Mark's thoughts: What I want my sons and daughter to understand about marriage, sex, and children.

 

My children are just about to go to college, are in college, or have just graduated.  They are entering into relationships that have the goal of marriage, and are beginning to think about future plans regarding life with a spouse.  As I reflected on this, I realized that I wanted to pull together what I have learned about marriage, sex, and children and share this with them. It is not as if they had never heard these things from me before.  But I wanted to provide them in an organized and cohesive fashion.  I will confess that I did not understand all of this when my wife and I entered into marriage. In my experience growing up in the Church much was not clearly explained, or not addressed at all. I wrote them a letter, and this was its content.

The place to begin is the recognition that marriage and children are inherently and intentionally linked by God.  Marriage is the one flesh union of a husband and wife (Gen 2:24; Mt 19:4-6). The one flesh union of marriage has the purpose of producing children (Gen 1:27-28; 9:7).  Scripture teaches us that we are to view children as a blessing from God, and not in any way as a liability (Psa 127:3-5; 128:3; 113:9).  In God’s design marriage is the setting for sexual intercourse (Heb 13:4). Many will recognize that celibacy is not a state in which they want to live. We learn that sex in marriage is a means by which we direct sexual desires in God pleasing ways and avoid sexual immorality. This means that husband and wife need to seek to meet the sexual needs of one another (1 Cor 7:2-5, 9).  There is to be sex in marriage, and God has ordered sex to produce children.  Marriage has family as its purpose and goal.

It is not hard to see that this biblical understanding calls into question the practice of birth control (contraception). Birth control is nothing new.  It existed in the Greco-Roman world, and some of the techniques were quite effective (see John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance).  I have learned that in the entire history of the Church until the 1960’s and the advent of oral contraceptives ("the pill"), birth control had been considered contrary to God’s will.  This is not a Roman Catholic thing. It is a Church thing.  The Lutheran church openly opposed birth control in its entire history until the 1960's which began the shift to a neutral stance.  Southern Illinois District President Heath Curtis has written about this, and I encourage you to take a look at the evidence he presents (for greater detail on the early and medieval Church, see John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists).

This is not something that I learned at the seminary.  It is not something that I learned until after my wife and I had our children.  I will confess that we entered into marriage planning to have two children just as we had experienced in our own families.  We used birth control until we had our first child with no difficulty.  Then our journey was one of miscarriage and infertility. In unexpected ways the Lord blessed us with four children instead of two.

I am thankful that the Lord gave us four children instead of what we had planned. The life of our family has been so much richer because we have had more children. I have come to understand that when God makes it possible, more children are better because each child is a blessing. I have also learned that when we ignore and reject God’s ordering it brings harm. The present struggles of the Lutheran church as numbers decline have been caused in large part by our decision to use birth control in order to limit the number of children we have.  When Christian families act in ways that are contrary to God’s will, the Church suffers.

God’s Word also teaches us that he created woman for the vocation of being a wife and mother.  He created man and woman to be different.  Eve was created from Adam as the helper who corresponded to him (Gen 2:18; 1 Cor 11:8-9). The woman was created to be different from man, and to complement him.  She is different from man not only in her ability to bear children, but also in the way she is equipped to nurture and care for them.  In God’s ordering, a woman’s primary and most important vocations are wife and mother (Prov 31:10-31; Tit 2:3-5; 1 Tim 5:4).  What we find in Scripture is not a culturally contingent description of life, but is instead God’s revelation that reflects the way he has ordered man, woman, and family.   Our culture has totally rejected this understanding, and in ever more obvious ways we see how it is burdened by the harm this has done to marriage, family, women, and children.

It is my prayer that my children will want to live according to God’s ordering, for not only is it God’s will, but as God’s ordering it is the one in which they will receive his blessings.  It is my hope that my sons will want to marry a woman who sees being a wife and mother as her primary and most important vocations. It is my hope that my daughter will view her future life and goals in this way.

This is not to say that a woman will never do anything other than being a mother.  My wife was a nurse when I met her, and has worked as a nurse and then nurse practitioner during our entire marriage. Yet while she has found this to be significant and rewarding, there has never been any doubt that being a wife and mother was the primary focus of her life – the thing she considered to be most important.  Before they went to school she only worked on Mondays, the day when I was off and could be with the children. The rest of the time she was at home with them, because that is where she wanted to be.

The world says that women “can have it all.” But that’s a lie because they were created by God to be wife and mother first. “Having it all” means that a career becomes a primary focus. Life decisions are guided by career, and children become something that are worked into that plan using birth control. The result is a life in which the woman juggles career, family, and children. In such an arrangement, family and children suffer. In the end, as many women are discovering, the woman suffers.

The way of the world is to have few children and for the wife to pursue her career because this provides greater wealth for the family. It yields financial resources to own the dream house and take all the vacations that a couple desires (and where the argument is framed in terms of "need," we must ask whether that need is based on our own expectations about what life should be like) . But God’s Word teaches us that contentment with the daily bread he provides should be our goal (1 Tim 6:6-8; Mat 6:25-33; Heb 13:5), as we live according to his will and ordering. This is the way – God’s way – and it is one filled with rich blessings.