Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

Author’s preface
Introduction: God at the centre
1. A word about baggage and grace
2. Married for a purpose
3. What is the point of having children?
4. What is the point of sex and intimacy?
5. God’s pattern for the marriage relationship
6. What is the point of the marriage institution?
7. Is it better to stay single?
8. What is the heart of marriage?

Conclusion: The greatest invitation

Author’s preface

Is this book for you?

Sex shouts at us in every movie, from every bus and poster, and from every shelf of the station bookstall. Well, not every one; but enough to make a strong impression on us. The combination of this pressure with our own natural desires is explosive. My guess is that Christians who say they never struggle in this area are dishonest on this point. We need help. This book is a straightforward account of what the Bible teaches about marriage.

If you are engaged, I hope this book will help you prepare for marriage. I hope you will find here Bible teaching to consider together as a couple that will shape your hopes and expectations in a really healthy way.

If you are in the first few years of marriage (or even later), I hope this book will help you lay foundations for a good marriage. Whether you received good marriage preparation or none, I hope this presentation of the Bible’s teaching will challenge and refresh you both.

If you are single and wondering whether to get married, I hope this book is for you. I hope you will find here clear Bible teaching about what marriage is, and – more important – what is the point and purpose of marriage.

If you are single and disappointed, because the opportunity for marriage has not (yet) come your way, I hope that you too will find here some comfort and encouragement to live your present unmarried life wholeheartedly and joyfully for Christ.

And, for that matter, if you have no intention of being married, this book may help you understand and encourage those who are.

There are questions for private study and/or group discussion at the end of each chapter. A selection of these could form the basis of a Marriage Preparation Course or a Marriage Refresher Course, for couples on their own or for a larger group.

Extract from ... Chapter 3 - What is the point of having children?

Garry put the phone down, stunned. He had not expected this. He and Sarah had been married just six months. And Sarah was pregnant. Really he had not expected this. They hadn’t talked about children, and certainly hadn’t planned on having a family just yet. And now she was pregnant. Within a few seconds his mind had swept through (a) the mortgage and how it relied on Sarah’s salary, (b) the planned trekking holiday in six months’ time, (c) the size of their one-bedroom flat, and (d) a host of other implications, all unwelcome.

When he arrived home, he found Sarah in floods of tears. She had been worrying about whether she had it in her to be a good mother, and had persuaded herself she never could be. She was frightened. Garry didn’t really try to comfort her. Instead they had a row about whose ‘fault’ it was. When the news leaked out at work, Garry’s and Sarah’s respective colleagues offered their congratulations. ‘Commiserations, more like!’ was all they could think, though they put a brave face on it. ‘Yes, we’re very pleased,’ said Garry and Sarah through gritted teeth. But inside they wondered what on earth was the big deal? To them it just seemed like a most unfortunate accident.

"And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'" (Genesis 1:28)

We have seen in chapter 2 that God made us male and female so that we might serve him in caring for his world. I suggested the motto sex in the service of God. In this chapter and chapters 4 and 6 we work out what this means in practice, taking the three traditional reasons for marriage: children, relationship, and sexual order.

Although it may seem counter-cultural, we are going to begin with children. This may seem as unwelcome to the reader as the pregnancy was to Sarah and Garry. But this is quite deliberate. If you are engaged or wondering whether to get engaged, it may seem a bit premature to start talking about children. After all, they seem a long way ahead! But I want to suggest to you that if you are thinking about marriage, you need to think now about children and where they fit into God’s picture. So please don’t skip this chapter.

For childless couples this is bound to be a painful chapter. It will hurt as you read of God’s purpose for children in marriage, and I am sorry about that. I very much hope that the section on childlessness towards the end of the chapter will be of some comfort and help to you.

In Genesis 1:28 we saw that the blessing ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is given so that men and women will be able to govern and care for the world God has entrusted to them.We serve God by bringing up children in the hope that they too will in turn serve God. In Genesis 2 we deduced the same point using the language of the ‘garden’. The job of caring for the garden was too big for Adam the gardener to do on his own (Genesis 2:15, 18), and so Eve is given to work alongside him as his helper. Alongside her contributions to the work (as an equal human being alongside Adam), it is her unique privilege to bear and nurture children and so increase the ‘gardening’ team.

Children are a blessing not a curse

The Bible therefore understands children to be a blessing rather than a curse. It consistently affirms what it poetically calls ‘blessings of the breasts and of the womb’ (Genesis 49:25), rejoices at birth and laments when birth is interrupted by death. This Old Testament attitude became one of the ways in which the early church was most clearly different from the society of its day. One of the things that made the early Christians stand out most strikingly from their contemporaries was their refusal to accept abortion or infanticide (especially the killing of baby daughters, which was – and still is, in parts of the world – common). They were deeply pro-life and anti-death. We ought to be the same.

This is a deep and fundamental attitude not shared by contemporary Western society. The Bible turns us towards children with thanksgiving to God. But Western society in some ways seems to consider children a curse. This is strong language, but I think it is true. Some trends in society turn us away from children with anxiety and fear. More than one in five conceptions in Britain is terminated by an abortion, many of them within marriage, but far more outside marriage (for a cohabiting couple, abortion is about four times more likely than for a married couple). For decades now we have been having children on average later in life (about a year later for each decade from 1970 onwards), and having fewer children in our families. Since the 1970s the birthrate in most European countries has been well below that needed to keep the population steady. Were it not for immigration, we would be like Japan, where the population is even set to fall in absolute terms. (In other parts of the world, of course, we have the reverse problem: attitudes to children are very positive, and here may be a case for encouraging slower population growth.)

Without God’s perspective, children tend either to be idolized (if they are adorable) or abused (if they are not). Some people don’t want them at all. So the chairman of the British Association of Non-Parents (i.e. deliberate non-parents) says, ‘I have never wanted to be a father. I have never wanted that sort of responsibility. It is the fact that child-rearing goes on every bloody day for so long . . . I just do not want to devote myself in this way to children.’ He is right about the demands of parenting, but wrong to be so selfish. A counsellor with the marriage counselling service Relate comments that the decision not to have children is ‘usually a lifestyle thing. They have a life they enjoy and feel that children would change it too much.’

Of course many people still do want children. Even here, however, the world’s perspective is often different from the Bible’s. So, for example, some people may choose to have children because they need to be needed, like the actress Michelle Pfeiffer, who said, ‘I’m one of those people who needed to have children. I needed to have that centre to my life, that base.’ Some want to have children when they choose, of the gender that they want, with the genes that they prefer. The decision to have children or not is viewed as just a personal lifestyle choice. But the Bible gives us a very different picture. Children are a wonderful gift of God and we should be deeply thankful for them, however exhausting and troublesome they may sometimes be! ...