Christian Marriage #3- The Purposes Of Marriage—Procreation

Well, in the interest of not having to tell the same story 10 times, I'll tell you all that I'm very glad to be back with you guys. It was hard to be away. At first I thought, it'll only be a week and I'll be fine. At first I thought, this isn't COVID and I'll be fine. But I determined late in the week a few weeks ago that in fact it was COVID. I've never actually lost my sense of taste and smell before, but I tell you, it makes eating much less enjoyable. At one point, my kids said, you really can't taste anything? And I said, no. And they said, put cayenne on your dinner. You know, cayenne pepper. So we did. And I couldn't taste it. Not one bit. I felt it in the back of my throat. And then my nose started running. But I couldn't taste it a bit. It was an interesting thing. I was wondering where the hot pepper eating contests were at. And I thought, I can go and win. I can do the one chip challenge now and put everybody to shame, right? I felt pretty crummy for about three days.

Pretty bad cough, low-grade fever, headache-ish. That was almost two weeks ago at this point. I do still have a cough that's hanging on just a little bit, but I do feel good. My family was a little sick along the way. Vanessa had a cough similar to mine for a few days, though I don't think it was as bad. Our kids never seem to get sick. So they get to go back to school next week, and we get to go back to normal life. We're very glad to be here with you guys this morning. We've missed you very much and I've been thankful for the kind words that you guys have expressed to me and to my family and the meals that you've brought to us over the last couple of weeks. It's just been sweet. You know, it's been awkward to receive a meal through a glass door. Your friends and the people you love come and then you wave through the glass. It's very strange, but kind nevertheless. And so we're very thankful for your love and your generosity and also very glad to be back with you this morning. And so this morning,

Excuse me. We're going to be picking back up in our sermon series on marriage. We got started, we got two weeks into it, and then we took two weeks off. We're in the middle of studying God's purposes in creating marriage. A couple of weeks ago, we started with studying his first purpose in creating marriage, which was companionship. We studied the text where it says that it's not good for man to be alone. I'll make a helper suitable for him. And we saw how Eve was to be Adam's helper, what it meant for her to be. his wife. And we also saw what Adam's responsibilities with regard to companionship were in regard to Eve. This week, we're going to be moving on to God's second purpose in marriage, which is procreation. This morning, we're going to be studying what God says regarding procreation, which is having children. And I hope that by the end of our time today, we'll see where we need to repent, where we need to trust God, and where we need to pursue obedience in this area. Now, I have a disclaimer, okay?

I know that this is a sensitive topic, that it's intensely personal, that it's the sort of thing that we guard with tall walls and think, no one can tell me what to do. And it's a strange thing, having kids, because it's evident in people's lives if they have kids or if they don't. And all of us are quick to pass judgments about why people do the things they do. If we were to look at a big family, you'd think, oh, I know what they think. I've had people tell me, I know what you think about contraception. And I said, really? What do I think? And then they proceed to tell me what I don't think. And they've gained this understanding simply by looking, oh, he's got a big family. We know what he thinks. Or perhaps we'll look at a small family and go, well, we know what they think. We think they're unfaithful in this. When in fact, it may be that the Lord's closed their womb and that they would like nothing more than to have more children, but the Lord hasn't given them to them. And it's a grief that they bear.

Or maybe that they've had a number of miscarriages. There may be sorrows there, but it's not the kind of thing we talk about. You know, when people get pregnant, it's common in our culture not to tell anybody for at least the first trimester. And the danger with that, this is just as an example, what happens if you have a miscarriage and you didn't tell anybody you were pregnant? What it means is that you have to grieve the death of a child with no one around you to support you. Now, we wouldn't wish that sort of grief on anybody, right? But we certainly wouldn't want them to have to grieve that way alone. And so this is a very personal topic, having kids. We're all happy to talk about it generally and say, yes, we love kids and they're good and we should have them. But if we were to get any more particular about it, it's like a closed door. And so I realized this morning I'm speaking into very personal and private discussions that are reserved for husbands and wives to have. I'm not suggesting.

That this is the sort of conversation you should be having with our small group and saying, hey, after small group's night, let's all talk about our thoughts and convictions and troubles and hardships and desires and about how many kids we want to have and why. I'm not suggesting that's what we ought to do. And yet, we do need to know what God says about having children, don't we? We are getting an education about children and child rearing and the goodness or the badness of this work. And I'd set out to you at the very beginning of the sermon how important I think this issue is. I think this is going to be, is already and will increasingly be the most obvious testimony of Christian faith in our society. And I say that knowing that some of you in this room want to have kids and the Lord hasn't blessed you with them yet. And I'm not saying that you've done something to cause God to withhold his blessing. We can't think this way.

