00:10:15.020Brian, I want to ask you one question.
00:10:16.820As you think about the state of Christianity today, do you think children are a priority for most Christians?
00:10:24.980I think that we have been successfully colonized and discipled.
00:10:30.700if you're talking about evangelicalism as a whole, with the idea that even saying that children are
00:10:37.300normative and that you should want children and lots of children and children are a blessing,
00:10:41.140that that is some kind of idolatry of the family. And that instead, we need to prioritize things
00:10:47.580like singleness. The glory of singleness. Glory of singleness. And the problem is that I see is
00:10:54.480What we're doing is we're wholesale, in many cases, adopting the sexual ethic of secularism, which is lots of sex with lots of people but no babies, or if you have any, kill them, and over against the – I mean, and so much is this the Christian view.
00:11:11.960This is like, there is no historical question at all.
00:11:15.580The Christian view is covenant, marriage, man and a woman, lifelong covenant, and have
00:11:21.260children and enjoy them and lots of children and raise them in the discipline of the Lord.
00:11:24.900And this is a blessing and this is a good thing.
00:11:26.980And that biblically not having children is a curse.
00:11:30.600Like people listening that have infertility, they know it's a curse.
00:11:36.520And we mourn with them and we pray for them.
00:11:38.820And we have this in our church regularly in the pastoral prayer.
00:11:41.960often bringing to the Lord, hey, this couple would love the blessing of children. Would you
00:11:46.760please bless them with children? Open the womb. So absolutely, I think that the state of the
00:11:51.660Christian culture has far too much been impacted or enculturated by the death cult of secularism.
00:12:01.540Well, it's ironic, Dan, because we were talking about this before the show,
00:12:05.240but the 20th century in America, probably the most prosperous century in many centuries. I mean,
00:12:11.840maybe go back to the time of solomon but america by far 20th century most prosperous that they've
00:12:17.060you know many nations had experienced up until that point it was all based on a baby boom
00:12:22.880the prosperity was tied directly to the number of children that were had by people coming out
00:12:28.040of world war ii then that generation turns around and says thank you for the prosperity
00:12:32.040i'm going to be 100 completely selfish and now we're going to do everything we can to stop having
00:12:37.140children. A lot of nations have actually figured that out. We'll talk about it more in just a
00:12:41.640minute, but children are a function of prosperity. They're not the curse, but today we treat them as
00:12:47.580the curse, the financial burden. Yeah. One thing that Brian likes to say quite often is that people
00:12:52.820are your greatest resource. People are your greatest resource. And so when you deny God's
00:12:57.700commandment to be fruitful and multiply, you're actually cutting your legs out from under you.
00:13:01.600And I'll read this lengthy section from Death of the West by Pat Buchanan in a moment, but I think you're right.
00:13:09.600So in the 1950s, I read in the cold open that the average number of births per woman worldwide was five, and it dropped to 2.3 in, I think it was 2021.
00:13:21.280It's anticipated to drop to 2.1 by 2050, which is less than replacement.
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00:14:01.120at advertising at newchristendompress.com. Well, I was going to ask, I know you'll continue,
00:14:10.940but I want to interject here that what's interesting is having two children isn't
00:14:15.500multiplication, as you're saying, because it's not even replacement level. So for people who
00:14:20.820don't understand that, they're like, well, you'll be fruitful and multiply. Why do you think that
00:14:25.240means a big family well even just the principle of multiplication two yeah two times what not two
00:14:33.120times one equals two right that's right and so we're going for more like three or four or five
00:14:38.720or six and then we're multiplying and then we're going to take over the world with our fertility
00:14:44.020that's what that's what somebody is taking over the world with their fertility but it's not the
00:14:49.420christians not the christians this is the interesting story in exodus one exodus one
00:14:54.140is an echo of Genesis 1 because it says the people were fruitful and multiplied and now
00:14:59.040they're a political problem for Pharaoh. Here comes Moses. So even you think about all of our
00:15:04.300states, you're like, well, we're outnumbered. Okay. Well, they don't want to have children.
