Transcript
Speaker: Sex is meant to be costly. It's meant to be costly. You might be like, what? No, why would it be costly? Stick with me. It's worth hearing the whole argument.
Speaker: Hello, friends, and welcome to Verity Podcast. My name is Felicia Masonheimer, and if this is your first time listening to my podcast, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. I am presenting to you in this particular episode a very big conversation, and it has a lot of notes, a lot of resources that I have compiled for this episode. So you'll notice as you watch this that they I'm actually wearing two different outfits because I'm recording this introduction separate from the actual episode. There was so much content to cover that I had to move through my notes very quickly and didn't get to directly get into all of the scriptures that make up the case for what I'm sharing with you here
Speaker: When I talk about this topic of sex and fertility and procreation in this episode, I'm talking about it as Matthew Lee Anderson says in a quote that I share at the very very beginning. I'm talking about it from the perspective of the entire canonical ethic on sexuality and gender. And with that in mind, that means I'm looking at the whole of Scripture together and Scripture interpreting Scripture. Verses in the Old Testament, verses in the New Testament, not cherry-picked verses that are being used out of the context of the whole story, the whole ethic of life that God has. And it's important that I start this episode so by saying that and then looking at these passages in Scripture as the foundation from which I will talk about my perspective on these topics. I have 12 passages to share with you, six from the Old Testament and six from the New. And I'm going to briefly kind of introduce these to you, and then we'll move into the, you know, real meat of the episode where i talk about this from an ethical standpoint. But I wanted to first make sure that you knew The ethics that I'm talking about here are drawn from Scripture, but they're drawn from an understanding, a foundational viewpoint in Scripture that is interwoven into the very fabric of the redemption narrative. It's not something that you can just pick out a verse and clobber someone with. It's it's woven into the very nature of who God is and who creation is and who humanity is, and it can't be separated from that. And so we're going to look at that together. So the first verse is Genesis 1, 27 through 28. This is when God creates male and female in his image, and he blesses them. And he says, "'Be fruitful and multiply.'"
Speaker: Two things we learn from this. Number one, our maleness and our femaleness are ways that we image God. They are built into who we are down to our DNA. We know this from biology that this is who you are. You are male or you are female, and that's a way that you image God. And no matter how the brokenness of the world may have confused that for you, how the sin of others may have affected that for you, it does not change it. you were made male or you were made female, that is a good thing. And it is something to embrace. And we do not have the power to decide to change that. The second thing that we see is that fruitfulness and multiplication, having children out of the marriage bond is a blessing. It is a good thing. It is a good thing for humans. It is a good thing for society. It is a good thing for the church. It is never a bad thing.
Speaker: Now, because of brokenness of the world, This has been affected by the fall. And when we get to Genesis 3 and we see, you've heard me talk about this before in my episode on pregnancy, that the curse that we see come upon Eve is talking about the labor pains increasing. That's not just talking about in labor to deliver a baby. That's talking about the labor of conception, the the struggle of infertility, miscarriage, infant loss. It's talking about, yes, pain in labor. It's talking about the difficulty and pain of bringing forth life in a broken world.
Speaker: And then for Adam, it's the difficulty and pain of bringing forth life from the earth in a broken world. They're parallel observations. And what God is saying is by partnering with evil now, because evil's in the world, it is affecting these things. And so when we understand Genesis 1 through 3, we have the foundation for moving forward in our understanding of sexuality, of procreation, that it is a good and beautiful thing. Genesis 2 says that a man leaves his parents and holds fast to his wife, and the two become one flesh, naked and not ashamed.
Speaker: Again, this is pre-fall. So Genesis 3 lists when sin enters the world. So we're looking at Genesis 1 and 2. And in this section, what we're seeing is that a man is is cleaving to his wife. He's becoming united to his wife and vice versa. Their bodies are literally designed in such a way that they become one flesh through sexual intimacy, and they're naked and not ashamed. That's the original garden design. In Christ and in his redemption over a Christian marriage, that...
Speaker: beauty of nakedness without shame is restored or should be restored when there is not sin affecting that intimacy through pornography and infidelity and erotica addiction and all of those things. This is the foundation of the unitive purpose of sex.
Speaker: When we get to Exodus 20, 14, now God is giving his law to Israel. He's specifically outlining the Ten Commandments, you shall not commit adultery. And the command against adultery is not just infidelity when you are in a covenant marriage, but it's all kinds of sexual promiscuity, any kind of unsanctioned sexual act that's outside of God's design for marriage, which is a man and a woman in covenant for life,
Speaker: barring infidelity or abuse, and in covenant for life with the intention of of acting on that through unity, through intimacy, partnership, and procreation.
Speaker: That is the design of the marriage bond. Psalm 127, 3-5, children are a heritage and a reward from the Lord, like arrows in the hand of a warrior. Now, this is the verse that's often abused by two movements, the quiverful movement and the open womb movement. They're basically the same thing. Quiverful is kind of an older term. Open womb is a newer term. And this is the theological idea that Christians should have as many kids as possible.
Speaker: And that is not the view that's being presented in this particular episode. I am not saying that you can't family plan or that you can't, it's unbiblical to pray about something and feel like, oh, we're done. We've had three kids and we feel like this is this is where um we're done. um But what we do see in Psalm 127 is that children are always a reward. They're always a blessing. And I'll talk about the exception of infertility in this episode. If you're struggling with infertility, honestly, this episode just might not be for you. I'm not really talking to you. I have walked through secondary infertility, and that's really not the focus of this. The main audience for this episode are evangelicals and people in
Speaker: Christian churches, Protestants mostly, who have abandoned any kind of consistent sexual ethic. They maybe oppose homosexuality, maybe oppose abortion, but they don't really know why. And they're kind of picking and choosing what things that they think are okay based on how they feel about it a or a couple verses pulled out of the Bible. And that is the those are the people I'm talking to here.
Speaker: So if you are struggling with infertility, you read this and you're like, but for children are a reward. Why am I not being rewarded? That's not the context of this verse. The Bible speaks repeatedly to infertility, the pain of it, the difficulty of it. It makes a lot of space for women who are experiencing infertility. infertility and how God cared for them and cares for them. All throughout scripture, we see this. So this is not saying God will not reward you. God rewards in different ways when we are experiencing the brokenness of the world. Sometimes those ways don't look like a child. Sometimes they do. But what he is saying is that with that conversation over here,
Speaker: Children are always a heritage. They're always a reward. There is no context in which they are not. And that's a very important foundational understanding for Christians to have because you can't engage with the abortion conversation if you don't get that.
Speaker: Psalm 139 through 18 through 16, God knits us together in the womb. He sees our unformed substance. This means he cares about the unformed substance. He cares about that child, that he is the author of life. No matter how much science advances, how much technology advances, doesn't matter He is still the author of life. He is the one who decided that life could be born in that moment. And so we don't get to mix up who God is here.
Speaker: Malachi 2, 14 through 15. In this one, it talks about marriage as a covenant that God himself witnesses and that he seeks godly offspring from it. Unity and fruitfulness are tied together in this going back to Genesis 1, that fruitfulness is a blessing. It's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's not something that we try to manage and avoid. We can use wisdom to plan for fruitfulness as much as we can. We'll talk about how to do that in this episode.