But a desire to have children and a love for them is going to be the most basic thing that will set you apart as a Christian in the years to come. I'm convinced of it. And so I hope this morning we'll be able to see why. Our text this morning is Genesis 1, verse 28. Would you please stand for the reading of the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. God blessed them, and God said to them, This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I want to start by asking, do you guys remember Jethro's counsel to Moses when he was ruler in Israel? What did Jethro come and tell Moses? Well, first, what did he observe?

sun up to sundown every day was judging the people and dealing with their problems. And what did Jethro say to him? He says, well, this thing you're doing, it's not good. You're going to wear yourself out and you're going to wear those people out. You need help. And it was good counsel. And so Moses took and said, I'm going to follow his counsel. And he appointed judges of 10 and a 50 and a hundred and all the rest. He, he, he, God enlisted help. And what I would submit to you this morning in this passage, which is typically called the creation mandate or the cultural mandate, is that God is commending to Adam and to Eve that they do the same thing. We can understand in our minds that there is no way that Adam would be able to fulfill this command, rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth, that there is no way

that he could do that himself. It would be impossible. And so before God tells him, you need to rule over all of this, he says, you need to multiply because you can't do it alone. And so Adam and Eve's work, their first work, their primary work, the work that would allow them to be able to do everything else that God called them to do. First, God says to them, be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth. Fill it. Fill it with what? People, your children. And every time a child's born in this world, we're doing that work of filling the earth. That's our work, okay? Our job's to fill the earth with people so that we can rule over it, excuse me, so that we can subdue it. And so being fruitful and multiplying is a simple, very simple instruction. And it's a simple instruction that the church historically has understood. There's been lots of things in church history that the church has divided over, fought over, persecuted one another over. There's been all kinds of things to fight about. But up until, I'd say, about 100 years ago, maybe a little longer, maybe a little shorter, this was never a question of what it meant to be fruitful and multiply. It didn't matter if you were Orthodox or if you were Catholic or if you were Protestant.

They all understood what this command meant. It meant have kids, right? We all understand that as well, don't we? When we read it, we're not going, I wonder what it means to be fruitful and multiply. We all understand it. If we were to ask the three or four-year-olds, what's it mean for a mommy and daddy to be fruitful and multiply? They'd say, give me more siblings. And so from young to old, we understand what the command is here. Historically, having children wasn't so much a decision that people made. It's interesting that nowadays that's how we think of it. We think of having children as a decision. We can decide whether we want children or whether we don't want children or how many children we want or when we have them. And I can tell you that historically, no one thought that way. It would be a strange question if you were to go back 100 years and say, how many kids do you guys want to have as you get married? Christians would look at you and they'd go, I don't know how to process that question.

It's not a question we would think to ask. They wouldn't think in terms of limiting. That's something we've learned in our society, that we think of children straight out of the gate in terms of limiting, controlling. And this is true in our world, and this is true in our church. We all have been trained to think in terms of control. But from the beginning, it was not this way. And even historically, God's people didn't think this way. To put it another way, thinking this way to anyone outside of the last hundred years or so. They would have thought it was a very foolish or even sinful way to think. There are some questions that you just wouldn't ask. You just think that's just not something we ask. Nowhere in the Bible do we speak of limiting and controlling and managing and worrying with regard to having children. In fact, I'm convinced historically that the idea of limiting the number of children you have would have been considered rebellion. That that's how it would have been thought of and processed. And this is because being fruitful and multiplying is one of the most basic commands that God gives to married couples. It's the biggest work they'll do as a married couple. It is what God calls married couples to give their lives to. And whatever else they do on top of that is well and good.

a man and his wife should be giving their lives to. Okay? Now I realize that I'm talking like I have a third eyeball out of my head. And that many of you, whether you're keeping up a poker face or not, are sitting here and going, yeah, you can't, what are you saying? You feel like we're in a free fall. And my goal is not to make you feel like we're in a free fall. It's simply to say, I want you to see from the very beginning how far we've come. In our society, in how we think about children and ultimately, and really how we think about marriage, when we find ourselves in the context of the Christian understanding of this issue, we're a long way off of center in the way that we think and in the way that we live. And if we had gone, as I said, to a different time, we would be crazy. The way we think in our society would have been thought of as,

Un-Christian. Intimacy between a husband and a wife is an essential part of marriage. Without it, you don't have a marriage. It is that act that consummates the marriage that says, this is now a husband and a wife. It is what the kiss in the marriage ceremony represents. And so as intimacy between a husband and wife is an essential part of marriage, that union bearing fruit, is only natural. It's only natural that when a husband and wife love each other, that it would produce children. And so how can avoiding this blessing, throttling down this blessing, or controlling this blessing, be seen as anything other than rebellion? Do I mean rebellion? Yes, I do mean rebellion against God. Now, I know I've walked right up to the edge with you guys. For some of you, I'm probably way over the edge.

