Dr. William Lile, a board-certified OB/GYN, who performs outreach as the Pro Life Doc, is advocating for pastors to preach about life specifically tying the truth of the Gospel to abortion.
“Sadly, we’re not teaching much about abortion in our Christian colleges and in our seminaries,” he said.
He explained how he spoke at a pastor’s banquet with 120 pastors and asked if in either undergraduate college or seminary they’d had at least one lecture on how to discuss the issue of abortion and life from the pulpit, to raise their hand. Only three of the 120 pastors raised their hands.
Lile speaks regularly across the country at churches, universities, and other organizations advocating for the life issue. In presentations Lile shares tools to defend the unborn focused on the duty of physicians to “first do no harm” and emphasizing that the unborn are patients.
Audience members are encouraged to learn about the advances in medicine to treat babies in the womb, which proves they are patients, connecting the dots from “all patients have rights” to “the unborn are patients and therefore they have rights.”
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Pregnancy Help News spoke with Lile regarding his Gospel-centered approach which uses Scripture to turn hearts toward God and the pro-life message beginning with Psalm 51:5: “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”
“We’re not just born with a sin nature, but we are conceived with a sin nature,” he said. “The Gospel message is simple, because of sin we’ve separated ourselves from spending eternity with God but out of love He gave us a way to escape that punishment.”
“Jesus lived a perfect life, He was in the grave for three days and miraculously He conquered the grave, He rose again for us,” Lile said. “If we put our trust in Him then we can spend eternity with Him.”
Lile spoke before the student body of Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio, in late November, following the same approach of addressing the students as “medical students,” detailing the evidence of how an unborn child is a patient and then challenging the audience to focus on winning the battle for life with a Biblical worldview.
Noting that 18-24% of individuals attending church at least once a month have been personally involved in an abortion, Lile concluded that the Gospel is key to reaching people.
“These people are hurting,” Lile told Pregnancy Help News. “They’re still hurting from this decision that they made decades prior but they’re hurting, they need healing.”
“Healing only comes from forgiveness and forgiveness only comes through Christ so when you have up to 64 million abortions that have been performed and probably 18-24% of those abortions came from people who are there in our churches, they need to hear that abortion is wrong and that it is not such a horrible sin that the blood of Jesus can’t cover it,” Lile said.
At a men’s conference in Pensacola one man who heard Lile’s presentation told Dr. Lile afterwards about a past abortion he had supported his daughter through nearly 30 years ago.
“Not only was that my first grandchild, that was my only grandchild,” the man told Lile.
The man described his burden as a “lump of white charcoal that had been burning on his heart” all that time, and Lile’s presentation enabled him to hear a message of forgiveness.
Lile is not alone is looking to the Gospel to address the issue of abortion.
Toni Brubaker, Abortion Recovery Program Manager at Pregnancy Decision Health Centers in Ohio, told Pregnancy Help News, “I believe that true healing comes directly from the message of the Gospel. The common thing I hear from women and men who have experienced abortion is, ‘I just can’t forgive myself.’”
“That’s the beautiful thing about the message of the Gospel,” Brubaker said. “Abortion is sin, and we don’t have the power to forgive sin. That was done at the cross by Jesus. We simply get to choose if we are going to accept that gift.”
“That’s always a huge ‘aha moment’ for those walking through healing,” she said. “They don’t have to carry it around anymore struggling to do something that they don’t have the ability to do. Jesus paid it all for us.”
Tweet This: The beautiful thing about the message of the Gospel is that forgiveness for the sin of abortion was done at the cross by Jesus.
Pregnancy Help News previously reported on a pregnancy center in Alliance, Ohio, that shares the Gospel with its clients as a regular practice and staff there have witnessed women turning to Jesus and finding courage and hope to choose life for their babies as a result.
Rachel’s Vineyard founder, Theresa Burke similarly fosters forgiveness and redemption with the post-abortion healing ministry. Rachel's Vineyard retreats utilize Scripture to invite individuals to place themselves into the story so that they can listen to Jesus speak to them the same words of grace and forgiveness that He spoke to others.
This use of the Gospel message is a powerful encounter with the Word of God through passages such as the woman at the well in John 4 or the woman caught in adultery in John 8.
The passage is examined in context and then personalized for participants. Healing occurs at a deeper level as the soul wound is look at in the light of God’s Word bringing to life the mercy of God.
Another ministry doing excellent work utilizing the Gospel message while validating the pain of past abortion is offered by Jane Abbate, known as “My Mentor Jane.”
Abbate first benefitted personally and then was part of a Rachel’s Vineyard team, and now works alongside the ministry’s efforts in a follow up for women and men on the healing journey. Through her books and videos Abbate acknowledges the pain, fear, guilt and other emotions individuals connect with in the process of reflecting on a past abortion.
“I try to connect the Word of God in my videos to reach those who don’t know but also for those of us who do know but just didn’t think it applied to us, or it didn’t apply to abortion,” Abbate told Pregnancy Help News.
For example, for people who had multiple abortions Abbate will utilize the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus. After His resurrection Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves Him (see John 18 and 21).
“One day sitting in church that’s when the Holy Spirit connected for me,” Abbate recounted. “I had had three abortions, and I denied Jesus three times. And here is Jesus coming to me asking, ‘Do you love me?’”
“And I can say, maybe I didn’t love you then, I wasn’t connected to you then, but I love you now and I want to love you now, I want to love you more,” she said.
“It’s super important for us to connect the Word because that’s the truth and you can only get so much emotional relationship healing in the mind,” Abbate noted.
“Your healing will never be complete; you will never be whole unless you are developing that relationship with Jesus and that is why the Word is so important,” she said.
“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has stated. “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
