By Mark Nicholson

This past week a family friend of ours confided in me that her unmarried daughter is pregnant. She is in school and she took the news very hard. In fact, she despaired of life for a few days. It was touch and go for a while. A very difficult circumstance. She’s embarrassed. She doesn’t see how she can possibly finish school with a baby in the picture. Obviously in this situation, we have a young girl who has a high amount of fear and a very low amount of hope at this point. In talking with her, and I was not the only one who talked to and counseled her, the fear began to come down as people told her, I can help you. I can talk with you about your circumstances that make you feel like you can’t do this. I can help you find a job. I can help you find a place to go. I can help you whatever it is. The fear is coming down and the hope is going up. At some point she made the decision that she was going to be able to keep this baby. And that’s a really great, noble thing for her to have decided. It has derailed some ways and some of the plans that she had for her own life, but we can all agree that pregnancy is not a deadly disease. It strikes the conscience though, sometimes as though it is or were a deadly disease.

So the question that we come to today is where does that hope come from? It’s often from people just speaking words of encouragement and giving a glimpse or glimmer of hope to these people is all they need. I will help you. What can I do to help you feel like it’s possible to keep this baby or to raise this baby or even to put this baby up for adoption? And that person will begin to put hope, place their hope or their faith in you as you say that to a woman who is in crisis. And we often say that placing your faith in somebody who is helping you through a crisis is very similar to the way people place their faith in a savior when they need a savior for all of their sins and their lives. Life is messy. Choosing to keep life by placing faith in someone to help you is similar to choosing to make the spiritual decision to put your life in the hands of an eternal savior.

But people can only take us so far. The Bible describes the heart as wicked, fickle,unpredictable and changing from time to time. The heart can’t be trusted as constant. We have one hope, though, that far exceeds all other hopes in the human condition. That hope, of course, is in Jesus Christ. He is the one thing that can make atonement for the shedding of innocent blood, something as horrible as the shedding of innocent blood, and the only thing that is equal.
To the horribleness of the shedding of innocent blood is the beauty of the shedding of innocent blood. Jesus Christ on the cross is also the shedding of innocent blood that covers over and atones for the guilt. So this is not helping us through our life circumstances, helping us through a couple of weeks or a couple of months when things seem very grim. This is eternal hope. And hope eternal springs from one place, and that is Jesus Christ. This is why when we teach the Four Questions at home or abroad, question number three is so crucial to the whole of the teaching, because question number three says: “What can we do to bring the grace of the gospel to the guilt and the grief and the shame of abortion so that people experience not only forgiveness for their sins but freedom to turn now and rise and step forward, chin up and serve the living God?” How can we bring the gospel to bear on the one thing that makes people sometimes feel most awful about themselves? The answer which we will begin to break down over the next several recordings and look at it in finer detail is that we have the one hope that the shedding of Jesus’ perfect blood is the one thing that can make eternal atonement for all of the sins, even the ones that we feel most guilty and ashamed of.