Speaker: But marriage is something that God himself witnesses. It is a covenant. It's a lasting covenant. This is why the commands that we see in the Bible about divorce are so serious. It is why that we see God saying that godly offspring, that's a wonderful thing, raising children in a home that's godly and pointing them toward him. That's a beautiful thing.
Speaker: Now to the New Testament. In Matthew 19, Jesus uses Genesis 1 and 2, which we referenced earlier, to say, god when God has joined together, let not man separate. And he's talking specifically to people who want to divorce Pharisees and Sadducees, who want to divorce for basically any reason, which is what men were allowed to do in that cultural era. And he says, no, you don't get to just decide that it's too difficult for you or you don't like like it or it's inconvenient. God has joined this man and woman together. He has witnessed their covenant and it cannot be broken. You do not get to do that.
Speaker: And so in this passage, what Jesus uses is Genesis 1 and 2 as the foundation for his argument back. And Jesus affirming Genesis 1 and 2 is important because a lot of people will try to say, well, Jesus doesn't talk about these things. He doesn't care about these things. But Jesus said that not a jot or tittle, you know, these little marks, these scribal marks in the Old Testament would pass away. They would all be fulfilled. He affirms the Old Testament law. God gave the Old Testament law. Jesus is God. There is no disunity between the God of the Old Testament and Jesus in the new. He affirms everything that's being taught in the Old Testament. So we don't get to unhitch the two.
Speaker: The two are together and the two must be viewed together when you're building your sexual ethics. 1 Corinthians 6, 18 through 20, flee sexual immorality. This is the argument Paul makes about your body being a temple of the Holy Spirit, that we are bought with a price. So if your body is a temple of the Spirit, what is he saying? He's referring back to the idea of the Jewish temple holding the dwelling place of God and before that, the tabernacle, which housed the Lord, um his presence, um He's saying, well, now under the new covenant, your body is that temple. The Holy Spirit resides in you. And that's why you flee sexual immorality, whether that's, you know, infidelity, porn, erotica, um lusting after a random person that you see, whatever it is.
Speaker: You need to flee from from that because that has no place in a Christian life. 1 Corinthians 7 through 5, this builds on this case. This is where Paul makes a very controversial statement and says, husband and wife give each other their bodies mutually and should not deprive one another except for mutual agreement or a season of prayer.
Speaker: And this relates to when we talk about family planning and natural family planning, the discernment process or discernment of spirits in marriage where you're discussing together. um How do we discern? Like, do we want to pursue having another child with um or do we want to pursue abstaining so that we don't?
Speaker: This is an example of that, but it's also an example of the mutuality that is built into Christian marriage. In a society where the husband should, according to the Greeks and Romans, be able to have sex whenever he wants, instead, his body belongs to his wife and vice versa.
Speaker: Ephesians 5, the one flesh union. This is Ephesians 5, 31 through 32. This is where Paul says that the the one flesh union of a man and a wife, this is um this is a mystery. We don't fully understand how it pictures Christ in the church, but we know that it does. We know that it is a deeply spiritual reality. And as such, that we need to be very cautious in what we say is okay, what we call sacred, holy, permissible, what things that we obey and what things we don't obey.
Speaker: And Hebrews 13, 4 tells us, let the marriage bed be held in honor among all, or the marriage marriage be held in honor and let marriage the marriage bed be undefiled. Basically, two things being said here, that we don't dishonor marriage. We don't act like marriage has no value. We don't act like marriage is stupid or, you know,
Speaker: pointless or the worst. like We don't talk about that as Christians. We don't say those things. And that the marriage bed is to be protected and honored and treated as sacred. Why is it treated as sacred? In this episode, we'll talk about how God is present In sexual intimacy between Christian spouses, he is present there. And the procreative act, the fact that sex is in itself, has the option and the ability to create life, makes it a sacred act. 1 Thessalonians 4, 3-5, God's will is your sanctification to become holy. And that we are to abstain from sexual immorality and control our bodies in holiness and honor, not in lustful passion. And ultimately, God's goal for us in our Christianity, in how we talk about these issues that we call them cultural issues or political issues, but they're not. They're issues that the church must address and must face. Things like gay marriage, things like surrogacy, IVF, hormonal birth control, vasectomies, abortion, and all the rest. These things are all connected to one another. They all have to do with the question, what is the purpose of sex? And that is what we're going to talk about in this episode.
Speaker: Whether you're joining my YouTube channel for the first time or listening on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, I'm so glad you're here, and I hope you've been enjoying this Thinking Biblically series. Or if this is your very first episode with me, I hope you'll head back and listen to some of the other episodes of this series as we talk about some controversial topics, looking at what Scripture says about them.
Speaker: This particular episode has been in very high demand for a very long time, and I'm so excited to provide it as a resource or a jumping off point for your own research, which is the point of these episodes. When I do these episodes, my goal is not to answer every question, to cover every base, but to give a high-level overview and give you the resources to continue doing your own study.
Speaker: As you know, i do not want to tell you what to think. I want to teach you how to think. And I'm willing to push back on some very accepted narratives in order to do that. And that's what we're going to be doing today. So put on your big girl pants because that's where we're headed. Now, as we talk about this topic,
Speaker: I want to first say that not everybody on my team shares my exact opinions or viewpoints on this. I have a very diverse team with a lot of different denominations represented and different personal viewpoints. And so what I'm about to share with you is what I and my husband have arrived at through much study and much prayer and challenging our own conceptions, pardon the pun, about these topics. And so as I talk about this, ah when we talk about controversial things like this, I think sometimes people take it very personally. They feel personally attacked and And they, instead of sitting with that information and and allowing it to draw them into more question asking and more research, they instead live in ah a bit of a fence or, um you know, just that like a mental struggle you
Speaker: this topic is pushing back on what they've always accepted. And part of growth is being willing to learn new ideas. And that if that's talking about our reading habits and challenging our reading habits or talking about um how we view the death penalty or how we view topics like immigration We need to be willing to engage with different viewpoints on that so that we can broaden our perspective and either refine our opposition or give some credence to the other viewpoint.
Speaker: And for me, this was a very real journey because i did not believe what I believe now five years ago. And so you get to be in the front row to where I've arrived after a long journey with this topic. So you might be sitting where I was sitting five years ago. One of these topics were first broached with me um even nine years ago, really. i I think I was really beginning this journey. um And you might be shocked. You've never heard a Protestant, so a non-Catholic, talk about this before.
Speaker: I'm happy to be the one who does. So let's get started. Let's start with my own journey. So um I had a very unique start to this conversation. Now, I come from a family of women who have a lot of complications around fertility and um a female health, be female reproductive health.
Speaker: PCOS runs in my family. Hashimoto's runs in my family. Thyroid issues run in my family. I myself have two autoimmune diseases triggered by pregnancy, um both related to my skin.
Speaker: And so going into marriage and going into my childbearing years, I already had some struggles in regard to fertility and my understanding of my body.
