A Conversation with Michelle Shelfer

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together.

It's reasoned relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know. From Alex McFarland Ministries, this is Truth for a New Generation Radio. And now, the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland. Throughout the Word of God, it is clear that the giver of life is the preserver and protector of life. And in the eyes of God, and in our eyes as well, life is viewed as sacred.

Hi, Alex McFarland here. Welcome to another edition of Truth for a New Generation. And one of the issues that is so core to our ministry and to my wife and myself personally is the issue of life. The Word of God says in Psalm 139, �For you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.� Now listen to this. Speaking of God, our Creator, who knows every person even before they're born, Psalm 139 says, �Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

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.� I mean God knows who we are. God knows the steps of our journey. God sees our life even before we're conceived and born. And so one of the things that the Bible is very clear about is the personhood of all people. Well I want to introduce you to a brand new friend and colleague in the ministry and we're going to talk about these things. The personhood of the unborn and also help and healing for those hurt by abortion. Michelle Shelfer is an author and an editor and a Christian thinker and Christian leader in California and we are so honored that she's taken a few moments to be with us and we're going to hear her story and I want you to listen very carefully because we're going to learn about her wonderful book �Prepare a Room, a Path to Peace and Healing for Those Hurt by Abortion.� And she is an author published by Nord Skog, a publisher.

You've heard me mention that I just learned of them last year but I love this publisher. And so Michelle Shelfer, thank you for being on Truth for a New Generation and we look forward to hearing the message that God has given you. Thank you so much, Alex, for having me and greetings to all your listeners. I'm so honored to be here and I heard you talk about the collateral damage and then I listened to that portion of Psalm 139 that you read and I began to think that beautiful gift of life that's being formed in the belly. How many people have read that psalm with the thought that there's a mommy, there's a woman wrapped around that beautiful life and that woman is the carrier of the life? And when you talked about collateral damage, you know, we live in a culture that's just really celebrating sexual convenience and sex without responsibility and really doing its best to divorce the connection between the sex that we have, our children. And they've done such an excellent job of that that abortion has become a very obvious answer. And the collateral damage that my particular ministry wishes to draw attention to is that of the men and women who have suffered the loss, who are now peaked and their consciousness is no longer seared but is beginning to feel a loss there and I did something that brought harm to another innocent human being and now I'm suffering for it. And those are the people that we're addressing in our ministry, those men and women. I don't want to leave the men out even though it's of course the women who are carrying the babies but the men are also very much affected by this. So that's what the book is for. It's addressed to people who are hurting from abortion and it actually lays out a 10-step path that's roughly based on what I went through because I am not speaking as one who doesn't know this sin.

I am very intimately familiar with it because I had my own abortion and I'm bringing the wisdom that God has offered to me to bear for those who are hurting so that they can find peace and healing after an abortion experience. Michelle, 10 years ago I was on the road speaking and I would say to audiences that the core value of this generation seems to be sexual license. But now I would say the core value is just license and is it fair to say that as we have really failed on one moral precept, I mean the moral precept of defending life, we're incrementally failing on all the other moral precepts, just order and honesty and respect for other people's property and just respect in general. If the highest moral precept, love thy neighbor and defend the orphan and the fatherless, if we're failing at life, is it just a given that we're going to lose our way on all other moral considerations as well? Well yeah, I think what's happened is a cutting of the rope from the moorings of biblical morality and it's no different from what happened in the garden actually because we see that in Genesis 2, I believe it's 2.15, God has a specific purpose for Adam in the garden and that is to cultivate the ground and to keep the garden and that word that's used in the Hebrew, it really means to safeguard, to guard and he, Adam that is, failed in guarding Eve from the temptations of the enemy of God and this is what we're seeing now. We're seeing a failure to safeguard biblical concepts and the plan that God has for his creation and his people to be redeemed and to be at their best and at their highest and yes, I think you're right that once you've opened the door to the enemy of God, anything can flow in and we are seeing that now. I don't recognize the nation that I'm living in anymore. It's gone so far. It's gone so far away from any kind of order like you said order and civility, respect and yet I also recognize that we can read in biblical times that there were also really perverted nations who went through similar times so this is not something that's new. I agree.

Forgive me, we're going to have to take a quick break. We're talking with Michelle Shelfer and I agree. I don't really recognize the America of 2021 contrasted with the America that I grew up in but folks, stay tuned. We're going to learn about this book Prepare a Room, a 10-step path to peace and healing that addresses the damage done through abortion.

