Interesting thoughts

I have really enjoyed the thoughts everyone has had on my last blog. I have definitely been thinking about it a lot. This entire topic has challenged a lot of my thinking. Maybe it's done the same for you! Here are some of my "final thoughts" (Do I sound like Bill O'Reilly??)

I used to think that if I were taking birth control and God wanted me to have another baby that I would just get pregnant. I thought that was the rule of His Sovereignty. Now I feel like He has given us choices in the matter of children. Although there are many "contraceptive failures" that result in pregnancies, I can no longer believe that every child that God would like to be born is actually born on this earth. The Bible says that children are a blessing from the Lord. How I say that God will FORCE blessings on everyone who didn't want them? It is a sobering thought to me. I like the idea that God would just automatically trump me when I wasn't doing what He thought was best. He gives me the choice. I can choose what is sinful. I can choose what is good. I can choose what is best.

Who am I to say what I can and can't handle? In almost every other area of my life, God forces me to go beyond what I can handle so that I will grow and depend on him more. He uses those situations for me to go beyond myself and really take hold of the power of His Personhood.

Along this vain is the classic debate of "faith versus wisdom." Are we exercising faith by allowing God to truly provide for all of our needs, like He promises to do in Philipians, or are we be wise to seek to take care of our family, like He mentions in Proverbs? Am I being wise by not having too many kids because I don't think I can "handle" them or am I not living out of an attitude of faith?

These questions then bring up what Paul deems in Romans as the "measure of faith given to us." God has given each of us a different measure of faith. Some of us have more faith about finances. Some have more faith about how God will raise our kids in such a wicked world. Others have more faith about how God wants to build the number of kids in our family. We each must live according to the measure of faith that God has given us. Because, ultimately, the thing that matters is whether we are living out of faith (and thus, pleasing God the only way we can) and being obedient. That is what we have to answer to when we reach heaven. I don't believe that God will judge us on whether or not we used birth control UNLESS He has prompted you to NOT use birth control and you disobeyed. Or, if He directed you to use birth control and you were rebellious.

The long and short of what the author was trying to convey: we, as a people, as the Body of Christ in general, feel that we have some type of "say" in how many kids we have. We have no say. We have no rights. It's not up to us. We were bought with a price and our bodies--and our lives and our families--are not up to us to decide what to do with our how to grow. We, as a collective people, feel that we can plan our children around our own timetables of what is good and convenient. We think we can decide the number of kids we have based on the amount of space we want to have in our houses and the kinds of vacations that we want to take each year (because we think that it is our right to have a vacation each year. Where is that in scripture?). We have lost sight of why we are to have children. Malachi 2:15 says that one of the very purposes of marriage is to "raise Godly offspring." Children are disciples. They will mimic our lives of faith more than any other person possibly could because they are with us day in and day out. Through our children we advance the Kingdom of God in a way that we cannot do by any other means. The author thus challenges us, as a Body, to think about how we think. And if this blog is any indication, I think she has done just that!