coming in. Let’s just gun you down before you try.” And saying, “You know what? We have rules. We’re a nation of laws and immigration is always at the discretion of the governing authority. We do allow some people into our country, but we have rules and guidelines and threshold thresholds for how that’s to happen.

We’re not just going to have an open border. Closing the border leaves the immigrant or the refugee, however you want to call it, in exactly the state they were in before they came to the border. We leave them exactly where they were, which is a product of their own governments and their own cultures, not us. But with abortion, we don’t leave the unborn where they were, safely ensconced in their mother’s wombs. We make them immeasurably worse off by intentionally slitting their throats through abortion.

This is the kind of nonsense though that a lot of our own clergy and Christian leaders are falling for. They think there’s moral equivalence between denying someone entering the country and intentionally killing an innocent human being. And that’s simply false. And we as pro-lifers and those of us that take time to think more carefully are going to have to push back on this nonsense because it seems to be growing. It seems to be something that people keep coming back to. All right, let’s see what else he says here.

He says in choosing David as the new king of Israel, Samra focused on a checklist and that checklist involved the following. Notice what the prophet says this pastor. Quote, “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.” Okay, duh. That’s obvious. Of course, scripture teach that teaches that God knows the heart of man. But here’s the interesting thing. Scripture also teaches that the human heart is desperately wicked, sick and darkened, and in massive need of regeneration.

Okay, that’s what the whole new birth is about. God taking out our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh, a heart that reflects his values, his person. Well, what this pastor is basically trying to say here is don’t look at external evil like abortion. Rather, look at the heart of the person. Look at the heart of the candidate and maybe in their heart they’re actually better off than the person who is advocating externally for the protection of the unborn.

Okay, I can admit that there could be pro-life candidates out there who have bad hearts. I can admit that. But here’s the thing. I’m not really interested in the individual heart of the candidate if that candidate is going to promote evil from their political position. I thought ma Martin Luther King put this so well when a critic asked him one time, “Dr. King, the law can’t make the white man love you.” And Dr. King said, “You’re right. It can’t. The law can’t force the white man to love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.” And that matters.

The purpose of good law is not to make people love fetuses, love immigrants, or whatever. The purpose of law is to control the heartless. Let’s be honest here. Most people are not going to have their hearts changed through the proclamation of the gospel where they respond and become born again. Most people are going to reject the gospel. They’re going to reject God’s word. And therefore, we need something to prevent them from promoting evil wholesale. Well, that’s the purpose of civil law.

So, when I’m evaluating a candidate, the focal point is not what’s in their heart in terms of how they truly love people. The focal point should be what are the policies they’re going to promote? What are the laws they’re going to try to enact? Are they going to be laws that protect the innocent, protect the unborn, or are they going to be laws that intentionally harm the unborn? If you were a slave on a ship in Charleston Harbor in 1860 and you were praying to God for deliverance, what would cause your heart to take courage?

Hearing that there’s a candidate out there that had a lot of warmth for people but wanted it to be the case that you remained enslaved or would you take more courage from a rather rough guy who was a bad talker, swore a lot, wasn’t very good in his personal relationships but was committed to passing laws outlawing slavery. Which candidate would give you more hope? I think we all know the answer here. It’s not about love in our hearts. It’s what are the deeds you’re going to promote.

It’s true when it comes to salvation that that is a work of God in the human heart, regenerating that person and restoring them to right relationship with God. Totally agree with that. But when it comes to civic responsibility, we do in fact judge by deeds. Look, I’ll give you an example. Donald Trump did not talk a real good pro-life game either in 2016 before he was elected or in 20124 before the election we recently had. If you were just evaluating his words and trying to look into the heart of Donald Trump, you probably wouldn’t come out with a very good analysis of what his policies would be.

And yet it was indeed his policies during his first administration that overturned Roie Wade, overturned Planned Parenthood versus Casey, and cut off federal money for abortion to be spent promoting it worldwide. Those are big deals. Okay? I judge by a person’s act more than their heart. Yes, God judges the heart, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we should judge. We should also judge acts, behavior, proposals, not just what someone might feel in their heart. Now, this pastor goes on to say, “But how can we refocus ourselves from outward appearance to better discern where a candidate’s heart might be?” First John 4:16 says, “God is love.

Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them.” Now, this is a bit of gobly goop. Not the passage of scripture, but the way this pastor is trying to use it. It’s a very clever way people try to say that the way we know we’re really godly is we don’t judge people. We don’t judge outward actions or appearances. We love people. And that proves we’re Christian. And that will draw people to believe in Christ because they see how we are loving and nonjudgmental.

Again, this is just nonsense. Again, let’s suppose the issue is the treatment of Jews in 1940. And imagine someone confronts Dietrich Bonhaofer and Martin Neoler, the two Lutheran pastors who stood against Hitler, and said to them, you know, your outward appearance against Nazism is really not the most important thing here. What we need to know is what’s in your heart. Do you really love people? Do you love those SS troops? Do you love those that are running the concentration camps? That’s what we need to look for.

No, what you need to look for is who’s going to stop the intentional slaughter of innocent human beings. And it’s not people that talk gobblygook about love. That just isn’t going to get it done. Now, it’s interesting. This pastor then goes on to go to 1 Corinthians 13, the well-known love chapter in scripture, and he says, “Here’s what we should be looking at in our leaders that we elect. Are they patient? Are they kind? Are they engaged in envy? Do they boast?

Are they proud? Do they dishonor others? Are they self-seeking? Are they easily angered? Do they keep records of wrong? Do they rejoice in the truth? Okay, I agree with those things, but let’s look at the two he kind of overlooks here. Love also does not delight in evil. We have one political party in this country that not only tolerates evil through abortion and same-sex marriage and mutilating children through transgender surgeries and other issues, but we have one political party here that rejoices in abortion, promotes it wholesale, and wants to destroy anything that would stand in the way of the destruction of children in the womb.

If that’s not delighting in evil, I don’t know what is. And if that doesn’t persuade you, how about this? We have blue states in this country like Illinois, California, Vermont, Massachusetts, and others that will actually help a woman come from a state where abortion is illegal. They will pay for her transportation, pay for her lodging, pay for her abortion, and pay to send her back home in order to promote abortion wholesale. These are Democratun states, blue states, and they are promoting evil wholesale.

If that is not delighting in evil, please tell me what is. I can’t imagine how this pastor missed this. He also says that love should rejoice in the truth. I agree. Let’s start with truth, then, not how someone might feel in their heart. So, here’s the truth of the pro-life position. Premise one, it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Premise two, abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being. Conclusion, therefore, abortion is wrong. And proifers defend that basic formal presentation of their argument, their syllogism, by first appealing to science, showing that there is a distinct living whole human being there from the earliest stages of development from the one cell stage.

At fertilization. In other words, you didn’t come from an embryo. You once were an embryo. Notice, we’re not appealing to blind faith. We’re appealing to the facts of the science of embryology, which are available to anybody who bothers to look. Then we argue philosophically that there’s no essential difference between you, the embryo, and you, the adult, that would justify killing you back then. Differences of size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying we could kill you then, but not now.

Let me put this in a way maybe this pastor could understand. Just as it’s wrong to discriminate against people based on their skin color or gender, it’s also wrong to discriminate against them based on their size, their level of development, their location, or degree of dependency. They’re wrong because none of those traits have moral valuegiving properties. In other words, they’re morally irrelevant. There are small humans, large humans, there’s smart humans, there’s dumb humans, there’s humans who are more or less dependent than others.

And there are humans who reside in differing locations throughout the planet. None of those things are good reasons to justify intentionally killing you. And this pastor does nothing to refute my friend John Crotz as to why his pro-life editorial was mistaken. He just tries to change the subject and say, “Let’s talk about love.” Well, I agree. But here’s a question I want to put to this pastor. Is it loving to intentionally kill an innocent human being? Now, this pastor appeals to loving our neighbor.

Again, I totally agree. But is the unborn my neighbor? See, what’s assumed here in this editorial is that the unborn is not a human being, is not one of us. Because otherwise, is it loving to the unborn to intentionally kill them, to vote for candidates that will promote their destruction wholesale? Is that loving? It’s only loving if you assume the victim class in question is not a member of the human family. And that is something this pastor nowhere argues for. He just assumes it under this kind of wishy-washy gobblelygoop concept of love.

And I’m more and more troubled by evangelical and Catholic leaders who are promoting tolerance and love and care as a way to excuse intentionally killing an innocent human being. This is nonsense. And Christians are going to have to get tough on their leaders and say, “Grow up.” You know, look, can you grow some courage here? Because you’re certainly promoting a bunch of nonsense when it comes to how we truly love. Love does not mean we affirm what is evil. And scripture is clear that God particularly hates the shedding of innocent blood.

