A reason to remember, a reason to mourn, and a reason to celebrate who we are.
Filed on 27 May 2018 in Food For Thought category. 
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A reason to remember, a reason to mourn, and a reason to celebrate who we are.
Last night, Saturday 26 May 2018, was the 20th anniversary of the passing of the abortion legislation in Western Australia. We gathered at Supreme Court Gardens in Perth city where 3,500 crosses, each representing 50 children, had been laid out the day before to remember the children lost.
O Lord, our God, our Creator God, we worship you for who you are. We thank you for this meeting where we have been together as your children and we thank you for the freedom that makes this possible. We thank you for this facility where we have met and we pray your peace and justice will rule in the courts of this city.
Tonight, we thank you for the magnificence of your creation.
Specifically, we praise you for the gift of life. We thank you that you have created us in Your Image and we thank you for all that means in terms of the intrinsic value and dignity of human life and that You, Lord Jesus, actually came to this earth in human flesh thus honouring your own creation. Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made and as you saw our unformed bodies all the days ordained for us were written in your book before even one of them came to be (Psalm 139:14,16).
We thank you for the increasing consciousness of your truth and specifically of the truth of when we came into being. And we thank you for the science that has brought this into sharp focus
We pray for continued increasing consciousness of these truths and that in this age of outright opposition to truth and increasing determination to do things our own way that we will have the courage and will to stand for truth, including Lord Jesus your truth, that you died that we might live.
And so we thank you for the cross and all that it means. We thank you Lord Jesus for the cross that you carried for us and we thank you for the triumph of your rising from the dead and that one day you will return to put things right and reign in truth, justice and mercy.
We thank you that we can commemorate our lost ones with a cross. We thank you that we can celebrate with a cross those who have given their lives that we may live. And we thank you that tonight we have been able to symbolise with crosses the lives that we have allowed to be killed.
We thank you also that the cross symbolises and offers hope and resurrection.
And so, Lord, as we commemorate, help us also to celebrate. To celebrate forgiveness and new life for ourselves. To celebrate and extend your forgiveness to others. To celebrate You, as our most High Lord and God. To celebrate amongst your people, in our churches, from our pulpits, the truth of your creation, that we are created in your image and that every human life has innate dignity and worth from conception to life’s natural end, in all states of dependency and disability.
This year especially is a year to celebrate. With joy, let us do that, so that “the shout of the King” may be heard among us (Num 23:21 NIV).
See also the statement signed by 15 church leaders in 1998 in the leadup to the Abortion Bill http://www.chooselifeaustralia.org.au/life/combined-churches-statement-on-abortion/
