Is Birth Control / Family Planning Wrong ? (III)

So after establishing that God is good, I now want to focus on what I believe to be the next crucial question you have to answer in this debate and that is:

Do you trust God?

It’s hard to trust someone that you don’t believe is good. We normally don’t trust people who break into our homes, rob us of our possessions, treat us rudely, or harm us in physical or emotional ways. We just don’t trust them. No matter how much we might want to, or how much we want to make ourselves do it, we can’t trust people that we don’t believe have our best interests in mind.

Which is why you have to establish and believe that God is good, otherwise, you won’t trust Him – EVER! But once you believe He is good, and that He has only your best interests in mind, then your next step is trust.

And this is the crucial issue in the birth control / family planning context. I would argue that most people would say “I believe God is good”, but most people would have a hard time saying “I trust God to do what is right when it comes to having many children”. Consider these scenarios:

1. When you have your first child, you are so excited and can’t believe God has given you this blessing in your life. When you have your second child, you’re still excited, can’t believe God has given you this blessing, but somehow you’re leary of having more. You are growing weary of the sleepless nights. You’re tired all the time. You can’t seem to think straight. There’s more noise in the house with two kids. It’s just hard to imagine going through having a third child.
2. You’re a young couple who has gotten married while you are in college. You love each other very much. You’re so excited about spending life together. But you don’t want children yet. You feel like there is so much that you want to do and see. You want time to spend with just one another. You’ll have a family eventually, but right now life is just too hectic and too many things going on. You’re just not ready to have children yet.
3. You’re a family who has had two children already. Dad is working hard at one job and mom has stayed home with the children. You’ve made a commitment to one parent being home with the kids because you really feel like that’s important. And you’ve noticed now that you’ve had your second child, that money is really tight these days. You’re having to put some essentials on the credit card each month because you don’t have enough money left over from each of the paychecks to cover all the bills. You’d love to entertain the thought of having more children, but you know in your mind that there is NO WAY you can afford to have a third child.

In all of these scenarios, people usually take matters into their own hands and either permanently (through surgical means) or persistently (monthly precautions) ensure that more children do not enter the equation and if you boil it right down and get to the heart of the matter, there is only one reason:

YOU DON’T TRUST GOD TO DO WHAT IS IN YOUR BEST INTERESTS!

Plain and simple, you don’t trust God. God can’t possibly be trusted with your procreation and reproductive systems. God can’t possibly be trusted to supply all your needs in Christ Jesus. God can’t possibly be trusted to bring another child along and then help you provide for that child. God can’t be trusted.

That’s what we are saying MOST OF the time in the birth control / family planning debate. If you boil it down to the heart of the matter, we don’t believe that God can be trusted.

I know that will offend some people, it offends me when I think about how much I don’t trust God with every area of my life. But in many ways, we simply have a trust issue with God.

And there are several reasons for that and we’ll cover those in later posts perhaps, but the question you have to ask is this:

Why don’t I trust God to do what is right in the area of blessing me with children and then helping me provide for them?

If he fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread on a hillside, what makes you think he won’t help feed another lovely mouth in your household? Tomorrow, we’ll talk about another controversial aspect of this trust issue. But it’s one I want to write a whole post on. Stay tuned!