00:15:08.720They just want to steal yours. Liberals don't reproduce in the bedroom. They reproduce in the
00:15:13.500classroom. Okay. Have kids, keep them out of school, out of public schools. It's like, okay,
00:15:19.240that's pretty simple. And then it would change us. But Dan, right now we have a huge problem
00:15:23.520with the birth rate. Yeah, we have a huge problem. So it's not just that, uh, people aren't having
00:15:28.920kids that, I mean, that is a problem, but the problem is downstream. We won't see it, uh, for
00:15:34.320generations. I mean, we hear about this all the time, come the election cycle where, where social
00:15:39.920security comes up as an issue. Like we have an aging workforce and we have more people on it
00:15:45.420than ever before, but Eric's right. Post-World War II with the baby boom, it's not a coincidence
00:15:51.540that worldwide, you had economic flourishing, not just in the United States, but worldwide
00:15:58.180economic flourishing with the number of children that we had. And it proved to be the backbone of
00:16:04.900American culture and society economically that we've been reaping now for a while.
00:16:12.740But unfortunately, the boomers, they're now entering that retirement age. And that's why
00:16:17.520there's a concern over social security so uh if you'd like i can read this portion from please
00:16:22.520death of the west uh by pat buchanan buckle up it's going to be lengthy he's talking about birth
00:16:29.780rates uh specifically in different countries and this is about italy prospects for the italian race
00:16:35.560which gave us rome and all its glory saint peter's and the sistine chapel dante and michelangelo
00:16:41.400columbus and galileo are even more dire italy's birth rate has been below replacement levels for
00:16:47.50025 years and is down to 1.2 children per woman. At this rate, Italy's 57 million people will fall
00:16:55.420to 41 million by 2050. Wright's population researcher, Nicholas Eberstant of American
00:17:02.120Enterprise Institute, barely 2% of the Italian population in 2050 would be under five years old,
00:17:09.100but more than 40% of it would be 65 or older. The birth rate in the most Catholic and romantic
00:17:16.360of Nations, adds New Republic's Greg Easterbrook, means that Italy will be a theme park for the
00:17:22.840generations. A recent survey in the popular semi-feminist magazine Noi Done found that 52%
00:17:30.680of Italian women between 16 and 24 planned to have no children. Career was their principal
00:17:37.900reason for not wanting any kids. University of Rome demographer Antonio Gioni said that the
00:17:45.340nation is already dependent upon immigrants to bear the load of its deeply indebted pension
00:17:51.060system. But now Italian culture is at risk. Gioloni believes Italy will no longer be Italian.
00:17:58.540It will be the end of society as we know it. Gioloni, which I've said three different ways,
00:18:04.240was now called a demographic terrorist 20 years ago when he first warned of Italy's
00:18:10.220impending population crisis. He is called that no longer, though. Dr. Gialoni remains deeply
00:18:17.180pessimistic about his country. In an increasingly globalized labor market, Italy must compete with
00:18:23.640France and with the United States, with India. How can we, with such an aged society and so few
00:18:29.840young people? Cardinal Giacomo Biffini of Bologna has called on Rome to restrict immigration to
00:18:37.460Catholics, to save the nation's identity, raising eyebrows with his remarks that Muslims have
00:18:42.460different foods, festivals, and family morals. But where does his eminence propose to find these
00:18:48.620Catholics? Certainly not in Spain, where in the days of Claudio General Francisco Franco,
00:18:54.660big families were sacred and received medals and gifts from the state. The Spanish birth rate is
00:19:00.220the lowest in all Europe, lower than that of Italy, the Czech Republic, or Romania, all of
00:19:05.520which have fallen to 1.2 children per woman. In Spain, the birth rate is down to 1.07 children
00:19:12.440per woman, and the population is projected to fall by 25 percent in 50 years, as the number
00:19:18.120of Spaniards over 65 soars by 117 percent. In one generation, we have gone from a society in
00:19:24.920which families of eight or even 12 children were not unusual to one in which childless couples
00:19:31.040are common, or people think long and hard about having a second child, says Madrid sociologist
00:19:36.480Victor Perez-Diaz. By 2050, the median age in Italy will be 54, and in Spain, 55, 14 years
00:19:45.080above the median age of Japan, the oldest nation on earth today. Prosperity has strangled us,
00:19:50.920says Dr. Propaglio Dante, a leading Catholic intellectual and professor of sociology at the
00:19:57.840University of Bologna. Comfort is now the only thing anybody believes in. The ethic of sacrifice
00:20:04.340for a family, one of the basic ideas of human societies, has become a historical notion. It is
00:20:09.740astonishing. In 1950, Spain had three times as many people as Morocco across the Strait of
00:20:15.860Gibraltar. In 2050, Morocco's population will be 50% larger. If 100 Spanish young people marry today,
00:20:23.580They can expect to have 58 children, 33 grandchildren, but only 19 great-grandchildren.
