Disclaimer: the following analysis is not meant to bring shame upon those who biologically cannot have children or experience life circumstances that preclude having children. Paul himself had no biological children, which God ordained so he could have spiritual children, like Timothy (1 Timothy 1:2) and Titus (Titus 1:4), and could focus on planting churches (1 Corinthians 3:6). Rather, I am speaking to the loss of focus on the importance of childbearing and childrearing in our culture.

Children vs Work

In the Bible, children are described as a heritage and a reward, and the man who has them is “happy” (Psalm 127:3-5). As Psalm 128:3 indicates, children are the fruit of a well-tended household. This makes sense: if people are made in the image of God and designed to worship God, then birthing and raising children is a noble pursuit that any money-making career is going to have a very hard time competing with.

This is something modern man has lost sight of. It is critical to grasp that no matter how good you are at your job, nor how appreciated by your coworkers you are, you are unlikely to be thought of anymore two months after you retire. I work for a major corporation, and I have seen this happen many times. The occasional genius, visionary, or hard-driving industrialist can leave a lasting mark on the working world, but having an impact on a “Steve Jobs” level is as likely as winning the lottery. If you wish to play the lottery for your earthly legacy, go right ahead.

If, however, you would like to guarantee a significant eternal legacy, you need do no more than invest your time and energy into loving your children and teaching them the ways of the Lord. Unlike in a career, you are not interchangeable as a parent, and the impact you have on your children will cascade down indefinitely, through both your biological line and all the people your descendants impact spiritually.

This is not to say that work is unimportant. Usually at least one parent needs to work to provide for the family. Based on how God designed men and women, that would generally be the father. However, if:

• Both parents need to work to survive
• The wife has significantly more earning potential than the husband
• Both parents decide jointly that their children would be better served by the father staying home
• The mother needs to work part-time just to get out of the house
• You both want to work and are certain that your children will have as much love, attention, and discipline without significant time spent with at least one parent

Then it absolutely makes sense for the mother to work. However, women also need to be clear-headed about the relative value of children vs work. According to the Bible, women are “saved in childbearing” (1 Timothy 2:15). Bearing children is therefore absolutely essential to the spiritual life of women. And indeed, in Scripture we see godly women repeatedly longing for children, e.g., Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah.

This rings hostile to the ears of most modern Americans, but only because the value of children themselves has been curiously downgraded. Women are told that to have value, they must have careers and significant amounts of sex outside of marriage. We have already discussed sexual morality in Reconstructing Marriage, but the Bible also has much to say about careers.

In fact, the Bible does not speak highly of work as an end in and of itself:

What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun? … This burdensome task God has given to the sons of man, by which they may be exercised. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind. (Ecclesiastes 1:3, 13-14)

Thus, while it is important for a man to work to feed himself (as Paul said, “If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat” – 2 Thessalonians 3:10), work is generally not worth pursuing as a higher-level good.

This is intuitively obvious. Think about it: how many companies or businesses have lasted more than, say, 200 years in human history? Possibly the most influential company of all time before the Internet Age was the East India Company, and it didn’t even make it 300 years. Being an executive at a major corporation seems very glorious, but ultimately, we are laboring for nothing. Solomon, the wisest man of all time (besides Jesus), called it a “grasping for the wind.”

Worse still is to pursue riches for the benefit of oneself:

There is a severe evil which I have seen under the sun: Riches kept for their owner to his hurt. But those riches perish through misfortune; when he begets a son, there is nothing in his hand. As he came from his mother’s womb, naked shall he return, to go as he came; and he shall take nothing from his labor which he may carry away in his hand. And this also is a severe evil— Just exactly as he came, so shall he go. And what profit has he who has labored for the wind? (Ecclesiastes 5:13-16)

In other words, building your own net worth and living the good life without attention to the needs of others is a severe evil. One can only properly benefit from wealth when he is actively using it for the benefit of others. By extension, a job may also have some intrinsic good if it is for the benefit of others (e.g., a surgeon who saves lives, an evangelist who spreads the gospel), but only on that level. Advancement and promotion in service of a business is rarely more than a means to make more money, which offers no spiritual benefit in and of itself.