That he finds that very egregious. This is something we see taught in Exodus 23. We see it in Proverbs 6. We see it in Isaiah 1 and a host of other passages we could point to. Matthew 5, for example. If God hates the intentional shedding of innocent blood, in other words, what we would call the intentional killing of an innocent human being. We’ve only got one question to answer here, and that is, are the unborn human beings? Because if they are intentionally shedding their blood is going to be particularly egregious to God.

So be aware of all these false appeals to moral equivalency to distorting words like love under the banner of oh you know we can vote for people and promote people who support child sacrifice because after all if they’re more loving in their hearts then actually we’re doing better for the kingdom and doing better for God by promoting them than we are those who outwardly say they value life and will pass laws outwardly but their hearts are darkened. That’s nonsense. Don’t fall for it.

We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to bring up another thing that’s under my skin and irking me a little bit and I’ll refer back to it. It has to do again with this whole concept of distorting love. I’m going to give you another example of that. We’ll see you on the other side.

Welcome back everybody. We’ve been talking about love and how the word is often distorted. And I have one more example here for you. In a wildly popular piece a few years ago that I still see being circulated by Christians on the internet, a psychologist by the name of Carolyn Yodar tries to argue that the problem with abortion is we just don’t love each other. And she writes the following in conclusion to her article where she lumps all these moral issues together and tries to say we shouldn’t be so worried about outlawing abortion because no matter what we do, we’re going to end up with blood on our hands.

So, let’s not even bother trying to legislate to protect the unborn. I’ve dealt with that argument elsewhere. You can check the Life Training Institute website if you want to see that. But let me get to her conclusion here. She says this. It’s easy to forget that Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God and each other. I wished we loved each other to stop demonizing. Okay, fair enough. But I have a question. First of all, does quote include the unborn?

In other words, when she appeals to us and we, does that include the unborn? And obviously she doesn’t think they do. And then she goes on to say this. Can we just quit demonizing each other and can we just love? Okay, I’m all for that. But is it loving to stand by while my neighbor is legally butchered? Again, the only way you can appeal to silence in the face of that kind of injustice is if you assume the victim class in question is not human, not a member of the human family.

Look, pro-lifers, we stand alone in our calling to save unborn humans. No other causes are coming to our rescue. We’re going to have to dig in and look our pastoral and Christian critics in the eye and say, “You’re morally compromised. You do not have the backbone to oppose what is clearly evil.” And instead, you’re trying to disarm the troops. Knock it off. And I think we need to be that tough with some of our leaders who tried to pretend that if we just were more loving and didn’t get caught up in all these external issues like abortion, secular people would flock to our churches.

That’s a bunch of nonsense. Let me tell you why people reject the Christian gospel. It’s not because Christians aren’t nice enough. No, it’s because people love darkness rather than the light. Open your Bible. It’s very clear that people love evil. They love practicing evil and they don’t want to come to the light. They don’t want to turn to Christ because they like doing what they’re doing. You could be the nicest Christian on earth and I will tell you something. Unless God is doing a work of regeneration in that person’s life, they are not going to repent and believe the gospel.

You are powerless to get people to believe. Now, that’s not a license for us to act like devils, but it does show that these marketing approaches to church growth are just ridiculous. We can’t sell the gospel. How do you sell a gospel that says, “Repent, reject yourself, pick up your cross, and follow Jesus.” That’s not a good sales pitch. Okay? The culture wants to hear, “How are you going to make me feel? How are you going to do something for me?

How are you going to make my life better? Telling people that it’s wrong to intentionally kill their own offspring so they can go to college, go get a better job, or save a relationship they’re in does not make their life here and now better. It makes it immeasurably more challenging. Yet, that is exactly what the Christian gospel demands. So this idea that somehow if we can just love each pe love everybody and maybe then they’ll like us and if we quit focusing on these external issues and worry just about the heart will be okay.

That’s nonsense. Don’t fall for it. Stick to the principle that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. And anybody that tries to either affirm that we can kill them or cover up the evil of abortion by appealing to other issues is not somebody worthy of you listening to. Listen to better voices. Read better books. Inform yourself so you can bring truth to these issues. Thanks for joining us. I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.