Council Grove Christian Church

5/6/26

Servants of God,
“…male and female he created them…”
-Genesis 1:27
“The woman corresponds to the man, not as a duplicate,
but as a partner suited to shared vocation.”
-Jacob Percy
 
Mother’s Day is coming. This holiday gives us a genuine reason to think deeply about human sexuality and how it fits into the Christian life. In reality, every day is Mother’s Day. The fact that human females can conceive, carry and birth human beings is both mysterious and glorious. It is part of the created order. Motherhood is part of being “fearfully and wonderfully made.” What a sad commentary on the state of our civilization that some want to replace the term mother with the ludicrous and sterile term “birthing person.”
 
The falling birth rate in the United States is alarming. It takes an average of 2.1 children per woman to replace a population. America’s current rate is 1.6 and our nation is not alone in the downward trend. Western nations are nearly all below the 2.1 threshold. Only a handful of nations are exceeding the replacement level in numbers of births. Most of those nations are Islamic. If you are interested the Total Fertility Rate in Kansas is currently 1.8.
 
Christians in general and evangelical Protestants in particular, tend to have higher birth rates than the secular and nonreligious in America. Sadly, overall, the birth rate is falling among both religious and nonreligious Americans. What does this signal? If you listen to the secular media you will be told that children are just too expensive. Women in large numbers have decided that they just cannot afford to raise children. This, at, least is the popular reasoning. I believe there is a greater and more troubling explanation. Men who refuse to grow up and join with a wife in the holy covenant of marriage and share in raising children are responsible too.
 
Americans as a whole do not believe the Bible. They do not believe God designed women to have babies as a glorious vocation. Many women now believe that being female is some sort of curse that keeps them from real meaning and purpose in life. Even among those who call themselves Christian there is an intellectual lean toward trusting in the secular experts rather than the all-wise Heavenly Father. Falling into line with the feminist movement’s troubling notion about what it means to be female is a road to nowhere.
 
God’s mandate to his human image bearers includes being fruitful and multiplying. If the planet is to be filled with the good news of the glory of God, that news must to spread by human beings. Humans are created by God to image the Creator. The intentional failure to reproduce is to wage war against God. It will not work in the long run, but millions of humans can be cheated of the joy of bringing children into the world when they chase after the false gods of affluence and pleasure.
 
Sin and the fall of humanity has distorted and disordered the world God created. The Bible teaches that God has always had a great restoration plan for the world. Jesus Christ’s messianic mission was to do for humanity what humans could never do for themselves. It took the birth of the promised Messiah to bring the possibility of right relationship with the Creator. Before there was a creation there was a plan of redemption (Eph.1:4,5; 1 Peter 1:19,20 etc.). The key to that plan was for a human mother to give birth to a baby—the “seed of the woman” promised in Genesis 3:15.
 
Humans are designed to be involved in populating the world with other humans who will glorify God by their creative and productive lives. The unregenerate heart does not understand this. Humans who are left to their own devices do not understand the glory of bringing a child into the world. Women who intentionally refuse to engage in bearing children do not clearly understand what it means to be created female.
 
When a society begins to believe that a career and the accumulation of material goods and accolades is more important than bearing children, the society is sick with a fatal disease. You need not be a mathematician to understand that a birth rate below replacement numbers is a downward spiral that can only, eventually, lead to the destruction of that society. The enemy of our souls wants us to believe a lie. We cannot willfully refuse the gift of motherhood and still be blessed by God.
 
Christians have a lot of work to do if we are going to be involved in avoiding a population implosion. But our calling is not just to push for more children. We are called to nurture and teach those we already have and to teach the importance of marriage and family as God desires them to be.
 
Women who believe that aping being masculine or who believe child bearing to be demeaning and that raising children will spoil their fun in life are deluded creatures who misunderstand their calling. C.S. Lewis wrote about the tragedy of thinking our own desires are superior to God’s design. “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
 
Motherhood is a gift from God. To refuse that gift is tragic blunder. Let us all rejoice in the gift of motherhood, honor and remember the mothers in our midst and rejoice that God’s best always comes to us according to his terms and not our limited human reasonings and speculations.
 
Blessings,
 
Pastor John
Coram Deo