Therefore, men suffer spiritually when they go beyond the basic earning of income to provide for their family and those in need and become workaholics, and women suffer greatly when they forego children in search of a pointless “equality” with men in the workplace. Married men and women should be focusing on raising children (if they are able – if not, they should focus instead on their spiritual family, the Church). As mentioned previously, children are an incredible investment, because any business you pour your life into will be gone soon. You, however, are the descendant of a child who lived thousands of years ago. If you raise godly children, odds are good your legacy will still be going thousands of years from now.

Note that even if you are producing spiritual fruit in your job, e.g., if you are a successful evangelist reaching many with the gospel, God will never call you to neglect your children. Your first and most important Christian duty is always to your spouse and children. God will never ask you to abandon your family so you can support those who are not in your family (1 Timothy 5:8). Remember, no matter how important your job seems, you are replaceable, which is not true for your role as spouse or parent.

How to Raise Godly Children

Let’s consider the progression of life for a child. When a child is born, he is 100% attached to his mother. In fact, he literally exists within his mother’s body. All nourishment and protection come exclusively from her.

Once he is born, however, he is exposed for the first time to his father, though his life is still largely based around his mother. His only nourishment comes from his mother’s body, and his father’s role is largely supportive (providing financially, changing diapers, etc.).

None of this means that the father isn’t playing an important role the whole time. Rather, his role is very indirect. He may be helping the mother from the very beginning of pregnancy, but the baby can’t see that at all.

Nonetheless, as the child grows, the father becomes more and more important. He becomes more involved in his child’s emotional and spiritual growth, setting boundaries, modeling good behavior, and leading his family in worshipping and serving God. He teaches the boy the Bible, and before long, the father is teaching his son how to be a good worker, a faithful husband, and a godly father himself. If the child is a girl, the father teaches her to be a good worker and to never settle for marrying a weak or faithless husband. Overall, the father’s involvement in his child’s life becomes more and more direct.

Note that throughout the child’s whole childhood, his mother continues to play the vital role of nourishment, emotional support, and logistical coordination. The father does not replace the mother – he simply comes alongside her, complementing her parenting with his own. Children love their mothers, but they also depend desperately on their fathers for role modeling, which is why devaluing the role of men in the home has such devastating cultural consequences.

Therefore, if you wish to raise happy, healthy, godly children, your first priority (after giving your life to Christ, if you have not already) is to partner with your spouse and work with him/her to bring the child up in the fear of the Lord. Indeed, the chief goal of parenting is to educate your children in the ways of the Lord:

You shall also teach [these words of mine] to your sons, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your sons may be increased on the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:19-21)

Consider the following principles that can help you make sense of how to parent as a Christian, if your own parents did not model it for you:

