A Culture of Life: Vision and Hope

Today's Scripture

Romans 8:22-23 — "For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."

Revelation 21:3-5 — "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.' And he who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new.'"

John 11:25-26 — "Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.'"

The Big Idea

We end where the Bible ends: not with a culture war won, but with death itself abolished. A culture of life is not built by people gritting their teeth to be good. It is built by people so certain of the world God is bringing — no tears, no death, no impossible choices — that they start living that way now. Hope is not the opposite of action. Hope is its engine.

Reflection

Choose life

At the end of his life, Moses gathered Israel and put the whole covenant into one sentence: Deuteronomy 30:19 — "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live." Notice that the choice is not just personal. That you and your offspring may live — choosing life is something a whole people does, generation by generation, and the children inherit the result.

That is what this plan has really been about. Not winning arguments about abortion or euthanasia, but becoming the kind of people, and the kind of church, that chooses life at every point where life is fragile — the womb, the crisis pregnancy, the hard case, the deathbed. Ten days ago we started with the claim that life is God's gift and God's possession. Everything since has been working out what a people shaped by that claim actually does.

Why? Because of who God is. Jesus drew the line in one verse: John 10:10 — "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." Death and destruction are the thief's signature. Abundant life is Christ's. Every time we protect, welcome, feed, adopt, visit, or simply stay, we are signing our Lord's name.

Irenaeus, a pastor from the second century who had learned the faith from a student of the apostle John, said it in a line Christians have loved for eighteen hundred years:

"The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

A human being fully alive gives God glory the way a stained-glass window gives the sun glory. That is why every life matters — the embryo, the teenager in the parking lot, the grandmother on the ventilator. Each one is a window the light wants.

And so the people of God live deliberately. Jonathan Edwards was about nineteen when he wrote himself a list of resolutions, and the sixth one fits this whole plan:

"Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live." — Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions

Choosing life is not a position. It is a way of spending your might.

Groaning is not the last word

But let's be honest about the world as we found it these ten days. Women weeping in clinics. Children no one fought for. Families wrecked by diagnoses. Old people quietly convinced they are burdens. If you have felt the weight of it, you are reading reality correctly.

So does Paul. Romans 8:22-23 — "the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves... groan inwardly." Groaning is the Bible's own word for life between Eden and the end. But Paul chooses his metaphor with care: childbirth. These are not death pains; they are labor pains. Something is being born.

The prophets saw what. Isaiah 25:8 — "He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces." Death — the thing that has driven every hard question in this plan — does not get reformed or managed in God's future. It gets swallowed.

John saw the same future from his exile: Revelation 21:4-5 — "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore... Behold, I am making all things new." Read the list slowly. No more death: the deathbed questions, gone. No more mourning: the clinic grief, gone. No more pain: the labor of the whole creation, delivered. And 2 Peter 3:13 adds the address: "new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." Not a wispy cloud-existence — a remade world where things are finally right.

Augustine ended his enormous book The City of God trying to put that day into words:

"There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end." — Augustine, The City of God

The end without end. Every story we tell ends; the one God is writing opens out instead, like a door into morning.

Hope that rolls up its sleeves

Here is the surprise: people who believe all that do not float away. They dig in. C.S. Lewis checked the record:

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next... Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

He is right historically. In the Roman world, unwanted newborns were sometimes left outside to die — and it was the Christians who became famous for taking those babies home and raising them. Believers built the first hospitals. Wilberforce ground away at the slave trade for nearly fifty years. Cicely Saunders founded the hospice movement. All of them were aiming at heaven, and earth got thrown in. Hope is not a waiting room. It is a workshop.

Paul says exactly this at the end of his great resurrection chapter. After announcing 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 — "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" — he does not conclude "therefore, relax." He concludes, 1 Corinthians 15:58 — "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."

Not in vain. N.T. Wright has spent a career unpacking those three words:

"You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire... You are — strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself — accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world." — N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Think of it like setting the table hours before the family arrives. The work is real even though the feast has not started. The meal you helped a young mother eat, the afternoon you sat with a dying man, the child your church helped place in a family — none of it is wasted motion. It is table-setting for a feast that is actually coming.

The God who chose life for you

One last turn, and it is the most important one. After ten days like these, the danger is that you walk away with a to-do list: be more consistent, more compassionate, more courageous. Try harder. But tired moral effort has never built a culture of life, because it runs on guilt, and guilt runs out.

The gospel runs on something else. Lewis put his finger on the difference:

"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

You do not defend the vulnerable so that God will finally approve of you. You defend the vulnerable because you were the vulnerable one, and he came for you. When the human race was the doomed pregnancy, the hopeless case, the patient not worth saving — God did not weigh our usefulness. He chose life for us, at the cost of his Son's. Bonhoeffer, who walked that road behind his Lord all the way to a prison gallows, described the call without varnish:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

Come and die — to convenience, to tribal loyalties, to a life organized around self — and discover, like a seed going into the ground, that this dying is how God grows life through you for other people.

Stand at the tomb of Lazarus one more time. Jesus says, John 11:25-26 — "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live." He does not say I will arrange the resurrection. He says I am it. Hope, for the Christian, is not a doctrine to recite at funerals. It is a person who has already walked out of a grave — which is why Tim Keller loved to say, borrowing Tolkien's question and answering it with Easter:

"Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost." — Tim Keller, The King's Cross

Everything sad. The clinic tears. The hard cases. The deathbeds. The failures of the church, and yours, and mine. Coming untrue. That is the future this God has promised, sealed in resurrection blood. Live toward it with all your might.

Going Deeper

Do not let this plan end as ten days of opinions. Tonight, choose one act and put it on the calendar before you sleep: volunteer at a pregnancy resource center, begin a conversation about fostering or adoption, schedule a visit to someone dying or housebound, set up a small monthly gift to a ministry that serves mothers, or write the letter from Day 6. One act, dated and named. A culture of life is built exactly that way — one ordinary person at a time, choosing life, because Christ first chose it for them.