Pro-life sidewalk counselors have an extremely difficult job.
Life hangs in the balance during the conversations that counselors have with women outside of abortion clinics. So it’s a joy like no other when a counselor successfully turns a woman away from the clinic.
You thank and praise God, and it’s the kind of moment that, in a sense, validates your entire life. But that isn’t always the end of the story. Babies are in the womb for nine long months.
Sometimes—and this has happened to counselors I know—a woman will change her mind again, go back to the abortion clinic later, and kill her baby. That’s the kind of moment that crushes all your thanks and praise that you offered to God just days before.
What was the point of it all? The baby died anyway.
We’ll all ask this question at some point, because we live in a world filled with wicked politics, twisted culture, broken families, and evil men going from bad to worse, as 2 Timothy 3:13 says.
Sure, recent developments at the national level have honored God more than before, but each administration only lasts four years. And all you Illinois residents know that the devil’s perversion infects more than just national politics—your own legislature is considering a bill to make suicide legal.
If it does pass, would you be tempted to wonder what was the point in fighting it so hard?
We’ll all ask this question at some point, so we all need to be reminded of the answer. In fact, I learned this lesson from a pro-life sidewalk counselor, which makes it especially poignant.
When we start wondering “what was the point of it all?” we need to ask a deeper question. “Who were we doing it for?”
Were we fighting for righteousness only so we could see good consequences? Or were we being faithful to God regardless of the end result? If we were fighting for righteousness to be faithful to God, then no matter how things turn out, it was worth it.
King Josiah was a stellar example of this. After all, he inherited a doomed nation. His grandfather, Manasseh, was one of the most wicked kings to ever sit on the throne of Judah. Manasseh had set up pagan altars in the Temple, sacrificed his own son in the fire, and led the people to do more evil than the pagan nations they had driven out of Canaan generations before. So God had promised impending doom on the nation:
“I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle” (2 Kings 21:12).
But Josiah was a righteous man in God’s eyes, and as he began to repair the Temple, his workers found the Book of the Law. When Josiah discovered how wicked his nation was, he tore his robes and inquired of God. But his repentance didn’t change the curse on his nation—God’s response was:
“Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place” (2 Kings 22:20).
The disaster was still going to come.
Yet that didn’t stop Josiah. He began an unprecedented national revival. He read the Law to the people and renewed the covenant with God. He removed and burned the idolatrous objects that were in the Temple. He smashed idolatrous sacred stones. He got rid of spiritists and household gods. He broke down pagan shrines and pulled down pagan altars.
He desecrated places used for child sacrifice, and he even killed pagan priests on their own altars. He and the people celebrated the Passover unlike it had ever been celebrated in Israel since the judges of old.
God was surely pleased with what Josiah did:
“Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the LORD as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses” (2 Kings 23:25).
Even today, we remember Josiah as one of the few good kings that Judah ever had.
Yet that didn’t stop the curse on Josiah’s nation. In the very next verse, we read,
“Nevertheless, the LORD did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to provoke him to anger” (2 Kings 23:26).
So did Josiah do what was right? Absolutely. Did that change the fact that disaster was going to strike his nation? Absolutely not. Yet Josiah still did the right thing to do in the time God gave him to do it.
Josiah’s attitude should inspire us today.
Even if we know that any particular fight for righteousness will fail in the end, we are still called to be faithful to God and do what is right anyway. Even if we live in the most God-hating part of the country, where wicked politicians push through wicked initiatives day after day with no one to stop them, we are still called to be faithful to God.
Sometimes, that means fighting even though you know you’re going to lose. But the fight was worth it, because “well, done, my good and faithful servant” makes anything worth it.
Let’s wrap up by taking this in a slightly different direction.
Sincere Christians have different views on what the end of the world will be like. Premillennials tend to believe that everything will get worse before Christ returns, and postmillennials tend to believe that everything will get better.
I sometimes hear postmillennials criticize premillennials who want to “give up” on this world because “it’s all going to burn anyway,” so we should just retreat to our bunker with our Bible and a can of spam and wait for the Lord to rapture us out of here.
No politics, no cultural engagement, just lamps under bushels until the recess bell rings.
But personally, I think this is a shameful way to live, even though I’m a premillennial too. Even if you do think this world is going to burn in the end, that is no reason to give up on being faithful to God in whatever corner of it He may call you to.
Fight for Christ in politics—even if you think evil will prevail in the end.
Fight for Christ in culture—even if you think it’s all going to burn.
After all, Josiah lived in a kingdom that was going to “burn in the end,” but that didn’t stop him from being the most righteous king his nation ever had. He was being faithful to God, and that made it worth it.
We should do likewise.