• If you’re not married yet, make sure you marry a Christian. Establish Jesus as the Lord of your life and of your marriage, so you can saturate your kids in the faith.
• Love your children unconditionally (except in cases of extreme and highly unusual wickedness). Do not base your acceptance of your children on their obedience. Protect, provide, and stay committed to them at all times, patiently calling them back to the faith when they fail or stray.
• Do not expect your children to fulfill you or exist only for your entertainment. While children are rewarding and often entertaining, the primary reason you should have children is because that is where God gets new worshippers from. God has commanded men and women to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28). For some, like Paul, this is spiritual in nature, but for most people this means raising children. Losing sight of this commandment is a path to significant spiritual loss.
• After the fundamentals of faith, Christian ethics is the most essential topic to teach your children. For example, teach kids that sexuality is not evil, but rather that self-control is essential. Sex without commitment is destructive, especially to women. Thus, you are not villainizing sexuality, you are channeling it.
• Acknowledging that you mess up as a parent and apologizing to your kids is absolutely critical. Doing this to God is called repenting and is central to the faith, so you need to model that to your children. Practice what you preach: not presenting yourself as perfect, but rather confessing, repenting, and striving to live in obedience to God through Christ’s indwelling strength. To that end, as is age appropriate, be open about your own past bad decisions. It is more important that your children deeply understand the power of God’s forgiveness in Christ than that they think of you as infallible.
• Teach your children to “do as I do, not just as I say.” Go beyond lip service to the Bible and live out God’s power so that they see it. As a result, you should use the following five responses when your children ask if they can do something:
  • Yes
  • When you’re older
  • I wouldn’t, but you can do what you want when you’re an adult
  • I wouldn’t, but you can do what you want when you’re an adult and out of our house
  • Never – if this is your response, it needs to be something that you don’t do yourself. Hypocrisy is the surest way to lose your children’s trust and respect.
• Never pressure your kids to believe the Bible or the gospel – just explain to them as they grow up why you believe what you believe. You should be teaching them the Bible because you believe it is true and because you believe it is good for them, not because you are trying to secure their salvation for them. God is in control of their faith, not you. It’s ok for your children to blindly agree with your faith when they are young, but they have to own it for themselves as adults. 
• To support their development of an independent faith, you must always be willing to hear an alternative viewpoint. Of course, you must have a solid understanding of your own faith to engage with alternative viewpoints, so be sure to ground your faith in reason. Do remember, though, that faith is still faith, so you can’t prove everything – if your children don’t yet feel God’s presence, you can’t reason them into believing. In fact, I would encourage you to prefer your children to become intellectually consistent atheists rather than ignorant Christians. If you grant your children such freedom to think for themselves, they are less likely to rebel against your faith solely to aggravate you.
• Control your child’s peer group carefully. If they hang around with the angry, they will become angry (Proverbs 22:24-25). In fact, children generally adopt the habits and ethics of their peers. Surround them with good friends while they are young and be sure to teach them to pick good friends for themselves once they’re adults.

Understanding the Rod

It is also essential to teach your children about the necessity of godly confrontation (Matthew 18:15-17). Avoiding confrontation leads to misery, gossip, and losing out on relationships and opportunities. Therefore, you need to model confrontation by teaching your child to accept “no” as an answer. If you don’t and instead give into your children all the time, they will learn that to get what they want, they need to ignore people’s pushback and requests to respect boundaries. They will learn they need to violate what other people want for themselves and thereby elevate their own desires above the needs and happiness of others. Is this a socially well adapted way to enter the world? Or is that how a narcissistic sociopath acts? You must restrain your children.

However, it is critical to understand how the Bible says to restrain children. The following four passages are often used to justify corporal punishment for children, especially spanking in the present day:

• Proverbs 13:24: He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly.
• Proverbs 22:15: Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of correction will drive it far from him.
• Proverbs 23:13-14: Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die. You shall beat him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell.
• Proverbs 29:15: The rod and rebuke give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.

In this interpretation, the “rod” is seen to represent physical correction for a child. The problem is, if you’re going to take this literally, why not insist on an actual rod? Why is spanking acceptable?

A more reasonable interpretation is to focus not on a literal “rod,” but the closely related word “correction.” The “rod” could thus be verbal correction, a withholding or revocation of privileges, or any other negative consequence suited to a child’s misbehavior.

This figurative approach is supported by two things:

First, there is no mention of righteous men using corporal punishment on their children that I am aware of anywhere in the Bible. Consequences being physical doesn’t seem important. In fact, 1 Kings 1:6 implies David would have done Adonijah much good if he had simply rebuked him.

Second, the rod is used metaphorically to describe God’s correction of His people in verses like 2 Samuel 7:14 and Isaiah 10:5. A “scourge” is used metaphorically for the same purpose in Hebrews 12:6.

Thus, I would encourage you to use whatever form of discipline and negative consequence works best with your kids. For example, we found taking privileges away (like iPad time or dessert) to be significantly more effective than spanking. Corporal punishment is not necessary, and unless it can be done in a helpful way, it should really be avoided altogether.