Stay tuned. Truth for a New Generation is back after this. America today is like a patient struggling to live yet is being forcibly euthanized by her quote doctors. The life force within the patient fighting for survival is the honest citizens like yourself.

The team of quote caregivers are the local and national leaders actually contributing to the demise of the patient. The economy is crashing, crime is exploding, the Constitution is being abolished. The Assault on America, How to Defend Our Nation Before It's Too Late by Alex McFarland has one single purpose, to get you prepared. Learn the real source of America's current problems that no one else is talking about and what you can do now to face tomorrow regardless of what tomorrow brings.

The Assault on America, How to Defend Our Nation Before It's Too Late available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and local Christian bookstores. Christians don't necessarily agree with one another when it comes to questions of religious pluralism, homosexuality, the role of government, abortion and war. Too often we manage these disagreements by ignoring them. Yet we're called to engage the world for the sake of Christ.

How can we be effective if we avoid society's most pressing questions? In 10 issues that divide Christians, Alex McFarland challenges us to drill down to the biblical core of 10 current issues such as social justice, evil and suffering, pornography and environmentalism as he echoes the biblical invitation, Come, let us reason together. Only by engaging the scriptures deeply, thinking clearly and speaking truthfully can we in God's family address our differences and discover the peace that comes with unity of purpose. 10 issues that divide Christians.

Find this book and many others at alexmcfarland.com. For apologetics resources, books by Alex McFarland and to find out where Alex is speaking, visit alexmcfarland.com. Welcome back to Truth For A New Generation. You know, the issue of life is the issue. And I have to say that God has grown me on this journey.

When I first became a Christian, I was in my 20s, and then I began to grow in the Lord. I wasn't pro-choice, certainly not, but I wasn't necessarily actively pro-life. I just not really thought about the issue and I began to read writers like Francis Schaeffer and Chuck Colson and Phyllis Schlafly and others and I began to realize that the issue of defending the unborn and legal protection for the unborn, that had to be part of a nation that in any conceivable way could say that it was based on the Judeo-Christian worldview. Hi folks, we're talking with Michelle Shelfer. She's an author, a speaker, an editor, and she herself is one that went through the horrors of abortion. So Michelle I want to thank you for what you're doing very courageously, effectively speaking to this issue and being with us on Truth For A New Generation. Before the break we were talking about America and you said, and I agree, you don't necessarily recognize the country right now.

In what ways do you think we're a different nation than certainly when we were founded, but even a different nation from 10, 15, 20 years ago? I think that the enemy of God takes small steps in gaining ground. The Bible tells us that he's the ruler of this world, and so we shouldn't really be surprised that he wants to take his rulership, but perhaps he's wily as a snake and he infiltrates our education system and destroys an entire generation of our children, takes them right out of our arms and turns them into our enemies, and those who are cut off from their history so that there's no sense of where they came from, whose shoulders they stand on, and instead they are filled with a passion, which is a natural thing, a desire for worship and a desire for meaning and purpose, and they fill that void with causes that are fed into them really.

I mean, it's a leftist agenda, but it's not just a leftist agenda. It comes from the pits of hell, frankly, and it becomes unrecognizable. You know what? There's no end in sight except the end of death. I remember when the Gay Pride rallies first started, the Gay Pride parades and so on, and at first it was fairly civilized, and the following year it got a little wackier, and then the year after that it got crazier, and now you've got people dressing strangely, and then it gets worse and worse, and really the only end that is logical and natural for such a progression into insanity is the end of suicide and death. Yeah, and you grew up in San Francisco, right?

Yes, I did. My parents were bohemians, they were artists, and I'm an artist as well. They came to the West Coast and to San Francisco because they were seeking that kind of libertine lifestyle and the freedom conducive to their creative expression. You know, that word freedom is pretty funny because when you get free, what are you free of and what are you free to do? And oftentimes the sexual freedom, when we talk about sexual freedom, it really is a form of empowerment. Would you say that America looks like San Francisco? Has San Francisco and the libertine lifestyle almost been exported to the entire country? Oh yeah, or you could look to France, the French Revolution.

There's many models. Let me ask you this. You were talking about things get wackier and wackier and ultimately it's like death or suicide. I'm sure you've heard of the big festival. It's kind of a music and art festival, Burning Man, right? Yes, that's an art.