Speaker: I did not have, I think, a high view of my body. I kind of saw it as something to be managed. And when I got married initially, I was like, I'm 100% going on hormonal birth control. And thankfully, my mom stepped in and knew enough about it that because she had been on it and then had gotten off of it when she was married that she said, I highly recommend that you pause on that. You do some more research before you just jump into that. Instead, try to understand more of what's going on here And I'm glad she did do that because it prevented me from going down that road for ethical and health reasons. And I'll talk about the ethical reasons here, um and I'll give you some resources for more of the health reasons um why I think that was a great decision.
Speaker: but My point in sharing that is that I was like, whatever I need to do to control when I have kids, that's my perspective. look That's what I want. And even after Josh and I got married with our first three kids, that was very much our posture. We were like, well, we clearly easily get pregnant because with our first child, we started trying and got pregnant right away.
Speaker: And so we thought, obviously, this is really easy for us. And so we need to control this. We need to be good stewards of this because we need to make sure that we are, you know, not overburdening ourselves and stuff like that. it Sound familiar?
Speaker: That is the general attitude of the evangelical church. And that was us, a standard evangelical couple. So we move on through our, um you know, we're married, we're having children. And around after my second child, i was traveling for ministry and I got a phone call from a friend of mine that I had been talking with. And this friend of mine had recently um come out as gay and um we were kind of talking about his reasoning behind that.
Speaker: And he said something on that phone call where he said that one of his reasons for believing that God was endorsing his choice to come out and and the embracing of that attraction in his life was because in Scripture, he couldn't tell whether the command to be fruitful and multiply came before or after the fall.
Speaker: And so I asked him, I was like, what does that have to do with this whole thing? Like, what what is how does that play a role? And he said, well, it matters because if marriage is not does not require procreation, if it doesn't require, you know, in a healthy setting, barring infertility, if it doesn't require procreation, then same sex marriages are sanctioned.
Speaker: And my mind was just. I had never heard someone make this connection before. Now, i did not agree. We were not on the same page in terms of the definition of marriage, and we'll get to that in a second. um But I loved my friend and I wanted to hear, you know, the the thought process, even though he knew I didn't agree. um And it really challenged me in that moment because what it made me do was go,
Speaker: I have never thought about the purpose of marriage. I mean, I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, but I don't know why. And in his challenging this and his bringing this up, I thought, well, what does procreation have to do with marriage? I've always thought of it as like this optional add-on. Like if somebody wants to have kids, then sure, go ahead and And however you get those kids, whether that's through, you know, um marital intimacy or through IVF, yeah like whatever, like God loves life, like have more babies, if however you want to do it. That was my posture because I just hadn't studied it. i hadn't thought about it.
Speaker: So fast forward a few years, I was talking to another friend of mine who was doing ministry um to individuals who are in the LGBTQ plus community. And this person said to me,
Speaker: Well, one of the questions that evangelicals have to answer is, why is it okay for you to get vasectomies, but it's not okay for this community to have transgender surgeries?
Speaker: And I was like, those are not the same. They're not the same. And he pushed back and said, well, in both cases, you're trying to control your sexuality. You're trying to decide how that functioning part of your God-designed body should be used. And you're going under the knife to break its natural function so you can use it the way you want.
Speaker: Once again, mind blown. Now, at that time, I was not in agreement with this fully. It was like this shocking statement that was like, what are you talking about? But it took a person in the LGBTQ plus community and a person ministering to this community to talk to the heterosexual Protestant evangelical community.
Speaker: you know, believer in the historical sexual ethic, believes marriage is between a man and a woman. Me, to get me to actually sit down and say, what do I think is the purpose of sex?
Speaker: What do I believe is the role of fertility in marriage and marriage? And is contraception, as we talk about it in the American evangelical church, is this actually honoring God?
Speaker: Or is this actually part of an entire framework, an entire belief system around life and family and sex and children that is coming from the culture and not from Christ.
Speaker: So that's where I was. So we were able to have three children in the span of five years. And then after my son was born in 2020, I started to have some really weird symptoms regarding my fertility.
Speaker: And then those symptoms continued and they stretched out. And before I knew it, it had been four years of secondary infertility that we did not even realize we had until it felt like it was too late.
Speaker: Then i was going to a fertility clinic, which I never thought i would need to go to, taking rounds of Letrozole, which is an ovulation medication, and being asked, if this doesn't work, are you willing to consider idf So as I went from fertile myrtle to, oh my goodness, we can't conceive, I was still processing what these friends had said to me and kind of asking these questions like, okay, as someone who has an automo autoimmune disease related to pregnancy,
Speaker: As someone who's like asking these questions about how is this all connected, and I'm sitting here in this office being told that, oh yeah, you used to be able to have kids easily, but now you can't have them at all. And you may never have them because you're now a geriatric pregnancy. I had to actually ask questions about fertility that...
Speaker: were impacting me in my real life. And I want that to be very clear in what I'm saying in this episode. I think a lot of people, when I talk about this, they get emotional and they DM me or they email me and say, you don't understand it. And I have to say, yes, I do understand because I have two pregnancy-related autoimmune diseases.
Speaker: I used to get pregnant very easily and was anxious about that. And then I couldn't get pregnant at all, and I was anxious about that. And my husband and I have been very poor, and we're ministry leaders trying to employ nine families. So yes, we understand the financial burden. My process of coming to talk to you about this has been so real in my own life, and my beliefs about this directly impact how I live in my real life.
Speaker: This is not an isolated ivory tower theology. This is a theology that impacts my life. And so in bringing it to you, I'm not about to tell you that this is an easy theology to swallow. This is not an easy thing to live out.
Speaker: But theology isn't meant to be easy. And sometimes there are parts of what we believe that actually challenge the culture and challenge the ways we've immersed ourselves in the culture.
Speaker: And I'm willing to be the person who's going to hop out there in the Protestant evangelical world and say, alongside some other amazing people who I'm going to introduce you to, we need to push back on some of what we've accepted as normal when it comes to sex and fertility and procreation.
Speaker: So let's get into the guts of this. Matthew Lee Anderson, who's an author who's written extensively about this and and is um just really gifted with words, says this.
Speaker: It does not matter for Christian ethics whether one can marshal a Bible verse for or against vasectomies. Christian moral judgments must be shaped by the whole canonical witness.
Speaker: They are practical determinations that arise from a thick description of the reality of God's creation and its end and goal in Jesus Christ. The advent of new medical and military technologies in the 20th century presented humanity with new moral questions that require more robust, stable answers than it depends.
Speaker: And what I love about this quote is that he's pointing out that you can't just isolate and say, well, the Bible doesn't specifically talk about abortion. The Bible doesn't specifically talk about sterilization, doesn't specifically talk about hormonal birth control. So it just isn't talking about it at all.
Speaker: That's not how we build a strong Christian ethic. And if we were to, you know, make that argument about other topics, like the Bible doesn't talk about immigration other than to love the foreigner among you. They didn't have immigration policy the way we do today. um People would say, well, that's ridiculous. It gives us some guidelines. It gives us some outlines of how to actually walk this out. And the Bible does the same thing in regard to procreation, in regard to our honor for life.
Speaker: um The Life Considered Project, which is run by Haley Bommeister, she's linked in the show notes. all Everything is linked in the show notes for you um or in the description on the YouTube video. And she has written extensively on this topic and gathered sources from all different perspectives um on this topic.