00:22:03.220I mean even recently I saw a video where David Platt was doing this, talking about immigration and mass immigration.
00:22:08.040And they weaponize the idea of like, well, don't you want to evangelize your neighbor?
00:22:11.780Look, the mission field is coming to you.
00:22:13.500Look how amazing this is. And the problem is that it's actually not loving to your neighbor to totally destroy the economy, their livelihood, to totally destroy their culture.
00:22:25.460And we've said this before on the King's Hall, but I think one of the aspects that's often missed in this conversation is that the left is often waging an asymmetrical war against Christianity, and it's just a proxy war where whiteness is just a proxy for Christianity.
00:22:43.520since Christianity basically built the West.
00:27:07.340And the state – the corporations in bed with the state where you have mega-globalist corporations that become a political arm.
00:27:17.380They become an arm of the government, and then those corporations actually exist to transfer wealth from the people to the state and to the globalist corporations.
00:27:29.460And they use bureaucracy and government regulation to make sure that there's no competition.
00:27:40.620All of it exists to steal wealth and power from people and localities and families and transfer it to a globalist, bureaucratic, obese system that exists to propagate itself and restrict the freedom of real people.
00:27:57.640What's really interesting, Brian, as you were describing it, it seems like kind of inherent in the boomer worldview is a scarcity mindset that isn't biblical.
00:28:07.340Meaning like, well, if there's all this wealth out there, I need to protect mine by making sure other people don't have it.
00:28:15.440And so it seems like the population control arguments are – they thrive on that kind of thinking.
00:28:37.580But then I was thinking about, okay, how does – Dan, you talked about the bureaucratic filth state.
00:28:43.100And I was reading yesterday that the US government, state plus federal, spends roughly $20,000 per student per year on education, public education.
00:28:54.060This is K through 12, which amounts to $800 billion a year.
00:35:07.680how did God create our bodies to work and this to be directed towards the ends of earthly and
00:35:14.620heavenly good? And when you just read the book of nature and the book of scripture,
00:35:19.980you come away with a very positive view that a man shall leave his father and mother,
00:35:25.660hold fast his wife, the two shall become one flesh. They will have children. God blesses and
00:35:29.980opens the womb. He created a period where a woman is generally fertile and it's going to be, you
00:35:35.100know period of a couple decades where depending on at what age she gets married and a whole lot
00:35:40.180of different variables you're going to have a decent number of children if you just and i mean
00:35:45.020if you just went the nat like the most common view in church history which would have been
00:35:49.140totally against contraception of any of any kind this includes the reformers by the way a lot of
00:35:54.080people have pushed back on me and said that's just a roman catholic view you can read calvin
00:35:58.040no yeah they're just incorrect so this would have been a completely normative view of sex and
00:36:04.140marriage and fertility. Children are a positive good. They are image bearers of God. We should
00:36:09.480be delighted when they're born. Yes, a wayward son is not a blessing. That blessing can become
00:36:14.540a curse. A wayward daughter is not a blessing. If you fail to disciple them, then absolutely,
00:36:20.240yeah, it can become a curse. But generally, that's the positive foundation that Christians
00:36:24.480need to start with when they think about these questions and just be unashamed about starting
00:36:29.560from that foundation. And then when you come to these questions of things like birth control and
00:36:33.960vasectomies. I think birth control was the first chemical birth control, hormonal birth control.