I'm not saying that there aren't real life situations that we all need to take into account and decide for. I'm not advocating for ignorance with regard to children and child rearing and having children. I'm not advocating for foolishness. What I'm trying to get at is our desires deep down inside our hearts, what we want, what we are pursuing and what we desire. That's what I'm trying to get at. In my experience with young married couples, I've taken to saying when they get engaged, at the very beginning, and they're going to be engaged for four months or six months or ten months or whatever, I've taken to saying right at the beginning, before they've had a chance to talk about it themselves, I say, here's what I want. Don't get on hormonal birth control. I know you guys haven't talked about having kids yet. I know you haven't talked about sex yet because you just got engaged.

don't get on hormonal birth control. Don't do it. And I'll look at the girl and I'll say, don't go to the doctor with your mom and just get on and take the prescription because that is what always happens. The mother of the bride will say, well, you're going to get married. So you need to go to the doctor. That's fine. Good. And there's just not even a question that a prescription is going to be written and daughter's going to start taking it. And so what's been my experience is then we get it through the engagement process and we're getting close to marriage. And toward the end of it, we do actually talk about intimacy and premarital counseling. It's a few weeks before the wedding and all of a sudden we're going, oh, you've been on birth control for the last six months. And she goes, yeah, no one told me. I didn't, I didn't, yeah, I didn't know. I didn't even know it was a question. And I said, oh, it's a question. So that's why I say now at the very beginning when couples get engaged, don't do this.

You can talk about having kids or not or all that sort of stuff later. Don't get on hormonal birth control. Don't do it. The doctors won't tell you the truth about it. They won't tell you that it threatens the life of a potential baby. Don't do it. Now, why do I tell you that? I tell you that to say, this is how we in the church think about having kids. It is assumed in almost every case, not all, But in almost every case that when a couple gets married, they will wait to have children. That's just the assumption of everybody, of the parents, of the couple, of the doctor, of the church, and of the people getting married. They just think, well, we just have to wait. That's just what you do. It's like going to college, right? What are you supposed to do when you get out of high school? You go to college. That's just what everybody does, right? They just go to college.

And if you were to stand up and say, I don't know that I want my kids to go to college and accrue a bunch of debt. I don't know if we just want to go along to get along. You reap the scorn of the educators who say, well, you're going to ruin their life. You say, I don't think I'm going to ruin their life. I don't think I'm going to ruin their life. But you feel the pressure. If you're to step out of line at that point and say, no, we're going to actually have the discussion. And we may well make a different decision. You feel the pressure of it.

Same is true here. Contraception is assumed with all parties involved, except for me because I can't figure out in my way of thinking and in my reading of scripture, I can't figure out where that idea came from. The idea that from the very beginning of our lives, our priorities would not be God's priorities. Adam and Eve get married. He creates Eve. He blesses them and says, be fruitful and multiply. After Noah, and his family come off of the ark. And there's been a setback in this work. What does God tell them? Same thing. He reiterates it to them. Be fruitful and multiply. This is our work as Christian husbands and wives. Now, there are many, many reasons that people don't want to do this work, whether they're Christian or whether they're not. Because we all have an understanding of the reality that children change your life. And I want to talk a little bit about that.

some of the particulars of that later. But what area, what other area of our life do we take a good thing, reproduction, and try to limit it? If you were to plant a garden, what do you want from your garden? You want the fruit of your labor. That's what you want. If you have a tomato plant, what do you want it to produce for you? One or two tomatoes? You want to cultivate a tomato plant all year? No. If it only gives you a couple of tomatoes, guess what? It actually is cheaper to just go buy them at the store. You want production. And what happens in the fall around here? Those of you who have gardens show up with boxes of tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchinis and whatever else you have too much of. You can't eat it. You can't can it. You're going to give it to the people in our church that don't have a garden. You want production. It is your desire.