Speaker: And she describes fertility as having three interwoven prongs, the body, sex, and procreation. So you can't isolate just one of them. So you have sex and fertility, but they're not like over here. You have body, sex, procreation. And you can look at each individually, she says, but they're also wrapped up in um the others and informing the others.
Speaker: In these conversations, what I think we've forgotten in evangelicalism, is we've forgotten that these topics aren't just like neutral ground. This isn't my body, my choice, which when I bring this up, when I start talking about, hey, let's let's ask if hormonal birth control is even moral, not whether or not you want to take it. Let's ask, is getting vasectomy for preferential reasons, is that even moral?
Speaker: People will push back because they're either convicted or offended or, you know, they never heard this before. And the the issue at play is like, well, what I do with my family planning is is my choice.
Speaker: But that sounds a lot like what's said in the abortion conversation. And that's because the two are connected. And we'll get over there in a second. The point is that this is not neutral ground. There actually is a position that is going to be more in alignment with the heart of God. And I'm not saying, oh, well, you're not you're not saved anymore if you don't agree with me fully on this. No, but I love how Haley puts this. She says it's an invitation to spiritual formation.
Speaker: God wants our heart through the body that's being given to us. The two are interwoven. In fact, if you study Leviticus, you'll quickly see that in Leviticus, the law is divided into two halves. The first half is about the relationship between man and God. It's a vertical relationship. The second half is between man and man or man and woman. It's horizontal relationship.
Speaker: And the laws about what's happening in their community, a lot of them involve the body. But if you go back over into that vertical relationship with God, those involve the body too, where the priests are having to be bathed and clothed and have certain processes they go through for worship. The body has always been very integrally connected.
Speaker: connected and woven into the soul. And in heaven, we will have resurrected bodies. We're not just going to be souls floating around up there. We're going to have bodies. Jesus is in a resurrected body. He took on a human body. So like we can't separate out the spiritual from the physical. The body is ah is a part of what God is doing in us and through us.
Speaker: And so when we are are picturing, like trying to like siphon off the theology of the body, like over here and take our theology of the body from the world, but take our theology of the mind and spirit from God, there's going to be this splintering of our ethics because we aren't living consistently with how God made us to live, how God designed our bodies, the function of those bodies, the function and design of sex.
Speaker: So our choices that we make in this world when we make these decisions about fertility um and how we view things like IVF and and surrogacy, I'll get into the nuances of that towards the end. um we We have to be careful that we're not looking to the world to form those choices because what the world says, says this is the most logical choice This is stewardship.
Speaker: This is, you know, not overloading our environmental resources. And I'm like, yes, but absolutely. Care for the earth. Vote against data centers 100 percent. But don't try to act like...
Speaker: Human beings are the problem, like more humans are the problem for the Earth's future because God doesn't feel that way. God is God is in the the heart business of loving humans and he will take care of the Earth. and also take care of his human. So we steward the earth as best we can, but that does not mean that we follow the world's logic and its view of humanity. That's putting creation above the image of God, which is humanity. And that's a big part of this idea too. So that's kind of how I got here. That's kind of where we're going. Let's now talk about the purpose of sex.
Speaker: So going back to Haley and um kind of her framework for thinking about this, she asks some really good questions that I think are excellent for how we think about this. And sometimes just asking good questions pushes us to think about this in a in a way that we haven't before.
Speaker: Like my friends who are asking me those questions and I'm going, I literally never thought about this in my little tidy, you know, Midwestern world. So what does Scripture say about our bodies generally? Now, I wanted to look up a couple verses um in Scripture about what it says specifically about sex and bodies. um Hebrews 13, 4, a lot of us know, says,
Speaker: um He separates those two, sexually immoral and adulterous, and because it's two types of sin against your body. But why is that such a big deal? Well, when we go over to 1 Corinthians 6 and this is where Paul talks about Your body being a temple of the Holy Spirit, a dwelling place of God. And that is the reason why you should not be uniting yourself in his case. In this case, he's illustrating it as with a prostitute because your body is woven into your spiritual nature. And when you, in the in this specific scenario, um unite your body with a prostitute through illicit sex, what you're doing is you're weaving together the design of your spiritual nature and your physical body to a spiritual nature and a physical body that are in opposition. So now you're trying to be unequally yoked. You're united in a way that's not actually unity. You're like
Speaker: In this, but you almost like when you have two magnets and you put the magnets on the wrong ends and they're like resisting each other. Your nature in Christ is resisting that. It's being grieved by that. And that's what sexual sin does. Now, in the Christian church today, we're super comfortable talking about ah sexual sin. new Yeah. Don't have sex outside of marriage. You know, we'll talk about that. Oh, absolutely. But then when you step outside that and you start saying, okay, but that includes your erotic books and that includes your porn use that you are involved in, that includes how you view procreation and how you view fertility and how you view the whole purpose of sex. Oh, then, oh, you're just, you know, Catholic. That's the favorite evangelical ins insult. Wow. You just sound like you're Catholic. Okay. Well, maybe the Catholics have something to consider here. Like maybe we should actually pay attention to the inconsistencies that are now showing up in the fracturing of the American Christian Church on sexual ethics. What do I mean by that?
Speaker: Well, I have some data for you. Okay, according to Barna Group Research, 54% of practicing Christians report consuming pornography occasionally, with 22% viewing it weekly or daily.
Speaker: Sexual health, 62% of practicing Christians agree that a person can regularly view pornography and remain sexually healthy. Um, 56% describe traditional marriage ethics as marriage uniting, as in marriage is between a man and a woman and it needs to be monogamous. Okay, 56%, that's literally barely over half.
Speaker: View it as a positive thing. Um, 51% of Americans consider extramarital affairs always morally wrong. Only 51%.
Speaker: um
Speaker: born-again Christians do marry at higher rates, and they will encourage teaching sex education that teaches about abstinence. But here's something interesting that Barna Group said about this. It says, practicing Christians are almost twice as likely as adults of no faith to say that choosing not to have sex outside of marriage is a healthy choice. Women are more likely than men to hold this view compared to those who've never been married and people who are married.
Speaker: And summarizingly, cohabitating adults are more likely to agree with this statement. So the statement that not having sex outside of marriage is a healthy choice This is the general consensus.
Speaker: But here's what it says. It says, it may be that these differences of of opinion spring at least in part from confusion or ambivalence about the purpose of sex when u s adults are asked to choose one or more phrases from a list of options that summarizes what sex is for not everyone agrees Among all American adults, the most common answers given when asked about the purpose of sex were to express intimacy between two people who love each other, so 63%, to reproduce or have children, 60%, that's actually really high, and to connect with another person in an enjoyable way, 45%.
Speaker: forty five percent percent Now, of course, there's different generations being polled in this. And so that means that they're they're being averaged across. And I would bet you that that 60 percent number is because of the older generations being included in this report. It would not be there in the younger generations is my point.
Speaker: My guess, without a poll. The reason I share this is because when we look at the statistics, what we're seeing is that we have woefully taught to the American church, because this is a Barna report, this is a Christian um research company, woefully taught to the American church what sex is for.
