March 29, 2024

Hear My 2019 Pro-Life Sermon—“Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

The Bible says we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”—even while in our mother’s womb. Here is Dr. Jerry Newcombe’s sermon on January 20, 2019, New Presbyterian Church (newpres.org), “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made.” This message coincides with the 46th tragic anniversary of Roe v. Wade/Doe v. Bolton.

 

http://newpres.org/content.cfm?id=9054&download_id=180#attached_content

 

Here’s the text:

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min.

1/20/19

 

Psalm 139.

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

 

First of all, I want to start out with a word of congratulations. You are alive. And therefore you have won life’s lottery. One writer noted that the odds of the seed from your biological dad and the egg from your biological mom joining together were 200 million to one. And you—you won life’s lottery. You’re alive. Congratulations.

 

The late Zig Ziglar, a Christian motivational speaker, wrote, “Since the beginning of time, billions of people have lived on the face of the earth. There are several billion people on earth today, but there never has been and there never will be another you. You are a rare, exclusive, different and unique being on the face of this earth.”

 

The Bible tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

 

Verse 13 says,

—-For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

There is a big divide in our culture. We see it played out in the streets all the time. We see basically a conflict of different worldviews. Are we special creations of God or are we mere accidents of time and slime? Seriously. Did we just evolve or are we made in the image of the Almighty? Psalm 8 says, You have made man a little lower than the angels. But often the culture today says, No, in reality you are a just a little higher than the apes. Wow. There’s a big divide. In fact, there was a professor from Harvard, of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, until he became a creationist. He became a creationist? Yeah, he died and then the Creator confronted him. Seriously but he said that man is no better than “an accidental twig.” An accidental twig? Wait a minute—we’re made in the image of God. Nope, we’re just accidental twigs. What do you do with accidental twigs? Why, you gather them up and you throw them away. But Jesus said, Every hair of your head is numbered. And our Father cares for us. He loves us. He loves us so much that Jesus died for us. But we’ve got to see at the very creation of things, the very foundation of the issue: Does human life have value or does it not? Yes, it does because God has given us that value. God has made us.

Some people say, Well, we just evolved and that’s what the science says. But probability science is one aspect of science, and zero times any number(no matter how big)  is still zero. If the probability of life just happening by chance is zero, then it’s zero. In other words, we were created, not [evolved].

I know a man, a computer programmer, and he made a little computer program, in which he has a monkey sit down at a typewriter. Now this keyboard was specialized. It only had the 26 letters of the alphabet. It did not have numbers or punctuation marks. He had the monkey type out the 9-letter word evolution…just 9 letters, spelled correctly. What are the chances? He said the chances are 1 in 5.4 trillion. What? In other words, that’s virtually impossible.

Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of the book, DARWIN’S DOUBT, notes, “One approach is to try to explain the origin of information by chance, by the random shuffling of the parts of the DNA molecule. But that would be kind of like throwing Scrabble letters onto a table and hoping that they spelled out the Declaration of Independence,” word for word without mistake. It’s impossible.

 

Not only were we created, but we were created in our mother’s womb.

 

Now Milton Berle once said this, “If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?”  It’s a good question.

 

 

—–14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.

 

Now, here’s David writing 1000 years before Christ without the benefits of the scientific information we have. Man, we can see through the microscope how intricately we have been made, how fearfully and wonderfully we truly have been created.

Zig Ziglar said: “In your mind, you can store more information than you will find in the millions of volumes in the Library of Congress. Scientists tell us that if man were to attempt to create a human brain, it would cost billions of dollars, would be larger than the Empire State Building and would require more electricity than a city of thousands.”

 

One fellow, who is the Provost of Temple Baptist College. He’s from India. But he’s working here in America at a Christian college, named Joseph Paturi. And he wrote about the amazement of the human body. He said, “The brain is the centre of a complex computer system more wonderful than the greatest one ever built by man. The body’s computer system computes and sends throughout the body billions of bits of information, information that controls every action, right down to the flicker of an eyelid.” And he talked about all kinds of aspects of the human body, but let me just mention one—because I found this particular factoid amazing.

 

Did you realize that in your body—your body—there are thousands of miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries. Isn’t that amazing? The heart, says Dr. Paturi, “The heart actually is a muscular pump forcing blood through thousands of miles of blood vessels. [It] carries food and oxygen to every part of the body.” Wow.

 

Each of us is a walking miracle. And that’s also true for a little baby, even an unborn one….as the Lord is knitting that little baby in the mother’s womb.

 

—–15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

I once went on the Mayo Clinic website, and they have the anatomy of the unborn child and the development. They said this.

At the moment of Fertilization…the baby’s gender and “traits such as eye and hair color, and, to some extent, personality and intelligence” are set. At the moment of fertilization.

They said, Seven weeks after conception…the baby’s arms, elbows, toes, and eyelids develop. Yet the baby is only ¾ of an inch long at this stage. Wow.

∙Ten weeks after conception…fingernails now develop. Yet by this stage the baby only weighs about ½ an ounce.