If you didn't get production, what would you consider your garden to be? A failure. And you might think, I'm not going to plant a garden next year. But gardens are nice because they'll turn around and they'll give you fruit same year. What if you want to plant a fruit tree? Oh, now we have to wait. Because trees don't bear fruit the first year, the second, or the third. And you have to wait for the fruit. And it irritates us. We don't like it. Because if I'm going to plant an apple tree, I want apples. Our desire is not to limit. It's to multiply the growth. What do I need to do? What does this tree need? What does this garden need to produce the most fruit possible? That's how we think. I like to hunt, you know. I like to deer hunt. And there are a number of hunters who aren't just in it for the meat. They actually want to see the...

the deer populations grow and they want to see the mature, healthy bucks reproduce. And the result of that is they won't kill them. They'll see a nice two or three year old buck that's, most of us will go, yes. And they go, that thing's going to be really nice next year. And they won't shoot it. Why? Two reasons. One, they want the bigger antlers next year. And two, they want that deer to breed. They want that deer because he's got nice antlers. To make more babies first. Pretty smart, huh? We want them to be fruitful. We want them to multiply. Same is true with our finances, isn't it? We want growth. If we're going to give our money to an investment, what do we want that investment to do? We want it to grow, don't we? It would be a bad thing if it didn't. We would be angry as the investor if it didn't grow.

We expect growth. We want our homes to increase in value. When you buy a home, you want to know what the property values have been doing in the neighborhood that you're looking in. You want to know what the crime rate is because you know that if the crime rate's going up, the property values are going to go down. We want growth. We want raises in our income. In a word, we want fruitfulness. We want an increase. And we don't think ever about limiting it and saying, well, no, thank you. That'll be enough. But when it comes to children, It's flipped on its head, isn't it? We're backwards. Yes, we want children. Yes, we see them as a blessing. But it's possible, I want you to know, it's very possible for you to love children and to want children and still have your overarching framework be control and limiting. And so the question has to be asked, why do we clamp down and work so very hard to ensure that our marriage beds don't produce the growth that we seek in other areas of our lives? Why is that?

I believe it's because we haven't trusted God that children are a blessing and something that we ought to seek. I think we're selfish. I think we're selfish. On more than one occasion, I've had friends of mine, not believers, say to me, because they find out we've got a bunch of kids, they'll say, I'm glad you're having children so that I don't have to. I say, well, what do you do with your time and your money? They travel. They gamble. They go on vacations. They have lots of money. This is what they do. And they understand that children are a threat to all of that. And so they go, no thank you. Now it is true that historically, the way that the church has viewed children has not been understood by everybody. There have always been people who've rejected children. It's always been around. It's never been with God's people, but there have always been people who don't want children, don't want the burden, don't want the hassle.

Someone, after all, had to be putting the babies on the hillsides for the Christians to pick up and take care of. But the selfishness that goes along with that sort of thinking has infiltrated the church in such a way that we don't even recognize it, and we're not ashamed of it. We don't shudder at the thought of, oh no, another baby. What am I going to do? I don't want this. This is why, I've told you at the beginning, I think children will be the testimony of your Christian faith going forward. Your actual love of children and your desire to have them and to care for them and to teach them and to love them. Because that's falling by the wayside. I heard recently that the birth rate in America is lower than the birth rate in North Korea. I didn't fact check it. I don't know if that's actually true. But they said that the birth rate in America is 1.7. And in North Korea, not South Korea, North Korea, 1.9. And we're proud of it.

As a society, we're glad. We think we've evolved and done well. But I think one of the chief benefits that children bring to your home is humility. Children make you be humble. They demand it of you. They don't come out of the womb and say, you're going to be humble now. They just poop all over everything. You, and they spit up all over your nice clothes, and they don't let you sleep at night. They humble you. They scream when they shouldn't scream in places where they ought to be quiet. I was recently told there's a church in town I hadn't heard of, but another pastor acquaintance of mine has recently gone on staff there. And my friend said, yeah, at that church, they don't allow children in the sanctuary. It's like the opposite of family integrated. It's like, no. That's their rule. This is a church in our city, and that's their rule. We don't let infants in the sanctuary. And you have to think, why?