Speaker: And not just what sex is for, but what constitutes ah holy sex in God's eyes. And that's why these questions from Haley are so good. What is the purpose of the sexual body? What does honoring the sexual design given to us look like? What would wholeness of body and soul look like? So if wholeness is, you know, dignity and objectification is just like, you know, causing a person to to not be dignified,
Speaker: What would it look like to do the opposite of that? How can we do the opposite of that? We know that porn ruins that, destroys that. We know that erotica does that. But what if this, what we're seeing over here in those areas is actually a deeper issue?
Speaker: Yeah, I address reading erotic literature with women, but what if this actually comes down to The fact that we have removed the sacredness of sex and the church has now adopted that too.
Speaker: Sex is just something that serves us. It's what I want and how I want it. I can control it. I control the outcome of it. And if you tell me that I can't, I'm offended because you're treading on my personal autonomy.
Speaker: And that's really what I'm seeing across the American church when I talk about sexuality. You can't tell me what to do. Well, I'm not actually telling you what to do. I'm actually encouraging you to ask why you're doing what you're doing and if you think that God actually approves of it.
Speaker: So this is a quote from the priests of medicine. There are strong words in scripture regarding these vessels of honor and living sacrifices, these temples of the Holy Spirit and jars of clay. But that is because our creator and master Potter loves us very much. His heart is always after ours, even through these frustrating and finite bodies. It is vital to be reminded the spirit can be sought, can be pressed into, and both the blessing and seeming curses of our bodies." This has become very real to me in my autoimmune diseases, which are very rare, um hard to diagnose, um very painful when they're flaring. And in those moments, it felt like my body was a curse.
Speaker: And yet I know that my body is good and it was designed with intention. I'm just living in a broken world. My infertility was part of that brokenness. My two miscarriages were part of that brokenness. And that's a part of the cross we carry in this world. And yet there is so much goodness to be found.
Speaker: So let's talk about sex and marriage. What is the purpose of this? This is another point of confusion that we saw in that Barna Research um poll. um Well, what is it? And I would argue that the purpose of sex and marriage is, of course, unity, pleasure, enjoyment of one another. um it's It's to be partnered with someone. um But it's also designed for procreation, barring the brokenness of this world.
Speaker: Now, when I talk about this and I say sex is designed for pleasure and procreation, sometimes women who are walking through infertility get really hurt and they reach out and they say, sex can't just be for procreation because I can't procreate. And I want to say, I see you. i hear you.
Speaker: I've walked this road in secondary infertility. It's painful. Your situation is an exception. It's a painful exception that for some reason, this design is not finding its fruition in your experience right now or maybe ever.
Speaker: And that's so, so hard. And I'm so sorry. And yet, as Christians, we do not build ethics on exceptions. They are exceptions for a reason.
Speaker: I hear this same argument when I talk about smoking weed. My husband, before Christ, was an addict. And he openly talks about how weed and alcohol are not the same.
Speaker: You can drink alcohol in moderation. You cannot moderate weed. you You smoke weed to get high. And often what people will say is, well, my uncle needed it for cancer diagnosis to help manage the pain.
Speaker: That's an exception to the rule. We do not build ethics on exceptions. Just because your uncle who is dying of cancer needed to use it does not make it okay for you to use it because you're anxious.
Speaker: So what we're seeing here is that many evangelicals, because we're seeing this this drifting away from one, the biblical foundation, but two, also just critical thinking and discipleship,
Speaker: There's this idea that, well, I'm the exception to the rule, and now everybody's the exception to the rule, and now there are no ethics because everyone's an exception. There are exceptions. There is grace for that. There's grace for infertility. There is grace for someone who has a diagnosis that says you're going to die if you have another baby. There's grace for that.
Speaker: But what there isn't grace for is a stubborn adherence to an ethic that is contrary to the heart of God because you want what you want and you're going to make sure that you get what you want without questioning or sitting with it or bringing it into the light to ask the Lord and to hear other perspectives. So this is your other perspective.
Speaker: Now, one other point that Haley made in her questions that I thought was really good was this. Sex is meant to be costly. It's meant to be costly. You might be like, what? No, why would it be costly? Here's why.
Speaker: Because this is the setting where eternal souls and image bearers are created. Y'all, that's insane. That is absolutely mind-bending.
Speaker: That when a husband and a wife create a child through their sexual bond, God is joining them through his Holy Spirit.
Speaker: It's just overwhelming. Like, it's just such a miracle. i can't even believe it. makes me emotional. that In that moment, it's not just the two of you.
Speaker: God is there too. And he's creating that life. You know, our world wants to say, like, it's just biological. It's just science. It's just that's how. And yet nobody can create life. Nobody can give the spark of life.
Speaker: They still have to follow the rules, the the rules of the natural law of the world in order for it to work. It has to follow God's rules. Now we have all of this new medicine and new science where people are doing this in a lab, but it's still following the process that God designed.
Speaker: And God, for some reason, is allowing mankind to play with his power and still allowing children to be born from this.
Speaker: He's still like, using it to produce human souls. And sometimes it I get a little bit scared about that, like that one day of, I don't know, it's just, it's wild to me that that God is is allowing us to participate in in the sexual act together um as married couples and that he he gives us life through that. But then it kind of scares me that that in a lab we're trying to replicate that and and we'll we'll talk about that in a second.
Speaker: Sex is meant to be costly and it's also meant purposed, designed to generate life.
Speaker: When we talk about this in the abortion conversation, if you're part of any pro-life group or but or if you've studied the pro-life movement, if you've helped with pregnancy centers, campaigned at all, which I have, I've done those things.
Speaker: In the abortion conversation, and especially in abortion, um but when you're talking about it with other people, one of the things that that we talk about is that that a baby is the is the natural design product of sex and that we don't have the right to take that baby's life away. And most evangelicals would agree with that.
Speaker: Less and less as time goes on. But most would say, yeah, we have no right to to alter um that child's future, and they have a life that matters, and we should honor that. And yet, how we talk about fertility and childbearing in evangelicalism, and in the American church, and outside of that, in the liturgical church traditions, too,
Speaker: we We talk about it negatively and we joke about things like vasectomies and tubal ligations and we act like this is just such a funny, fun thing when what we're joking about is the ending of that life-giving participation. Right?
Speaker: And I don't think that should be something we take lightly. Now, certainly you may feel led to be done having kids. And that's absolutely, I think the Lord can totally bring you to that conclusion, 100%. one hundred percent um But how we talk about that and how we think about that and how we go about that,
Speaker: Concluding is is something that we really need to think about. Ultimately, this attitude that that I'm seeing in the Christian church in America is that we we have a lot of pride involved in our view of fertility and conception and contraception. We, we want to be like God. We want to dictate that. We want to be in control and we want to have the exact little two or three year gaps. And we want to not have too many kids because that would be weird. um But not have too few kids and not have, you know, don't have them too late and don't have them too early. It's all control, all optics.
Speaker: And we, we need to step back from that and ask, am I viewing children as objects to be managed? Am I viewing children as assets and liabilities?
Speaker: Or am I viewing children the way God views them, which is as a delight, as the image of his face, as someone to be honored, as someone to be dignified,
Speaker: Have I actually adopted an abortive mindset? Listen to how pro-choice people talk about babies and ask yourself, but does my verbiage, does my attitude echo any of that unintentionally?