00:36:38.360That was the first one that Lexi and I reckoned with all the way back when we were, I think,
00:36:43.44019 at the time. We're about to be married. I was 20. She was 19 when we were married.
00:36:49.680And it was the first time that we'd ever, like I had just assumed, both of us pretty much, that
00:36:54.640hormonal birth control was normal. Lots of girls her age were even like, hey, get on birth control
00:36:59.540for acne get on hormonal birth control it solves all kinds of problems it balances your hormones
00:37:04.940no it doesn't number one well i remember uh even when we were getting married we were both virgins
00:37:10.340so you know your wife will go in for her checkup first thing they do is like okay we need to get
00:37:14.440you on the pill yeah like they don't even ask you it's not even a question to them it's like well
00:37:18.620you're gonna be on the pill we started looking into this and all of a sudden and i mean this
00:37:23.820How successfully the world had discipled evangelicalism, it was like the only resource we could find to talk about why the birth control pill was bad was this spiral-bound, like, hand-printed Kinko's.
00:38:02.640Of course, the fact that it can occasionally murder a child, that's bad.
00:38:07.720But that we shouldn't have needed that permanently chemically and hormonally altering a woman's body for the profit of large pharmaceutical corporations in bed with the government who continually remarket new.
00:38:21.340and highly dangerous by the way contraceptive forms that have literally killed women well it's
00:38:26.300interesting too brian that you mentioned that because in the last 10 years especially um i've
00:38:31.940been doing some research on this like is the pill bad for you uh hormonally just to give an argument
00:38:37.240to other people who are asking and what i found so fascinating is that the the majority of people
00:38:42.980writing about how nasty and horrible the pill is are atheist feminists who have done the research
00:38:49.700and they're like, the pill, I mean, it's screwing with your cycle. Absolutely would not put that in
00:38:54.700my body. My wife and I, like maybe a year and a half ago, we were trying to learn more and more
00:38:59.780about this as we talk about these things on Bright Hearth and that kind of thing. But it was
00:39:04.580saddening to me that the state of evangelical culture is so thin and so deracinated when it
00:39:11.560comes to the human body and God's absolute wisdom and glory in designing the human body. And we're
00:39:17.280our hubris and thinking we can just willy nilly completely alter the physiology and the hormonal
00:39:24.120balance of the human body and think we're improving things the the documentaries that
00:39:28.240we found to watch all made by feminists yeah and they get like 90 of the facts right and then they
00:39:33.760sprinkle in a bunch of witchy woo woo crazy feminist nonsense and they're like all of a sudden
00:39:39.180there was one time we're watching one of these documentaries lexi been like hey we should watch
00:39:42.420this and then uh we i learned a ton and then all of a sudden they're like and explore your bodies
00:39:47.880and it's like teach it you know and all of a sudden i'm like you know get behind me satan
00:39:52.480closing the laptop like this is pornographic it was so beware listeners but i think we need to
00:39:58.880reclaim this as christians though christians should be producing the best work on female
00:40:04.280fertility the female cycle and understanding the cycle as a vital sign of female physiology that
00:40:11.900God fearfully and wonderfully knit together. I mean, all of this is, and we are Christians,
00:40:17.160we see the glory of God in this stuff. And too often we're just like, oh yeah, kids are hard,
00:40:23.100they're expensive. We buy all the secularist lies. We poison our women. We make ourselves
00:40:29.780barren intentionally. And then when we finally get around to it, a lot of times we find out
00:40:34.740we're infertile because of these things. And oh, having babies is not as easy as we thought
00:40:38.060after all this stuff or we have one or two children and we say oh man it's so hard and
00:40:44.640then in the depths of a four or six or eight week old child we send dad in to get a vasectomy
00:40:49.380and that's it yeah it's interesting uh the number of kind of mainstream christians that i've talked
00:40:56.100to uh who have like you know they're on their like second kid and they're like oh it's really
00:41:01.040just so much to handle we've decided to you know we're done so there's kind of that attitude and
00:41:05.900just not really any general teaching in the church about these things.