 

There’s a famous line from a movie I haven’t even seen, but it’s called JUNO. It’s a crude movie from what I understand, but it actually makes a pro-life conclusion. A high school girl is going to go and have an abortion. It’s not convenient for her to have a baby.  As she’s about to go into the clinic, one of these prolife counselors on the outside—it’s usually Christian people—said, “Your baby has fingernails.” And the girl stops. What? She leaves, goes home and does some research and finds out that her unborn baby did have fingernails. And she chose life instead of death.

 

January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court decided 2 companion decisions. We call them overall Roe v. Wade, the name of the first one. Roe v. Wade. The other one is called Doe v. Bolton, the 2 decisions combined give us abortion on demand. And now, 60 million abortions later—we’re still suffering as a nation. We say God bless us. God bless America. I want God to bless America. May God bless America with repentance and a Third Great Awakening. We’ve killed all those unborn babies. People are going to look back at us and say, Wait a minute. You had 3D sonograms—you had 4D sonograms. And yet you tolerated all that? Look at how we look back at professing Christians who owned slaves. Can you believe that? What will people say about us?

In 1857 the Supreme Court said in the Dred Scot decision that a black person was not a person under the Constitution because of the color of his skin. It took a Civil War to undo the damage of that decision. Not that that decision was the only factor leading up to the Civil War. But abortion is a great black mark on American morality.

 

I once heard a man say, What’s the most dangerous place in America? It’s in your mother’s womb. It should be the safest place in America.

 

Many times when women are considering an abortion and they actually see a sonogram, they decide to choose life. There was a man who made a series of undercover videos, sting videos about some of the abortion practices. One of the things he found was that, On the one hand, the abortion clinics will say to anybody who asks, Is it a baby? Oh, it’s just a clump of tissue, it’s just a bunch of cells. It’s not really a baby. They’ll lie about that. Then, on the other hand, they turn around and carefully do the abortions in such a way so they can save the kidneys, the liver, the lungs, the heart, the brains—so they can sell these to laboratories for research—to make a lot of money that way. They make a lot of money doing abortions. And this is happening on our watch.

 

———16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

 

God has uniquely gifted each one of us for His purposes. We are here to fulfill our God-given destiny. But one of the things about abortion is that it’s not the only assault on life in America, cheapening life. There is a great push nowadays for suicide. A lot of times, terms like “death with dignity” are used. But in reality it’s just suicide.

 

Do you know one of the most famous scenes from a play deals with suicide? I refer to Hamlet by Shakespeare. In the scene of “To be or not to be. That is the question.”  We all know that line, but realize he has in his hands “a bare bodkin”—-that means an unsheathed knife. He’s basically saying, Should I or should I not kill myself? As he talks about how life stinks because of all these ills that mortal flesh is heir to, but then he concludes. Wait a minute, What happens if after I die, there’s something worse, when I “shuffle off this mortal coil”? And he says that the Almighty has set His canon (His divine law) against self-slaughter.  Therefore, he chooses not to kill himself.  Why does he not go through with it? Because he realizes when he dies, he’ll stand before the Creator. [Conscience doth make cowards of us all.]

 

I read a list of celebrities who died in 2018, and I was shocked by the fact that about half of them died at their own hands. I know of a very humanist celebrity. I was once on his show a few times, Bill Maher. And he said, if I get some sort of disease, I’m not going to let God kill me. (Oh, he recognizes that there’s a God? Oh, wow, well, that’s a good start).  But he said, I’m going to say to God, I quit before you fire me. in other words, he’s going to kill himself.

 

But people don’t realize when you die at your own hands, you’re going to stand before the Almighty. Jesus Christ came into our world and lived a perfect life. The only human being who ever did. Because God loves us so much that He gave His only Son. He gave His life. What more could He give? He did this to die in our place, to offer us the gift of eternal life. Life is great, from a Christian perspective . Look at Paul the Apostle. He was beaten. He was shipwrecked. He was left for dead even after being stoned. He was whipped. He had all these terrible things happen to him. And through it all he could say, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” The book of Hebrews tell us, “The Lord is our helper who will help us in all things. God has said, ‘Never will I leave you or forsake you.’ So we say with confidence the Lrod is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

 

The Christian perpective of life is that it’s a gift. It’s a gift from God. A gift to be used. For His glory and others’ good. Hhow can somebody just take that gift and fling it in the face of God? No thianks. How can they do that? They do it when they don’t have hope. When they don’t realize that Jesus loved us so much that He died for us in our place.

 

Life is a gift from God. We have been fearfully and wonderfully made. And this gift from Him is not something to be taken lightly. It’s a gift to use for His honor and glory.

 

Please if you know people who are contemplating abortions tell them that there is hope. There’s a whole group of people who are willing to help them through their problem pregnancy. [PLUG FOR SATURDAY’S EVENT—TESTIMONIALS FROM WOMEN WHO REGRET THEIR ABORTIONS, 1/26/19]

 

Life is a gift and God is the giver. If Jesus said the very hairs on our head are numbered, then we see that He cares for us. Jesus even said, What does it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your soul? It’s not worth the exchange. I close with the words from Deuteronomy Chapter 30 where the Lord said through Moses, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life [that is, choose God], so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to His voice and hold fast to Him, for the Lord is your life.” (Deut. 30:19-20, NIV). May we pray…