Speaker: Because I have heard a lot of things come out of Christian mouths about this topic, sex, fertility, contraception, that sound a whole lot like what I'm hearing in the pro-abortion community.
Speaker: Now, in Catholic sexual teaching, this is actually a spectrum. and i'm And I'll be honest with you, I don't disagree with them. I think they have some good points. I don't agree with everything, but this isn't this is a really um tough question ah to ask. There's a spectrum.
Speaker: That but you have abortion, which is the killing of a life over here on, you know, let's say, the far left. Right. But over here, we have the beginnings of that spectrum, and that is hormonal birth control. Because hormonal birth control was the first time medical advancement was used to intentionally break a healthy body. Christopher West, who is the head of the Theology of the Body Institute, recently talked about this on a podcast where he said that this was the first time that Medicine was used to break a functioning body instead of restore it to health. And there were many doctors in that time when the pill was invented who would not prescribe it for that reason, because they felt that it was not in alignment with the Hippocratic Oath that said, do no harm, because they were would they would be doing harm to break a woman's reproductive system by giving them this pill. And we know now that there were some real side effects of the original pill on women who took it in that era. so
Speaker: So have to ask ourselves, you know, if there is indeed a spectrum and you have abortion over here, you have hormonal birth control here, which is initially breaking the human body in order to achieve freedom, in order to achieve control.
Speaker: If you keep following that spectrum over, yes, you have death, but what's in the in-between? You have permanent sterilization. You have things like vasectomies, things like tubal ligations. Then you have transgender surgeries.
Speaker: Going back to what my friend said to me when he challenged me on this, he's saying, guess what? It's all a spectrum of control. It's all just sexual control and saying, I want to be God and I'm going to use whatever technologies are available to me to accomplish that goal.
Speaker: I'm going to use this in order to be free. Now, in evangelicalism, we like to frame this as stewardship so that it doesn't sound so bad.
Speaker: But what we're doing is we're not always acknowledging the through line of our sexual ethic that is going from the usage of hormonal birth control into these more what we would call progressive ideologies over on the left of abortion and transgender um surgeries and things like that.
Speaker: And I understand that in sharing that, many of you are just like I was nine years ago. You've never heard this. Maybe you're even mad. Stick with me. It's worth hearing the whole argument.
Speaker: So I love this quote. It's from Abortion, Assyria, and Us. It says this, opportunities exist in all our interactions for us to embrace language, which reframes these experiences less in terms of scarcity, fear, and control, and more in terms of the abundance of God and our grateful receptivity. This is the Sabbath-shaped life. End quote.
Speaker: but they are still good and hold ways in which we were meant to know the lord in those sufferings we were meant to press into the holy spirit christians do not jump ship at the first sign of struggle end quote This really is at the heart of it, that when I talk about this, you know, the pushback that I get is often from that place of discomfort and the idea that I might have to struggle a little with this ideology. I might actually have to struggle a little with how this plays out in my life. It's not going to be this cut and dried, easy way that everyone around me is doing. I might actually have to have continual conversations with my spouse around this topic. I might, ah talking to the men here, um I might not get to have sex whenever I want, however I want.
Speaker: I might have to actually consider my wife's body and how it's designed to work. I might have to be patient. I might have to wait. I might have to, as the Catholics say, I might have to operate in discernment in marriage, which is that ongoing loving communication. I will tell you one thing that in moving to this way of of being married in this way of honoring both the sexual act and honoring um the design of my body, it has transformed our marriage and our communication around this. especially for me, because what I've seen is that in the years when I was serving women who were coming out of sexual addictions and um seeing, reading these emails from women who are going through these tough marriages with very entitled men, men who wanted to have sex whenever they could and believe that, you know, they couldn't go three days without it. Guess what was the underlying factor that made them able to do that?
Speaker: Birth control. Because if they didn't have to worry about a pregnancy, then they didn't have any skin in the game. They didn't have any more kids to provide for. They could just have sex whenever they wanted.
Speaker: There had didn't need to be any conversation. They could guilt their wife into it. Now, some men still do this ah and you know because it's an abusive trait. So if that's who they are, then they still do this even sex.
Speaker: places like that are the quiver full or open womb movement. Certainly it happens there too. But I truly believe that in the standard evangelical home, this entitlement largely is enabled. Birth control enabled entitlement in men. It is proclaimed as a feminist advancement. But if I were a secular feminist, I would be pretty disappointed because I would say it actually enabled the patriarchy.
Speaker: They can now walk away with no consequences. So it's really not the win that feminism thinks it is, which is one reason why I do think that abortion is such a big part of that conversation. Because if for some reason the birth control doesn't work or you aren't taking it, there's now a way to get rid of that consequence, a.k.a. a baby.
Speaker: So we've touched a little bit on hormonal birth control, and I didn't get into the medical details of all the forms that it takes. takes many different forms, patches, pills, shots, etc. But now let's move to more permanent sterilization. So we're looking at that spectrum and we are looking at hormonal birth control. Let's move on to now sterilization, and then we'll talk a little bit more about IVF and surogy and surrogacy and how those are also on that spectrum moving that direction towards abortion.
Speaker: So, interestingly, the National Catholic Register citing NPR said this. since the overturning of roe versus wade in twenty twenty two reports have emerged of greater numbers of young people some of whom have never had children requesting vasectomies and tubal liations both forms of sterilization.
Speaker: This is so interesting. This happened after Roe v. Wade. And I remember this because during the last election, um Michigan's governor was the closing speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And outside the DNC, in the street, they had mobile Planned Parenthood vehicles there doing abortions and vasectomies.
Speaker: And that was the first time I saw those two things paired together. And I thought, That's weird. Why are they paired together? It's because of this, this mentality.
Speaker: And in this report from NPR, which is linked in the show notes, they were combining the abortions and the vasectomies outside of the DNC. And this was the first time I saw this combination, both forms of sterilization for men, vasectomies for women, tubal ligations.
Speaker: And this was seen as a way to protect from ever having an unwanted child or burdening the environment or burdening future society with these children.
Speaker: And it comes from that same mentality. It comes from the same heart that's that's abortion seeking. It's the spirit of abortion, the spirit of of death, of hating a child. Now, in saying that, I'm saying that that spirit is what's happening at the DNC in those vehicles outside of the convention. I'm not saying every person who pursues these um has a spirit of death. I'm not saying that. But I am pointing out, though, that This idea that permanent sterilization is just the natural choice when you're done having kids, it should be pushed back on.
Speaker: It should be challenged. We should question that. We should not be making decisions out of logic, out of practicality, out of sheer emotion or feelings. We should be making decisions out of a strong foundational ethic based on the heart of God and how much he loves his people and how much he and how he designed us to honor the body that he gave us. This does not mean Have 12 children. i am not a proponent of the quiverful or open womb movement, which is no no form of family planning whatsoever. That's not what I'm promoting here, um to be absolutely clear.
Speaker: But what I am saying is that this idea that you have a couple children and then you just decide, oh, you know, we're done. And, you know, it's practical. It's logical. Everyone's doing it. It makes sense. I don't want to buy a bigger car. Whatever it is, those are not reasons.
Speaker: Those are not the reasons we make a decision like this. We actually seek the Lord's face. We pray about it. We ask him for wisdom. And then we ask, how can I steward the design of my body?