00:41:10.360One of the things I think about, though, in college, in philosophy, I believe, we read
00:41:14.980Humanae Vittier by Pope John Paul VI, and, you know, in college, we're basically making
00:41:33.720And now I look back reading Humanae Vittier and I'm like, yeah, no, he actually nailed that for the most part.
00:41:40.720Yeah, and that was the late 60s when he wrote this.
00:41:43.740You compare that to the liberalization of even all of the many traditional streams of Christianity and the way they've been successfully discipled in this secular pharmaceutical globalism.
00:41:55.440And it's like it's one of the most successful cultural takeovers in the history of mankind.
00:42:01.660the birth rates global birth rates just show how successful that they've been in in these things
00:42:07.840yeah and talking about how having these negative stereotypes attached to having children uh dan i
00:42:14.220want to ask you one of the ways that we have a negative stereotype i'm gonna use a personal
00:42:18.180anecdote and then ask you a question here about it my wife and i were like 18 19 uh we're dating
00:42:24.140wanted to get married uh willing to talk to pastors and parents and all those things
00:42:29.560Across the church, I was told, don't throw away your 20s by Christians.
00:46:01.120Was it that people just, like, didn't have teaching on this?
00:46:05.180I guess, what was the church's influence in a lot of it?
00:46:10.160I believe I was told that you should want to have kids, but it was by a couple of men I didn't really respect that much.
00:46:17.700The person that I heard that really, I mean, really got under my skin, really got me thinking about delaying and having kids was Mark Driscoll.
00:46:27.760Mark Driscoll had said he would not marry any couple that told him that they didn't want to have kids.
00:46:33.940If my recollection is correct, I believe it is. And hearing him say that, I was like, that really grates me the wrong way. That really grates me the wrong way. And so because my wife was a high performing, not just university student, but also in the workplace, she climbed the corporate ladder very quickly.
00:46:54.640actually was for a little while, she would make more money than me. And then I would get a promotion
00:46:59.740or a new job and I would make more money and that she would get a raise. And she kept climbing very
00:47:05.020quickly. The money was very, very attractive. And so to bring it full circle, eventually it was
00:47:12.380Pastor Brian Sauve, his influence that my wife and I made the difficult decision to have her
00:47:20.280leave her job, and I had actually ended up taking a job here at the church, we had a
00:47:27.280substantial reduction in our income. And then we had kids. It was a big one. We lived on our
00:47:35.500savings for a couple of years. It was so big. But this would have all been alleviated. It would
00:47:40.400have been so much better if when I had known I want to marry this woman. So within like 18 months
00:47:47.340of dating. If I had had counsel and been cooperative, because a lot of it is my
00:47:53.320responsibility, I'm not blaming anyone else, but it would have been really helpful to have wise
00:47:56.820counsel to say, you should get married. Don't delay in having kids. This is the direction you
00:48:02.380should go. And here's why, man, that would have been, I would have so many more kids.
00:48:08.260Well, even the, when I was 20, uh, we were in a small group and the pastor of the church,
00:48:14.160I remember going to one small group and my wife and I were both like, even though we were married, a lot of people told us like, take the first like three to five years to get to know each other, get to know each other.
00:48:23.420And so like, that's what we were going to do.
00:48:25.800And this is like within like a couple months of getting married.
00:48:28.900The pastor was like, I want to teach on what the Bible has to say about fertility.
00:48:35.400And he didn't really make a like, this is what you have to do.
00:48:40.460He's like, here's what the Bible says.
01:01:31.820Why do you think, why do you think they did it?
01:01:34.320Well, because like Brian always says, people are your biggest resource.
01:01:38.360And so when you're thinking from a countrywide leadership and you see that, like I read in Pat Buchanan's book, Death of the West, that you have the trajectory of countries like Spain that have 1.07 births per woman and the average age of your populace will be 55 years old, it means you don't have any workers.
01:02:01.360So you will lose economically to greater societies that actually have children.
