Chapter 8

Countering Culture

To many Christians, the principles I have articulated may seem obvious, but they are nothing short of revolutionary in our day. Instead of enjoying the good life Scripture speaks of, many people are practicing the hookup-shackup-breakup game of death. Birth control is their savior, keeping them from the hell of marriage, children, and obligation. If that fails, abortive murder often suffices. People love sex, but they don't love marriage; they love sex, but they don't love children. This is because they don't love God.

Subsequently, they have separated children, marriage, and sex into three issues that are not necessarily related. This folly has even infected the church, where there is little clear authoritative teaching on dating, sex, marriage, and children beyond the obligatory rant against a few common sins like premarital sex and adultery. Even rarer still is any form of church discipline exercised on anyone claiming faith but living folly.

Contrary to this laissez-faire attitude, there is much we can do. We can preach the gospel, teach the Bible, and call the men to love women and children. We can compel Christian men to be godly and leave childish ways behind them. As a preventive measure, we can begin with young men, before they have ruined their lives, devastated women, and aborted their children. We can encourage young men to have visions beyond merely getting a vasectomy, thinking that they can have a lifetime of sex without worrying about becoming a father. We can point them to Proverbs, by which they will become wise men who think about the joy of playing with their grandkids one day rather than being yet another dirty old man sitting in the corner of some dingy strip club by himself on Christmas Day.

We can also encourage God's men to be about redemption and marry godly single mothers, to love them and adopt their children like Joseph did our Lord Jesus. Children of single mothers are five times more likely to be poor and ten times more likely to be extremely poor. They're more likely to drop out of school, use drugs and alcohol, engage in sex and become unmarried teenage parents, perform crimes, suffer from mental illness, and commit suicide. Subsequently, we have an entire social service army, including prisons and psychiatrists prescribing countless medications, to try to cope with this crisis. Over 60 percent of the nation's mothers work outside the home, and in cities like mine, more children are admitted to hospital emergency rooms for mental than for physical health issues.

Married men who have sex outside their marriage, single men who fool around rather than seeking wives, fathers who walk out on their kids, and fathers who are too lazy to work hard and pay the bills all hate children by their actions. And because God is a father to the fatherless, they have made themselves enemies of God.

As Christians, we do not emulate these men in any way. They are the world, and we are the church. In the church, things are different because Jesus and his men are our example. Repentant men who desire to walk with Jesus, love women, and love children with masculine dignity are welcome. But men who want to abuse our sisters in Christ and ignore their responsibilities are unwelcome. Simply, churches must demand that sinful men change or leave.

Our only hope is men meeting Jesus and obeying his Word. We want the men to be different kinds of men, we want them to have different kinds of marriages, and we want them to have different kinds of children because they are sons of the King of Kings and that means something. And by different we mean holy.

Jeremiah called the men in his day to a similar calling. God's men were in exile in a godless pagan city called Babylon. Surveying the sickness of their city, the young men began wondering if it would not be better for them to not marry, not have children, and not get involved in the transformation of Babylon, because it was beyond hope and a tough place to be a son of God, a husband, and a father. In Jeremiah 29:4-7 God says,

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

What a dark city like Babylon or your town needs is good men who love their wives and have lots of kids, adopt lots of kids, and raise them up as preachers and lovers of the gospel, living out its truth every day.

There are two groups that are intentionally having children. Do you know who they are? Mormons and Muslims. They plan on changing the world by raising up children and thinking multiple generations into the future. They took that principle from our Bible: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen. 1:28). I have heard some men say foolish things like, "I don't want to be a husband and a father because I want to do ministry." This is simply silly. Wisdom leans into the future, and I pray that my sons and grandsons and great-grandsons worship the same God, preach the same gospel, and teach the same Bible so that the work of the gospel outlives me. I can assuredly get more gospel work done with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren than I can by myself.

All of this begins with the elders. Practically, the road to the pastorate passes through the home. Every man in the church is supposed to conduct himself as a pastor in his home. Those men who do this the very best are then qualified to become church pastors because they manage their households well, as 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9 require. Any man desiring to be a pastor must begin by cultivating himself, his bride if married, and his children if he is so blessed so that they love the Lord and respect him in word and deed. Any notion of avoiding marriage and parenting to do ministry is simply antithetical to biblical thinking because those things both train and qualify a man.

Your children and your wife are your first ministry. You must begin at home. Then you can work out from your home to invite strangers in to see the difference Jesus makes in the life of a man, his wife, and their children. Isaiah 8:18 says, "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given me are signs and portents in Israel from the Lord of hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion." Isaiah rightly understood that in dark days, it is men who love God, love their wives, and raise their children with wisdom, grace, and joy who shine forth like the first rays of dawn.

More than bigger governments, bigger schools, more free school lunches, more child therapists, more child medications, more daycares, more prisons, and more birth control, we need more godly men who raise their sons to be godly men who raise their sons to be godly men who raise their sons to be godly men (Ps. 78:5-8).