Home State, California. Yeah, well, you know, there have been a couple of times in recent years, very sadly, where people died at Burning Man and some run into the fire. And you know, that's tragic enough how the revelers and the attendees will run into the fire and die. But some of the people, when they were asking, what do you want to see next year? What events?

What bands? What happenings? And a number of the attendees of Burning Man said they want to see a human sacrifice. Does that speak to John 10-10, that the thief comes to steal, to kill, to destroy?

Yes, absolutely. Well, it's just part of a larger culture of death. I think we saw it in the zones that were protest areas in the various cities where you had a great idealism about what was going to happen there. But the reality was rape and murder.

That was the reality. And that's the vision. That's the vision that comes along with freedom with no restraints. You see, the reason that we have sexual freedom without restraint, without a sense of what our limits should be, without a sense of what the proper role of a man is in a relationship with a woman, ends up with the woman being victimized. She may think that she's got sexual freedom, but she's actually being diminished by this. And then she's diminished further when she deals with the consequences, which is her pregnancy, then she goes and has an abortion.

And then she's even further diminished. So that banner that they hold up at the pro-life rallies that says abortion hurts women could not be more true, could really not be more true. And let me say this, and I fully agree with you, I really do. When I speak at universities and I talk about morals, and quickly students will say, well, you can't impose religion. And I say, no, forget religion.

I'm not even talking about the gospel or salvation. I'm merely talking about the common moral ground that is the basis for any civilized society. If we cut ourselves loose, as I like the way you said, cut the cord, and really jettison moral boundaries, invariably we will descend into anarchy and chaos, not only the loss of stability, but the loss of life.

I mean, man without morals is chaos. Before we take a brief break, Michelle, give your website if you would, and where can people find the book Prepare a Room? Our ministry is Prepare a Room Ministries, and we're at PrepareARoom.com, and the book is available from nordskogpublishing.com, N-O-R-D-S-K-O-G publishing.com, as well as Amazon and other outlets. Folks, stay tuned. We're going to continue our conversation with Michelle Schelfer after this brief break. Truth for a New Generation will be back.

Don't go away. You know, Alex has been writing for many years, and one of his classic books is still great today as a basic introduction to the Christian faith. It's called Stand, Core Truths You Must Know for an Unshakeable Faith. This book will help you help your teens get off the roller coaster of doubt and onto solid ground. You'll read about the six pillars of biblical Christianity. They are, one, inspiration of the Bible, two, the virgin birth, three, the deity of Christ, four, atonement, five, Christ's resurrection, and six, Christ's return. You know, Alex mixes it up with humor and stories he gleaned from decades of working with youth and encourages teens to build a foundation of faith that will stabilize their lives and help them take a stand for Christ.

Simple and straightforward, Stand, Core Truths You Must Know for an Unshakeable Faith, available wherever Christian books are sold. Welcome to the podcast, I Hear You. We are so excited that you joined us. And this is just going to be a great new podcast dealing with issues around race, issues around friendship, and how do we deal with the tough issues. And I'm so excited to be here with my good friend, Alex.

It's great to be with you, Adell. And on the I Hear You podcast, we talk about race, we talk about culture, we talk about politics. And sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree. But we find resolution and common ground. And you know what's really cool? Not only do we learn new things, we make friends, we grow. And that's good for all of us. We're just two friends, one white, one black. And we just invite everyone to come and join and share with us.

It's a big difference between hearing and listening. And we're going to show people. We love it.

We look forward to it. And audience, thank you so much for giving us this chance. I Hear You with Alex and Odell, wherever you get your podcasts. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex McFarland is a voice you can trust to speak the timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. You're listening to Truth for a New Generation Radio. Welcome back to Truth for a New Generation.

Alex McFarland here, having a great conversation with Michelle Shelfer, the author of Prepare a Room. And before we resume our conversation, I do want to remind everybody that I will be at the Cove, the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove in western North Carolina. June 25 through 27, we'll be going verse by verse through the book of Acts.

The New Testament book of Acts, we'll be talking about the principles of revival and spiritual awakening. And so you can go to their website, which is thecove.org. And I would love to see you there, June 25 through 27. I also want to remind you to be on the listen for the I Hear You podcast. I Hear You, YA, myself and Dr. Odell Cleveland. He's an African American pastor and educator. And in many ways, he and I are different, but we're talking about politics, culture, issues, and the podcast I think you'll really enjoy.