01:02:07.360Every time. So so when a family produces four or five, six kids, they're not just producing like, oh, man, the infrastructure that it's going to take, the public schools, the funding, the daycares, all the social welfare programs like it's such a huge burden.
01:02:24.160And no, the way they're thinking of is like that family has six kids.
01:02:29.260Those are six future people, you know, hopefully men that will defend the country, that will defend the borders.
01:02:36.220You have future economic resources in those men, future productive people and the women.
01:02:43.800And so that's how they're looking at these families.
01:02:46.200It's like they're doing the work to continue this country's prosperity so that we don't become irrelevant or invaded, which is what's happening is invasions.
01:02:58.560Number one is this really is about a broader category of should Christians in a Christian nation use the legal system to replicate and produce more biblical justice?
01:07:30.280But what you could do is you can start a family.
01:07:33.620You can make sure that you go to a base Christian church, and you can make sure that you homeschool or private Christian school your kids, as would be the situation here.
01:07:41.560If you do that, you have kids – so you get married, find a godly wife, you get married, you have kids, and you have Christian worship, great Christian worship with Christian education.
01:07:52.060you have already defeated like the the foundational bulwarks of satan in culture and the way that
01:08:00.500culture is shaped and worked upon so it's like that's actually in reach for people uh kevin
01:08:05.600sorbo uh hercules uh the actor who played hercules super bass guy i asked him the same question
01:08:11.640how's one way that men and christians can win right now and he's like stop sending them to
01:08:15.580public school it's so obvious just stop doing it it's just so obvious and he even said he's like
01:08:21.160stop being lazy and using the public education system as a babysitting platform yeah it's just
01:08:26.480like the stuff that you need to do is take responsibility where you are stop fussing and
01:08:31.480take responsibility where you are do your duties if you need to move move like simple ass just do
01:08:37.660it i mean is your family worth it or or do you need to relocate locally do you need to find a
01:08:42.880better church do you need to start the business and stop thinking about like that loser mentality
01:08:47.100of those. Well, what about daycare and all this other stuff? Like, I know it's hard, but just go
01:08:51.980start the business, go do the next hard thing. And if you do those things consistently over time,
01:08:58.160then in your sphere of influence, you will have fruitfulness and that sphere will grow in its
01:09:05.480influence over time. It's not going to be five minutes. So I will say, uh, if you don't have
01:09:10.340that place you are formally invited to move to ogden utah yeah we would love we have a uh i mean
01:09:18.860top tier uh christian school classical christian school saint brennan's uh the church is great the
01:09:25.000community is excellent the thing that's unique about ogden is although you look at the real
01:09:31.160estate prices and you're like this is insane the cost of living here is really high there's a
01:09:35.120reason for that it's because it's economically advantageous to live here the economic opportunity
01:09:40.020is massive in this area. People get paid a lot of money for their jobs.
01:09:44.040Called the crossroads of the West. I mean, it is a big deal economically to be here. So economically,
01:09:50.360as far as worship and community and education, it's here and we would love to have you. People
01:09:55.760are the greatest resource. And so we want to have you. We want to have based Christians live here.
01:10:00.340And you should be in a place where there's enough people that the economy can support
01:10:04.080lots of people moving there and putting roots down here. And the thing is, like Lord willing
01:11:56.860And so there are lots of benefits here.
01:11:59.820And so, I mean, circling back to the topic, the reason that I brought that up is because if you're looking around and you're like, man, my kids are in public school or, you know, we're homeschooling and it's, man, I don't know if it's going that well and there's not a community to really support you and your church is really not great and there's not a lot of options, I mean, consider relocation.
01:12:21.280Yeah. Well, and so here's one of the pitfalls and I want to close here, but I think it's a really good thing to talk about is sort of an issue to be aware of. And that's a quiverful movement, sort of the Duggar model. I've seen a lot of families, Brian, get into this state where they're like, I'm going to have as many kids as I can no matter what.
