Desiring God Blog : Posts by John Ensor

All the women in your life have to be 80 years old or more to have gone through their child-bearing years during a time when abortion was not legal and accessible. Among the rest, 42% of American women have had one abortion by the age of 45 (abandoned or pressured, by and large, by men). There are 50 million abortions every year worldwide. The USA represents less than 3% of this. Where we gather college students and young professionals together to challenge them with the gospel, close to half of them are struggling secretly with this one particular form of guilt.

Addressing the Blood-Guilt of Abortion

Our generation needs a gospel presentation that address the blood-guilt of abortion specifically and openly as a gospel issue. To view abortion as a secondary, or worse, a political issue is to fundamentally misunderstand the defining experience of our times. Imagine…

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John Ensor is the Executive Director for Urban Initiatives for Heartbeat International.

The following story testifies to the life-saving, truth-proclaiming, soul-reviving, conscience-preserving power of the growing pregnancy help ministry and is praiseworthy all by itself. But the story is all the more significant for 3 additional reasons:

1. It arises out of a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in a city targeted by over 30 abortion facilities, all doing a brisk business.
2. It reflects the white-knuckle grip that abortion, as a temptation, has on our fellow Christians. 
3. It points toward a credible and achievable kind of victory that we ought to expect as the Third Wave of the pregnancy help movement unfolds. 

Recently, John Piper tweeted,

Wave 1: Catholics say No to abortion. Wave 2: Evangelicals flood the land with CPC’s.  Wave 3: B…

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John Ensor is the Executive Director of Urban Initiatives for Heartbeat International and author of The Great Work of the Gospel.

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I kissed retirement goodbye—at least the kind traditionally planned for in America. My mother has finally persuaded me that there are better things to do when I reach her age.

In August, I wrote about caring for family with end-of-life challenges. My mother, at 78, started to go blind while on a mission trip to Mongolia. Her sight was saved through high-dose steroids, which tripped other health concerns which were compounded by the discovery of breast cancer.

The subsequent surgery left her fragile. She fell and added injury to sickness and disease. We gathered with her in August to discuss how to care for her as she enters what I call “the frowning years."...

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When we help a young, unmarried mother in the midst of a pregnancy crisis save her baby, by God’s grace, the baby can save the mother.

• The baby saves the mother out of a sinful sexual habit that was hollowing out her soul and self-esteem.
• The baby saves her out of the entangling lies and stalking anxiety that attends premarital sex.
• The baby saves her from blood-guilt.
• The baby saves her out of a mechanized Christian walk and into a shaken-down and overflowing experience of biblical mercy.
• The baby saves her out of a shallow, undirected faith and drives her to trust God for the forgiveness of her sins and for her daily bread.

And all this can be true for young fathers, too.

When pregnancy is a crisis, it is a crisis of faith. When we are there to encourage faith by honoring life, it is amazing how often it turns out that Christ is fo…

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Black historiographer, Carter G. Woodson, introduced the first Negro History Week in February, 1926, “to inspire us to greater achievement.” It is now the end of Black History Month. I ignored it for too long, but I resolved a few years back to use this month as an opportunity to restore the colors of our national portrait that were bleached out of text books of my youth.

My first response when reading of Black heroes in battle, laureates in the arts, researchers in medicine, innovators in education, science and business, is to wonder at God’s unmerited favor. In spite of the moral blindness reflected in slavery and the crimes against humanity that it produced, the odious segregation that followed in its wake, and the malingering malignancy of racism that remains as constant as sin itself, God made the least of these, under the worst of circumstances, the source…

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The end of abortion as a business is in sight when the prolife movement is not only joined by, but led by, the African-American and Latino Christian Community. I call it the Third Wave.

The First Wave of the modern prolife movement was the Catholic Church. In the late 60’s, as abortion “rights” were argued for in New York and California, many Catholic doctors, ethicists, and laypeople understood the horrifying truth of abortion and began to organize. They opened educational offices to explain fetal life; launched political efforts to elect prolife leaders and started “emergency pregnancy services” to help women struggling with pregnancy issues. The modern prolife movement was born. It was considered (disparaged as) a “Catholic” thing...

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