The sermon was given in July 2024 outside Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, County Londonderry. The hospital sits inside one of the zones where the law bars what it calls influencing a person's decision about abortion services. Both sides in the case, and the judge, accepted that Mr. Johnston never mentioned abortion. He spoke of God's love and quoted a single verse of Scripture.
He was also convicted of failing to comply with a police direction to leave the zone. A district judge said Mr. Johnston had admitted his aim was to test the law. In the judge's words, he "tested the law, to the point where he broke the law."
His lawyers now argue that the conviction interferes far too heavily with his rights to free speech, freedom of religion and peaceful assembly under the European Convention on Human Rights. The appeal has been filed, and the case will go before a higher court.
Plain facts, then. An old man stood in a public place and spoke about God's love. He said nothing about any patient and nothing about any procedure. A court fined him anyway.
What the law cannot reach
Lawmakers who draw these zones say they want to protect vulnerable women from harassment. That is a fair concern, and no decent person wants a frightened woman shouted at on her way through a door. Harassment is already a crime, and it can be punished as one. But a law that fines a man for quoting the Bible within earshot of a hospital has gone well past harassment. It has decided that the gospel itself is a danger to be fenced off.
Look at what that means. The unborn child is a human life, knit together by God in the womb, and the zones exist precisely because the life inside a building is under threat. Yet the one message that speaks of God's love for the world is the message the law treats as the offense. A nation that cannot tolerate a sermon outside its hospital has a trouble no statute will fix.
My friend, this is not a new quarrel. Rulers have always been uneasy with a man who says the Lord Jesus Christ is above every court and every committee. The apostles were ordered to stop speaking in that name, and they answered that they ought to obey God rather than men. Christians honor those in authority, and they pay the fine and submit to the process. But they do not stop saying what is true. Mr. Johnston has chosen the lawful road of appeal, and that is the right road.
The verse itself
Set aside the courtroom for a moment and look at the words that landed a pastor in the dock. They are the best known in all the Bible, and they are for the mother in the hospital waiting room, the doctor in the corridor and the judge on the bench alike.
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)
Notice the word "whosoever." It shuts no one out. It does not ask who you are, what you have done or what you have chosen. It says God loved a lost world enough to give His Son, and that anyone who believes in Him will not perish. There is forgiveness for the woman who grieves a choice she made, and there is pardon for the man who pushed her toward it. There is even pardon for the sin of calling that verse a crime.
That is why the message cannot be silenced by a boundary painted on the pavement. It was spoken before any parliament sat, and it will be spoken after the last one has fallen. Law may restrain a preacher's feet for a season. It cannot restrain the Word, because, as Isaiah wrote, it shall not return void.
The court will decide whether a man may speak this verse near a hospital door. Every one of us must decide what to do with it. Believe it, and you have everlasting life.