01:12:41.040it puts a lot of strain on wives whose bodies cannot keep up with the pace. Sometimes husband's
01:12:48.040jobs that cannot keep up with the pace. I've seen a lot of wreckage. I've seen a lot of people like
01:12:52.540apostatize and leave the faith because they were basically told you need to have as many
01:12:58.100children as you humanly physically possibly can. And it breaks families. It breaks men and women.
01:13:03.060So I think one of the things that I would want to say is we are not quiverful. I'm not advocating
01:13:07.540that. I'm sympathetic to families who are. One of the things that we've talked about is Phil
01:13:13.300Kaiser's book, Conception Control. If people are interested in jumping into this issue,
01:13:18.220that's a pretty helpful diagnosis of this overall situation. Brian, I just want you to speak to that.
01:13:24.040Why are we not quiverful? Why is that not what we're saying?
01:13:27.000And I kind of referenced it earlier in that I don't even think it's necessarily the correct.
01:13:32.080Again, I want to think from the foundations, the positive foundations of what is a marriage,
01:19:51.460So you do see that even some of these traditions had ways that they were maybe even not as a prime concern, but by default, they were managing fertility.
01:20:02.000so that there were only like in terms of days of a month where you could lawfully have intercourse with your wife,
01:20:07.720it would be stripped down to some months less than 50% of the month that you could lawfully actually go to the marriage bed.
01:20:15.820Well, and that's what I think even the trad cats today that I've talked to about this,
01:20:20.520they're typically like the only thing that you can do is abstinence.
01:20:30.020And Roman Catholic Church tends to also, I think the early church fathers, and then also it still exists today, had a strain of asceticism that was contrascriptural.
01:20:39.700But also a low view of sex in general.
01:20:42.200So you read Augustine on this, or you read the church fathers on this issue, and you'll find a lot of sexual asceticism that is actually contrascriptural, where they would consider, many times you'll find church fathers considering marital sex sinful.
01:26:00.420And I could see why one would want to do IVF.
01:26:03.400You want to have your own kids, right?
01:26:05.260And so it seems like a simple procedure, harvest some eggs, harvest some sperm, mix it into test tube and just, you know, put it in the lady.
01:26:15.280Well, there's a few problems with that.
01:26:16.960First, they're fertilizing eggs outside of the woman's womb.
01:26:20.280And so you are making babies in a lab. And I think what this really is, is you actually you're subverting God and his created order and his desires for how life is created. You are making yourself God in a sense. This facility is now housing children. They're fertilized babies, even if they're frozen.
01:26:46.360You are trusting that there's not going to be a power outage or a fire or from some catastrophic event where all of your children are now dead.
01:27:22.780So you have all these – they fertilize a lot of eggs and then say you have three kids out of the batch, which is a horrible way to even talk about it or think about it.
01:27:37.360So you have to trust these people that when they say, oh, we're, you know, we only want three kids, please only take three eggs and fertilize those.
01:27:44.320You have to trust that they're actually only fertilizing three.
01:27:47.540They've had instances where this has clearly not been the case.
01:28:25.700And so there are so many issues around IVF.
01:28:29.660One of the analogies, like a picture that comes to mind for it when you're thinking about it is that would you be comfortable if you had like, let's say, six babies?
01:28:37.360in a big, this is going to sound weird, in a big slingshot, and you were going to shoot these babies
01:28:42.600at a fan that's circulating, and you know that like 30% of them are going to get through.
01:28:48.220And you think like there's a good chance that maybe 30% of them are going to get through,
01:28:51.540we'll catch them on the other side and take our baby home. But the other 65% are going to be cut
01:28:56.060up into pieces by the fan and killed. You would never do that. No. Because you're looking at a
01:29:01.300grown baby, you would never do that. I'm sorry guys, embryos, pre-born children are just another
01:29:06.960stage of human development, toddler, teenager, embryo, it's just stages of human development.
01:29:12.140We should not be comfortable as Christians taking these technologies into our own hands
01:29:16.980in ways that is dehumanizing and murderous.
