Well, young couples face a lot of questions. Can they use birth control? Should they? Can the wife be the breadwinner in this season and should she? Questions like these are faced by young couples in the transition years of finishing up school and launching into careers. And the email we get today is from a young man who writes this, "Hello, Pastor John.

I'm a junior in my undergraduate work with plans to attend medical school when I graduate. My girlfriend and I have been dating for about five months and are strongly considering marriage. We have the support of our church community, have preserved our physical purity, and are both maturing Christians. With medical school, I will not be able to support a family for at least four years if my girlfriend and I were to get married." My two questions for you are these.

One, is it pleasing to God for a young couple in our situation to use birth control? Number two, would it be wrong to get married knowing that my girlfriend feels her main calling is to be a wife and a mom and she will not be able to do this for at least four years of my medical schooling?

What advice would you give to a young couple in our situation? Well, I would be a hypocrite if I didn't tell you our story and then either regret it and ask you to do something different or affirm it and commend it to you for biblical reasons. So here we go.

First, I want to give praise to God that you have a strong church community, that it matters to you what they think about your relationship, that you have preserved your sexual purity. What a great evidence of God's grace and power in your life. Makes my heart sing. So Noelle and I started on a similar footing of sovereign grace.

We were married soon after college, and I was at the front end at that moment of six more years of school, graduate school. Three years in seminary, three years of doctoral work. Noelle had no career aspirations except to stand by me, partner with me in God's calling on my life.

She wanted to have children, make a home for them, make a home for me, join me in whatever dimensions of our ministry that were suitable to her gifts. So it sounds similar. As we talked this over and sought the wisdom of Scripture, it seemed to us that for a while it would be good for God's long-term purposes in our lives if we postponed having children.

So we took steps to avoid pregnancy, I hope, without any abortifacients. And the reason I say I hope is because I was so ignorant in the late '60s and early '70s. I was so ignorant, so naive in those days that we may not have taken all the necessary precautions that we should have to make sure the way we were avoiding conception was in fact a non-abortion.

And I tremble at what we may have unknowingly done, but nobody needs to make that mistake in ignorance today. But that was a fact. Now similarly, we talked it over and sought the wisdom of Scripture about Noel being the main breadwinner for a season. It seemed to us fitting that she would be our main support financially for a while, with me providing some income with a teaching assistantship.

Salaries were about $10 a week, and our little back house in Pasadena cost $75 a month, and we liked it. And we just got by. We had no savings, and we had almost no debt. I say almost because there was a little point about $1,500 that at the end of a semester I went ahead and took out a student loan, which I paid back by cutting it in half by this special deal that they had.

If you teach for five years, you lose—you give away half your money. Anyway, I don't want to say no debt, almost no debt. Then we headed off to graduate school in Germany, and even though Noel got a job at the European Exchange, she had worked now for three years, right?

She was our main breadwinner all through seminary. And we both were beginning to feel now into our fourth year of marriage that postponing children any longer was just undesirable. We wanted children. You couldn't imagine waiting six years, right? That just seemed not good. So we dispensed with the contraception and bang, pregnant, immediately.

We had no clear plan. Whether you want to consider this wise or not, I would do it again. We had no clear plan for how to support ourselves or pay for school, and you might think that that was just foolhardy, but there come points in your life—and I want to be careful with this, I don't say it's normative and you always have to act this way—but there come points in your life where you think the risk is worth it, and it seems God-ordained.

You don't claim any infallibility, it just seems right. And we only knew that it seemed right at that point to move ahead with a family. Seven months into her pregnancy, Noelle resigned her job, and she has never worked outside the home in a regular job since for the last 46 years at her own choosing.

Now, we didn't know what we would do financially. So we prayed earnestly for wisdom and for provision, and the phone rang one afternoon, and Professor Goeppelt said, "Herr Pieper," they called me Pieper, "Herr Pieper, a student from Africa had a stipend from the Bavarian Landeskirche, the state church, and he's not able to come.

Would you like to have the stipend? It's only for foreign students, and if you take it, since you're married, it will be 770 Deutschmarks a month." Well, I was stunned. I was just trembling. "Ja, ja, jawohl, we would like to take it." And from that day until the end of our studies, those 770 Deutschmarks a month covered all our expenses so that we went into doctoral studies with no money in the bank, and we came home with no money in the bank and no debt and a baby from Germany.

Now, of course, the fact that we did it that way doesn't make it right. But I think doing it this way can be right. If your heart is right, and if you are trusting the promises of God and seeking to be holy in all that you do with a view to glorifying Christ in everything—so let me just say a word why I think that's so.

With regard to the circumstances in which birth control or conception control would be better, with regard to the circumstances in which that could be right, I've done two "Ask Pastor John" episodes, number 230, number 552. You can find them at the Desiring God website. So you can check those out.

But the gist of the argument is this. One, that according to 1 Corinthians 7, 2-5, sexual relations in marriage is not only for making babies, as glorious and blessed as that is, it has other purposes. And that's the first step in the argument. Number two, having children in marriage is normative and good in the same way that marrying is normative and good.

Genesis 2-18, "It's not good for man to be alone." It's normative. And yet, Paul says, "There may be kingdom reasons for not marrying." And I infer that similarly, there may be kingdom reasons for postponing pregnancy. Not just selfish reasons. If it's selfish, you should do it. Now with regard to Noel working as the main breadwinner for a season, we considered that was a kind of extension of two biblical realities.

One is that women in the Bible and all through history were almost always fully engaged in making the farm, or whatever other family business sustained a family, making the farm a sustainable enterprise. Just read Proverbs 31. Nobody's a couch potato in this family. It takes everybody to make the enterprise of our family and bread on the table work.

The other reality is that in thousands of situations, a husband may be either dead or incapacitated, which means that the sustaining of the family falls on every able-bodied person, especially mom. So our thought was that my schooling, that short season, was essential to the long-term enterprise of the family as we conceived it, and Noel would look at this season, where she's the main breadwinner, as part of the overall united effort that we would make together to create a home that we thought God was calling us to long-term, with me as the main breadwinner, which I think is normative as part of what it means to be the head of a home in leading and protecting and providing.

So I hope that helps to give you at least a glimpse of one fallible couple's effort to walk in the truth. Yeah, that is a super helpful word for young married couples and really for any married couple. I'm surprised how many couples are not aware of this important word, abortifacients.

Abortifacients, it means chemicals that are designed to induce the abortion of a fertilized egg, most commonly through birth control pills, but also through Plan B morning after pills as well. Every couple needs to be aware of what they do. For more, again, see that pair of APJ episodes in the archive, episode 230, "Should Christians Use the Pill?" and episode 552, "Is Permanent Birth Control a Sin?" You can find those episodes and all of our episodes at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

Well, is a Christian righteous or unrighteous? A simplistic yes or no answer is the wrong answer. This is a tricky question and it calls for theological care and is our first question on the table next week. Am I righteous or unrighteous? That's Monday. I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.