Why would they do that? Well, because of all of the inconveniences that children represent, all the noise that they bring with them, all of the distraction. And the leadership of that church has said, we don't want any of that. We've got a nursery where you can drop them off. We don't want them disrupting what we're doing. And I know that we've just opened our nursery back up, and I'm thankful for it, very glad for it. And my wife tells me that I have a high threshold for noise and distraction, much higher than a lot of people. But I'll tell you, other than one or two times over the last however many months it's been, your kids haven't bothered me as I'm preaching one bit. I know they've bothered a lot of you. And I'm sorry. Because what I tell my wife, and now you have the privilege of knowing, is that you shouldn't be bothered by children's noise. And I'm sorry that you are. They're noisy. They're inconvenient. They're distracting.

Your children and other people's children. Here we are wanting to worship and somebody's stomping around or crinkling paper or whining or walking down the aisle or whatever it is the kids do. We're all distracted by it. And we all think, why don't they keep their kids from doing that? And I say, well, because they're not as good of a parent as you are, you young people. And sometimes that is true. Sometimes the parents aren't doing their work. But my judgment over the last six, eight months while we've had kids in here is when it first started out, it was, There was work that needed to be done by a number of families. And over the course of time, it got much better. That's just life with kids. If you have them, you know that. But how many of us don't want the bother, don't want the irritation, don't want the work, don't want the distraction, don't want the unknown, the X factor put into our life? I think all of us. I'm convinced that we're selfish as a society and that we're selfish as Christians when it comes to this work.

And I'm also convinced that our marriages suffer because they're fruitless. Children, I've often told you, will change your life. Getting married is a very important decision. And having a spouse will sanctify you in a way that if you're single, you just don't understand it. And when you get married and the rose-colored glasses come off and you go, marriage is hard. And you kind of go through that valley and you think, I never knew. And if you work at it and you repent, and you listen, and you love, and you respect, and do the things that we're going to talk about in weeks to come, you'll find that marriage is very sweet. Still hard, but you wouldn't trade it in. And then I tell you that children, it's like turning that up to 11. Because in marriage, you're dealing with another rational, for the most part, person. You can at least reason with them, right? That's crazy. You can say that, and they can understand that you just told them that they're crazy.

But what do you do with a two-month-old? You're crazy. Doesn't mean anything to them. You can't rationalize with them. You can't talk them through the problem. And if you leave them in the other room, they'll just scream some more. Very sanctifying. All of a sudden you realize, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. How do I make them be quiet? So mom gets on the mommy blogs, starts reading online, figure out how to be a mom. But the Bible tells us that the older women are supposed to teach the younger women to love their children. Why? Because children rock your world. And our society's answer has been, no thank you. We'll control, we'll limit, we'll manage, we'll reject. But it ought not to be that way with God's people. Now you might think I'm crazy saying all of this because I know personally that a lot of you want to have children and do in fact love them.

And I know there's multiple people in here who are aggrieved that they don't have children or have more children. I know that's true. And you think, why are you saying that to them? Why are you saying that to us? Don't we have kids here? And I'd say, did we all come out that way just realizing that this was good? When you got engaged as a couple, did you go, this is what we're going to spend our life doing? I don't think we did. I don't think we did. We had to be taught and instructed in the ways of God. to love the things that he loves. And then we had to wrestle through it. I was talking to a guy years ago one time, and he said, it's easy for you. He was saying, it's a hard decision for us to be open to having. I think they had one child. He's like, it was hard. It's hard. It was scary. And our marriage is hard. It's rocked the boat quite a bit. And his assumption was that it was easy for me and my wife. It wasn't hard. We didn't have those discussions.

That's right, no. And I just laughed at him. I mean, what else could I do but laugh at him and say, you think you're the only one that has a hard time with this? Do you really think that? You're nuts. You're crazy. Your head's screwed on backwards. It's not easy to have a bunch of kids. It's very hard to have a bunch of kids. It's very hard to do two weeks of virtual learning at a moment's notice. When six of them normally go to school, right? Jodi's done it, not with six, but with enough to have her hair turn gray. I'm teasing you, Jodi. I don't actually know if your hair is gray. Your husband's hair is gray. Yeah. It's hard. What good would I be doing if I told you, it's the greatest, sweetest, most wonderful thing. It'll be the most delightful. Man, that's not going to help you with the turbulence that's coming. And you don't have to have five or six or nine kids to have the difficulty. Just have one.

Just have one. And you'll say, I don't know what to do. We don't know how to handle this. This is hard work. It's God's work. And if you're a married couple, it's your work. It really, really is. And the idea that we would think in terms of limiting, out of the gate, without any instruction that limiting and controlling is the way we ought to process this question, is wrongheaded. Children are not a hurdle to you serving God. They're not an inconvenience. They don't keep you from bearing fruit for the Lord. That's not what they are. They're the garden that you're supposed to cultivate. And I'm afraid that because we spend so much time sucking in the culture around us that we think, as Christians, we're supposed to bear fruit for God, but we don't realize that this is one of the primary places you're to do it.

And that if other things have to fall by the wayside, that's in God's providence, that's okay. You be a mom and you be a dad and you work on it and it takes time and it's hard and it's good. Inevitably, there are a number of questions floating around. I'm going to do my best to answer some of them, okay? The first question that I think is probably floating around is, are you saying contraception is wrong? The answer is, some types of contraception, yes, they're wrong. Hormonal birth control, whether that's a pill or a shot or a patch or an IUD or whatever kind of thing that messes with a woman's hormones is wrong and you should not use it. And the reason is because they all run the risk. They all have the potential of killing a baby. And if you'll read the fine print and understand what's written on there, they'll tell you that, though your doctor won't. Back in, I believe, the 70s,

the American Medical Association changed the definition of when life began from fertilization to implantation, which means there's this time in a human being's life between when the egg is fertilized and the egg implants in the wall of the uterus. And those hormonal birth controls, every one of them, work in such a way as to make the uterus inhospitable to that baby. And that's why you shouldn't use them. But because the definition of when life begins has been changed from fertilization to implantation, your doctor will tell you that you have no risk of harming a baby because the life hasn't begun yet, but the life has begun. And so that's why you can't use hormonal birth control. And if you have some other extenuating circumstance where the doctor says you need to use hormonal birth control for a time, you're going to have to use something else as well to prevent getting pregnant. Beyond that, is contraception wrong?

Not universally. I know if you were to ask the Catholic Church, they'd say yes. I'd say not universally. But there should be a very particular reason that you're considering using it. It ought to be for a set amount of time where you and your spouse come back together and talk about it again. You may say, we're going to use contraception for these many months. And we're going to come back at the end of those many months and we're going to talk about it. We're not just going to leave this open-ended thing. Because there's only a season of your life, your married life, where you actually can have children, where it's even a possibility. I said to a man one time, he said, well, my wife and I, we're going to use contraception for four months after we get married, which I thought was kind of a strange amount of time. And so I asked, I said, why? And he said, well, because we want to get through our first year of marriage without getting pregnant. And I said, you do realize that you don't just get pregnant if you're intimate. That doesn't just happen. And he didn't know that.

He'd made it to being an adult and didn't know that. Now, praise God, he'd been pure enough not to have been corrupted in that area. I wasn't upset. I wasn't ashamed of him having that misunderstanding. And I said, you should just know that that's not exactly how it works. The Lord opens and closes the womb. And if you're open to having children, trust God. What's four months? Trust God. And he said, okay. And he did. If you're going to use contraception, there should be a very particular reason. And it ought to be a good reason. And it ought not to be one of the world's reasons. If it's inconvenient to have a child right now, that's not a good reason. It's not a good reason not to have children because it's inconvenient. It's not a good reason not to have children because you want to get established financially first. That's worldly wisdom. That makes sense in the world's eyes, but nowhere in Scripture do you see that being the case. If you're willing to take on the responsibility of a spouse, you husbands, you're ready to trust God about becoming a father.

If you think we need to work on our relationship, we want to gel together. And I say, when you become a parent, if the Lord blesses you with children, you will never cease to be a parent again. And you will not have been helped all that much by spending a year or two figuring out how to be childless and then turn around and have a child. Because what life was before children will never return. Even when they're grown and even when they're out of the house, a mother is still a mother and a father is still a father. You still love your kids. You still care about them. You still want to know what they're doing and if they're okay. That never goes away. You don't get to be free anymore. Say, well, we want to finish school. I say, then finish school. These are the world's reasons to not, if you're in school and you're like, oh, we got a bunch of debt or, oh, we've got, I need to finish school or my wife wants to finish this. And I go, these are just not Christian ways of thinking. I know that's crazy talk in our world, but that's just not Christian to think that way.

Your marriage ought to be marked by a love and a desire for children. And you ought to pursue it. And the benefit of it is that most of the time that pursuit is evident in time as the Lord blesses you with children. I realize that's not always the case. Many of you want children and the Lord hasn't given them to you. And that's a particular burden because there's a direct correlation between your desire to have children and the grief of not having them. And you might almost wish, I wish I didn't want to have children. I wish I didn't. I wish I didn't care so much. And what I can tell you is that this life has many hardships and many trials and many difficulties in it. And when you got married, you vowed for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, rich or poor, until death separates us. And the reason you made those vows that had good and bad on both sides is because you didn't know what the future would hold. The Lord did, but you didn't. And you still don't. But you're a Christian, and you have to trust God with what he gives you and with what he withholds.