Speaker: And how can I honor this body that God has given me and that and and steward it in a way that is not coming out of control, but is coming out of trust and faith in God?
Speaker: Really, the question we have to ask is, do we have the right to alter our sexual nature? Do we have the right to do that? And when we talk to people in the transgender movement, in that community, evangelical Christians say, no, you do not have the right to change your sexual nature.
Speaker: But when it comes to vasectomies and tubal ligations, preferential ones, we say, yes, you do. And the only difference is that, well, I'm not changing my actual sex. I'm like, I'm not trying to go from a man to a woman.
Speaker: But you are trying to go from fertile to infertile. And that's part of your sexual design. You are trying to go from able to procreate to unable to, to healthy, to functionally broken.
Speaker: That's what you're trying to do. You're changing your sexual nature. Another question Haley Baumeister asked was, is your biology fixed? Again, if you put that in the transgender conversation, we would say, yes, you're it is fixed. You need to, if you're a a woman, you stay a woman.
Speaker: But when we move back over down that spectrum backwards towards birth control, we're having a different conversation. So we're talking about the whole sexual conversation is is on the spectrum, but we're not giving the same answers across that spectrum. We say absolutely not to abortion, absolutely not to, you know, gender reassignment.
Speaker: But we say do what you want when it comes to hormonal birth control and permanent sterilization. and I am calling that out as inconsistent.
Speaker: It's inconsistent. I was inconsistent nine years ago. I was inconsistent five years ago. And now, what do I believe? I don't believe that Christians have the right, outside of emergency circumstances,
Speaker: to permanently alter the nature of their sexuality. And I believe that across the board. And that is why I oppose, I don't support, i don't say that God sanctions gay marriages.
Speaker: I don't believe that a medical establishment should offer gender reassignment surgeries. Don't believe they should give hormone therapy to people who want to be a different gender.
Speaker: I believe that abortion is murder. And I believe that hormonal birth control and permanent sterilization are just a more palatable form of what we're seeing in those areas.
Speaker: And yeah, if that shocks you, challenges you, It shocked and challenged me when I first started exploring this topic. But as I've studied it more, I'm just realizing more and more that to be truly consistent on this topic, I need to be willing to live a life that has a bit of a cost, has a bit of a cost to be truly embodied um in my Christianity means walking through that cost.
Speaker: Christopher West, who's the founder of the Theology of the Body Institute, um says this, and and it really basically touches on like how I thought before um I came to this conclusion. he says, before marriage, I thought when I got married, I should be able to have sex whenever I wanted without having to worry about raising 15 kids. Besides, what was the difference between contraception and natural family planning if both are used to avoid pregnancy?
Speaker: And he's Catholic. And so you might be wondering, like, well, what does the Catholic Church actually even teach about this? um Moral theologian E. Christian Brueger, who's Catholic, says contraception is wrongful, according to the Church, as St. Paul VI taught, because it intentionally separates people. the unitive meaning of the conjugal act from its procreative meaning. So the unity and the procreation, they're meant to be together.
Speaker: Since marital intercourse is by definition unitive and procreative, a contraceptive act is morally speaking non-marital. So this is at the core for Catholics in their theology. The core of why they oppose contraception isn't just because God is life and this is life creating and the Holy Spirit's present in the sexual act. Those things are all true, but that they argue that Contraception, in the forms that I've just discussed, is non-marital. It is no longer married sex.
Speaker: You have broken and taken apart the sexual act and made it something it is not. So you're having sex as a married couple, but you're not actually having sanctioned married sex. It's not it's not the way God designed it to be.
Speaker: And while I'm not sure I fully agree with that argument, I find it pretty compelling. I find it pretty um strongly compelling that this God designed it to be something that you've decided it's not. and And we don't have that power. We don't get to decide that. We don't get to redefine sex. And we've, you know, our cultures have done that and Christians have argued about that for decades, but they haven't made the connection that we're doing it in our own ways. We're doing it within the church. Anytime we try to redefine what sex is for, what's the difference between that and redefining what sex is in general, what gender is in general?
Speaker: And I don't see people who are in the sexual conversation. They don't want to talk about this. Even really great organizations that are talking about sexual ethics or in Christianity and, you know, Protestantism, they don't want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. Christian marriage books and evangelicalism, they will not talk about this. You'll never see this addressed because it steps on too many toes. It steps on the toes of people who want full control and they want to have control.
Speaker: This ideology that is, it you know, doesn't really upset the apple cart and everybody's doing it. So it must be acceptable.
Speaker: It's not a big deal. All right, let's talk a little bit about how this all connects um with IVF and surrogacy. So if looking at that spectrum again, and we have like hormonal birth control and permanent sterilization, and then we have um over here, abortion and gender gender reassignment.
Speaker: In the middle, we have The debates are on IVF and surrogacy. Now, I know people who have done IVF and have used all their embryos or plan to use all their embryos, and they're not just leaving them in a freezer. um And I believe that the heart behind that is is really genuine.
Speaker: And God has obviously allowed those babies to be born through that methodology. And originally, um years ago, I thought, hey, yeah, absolutely. no problem with IVF because like God loves children. So anything that brings life into the world, thumbs up.
Speaker: that was my That was my thought. I didn't think much about it. um But then I met someone who had done multiple embryo adoptions. And I asked her, I was like, so what what are you talking about? I've never even heard of this. She said there are, at the time, hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos from IVF um from when it started in the early 90s.
Speaker: And no one is no one is adopting them. They're just frozen perpetually. And they either will be destroyed or they will um stay there. forever.
Speaker: And so they adopted them and um they they are beautiful living children. And when I learned more about the process and the system and the money and everything that was involved, and then as I walked through secondary infertility and this was the automatic next choice, and I started learning learning more about natural reproductive technologies, which are an alternative to IVF and get to the root cause, I just thought, you know,
Speaker: ah this This is something that we as Christians have to be willing to talk about and talk about the the difficulties of this. If, you know, you were told this was your only option and and you did it because it was your only option.
Speaker: You know, again, like I said earlier, I think there's grace for what we don't know. If you had to dissect me and you are just like, I, that was the, everybody told me that was just what to do. God is so gracious. He's so gracious.
Speaker: And it's not like he's like, well, you blew it and you're never going to be forgiven. No, absolutely not. um Same with IVF. i But I think it's really worth listening to the Christians who are saying, hey, this is a system.
Speaker: This is actually kind of an oppressive system. And if we're in the business of like tearing down oppressive systems or capitalistic systems, which our culture really talks a lot about, then we should be looking at IVF. yeah Because what's happening here is that there's tons of money being invested in and babies being frozen. And it's, you know, yes, Christians have participated in this and tried to redeem it. But the question here is is, is this a system that we can redeem? Or is this a system that Christians seem to be more and more cautious about participating in? I would say the latter. And for us, it was an ethical no-go. there No matter what, we were either done and having children, if that was ah the choice, like, are we done? um Or we do IVF, yeah I guess we're done. Because we're not going to pursue that methodology knowing, um even if we would use all of our embryos, but knowing because we'd be contributing to the continuation of that system.