So wherever you listen to podcasts and digital content, just look for I Hear You with Odell Cleveland and Alex McFarland. Well, right now I want to give a verse and then I will resume this very special conversation with author Michelle Shelfer. Psalm 127, 3 through 5 says, Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward, like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them.

And the Bible is very clear that children are not a burden, but a blessing. And Michelle, let's talk about your own journey. How did you become a believer? Well, I accidentally married a Christian.

That will do it. I didn't know he had a Christian when I married him, which, to tell you a little bit about how off the beaten track we were, we decided to get married. And I was actually sitting in the abortion clinic ready for my second abortion when I was blessed.

People standing outside praying and their prayers were effective. And I changed my mind as I was sitting there waiting and he had changed his mind too and came running in and the two of us actually proposed to me. So there was a lot about this fellow that I didn't know. And one of them was that he, as a preacher's kid, he sprung loose from his moorings and lived a pretty wild life when I met him.

And I was living a pretty wild life myself. And he loved Jesus. And I couldn't stand to hear the name of Jesus. So here I was married to someone who believed in a person that I didn't know anything about. And it took 22 years of his steady prayers to bring me to that Easter Sunday or Resurrection Day Sunday 2004 when I dared myself, because I was so miserable, to invite Jesus into my heart. And I never dreamed that when I said those words that he would honor me immediately, that the heavens would open above me and he would pour down something that felt like golden honey all over me, such that I was immediately irreversibly and dramatically transformed and have never been the same since. That's a wonderful story.

I've got to ask you this. In what ways, if any, is the American abortion state, I mean abortion is a billion dollar plus industry. Abortion is defended with contorted logic.

I mean even as you and I record this, Michelle, there's a politician in Georgia, an alleged minister, and he has been in the press trying to say that the Bible promotes abortion. So with just horrible semantical gymnastics people are trying to justify abortion. My question to you, how is the American abortion industry like the Holocaust? Would it be fair to say this is our Holocaust?

And if there are parallels, maybe speak to what those might be. Yes, actually, I have a vlog, a video log that I do, and one of them is on the Holocaust. That's a very personal topic for me because my mother escaped the Nazi Holocaust. And as ironic as this is, she escaped the Nazi Holocaust and yet my child did not escape our Holocaust of our day, which is abortion. The numbers and the figures of, numbers of casualties and numbers of victims in the Holocaust of abortion just outranks any other Holocaust in history. There has never been a Holocaust that had so many victims. I think we're talking about somewhere in the realm of two billion victims in the last 40 years worldwide. And I look to this abortion worldwide report that was done a few years ago.

They took every nation and took great pains in every individual case to look through all the different sort of recording records that were kept in these nations and put together an analysis of the numbers of abortion per country. And it's just astounding. It's absolutely mind boggling. There's no way for the mind to even comprehend. And yes, it is a deliberate and systematic genocide and it robs the opportunity to pass on meaning and purpose to the next generation.

It's really a terrible, terrible scourge on history. Well, Michelle, we've got to pull away for today, but give your website again and I want to thank you for being with us on Truth For New Generation. I want to commend you for sharing your story and writing a very wonderful book, Prepare a Place.

Give us the website, please. It's Prepare-a-Room.com. Prepare-a-Room.com. And I can be found on social media at Prepare-a-Room on Twitter and Facebook and so on. And the book is available at nordskogpublishing.com.

Thank you very much. And folks, you know the Bible says in Matthew 24 that near the end of time, near the return of Christ, it will be a time of lawlessness because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold, but in Jesus we can be saved. And folks, our message to you is that God loves you and Christ died for you. And if you go to the website alexmcfarland.com, there's a tab, What Does God Say About My Relationship With Him. If we can be of any spiritual help, I would encourage you, go to that, read what the Bible says about how God loves you so much. God loves you no matter what you've done or maybe you think you're beyond the love of God.

No, the Lord cares about you and God has a plan for your life. Thank you for listening to Truth For New Generation. Let me encourage you, stand strong for truth because as 1 Corinthians 15, 58 says, your labor in the Lord is not in vain. Call us at 877-YES-GOD-1.

That's 877-YES-GOD and the number 1. Or give online at alexmcfarland.com. While you're there, listen to program archives, read Alex's blog, invite Alex to speak at your event or contact Alex with a question or comment, alexmcfarland.com. Thanks for listening today and join us again next time as we bring you more truth for a new generation on TNG Radio.