And as if we read in our scripture passage this morning in Isaiah chapter 30, if he has love and redemption in store for his people who are abandoning him and running to Egypt for protection, if he'll redeem them and he'll be kind to them and be good to them and give them joy and laughter in the midst of their enemy's destruction, you can rest assured that if the Lord's will is that you would not have any children or as many children as you might desire, it's no indication of his displeasure with you. That's the vulnerability of being a Christian, and particularly, I'd say, of being a wife. Because wives tend to feel this pressure more than men. They feel inferior. They feel broken. They feel like something's wrong with them. That's not the case. And I can say to you, I'm sorry that you have those griefs and that sorrow. But I also can say that you have to trust God with his wisdom and his timing and his dispensations. You ought not to live in fear. He's not given us a spirit of fear leading to slavery again.

The spirit of freedom. So is contraception wrong? No, I'm not saying there's never a time when you might consider it. But I can tell you when you look at the birth rate in America and in the church, many of us don't have a good enough reason. Are you saying that we should have as many children as possible? It's kind of the same question but a little different. No, I'm not saying that you necessarily should have as many children as possible because I don't know the future any more than you do. And if a doctor came to me and said, The risks to your wife's life are great if she gets pregnant again. That would be a unique particular situation, wouldn't it? And we'd need to talk about that and pray about that and work through that. What I am saying with regard to children is that you should trust God. And you'll need to live by faith as you work out your salvation. There's no parent that's made it through without feeling entirely overwhelmed at the work.

of caring for even one child. And you have to live by faith even when you're scared. The wife will say, I want to bond with this baby. I'm overwhelmed. I can't handle more. And having had more than one child, what I often think of when people are feeling that way is that in time, when they have another child, some of the problems they're having with just their one baby will naturally go away. But they don't know that yet because they haven't had a baby. Or a second baby, rather. And you say, what? What little Susie needs is a little brother or a little sister. And it'll straighten out some of little Susie's problems. Because some of little Susie's problems are caused by you because you have too much time on your hand, even though you feel like you don't. Have you noticed in families, as they get bigger, the kids, the older ones are really strange. They're weird. They have quirks about them. And as there come more children, they get a little more normal. As long as they're socialized.

Why? Well, because mom and dad don't have the time to screw it up as bad. No, I'm making a joke. Mom and dad are growing in wisdom. They're realizing and feeling their need to trust God more. They're growing, and you're seeing the fruit of that in their parenting of the younger children. It's a sweet thing to see. Here's a good question. What should we do if we disagree about whether we should have more kids right now? Right? Now we're right in the middle of it. What happens when a wife wants to have more kids and a husband doesn't? That's tough stuff, isn't it? What happens when the husband wants to have a baby and the wife's scared? That's hard stuff. And I'd say to you, that is marriage. That's marriage. When did we decide that having children was an area where we would not have to work through disagreements? Of course you'll have disagreements, even in that area. You shouldn't be put off by them or surprised.

You shouldn't think that your spouse is somehow no good. You just have to work through it. Many, many husbands and wives work through this in their lives. Hard decisions, hard discussions, fruitful, but you need to talk about it. I find that this usually happens when the couple hasn't been talking about their family and how things are going in the home and the things that they're concerned about and what's motivating them. They're not relating. Dad's not saying. Here's how it is, and here's what I want, and here's why, and here's what it's good, and I'm thankful. And so you husbands, when your wife's scared about having another child or having a child, you've got to love her. She's not broken because she's scared. There's not a mom in this room that hasn't been scared at the thought of having a baby. And I'm not even talking about just the having of the baby. I'm talking about the becoming a mom. That's scary. Talk to your wife and love her. Encourage her, strengthen her. Call her to live by faith. Lead her in it.

Be tender with her because it's a fearful thing. And that's not true just for young people. That's true what happens when she gets older and she goes to the doctor and they say, oh, you now all of a sudden have flipped into the high risk category because you've accumulated so many years of life. Because that's what they do. I don't know if it's 35 or 40 or what age. All of a sudden you're high risk. You get treated differently. That's scary. Love your wife and talk to her about it. What if we can't afford them? We can't afford more children. Again, you have to trust God and you have to accommodate yourself to his commands. Your whole life will have to be accommodated to it. If you have children in our society, I can tell you, you will not be able to keep up with people who don't. You will not keep up with their lifestyle. You will not keep up with their sports programs. You'll not keep up with the top-notch first-rate education and all the experiences their kids get to have. You won't be able to keep up with it. That's okay. It needs to be okay.