Lest your heart be too soft to consistently enforce boundaries and respect for your parental authority, however, I would encourage you to review the story of Adonijah in 1 Kings 1-2. Not being told “no” cost David’s son his life. You are doing your child no favors by being overindulgent, nor are you helping yourself, as you will never bring your children into a state of peace in your home without enforcing consequences for misbehavior.

As Paul wisely told the Hebrews, “No chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11). If you apply discipline and chastening with love and in reasonable measure to your children, without going too far and provoking them to wrath (Ephesians 6:4), your children will be happier, and your family will experience shalom.

Indeed, it is worth considering how much influence you have over your children’s ultimate destiny. David was one of the godliest men in the Bible, and yet he lost five children to destruction, four of which he could have avoided:

• The death of David and Bathsheba’s first child was a judgment on David’s wickedness in committing adultery with Bathsheba and murdering Uriah.
• Amnon and Absalom both emulated their father David’s sin and lost their lives as a result.
• As already mentioned, David never rebuked Adonijah, which led to him trying to seize something that wasn’t his and losing his life in the process.

The fifth son was Solomon, who ended up in failure because of his own greed and lust for excess. I believe God intends to remind us with this story that ultimately our children are independent actors who make their own decisions, and no matter how godly we are, we can never stop our kids from making foolish decisions and making messes for themselves. We do not need to bear the burden of our children’s choices – we simply do our best to model holiness, pray, love, repair what we break, and hope for the best, leaving our children’s ultimate destiny in God’s capable hands.

Avoiding Cultural Isolationism

In an attempt to protect their children from sin, some Christian parents cut their children off from most or all non-Christian entertainment. This falls under the topic of “open-handed” issues, like the eating of meat and the treating of certain days as holy were in Paul’s day (Romans 14:1-15:6). In truth, there is no one right answer for Christians as to which entertainment options to allow your kids to experience and which to restrict. Everyone must be convinced in his own mind about the choices he makes (Romans 14:5).

For example, we allowed our children to read Harry Potter because magic in those books works more like comic book superpowers than magic as described in the Bible, and we always carefully explained the difference between the magic of that universe and the magic of the real universe (in the real world, magic is always driven by a lust for worldly blessings and involves sacrificing to demons). I also believe those books teach lots of good moral lessons: they advocate love, bravery, sacrifice, fighting evil, honesty, and conservative notions of marriage and institutional authority, while opposing murder, theft, lies, etc. They just do so in a non-Christian world.

So yes, I’m a Christian fundamentalist who took my kids to Harry Potter World in Florida, and I believe I can back that up intellectually. If we don’t allow non-Christian worlds of fiction, then we have to cut out all non-Christian entertainment. That’s a very hard road to walk, and most Christian entertainment is junk anyway, so we sacrifice quality as well. Also, why is The Lord of the Rings OK if Harry Potter is not? Wasn’t there magic in there too? How far should a Christian go to stamp out any fantastical elements from the fiction their children read? 

While I respect Christian parents who choose to be stricter than me, who would for example never let their children listen to any of Taylor Swift’s music (we allowed the clean songs that weren’t about immorality), what should be a decision of conscience can easily turn into fear of the world. For me, it has been less about worrying about my children seeing the wrong thing and being “corrupted” than worrying about sending the wrong message by endorsing the wrong thing. I believe that my wife and I can protect our children from the majority of the evil out there while they’re growing, but we can also teach them to discern right from wrong, so that they can recognize evil for what it is.

The main point of Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 is that we should not judge one another for the choices we make around cultural engagement, for we are not one another’s masters. My family allowed dress-up and trick-or-treating for Halloween (no costumes of anything demonic or evil), but we never let our children believe Santa Claus is real (although we did warn them not to spoil it for other children). If a different Christian family chooses to do the reverse, if that is where they feel comfortable in their relationship with God, more power to them.

In the end, the best way to engage with culture is to find a system that works best for you and to model it for your children. You should play Christian music for your children because you enjoy listening to it yourself. If there is anything you enjoy that is too mature for your children to watch or listen to, let them know they will be allowed to experience it when they are old enough. This builds trust with your children, which is essential to maintaining a positive influence in their lives as they grow.