(upbeat music) - We love to hear from our international listeners who are spread out all across the globe. Here's a question today from a young woman. Hello, Pastor John, greetings to you from Finland and thank you for this podcast. I am married, but my husband and I have no children.

In Genesis, God tells the first couple to be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it. That's Genesis 9, 7. Today, many people in my nation, people who are married and capable of having children, choose not to. Intentional childlessness has become very common in the past decade and the reasons are diverse.

Fears about climate change, worries about the fragile health of the mother, worries about being a bad parent and simply deprioritizing children entirely. I know you said it was permissible for couples to wait to have kids and to limit the number of children that they have. That was in episode 1176.

And you said it's permissible in some cases for a missionary couple to forego children altogether. That's episode 286. But how about non-missionary Christians? Is it permissible for an ordinary Christian couple to simply choose to not have children at all? How would you respond, Pastor John? - My first response is, I don't think there is any such thing as simply choose.

She asks, is it permissible for an ordinary Christian couple to simply choose to have children? And I'm not sure what she means by the word simply, but it sounds like she means just because we want to. In other words, simply choose would mean without any struggles or conflicts or reasonings, but just because we feel like it.

And my first response to this is to say that there is no such thing. There are always realities in our hearts and in our minds and in our experiences that shape our so-called simply choosing. Jesus said, out of what's in the heart, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

How much more would it be true that out of what's in the heart, we choose not to have children. We are not simply choosing. We are choosing because of who we are, because of deep realities that have shaped our hearts, our preferences, our desires, our wants, our inclinations. So let me make five observations that may reveal some of the hidden things of the heart.

First, it is normal, beautiful, fitting, natural, and normative according to scripture, both explicitly and I would say implicitly in many places for a married couple to have children. This was God's plan from the moment of creation. It was part of what was very good. Genesis 128, God blessed them.

And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And it remained the plan after the catastrophic fall and the ruin of the world, and even after the flood and the recognition that sin is going to ravage the world until doomsday. Genesis 9, 6, whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed for God made man in his own image, and you be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth, multiply in it.

In other words, there's gonna be murder till the end of the day, so have children. This is just the opposite of the way some people think. And it goes on being God's good plan generation after generation. Psalm 127, behold, children are a heritage, an inheritance 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. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. This is the whole drift of God's word. Children are a gift.

Children are a blessing. When they are withheld, it is a heartache, sometimes even a judgment. The generations flowing from your seed and from your womb are a crown. Proverbs 17, six, grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of children is their father's, and they are a blessing.

Her children rise up and call her blessed, Proverbs 31, 28. What a sadness when many modern women, short-sightedly, I think, choose to forego that blessing, while millions would literally give their right arm to have it. That's observation number one. It's just the way scripture leans. Second observation, that positive view of children as a blessing remains true, even though the Bible is starkly realistic about how badly things may go in families.

Even the book of Proverbs, which is maybe the most pro-family book in the Bible, says, chapter 30, verse 11, there are those who curse their fathers and do not bless their mothers. And Jesus warns, they'll be family split, three against two and two against three. And he said it would have been better if Judas had never been born.

The cry of David has been heard in the mouth of 10,000 fathers, Absalom, Absalom, oh, my son, Absalom, would to God I had died in your place. The Bible is not a Pollyanna tale of happy families. Almost all of them in the Bible are broken, just one way or the other, but none of this, none of it hinders the ongoing reality that conceiving and raising children is normal, beautiful, fitting, natural, normative.

So the question is, why would that be? So here's my third observation. That can be because the Bible simply does not share the modern mindset, whether in Finland or in America, that the aim of life is the avoidance of hardship or heartache or suffering. Of course, we don't know whether we will have a disabled child or not who changes our lives forever.

Of course, we don't know whether a child will break our heart with unbelief. Of course, we don't know if our child will live six hours and then die. And of course, we do know that our children will demand enormous focused attention. We do know that to raise a child in the Lord demands spiritual desperation and prayer and focus and attention.

We do know that there will be financial demands from our lifelong commitment to this child. We do know that there will be thousands of hours that you must deny yourself an immediate felt need in order to do good to this child. But from the standpoint of God's Word, none of those possible heartaches and none of these guaranteed stresses are reasons not to have children because the Bible does not share the modern viewpoint that the aim of life is the avoidance of hardship.

On the contrary, the assumption of the Bible is that through many tribulations we enter the kingdom and that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness and that there's joy to be found through giving ourselves away. Jesus said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." In other words, almost all the arguments for not having children are built on a worldview radically different from the Bible's worldview.

Fourth observation, there's another problem with presuming to think that we can do more good by not having children, like for climate change. The problem is we simply do not know whether our child will be a debit or a credit to the human race, a curse or a blessing, a taker or a giver.

We don't know. We don't know. He may be a freeloader with a big carbon footprint or he may be the genius who invents the very means of saving millions of lives. Who do we think we are? My goodness, who do we think we are to predict that our children will be a loss rather than a gain for the world and for the glory of Christ whom we can believe and pray?

We don't know. And it's not our business to know. Our business is to give them life and raise them up and do what we can to build into them every dream and every possibility and power and blessing for the world and for the glorifying of God. And my final observation is that not one couple in a thousand decides to have children by sitting down and calculating the effect of their child on global warming or the replacement rate population so that in 30 years from now, the workforce will be big enough to sustain the aged or whether we will certainly have enough resources to establish the child in a fruitful location.

It just doesn't happen that way, not for 99% of the couples. And I'm suggesting it shouldn't happen that way. We're not smart enough for it to happen that way. And the Bible doesn't encourage us to have children with that mindset. Rather, it happens like this-- a combination of, one, the biblical blessing pronounced upon having children together with, two, the voice of God in nature every month as a woman ovulates and as the man stands ever ready to deposit his seed, and, three, as the deep-seated, God-given longings of a man and a woman to be a father and a mother rise up.

That biblical blessing and that voice of nature and that God-given longing should be followed, I'm arguing, unless God himself makes it crystal clear that the self-denying path of Christ-exalting obedience is childlessness. Thank you, Pastor John. And thanks for joining us today on the podcast. For our feed, our archive, or to send us your own question, even from as far away as Finland, go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

Well, over and over in the Bible, it appears that God saves us in order to draw attention to himself. This is nowhere clearer than in the first chapter of Ephesians. There we are told that God predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ. Why? To the praise of his glorious grace.

That's verses 4 to 6. Again, just a little later, it says God predestined us. Again, why? To the praise of his glory, verses 11 and 12. And then Paul even says that our eternal security is sealed with the promise of the Holy Spirit. Why? To the praise of his glory.

That's verses 13 to 14. So why does he do that? Why does God predestine us, save us, adopt us, and eternally secure us in order to draw attention to himself? So very important that we understand the answer to this question. That's next time. I'm Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday.