Sarah D. Shearer

The house is quiet. It is 8:30 in the morning and my daughter is still asleep. A true Monday gift! I will be delighted to see her when she wakes, but until then, I am cozy in the overcast morning haze, enjoying my coffee with lots of butter and collagen and whipped cream. I am hoping the butter will cancel out the Reddi Whip.

Something has been brewing in my heart lately. With the rampant abortion debate at the forefront of the news, I have been reminded of some deep truths and I have seen more clearly what we are fighting in the supernatural. I hate to use kooky terms like that, but there is really no other way to say it.

Simply put, there is a very blatant war on children going on, and unless we realize it and learn to fight the schemes of the enemy effectively, we will lose. We will lose more children than we already have.

I am going to step on a lot of toes here, but I want to wake Christians up and challenge them to seek the Lord while he may be found. You may find me extreme, and that’s ok, but before you post your defense to me, pray about how the Lord would have YOU fight in the war on children. Then we’ll talk.

Our society hates children. This may seem like an overstatement or an exaggeration, but there is proof everywhere, which I will show you in several examples.

Abortion is the gravest evil of our day. Before children even have a chance to live outside the womb, they are murdered senselessly and their deaths are defended and CELEBRATED. People are so deceived they have bought into the lie that it is healthcare, when the opposite is true. This deception a trend.

I have gotten ahead of myself. Before abortion is even on the table, we have rampant birth control EVERYWHERE. Children are to be avoided at all costs. They are an inhibition to progress and a stealer of joy and peace and quiet. I’m not making this up. Look no further than any commercial or social media. You should be able to have as much sex as you want without having to worry about having a child, and if your contraception fails, you are owed an abortion because a baby will get in the way of your plans. A child should come on your terms or not at all. The devil hates babies.

If by chance you want a child, then great, but don’t even think about wanting more than two. The narrative is strong that babies are hard and hosting one in your family is anything but normal. Everything you can buy in relation to babies paints them as complicated and expensive and lots and lots of trouble. Sure, you will love them, but you’ll lose so much. Sleep, your pre baby body, your great sex life, your marriage.. I can’t count how many articles I’ve read about how normal and OKAY it is to dislike your husband after your baby is born. The experts will tell you that children will stress your marriage out and bring you to the edge of your sanity. The devil hates babies and he has gone to war to wipe them out.

So, it should come as no surprise that women and men are hesitant to have a family. They are hesitant to rock the boat and ruin what semblance of normal they are currently experiencing. And if the math follows, then each subsequent child will make you even crazier and more unhappy and don’t forget more broke.

So why am I saying all this? Why highlight this? Why not leave well enough alone and just let people do what they want? What does it matter anyway? To each his own, yada yada yada.

Well, because it’s not true. And if we call ourselves Christians and want to emulate Christ, then we have the responsibility to turn the tide and speak louder than the culture. There is a time to be silent and mind your own business but I don’t believe that this is that time. While we christians sit idly by and blend in with the culture, babies are being murdered and young girls are being taught that this superpower they possess to mother is nothing more than an option, but they can do so much more.

What do we do? How do we win?

I think a good place to start is by acknowledging that children are a blessing, as Psalm 127 states. Do your children know they are a blessing to you? If you are young and dating or newly married, how do you and your significant other see children? As an integral part of your future and something you eagerly anticipate, or something peripheral to the goals you have, something you will probably do because it’s expected, but only one or two at the most.

Most people see big families as weird or some sort of accident, but if you spend any time around many of them, you will see that they have tapped into a deep joy that many people miss. They actually enjoy their children and their children enjoy each other. They actually have children on purpose.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, Sarah, this is such a limited view. Not everyone wants to have six kids and this isn’t a sin. You can love children and acknowqledge that they are a blessing without signing up to be a baby factory. Yes, yes, you can. But I’m using more extreme examples to point out how far we have fallen as a society. In less than one hundred years, a family of seven or eight has gone from normal to wild and rare and strange. Why is that? What have we lost? We have re structured our entire society to benefit self over others, and then we act surprised when abortion becomes commonplace. All way up to a woman’s journey into an abortion clinic, we tell her to put herself first, and then we surprised when she actually does it.

Christians have opted to raise their families like the world, and we have, in only a few generations, lost significant ground. We have bought into the narrative that children are optional and mostly a headache and a lot of work. We complain about them and keep them institutionalized from an early age. We let them spend most of their waking hours away from their parents, and then we send them to godless colleges to finish them off, and then we act SURPRISED when they fall away and perpetuate the anti child propaganda. As Voddie Baucham states, “we send our children to Caesar and are surprised when they return as Romans.”

Our methods aren’t working.

So if a family who is doing things counter culturally seems weird to you, consider that they may have prayed long and hard about how they want to raise their children. Maybe the parents who pulled their kids out of public school aren’t crazy. Maybe they are onto something. Maybe the ones who won’t let their kids have unbridled access to the internet aren’t archaic. Maybe they are wise. Perhaps the couple who has decided to forgo contraception isn’t weird or dumb, maybe they actually prayed about it and have decided that children, no matter how many or few of them, are truly a blessing. We act like anyone who does this is abnormal, but remember, only a few generations ago, this was the norm.

Perfect child spacing is also recent. Deciding when to “try again” for another child at the “perfect time” is a recent development, and we must ask ourselves, is it really progress? Are we better off now? Does our society love children more now than it did then? When a woman, even a christian woman, gets pregnant sooner than her plan, we think it’s normal to be upset. Again, this is recent. Couples used to recognize that children were a natural normal part of marriage. I think one of the biggest things we have lost is the normalcy oh children. Having children close in age used to be normal. Having honeymoon babies used to be normal. Is our new way working better? Are we Christians trampling the enemy daily?

Does your local church love children and welcome them? Are you as young parents welcome in the congregation with your babies and toddlers? Or are you seen as an interruption? I know several couples who stopped going to church because their church services weren’t conducive to small children. Are you kidding me?? The church should be the most welcoming place for a child. Pastors should be preaching often on what a blessing children are. We shouldn’t act surprised at how things are going, really. When was the last time your pastor encouraged you to be fruitful and multiply? The war on children will be won by christians who decide to love children. We can’t just say we are pro life and then go on living like we did before.

I’m inclined to believe that there is so much strife around these issues today because God is desperately trying to get our attention and give us blessings and joy but we keep turning him down. We have traded our pearls for swine. We’ve traded rich legacies for clean houses and careers.Be bold. Ask the Lord if you are living your life in such a way that the lost know that you LOVE children. Does the enemy quiver when you start talking about how much you love children? Children are our future. We can’t expect things to magically improve at the rate we are going. We are going to have to do things VERY differently. We are going to need to go back to the Bible and return to the ancient paths. Christians are always praying for revival, and I believe revival starts in the womb.