Speaker: And so I think that's something we need to think about, that sex is by design meant to be between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife. um And there are ways to support conception. I worked with a registered dietitian, Caitlin Johnson. I worked with a naturopath, um and they helped me so much um in conceiving Vera and finding the root causes of what I was dealing with. No matter what, I just think we need to really think through that IVF is not really a standalone issue. These are not all standalone issues. They're all connected. Same with surrogacy. We're looking at surrogacy and we're seeing like right now there's this case of the surrogate who tried to who did save her baby's life after the parents who who paid for it wanted to kill the baby. that She saves the baby's life and she loses any kind of custody of the baby to the parents who wanted the baby dead.
Speaker: And we've opened the can of worms. Once again, an ethical can of worms because we've taken sex and the and procreation out of the sexual act. We've redefined it. We've decided I can command sexuality the way I want to. I can say that two men can have a baby through a surrogate and I'm God.
Speaker: So that's fine. And evangelicals, and I say evangelicals, but you know liturgical churches too, so Protestants, Protestants want to think that we're we're not complicit in any of this. We don't believe in surrogacy. You know, definitely implant all your embryos with IVF. yeah Okay.
Speaker: But still, if you're back here defending hormonal birth control and permanent sterilization and saying, well, it's okay if I decide how sexuality should be defined. but you can't because you're doing things that are wronger and badder than me. What we're doing is we're, so again, that splintering of our ethics and that splintering of the Christian mind trying to hold two things in tension instead of saying, I'm going to be consistent across the board on this.
Speaker: In your notes, I have some a list things by Emma Waters on IVF and Protestant denominations, how the churches have talked about this, how they have um referenced this. She also has a little detail on um surrogacy, and I'm going to have all of these in the notes for you. um But what really what I want to move you towards as I conclude this episode, talked about so much information, what I want you to to really consider Because then I know you're asking, like, well, what then, Felicia? Like, what what are you what are you saying I should do? Well, I'm not telling you to do anything i'm except to think, except to address the way you think about this, to address the heart and to ask yourself, did I make decisions out of control and God-like management of my body and my spouse's body?
Speaker: Or am I willing to make a decision That is seeking the will of God based on, as Matthew Lee Anderson said at the beginning, the entire canonical structure of how God views bodies and how God views children.
Speaker: Because if we look in Genesis 1, 28, and God blessed them, and he said, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. This is before the fall. To go back to what my friend pushed back on at the beginning.
Speaker: Notice that being fruitful and multiplying is one of God's blessings. Now, hear me, those of you who are struggling with infertility, this is not saying God isn't blessing you or he's not blessing you in other ways.
Speaker: But that one of the blessings that God gives specifically is a blessing is fruitfulness, as in being able to bear children. And look, as someone who's walked through this and not being able to bear children, it sure as heck didn't feel like a blessing, right?
Speaker: It was the brokenness of the world, which is not a blessing. And so it's not to say, like, I just don't want you to take away from this, oh, God will never bless me or or anything like that, but that I do want to make sure that those of you, the majority of you who don't see children this way, that God sees them this way.
Speaker: He sees children and babies as a blessing. Now, we hold this intention with the fact, as he issues this command again in Genesis 9, but the tension that we hold is that We aren't, I'm not saying every person needs to have as many children as possible. That's the quiverful perspective. That's the open womb perspective. And that's not my viewpoint.
Speaker: My viewpoint is that we should be stewarding bodies and sexuality as God designed us to. We should not be using technologies to physically alter or permanently sterilize our bodies and or anything on the rest of that spectrum.
Speaker: Now, I would also say that when it comes to things like IVF, I think people may be convicted to use it. I wish that that people would look into other options first, like the options I'm putting into the show notes. um Woven Fertility, Caitlin Estes, looking into Caitlin Johnson, who does fertility um support and in nutrition, um all the things that I'm giving you, I would love for you to look into those first. But Can someone use IVF and and use all their embryos and do their best to honor God and and with it what they know?
Speaker: Yes, I 100% believe there's grace for that. But would I encourage someone who's considering it to jump into that system and keep it going? No, I would not. I would not consider encourage someone to jump in and be like, yes, I'm going to become a surrogate or i'm going to support surrogacy. I would not encourage someone to ah affirm gender reassignment surgery. I would not encourage someone to become pro-abortion.
Speaker: And so across the board, yeah, I'm outing myself. I do not believe that these things are the best that God has for us. Well, you might be asking, well, what then do you believe the best God has for us is? And I would say anything that is actively stewarding the godly design of our bodies and is supporting its wholeness and supporting its unity and the unity of body and spirit.
Speaker: And that might mean that you are doing you are you have two kids and you feel done. And so you pursue non-invasive, non-permanent, non-hormonal methods to to not have more than two children.
Speaker: also But i'm I'm of the opinion that the rampant acceptance of these methodologies that I have named is something that is truly going to undermine the ethical strength and credibility of the American church going forward. It's not going to stay isolated. It never does. And it didn't because back in the 1950s and 60s and when hormonal birth control came out and it was initially accepted and embraced by the Protestant church, that was really new. And then as time went on, more and more of these sexual issues have become accepted in the American church.
Speaker: And it's it's a progression. It's a progression of acceptance as we normalize one thing and it opens the door to another thing. Now, some might say that's a slippery slope argument. Yeah, well, sometimes there's a slippery slope.
Speaker: Sometimes there just is. And um we have normalized something that needs to be challenged and needs to be talked about. The last thing I want to share is um ah quote from Leah Blessed Endurance in an article she wrote called The Cross of Fertility, which is really relatable to me.
Speaker: talking about the spiritual side of this, and she said, a Christian understanding of female fertility and childbearing must rest upon the parallels of Genesis 3 and 1 Timothy 2. This admits that our fertility is central to women's experience of the curse upon sinners, while also recognizing its inherent beauty as part of feminine redemption when entrusted to Christ. Christian faith sees that the life-giving nature of woman in this fallen world directly represents the cross of our Savior, in which curse and blessing in greatest intensity meet to pour forth a fountain of eternal life. you Jesus bore a cross and he counted the cost in order that we may experience life.
Speaker: And sometimes that's what fertility feels like. And that's what creating life with God feels like. It feels risky or it feels scary or it feels not logical um or not practical or maybe it's annoying or hard. I'm pregnant right now. It's not easy.
Speaker: It's not easy being pregnant while leading a ministry and homeschooling my kids and caring for my home and making all of our meals. Not easy. There's really hard days. But I feel so incredibly blessed that I get to participate in the creation of an eternal soul.
Speaker: Now, does that mean that Josh and I are just going to have kids every year and a half until I'm 45? Probably not. I think we would probably feel done at some point. And so we'll pursue methods that align with the heart of God and the design of our bodies.
Speaker: to probably be done and prevent. But I want to do that in a way that honors who God made me and how he designed sex to be, to live in accordance with that design, not in opposition to it.
Speaker: Thank you for listening. If you made it to the end without getting too mad, hey, you're one of the real ones. I have put all of my notes um and links for you in the show notes and in the description on the YouTube video. If you would like my whole notes that have like everything I said, um you can email us at Felicia at FeliciaMasonHemmer.com and I will give you My full notes, they will have the same links though. So you can grab the links right in the description if you want something very quick.
Speaker: As always, thank you for listening to Verity Podcast and I will see you next time.