01:29:20.540You know, it's one of the questions that we ask in our member interview, if they've
01:29:23.200ever done IVF, because one of the things that we want to know is, have you functionally
01:29:42.500Even if it's just there's nothing I can do at this point, but I do need to confess this sin as sin and ask for the Lord's forgiveness and be reconciled to the Lord.
01:29:50.560Like all the way up to, yeah, let's you have those children or someone else in the church who's willing to adopt or to have the child.
01:29:59.520Well, I think these conversations are so important because I know there's a lot of young people, especially in the church, who want to learn the lesson, right?
01:30:08.820They're actually hungry for information here.
01:30:11.180But there's also a lot of people, and I would put myself in this camp, we've all, to some extent, we have regrets, right?
01:30:17.760Things that we weren't taught or the things that we were taught in the church that were bad.
01:30:21.420And so I think as fathers in the church, you have a responsibility to say to the generation coming up, hey, I don't actually want you to repeat all my mistakes.
01:30:29.740No, and this IVF thing is going to be a growing concern because of fertility rates.
01:30:34.660It's not just that people are having fewer kids because they want to have fewer kids.
01:30:44.520Fertility in women is dropping because of chemical birth control, hormonal imbalances, many environmental aspects and influences.
01:30:52.200And so even people that want to have kids can't have kids.
01:30:56.300Well, and I think a lot of the people that bought into this lie, I've actually known a lot of people in the LGBT community personally who are like, you know, you become a lesbian, you spend all this time in that world thinking a lot of these women have said, yeah, I was just thinking like later on when I'm really affluent, you know, I'll do the freeze eggs implant thing.
01:31:15.840And then they're like, it's like, you know, IVF is like 10 to 14 grand a pop and they realize they can't afford it.
01:31:22.420well, this whole thing was a lie. So I, I, when you get to that stage in your life where you're
01:31:27.960like, I can't reverse where we are now, I can't reverse the decisions we've made. People do not
01:31:34.240understand the deep, deep regret that you will have. And so I think that's part of the older
01:31:38.640generation to say like, Hey, we want to help you make the right decision from the beginning.
01:31:43.120Yeah. It's not because we hate you. It's because we love you. We love you. And we don't want you
01:33:09.880The curse landed right in her lap in childbearing.
01:33:12.760So men do need to lead well and love well and call their wife to feminine courage and also provide for her the masculine safety that she needs to do well.
01:33:24.220So I would tie a knot on it by saying fundamentally that what we're saying in this episode is that Christian men, you must reject the culture of death that is being peddled to you, that the church is being discipled into perniciously by the enemy and by sinful men.
01:33:41.320and you must reject it. It's going to be hard. You're going to fight against the current.
01:33:45.220And one of the key areas where this must happen is in marriage and in the marriage bed. Men must
01:33:51.220encourage their families and insofar as the Lord provides, lead their families into fruitfulness
01:33:56.660for their joy and for the glory of God and for the world. Go have babies. Disciple them,
01:34:01.880raise them well, provide for your wife well, but don't be cowardly. Don't shrink back from this
01:34:07.340out of selfish desire for comfort. Give yourself away. Your strength was made to be poured out for
01:34:13.300the good of your people and for the Lord. So give your strength away. Go and have children.
01:34:18.960Take leadership in your home, particularly in areas where your wife maybe has been discipled
01:34:26.220into worldly thinking. Begin the conversations. Be gentle. Be patient. Don't bludgeon her down or
01:34:33.020try to convince her all in one five-minute conversation, but do take the lead in these
01:34:38.340conversations and make sure that you are seeing to your generations for the glory of God.
01:34:44.400And so, you know, we pray that the Lord would bless you in this, that he would make you fruitful
01:34:49.680in every way, both in having children and seeing your children's children walking in faith in the
01:34:55.280Lord and be very blessed in doing so. So, Festin Alente, gentlemen, Festin Alente, make haste
01:35:01.260slowly, and may the Lord bless you. This has been another episode of the King's Hall. We hope it
01:35:05.360blessed you and helped your family. If you love the King's Hall, you want to support our work,
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01:35:22.960we'll see you next episode of the King's Hall podcast.
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