Should We Postpone Children While I Finish My Degree?
00:00:00.000 | Well, young couples face a lot of questions.
00:00:07.200 | Can they use birth control?
00:00:09.360 | Should they?
00:00:10.560 | Can the wife be the breadwinner in this season and should she?
00:00:14.720 | Questions like these are faced by young couples in the transition years of finishing up school
00:00:17.960 | and launching into careers.
00:00:20.840 | And the email we get today is from a young man who writes this, "Hello, Pastor John.
00:00:24.560 | I'm a junior in my undergraduate work with plans to attend medical school when I graduate.
00:00:29.800 | My girlfriend and I have been dating for about five months and are strongly considering marriage.
00:00:34.280 | We have the support of our church community, have preserved our physical purity, and are
00:00:38.480 | both maturing Christians.
00:00:40.540 | With medical school, I will not be able to support a family for at least four years if
00:00:44.540 | my girlfriend and I were to get married."
00:00:47.140 | My two questions for you are these.
00:00:49.160 | One, is it pleasing to God for a young couple in our situation to use birth control?
00:00:54.220 | Number two, would it be wrong to get married knowing that my girlfriend feels her main
00:00:58.240 | calling is to be a wife and a mom and she will not be able to do this for at least four
00:01:02.760 | years of my medical schooling?
00:01:04.660 | What advice would you give to a young couple in our situation?
00:01:08.080 | Well, I would be a hypocrite if I didn't tell you our story and then either regret
00:01:16.380 | it and ask you to do something different or affirm it and commend it to you for biblical
00:01:23.840 | reasons.
00:01:24.840 | So here we go.
00:01:25.840 | First, I want to give praise to God that you have a strong church community, that it matters
00:01:35.000 | to you what they think about your relationship, that you have preserved your sexual purity.
00:01:41.600 | What a great evidence of God's grace and power in your life.
00:01:47.200 | Makes my heart sing.
00:01:49.880 | So Noelle and I started on a similar footing of sovereign grace.
00:01:56.320 | We were married soon after college, and I was at the front end at that moment of six
00:02:03.760 | more years of school, graduate school.
00:02:06.960 | Three years in seminary, three years of doctoral work.
00:02:10.640 | Noelle had no career aspirations except to stand by me, partner with me in God's calling
00:02:19.680 | on my life.
00:02:21.240 | She wanted to have children, make a home for them, make a home for me, join me in whatever
00:02:27.080 | dimensions of our ministry that were suitable to her gifts.
00:02:31.320 | So it sounds similar.
00:02:33.440 | As we talked this over and sought the wisdom of Scripture, it seemed to us that for a while
00:02:42.200 | it would be good for God's long-term purposes in our lives if we postponed having children.
00:02:49.520 | So we took steps to avoid pregnancy, I hope, without any abortifacients.
00:02:57.400 | And the reason I say I hope is because I was so ignorant in the late '60s and early '70s.
00:03:05.760 | I was so ignorant, so naive in those days that we may not have taken all the necessary
00:03:12.520 | precautions that we should have to make sure the way we were avoiding conception was in
00:03:21.080 | fact a non-abortion.
00:03:25.280 | And I tremble at what we may have unknowingly done, but nobody needs to make that mistake
00:03:33.080 | in ignorance today.
00:03:35.740 | But that was a fact.
00:03:37.600 | Now similarly, we talked it over and sought the wisdom of Scripture about Noel being the
00:03:44.640 | main breadwinner for a season.
00:03:48.400 | It seemed to us fitting that she would be our main support financially for a while,
00:03:55.400 | with me providing some income with a teaching assistantship.
00:04:02.120 | Salaries were about $10 a week, and our little back house in Pasadena cost $75 a month, and
00:04:11.560 | we liked it.
00:04:13.320 | And we just got by.
00:04:15.100 | We had no savings, and we had almost no debt.
00:04:18.760 | I say almost because there was a little point about $1,500 that at the end of a semester
00:04:23.720 | I went ahead and took out a student loan, which I paid back by cutting it in half by
00:04:29.560 | this special deal that they had.
00:04:31.280 | If you teach for five years, you lose—you give away half your money.
00:04:35.400 | Anyway, I don't want to say no debt, almost no debt.
00:04:38.600 | Then we headed off to graduate school in Germany, and even though Noel got a job at the European
00:04:44.840 | Exchange, she had worked now for three years, right?
00:04:49.560 | She was our main breadwinner all through seminary.
00:04:52.280 | And we both were beginning to feel now into our fourth year of marriage that postponing
00:04:58.440 | children any longer was just undesirable.
00:05:01.880 | We wanted children.
00:05:02.880 | You couldn't imagine waiting six years, right?
00:05:05.920 | That just seemed not good.
00:05:09.040 | So we dispensed with the contraception and bang, pregnant, immediately.
00:05:17.000 | We had no clear plan.
00:05:18.440 | Whether you want to consider this wise or not, I would do it again.
00:05:22.400 | We had no clear plan for how to support ourselves or pay for school, and you might think that
00:05:29.160 | that was just foolhardy, but there come points in your life—and I want to be careful with
00:05:35.360 | this, I don't say it's normative and you always have to act this way—but there come
00:05:38.960 | points in your life where you think the risk is worth it, and it seems God-ordained.
00:05:48.000 | You don't claim any infallibility, it just seems right.