When we talk about being able to afford children, we have to look long and hard at what we're really talking about. Are we talking about a standard of living and being able to pay all of their ways through college? Or are we really talking about not being able to keep up with the people we follow on Instagram? Or is our hunting schedule going to be impacted for me? I don't know if any of the rest of you hunt, but having kids has impacted my ability to go hunting as much as I'd like. What about health concerns? How do they fit into this? Well, we have to work through, all of us, excuse me, have to work through the particulars of our lives. And we have to trust God with the decisions that we make, realizing that other people in similar situations may well make different decisions. And that's hard. Because we'd all like to be in this monolithic group where everybody thinks the same thing and does the same thing and has the same thing. We really, at our heart, we really want to be socialists. We don't want anybody else to have any benefit that we don't have.

But we have to live by faith and make decisions in our lives with our particular circumstances. Realizing, and I've seen it happen, realizing other people, two couples, very similar circumstances, make different decisions. I mean, they do it in every other area of their life, don't they? What kind of car are we going to buy? What kind of house are we going to buy? What kind of work are we going to do? Where are we going to go to vacation? They're going to make similar decisions with regard to children. We have to be all right with that. In the end, We really do need to trust God with regard to having children. And we really ought to desire having a bunch of them. You really ought to desire that. And I realize that saying that is hard because some of you desire it and don't have it. And I'm saying that's how you have to work out your salvation with God. That's going to be the field. You who are single and say, I'd like to get married and I'd like to have kids, but I'm not there yet. You kids sitting here going, what's this sermon have to do with me? Guess what?

Your parents are working through all of this stuff and it's not easy for them. And you can strengthen their faith and you can encourage them because you are capable of loving children and loving your siblings. I've had more than one older couple say that their kids praying for more children was like this thorn in their flesh. It was this hard thing. It's like, oh man, we feel really overwhelmed, but all the kids are praying for another baby. Isn't that just life? A godly older couple of mine, the wife said, A friend of mine, the wife said for years and years and years, I think 15 years, she prayed that her parents would have another baby. And they thought they were done. They had pretty well decided they were done. But then, then they had a baby. When she was 15, they had a baby girl. And she couldn't have been happier. And her parents were like, so kids can help their parents. Love and trust God.

We ought to love children. Some of you say, well, I'm past childbearing or we're done having children and what are we supposed to do? We made these decisions. We didn't, you know. Which one of us can look back on our lives and say, we did it right? Don't we always look back and say, man, if I could do again with the wisdom and the knowledge and the faith that I have now, I would have done differently. This is all of our lives. And we have to trust God with... our lives and the decisions that we make. We have to live by faith. And for some of us, that's going to mean, what are we going to do with a big family? And we have to learn how to live by faith. And for others of us, we have to learn how to live by faith with a small family. But God is faithful and he cares for us and he loves us. And we can't let our personal circumstances in our own lives, whatever they are, get into the things that God loves and

tells us to do just because it's hard for us or scary for us or it doesn't seem to be happening for us. Desiring to have children is an essential part of marriage. The giving of children is in the Lord's hands. He's sovereign over the timing and the circumstances of our fruitfulness. And we need to trust him as we seek him. The final thing I'll say to you, I haven't said a word about raising kids, right? Because this is a sermon about procreation. But the final thing I'll say is having children, loving children, is only the beginning of obeying God's command to being fruitful and multiplying. When he tells you to be fruitful and multiply, he's telling you to reproduce yourself, your Christian faith, and your love in God. He's not simply telling you, make a bunch of people. He is actually telling you, make a bunch of certain type of people, the kind that love God and that serve God and that trust him. So that's what you're multiplying.

That needs to be our goal in multiplying. We need to not just have children, but raise them in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. It's a lifelong calling, and it is the real work of fulfilling the cultural mandate. If God gives us children, we do need to teach them, whether we have one or whether we have a dozen. We do need to teach them to love and to fear and to trust and to obey God. Otherwise, we're not being fruitful and multiplying as God would have us be. Conviction is if you can get to where you want to have children and you're willing to have your life defined by God's priorities, you'll be a lot further down the road of being willing to do the hard work of raising them. If you'll have them by faith, you'll be on the right path to raising them. So be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Let's pray.