I can’t judge your heart. And I certainly don’t want to imply a hard-and-fast correlation between holiness and family size (which is often outside of our control). But I can ask you who are married or thinking about getting married to consider: What is your motive for having kids? Is it to accessorize and add value to your life, or is it about God’s kingdom?
If we’re more concerned with our standard of life than God’s intentions for our family, God has a harsh word for us.
Marriage and family are not about us. They are about God. But when we make them about us, divorce becomes a lot more common and kids become a preference.
When I know that marriage is about God, I’ll stick it out in hard times, because I know God’s name, not my needs, is the ultimate thing of importance.
I’ll understand that God can bring himself glory in my marriage by giving me a peaceful, harmonious relationship—but he can also bring glory to himself by enabling me to love someone with grace even when she’s difficult, because that’s how he loves me.
God says that he hates divorce (Malachi 2:16) because it tells the world a lie about his love. When we divorce because we are no longer getting along or because our spouse is no longer making us happy, we tell the world that God’s love is like that—that he loves us based on how sufficiently we meet his needs. The divorce problem we have in the church isn’t just bad for our families; it’s feeding the world a deadly deceit.
Marriage is supposed to be an earthly picture of God’s love. I hear of couples who divorce because of “irreconcilable differences.” All I can say to this is that Jesus has all kinds of “irreconcilable differences” with you and me. But he loved us anyway, and through his persistent grace he changes our hearts. Now we get a chance to demonstrate God’s love in our marriages in the way we unselfishly serve and love our spouse.
Couples don’t fall out of love. They fall out of repentance. They don’t falter in their passion for each other; they falter in their worship of God.
Let ours be the generation that begins to reverse this trend. The stakes could not be higher.
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