00:05:52.380 | And we only knew that it seemed right at that point to move ahead with a family.
00:05:58.760 | Seven months into her pregnancy, Noelle resigned her job, and she has never worked outside
00:06:06.000 | the home in a regular job since for the last 46 years at her own choosing.
00:06:12.600 | Now, we didn't know what we would do financially.
00:06:18.680 | So we prayed earnestly for wisdom and for provision, and the phone rang one afternoon,
00:06:28.000 | and Professor Goeppelt said, "Herr Pieper," they called me Pieper, "Herr Pieper, a student
00:06:37.920 | from Africa had a stipend from the Bavarian Landeskirche, the state church, and he's
00:06:46.400 | not able to come.
00:06:48.380 | Would you like to have the stipend?
00:06:50.540 | It's only for foreign students, and if you take it, since you're married, it will be
00:06:55.460 | 770 Deutschmarks a month."
00:06:57.900 | Well, I was stunned.
00:06:59.820 | I was just trembling.
00:07:02.260 | "Ja, ja, jawohl, we would like to take it."
00:07:09.580 | And from that day until the end of our studies, those 770 Deutschmarks a month covered all
00:07:16.900 | our expenses so that we went into doctoral studies with no money in the bank, and we
00:07:22.700 | came home with no money in the bank and no debt and a baby from Germany.
00:07:28.740 | Now, of course, the fact that we did it that way doesn't make it right.
00:07:36.500 | But I think doing it this way can be right.
00:07:41.580 | If your heart is right, and if you are trusting the promises of God and seeking to be holy
00:07:48.100 | in all that you do with a view to glorifying Christ in everything—so let me just say
00:07:54.820 | a word why I think that's so.
00:07:56.380 | With regard to the circumstances in which birth control or conception control would
00:08:02.500 | be better, with regard to the circumstances in which that could be right, I've done
00:08:09.500 | two "Ask Pastor John" episodes, number 230, number 552.
00:08:16.220 | You can find them at the Desiring God website.
00:08:18.860 | So you can check those out.
00:08:20.980 | But the gist of the argument is this.
00:08:23.700 | One, that according to 1 Corinthians 7, 2-5, sexual relations in marriage is not only for
00:08:32.160 | making babies, as glorious and blessed as that is, it has other purposes.
00:08:40.900 | And that's the first step in the argument.
00:08:42.460 | Number two, having children in marriage is normative and good in the same way that marrying
00:08:51.540 | is normative and good.
00:08:53.660 | Genesis 2-18, "It's not good for man to be alone."
00:08:56.620 | It's normative.
00:08:57.620 | And yet, Paul says, "There may be kingdom reasons for not marrying."
00:09:03.580 | And I infer that similarly, there may be kingdom reasons for postponing pregnancy.
00:09:10.380 | Not just selfish reasons.
00:09:12.280 | If it's selfish, you should do it.
00:09:15.040 | Now with regard to Noel working as the main breadwinner for a season, we considered that
00:09:22.720 | was a kind of extension of two biblical realities.
00:09:28.780 | One is that women in the Bible and all through history were almost always fully engaged in
00:09:37.480 | making the farm, or whatever other family business sustained a family, making the farm
00:09:44.140 | a sustainable enterprise.
00:09:46.080 | Just read Proverbs 31.
00:09:48.000 | Nobody's a couch potato in this family.
00:09:51.020 | It takes everybody to make the enterprise of our family and bread on the table work.
00:09:59.740 | The other reality is that in thousands of situations, a husband may be either dead or
00:10:07.180 | incapacitated, which means that the sustaining of the family falls on every able-bodied person,
00:10:16.020 | especially mom.
00:10:18.060 | So our thought was that my schooling, that short season, was essential to the long-term
00:10:27.220 | enterprise of the family as we conceived it, and Noel would look at this season, where
00:10:34.020 | she's the main breadwinner, as part of the overall united effort that we would make together
00:10:41.260 | to create a home that we thought God was calling us to long-term, with me as the main breadwinner,
00:10:49.780 | which I think is normative as part of what it means to be the head of a home in leading
00:10:56.700 | and protecting and providing.
00:10:58.340 | So I hope that helps to give you at least a glimpse of one fallible couple's effort
00:11:06.860 | to walk in the truth.
00:11:08.460 | Yeah, that is a super helpful word for young married couples and really for any married
00:11:13.940 | couple.
00:11:14.940 | I'm surprised how many couples are not aware of this important word, abortifacients.
00:11:19.540 | Abortifacients, it means chemicals that are designed to induce the abortion of a fertilized
00:11:25.260 | egg, most commonly through birth control pills, but also through Plan B morning after pills
00:11:31.460 | as well.
00:11:32.460 | Every couple needs to be aware of what they do.
00:11:34.100 | For more, again, see that pair of APJ episodes in the archive, episode 230, "Should Christians
00:11:39.500 | Use the Pill?" and episode 552, "Is Permanent Birth Control a Sin?"
00:11:45.260 | You can find those episodes and all of our episodes at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:48.660 | Well, is a Christian righteous or unrighteous?
00:11:56.820 | A simplistic yes or no answer is the wrong answer.
00:12:00.780 | This is a tricky question and it calls for theological care and is our first question
00:12:04.940 | on the table next week.
00:12:06.780 | Am I righteous or unrighteous?
00:12:08.580 | That's Monday.
00:12:09.580 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:12:10.820 | We'll see you then.
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