What does the Bible say about when to have your first child? Should you have a baby as soon as you get married, 1 year after the honeymoon, or 5 years after?
Here are 3 signs I believe will help you know when the Lord is leading you and your spouse to have your first child together.
1. If You and Your Spouse Want to Please the Lord Through Sacrificing for Others, This Is a Good Sign God Is Leading You to Have Your First Child
As Christians, we have to be careful we don’t fall for the lies the world will tell us about marriage. The world will take good things and use them in bad ways. When it comes to marriage, they will take this gift from God and try to use it to replace God. Instead of going to the Lord for their happiness, worldly spouses will go to each other. Obviously, this ends in disaster.
Ironically, the healthiest marriages are those that are outwardly rather than inwardly focused. Marriage is a gift from God, and gifts are meant to be enjoyed. However, the real way to enjoy a gift from God is to use it to serve people out of your love for God. 1 Peter 4:10, “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace . . .”
This isn’t to say that it’s wrong for a husband and wife to focus on each other. They should! Without prioritizing one another, major issues will form. A husband and wife should feel free to enjoy each other as much as possible (Proverbs 5:18, Proverbs 18:22). And yet, whenever Christians become too inwardly focused, unhappiness increases and happiness decreases. As Acts 20:35 states, “‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
With all that said, if you and your spouse want to serve the Lord together and do a ministry together that truly pleases him, there is no better option than parenting. Having a child will cost you in every way imaginable. And yet, for every sacrifice you make, you will be rewarded with far more than you could ever get back. When you choose to steward a precious life that is infinitely loved by God (Psalm 139:13-16), you are doing something that makes God very happy (Genesis 1:28).
If you want an even more practical application to this point, here it is: There is no right or wrong answer for how long you should wait to have your first child. If you feel prepared to make this sacrifice as soon as you get married, you should seek to conceive on your honeymoon. If you desire a few years together before making this sacrifice, that is fine too.
When it comes to sacrifices, 1 Corinthians 9:7 states, “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
If you’re ready to sacrifice together for the glory of God, you’re ready to have your first child.
2. If You Want to Have a Child Out of the Fulness of Your Marital Love and Not to Solve a Marital Problem, This Is a Good Sign God Is Leading You to Have Your First Child
Throughout the Bible, we are taught that while actions are important, our motives behind those actions are equally important.
Scripture is clear that having children is a good thing. However, why you want to have children is also a really important variable to consider. So why should a husband and wife want to have a child together?
As we already discussed in point 1, having children pleases the Lord. But why? Why does having children please the Lord? Having children pleases the Lord because it glorifies God. To appreciate that statement and to overcome the “Christianese” that glosses the mind whenever we hear “glorify God,” we need to take a quick detour and remember what it really means to glorify God.
In short, to glorify God means to make the invisible qualities of God visible or knowable to the world. When Moses asked to see God’s glory (Exodus 33:18), God said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord’” (Exodus 33:19). Remember, in the Bible, names are attached to identity. So when God said he would let Moses see his goodness and proclaim his name to him, this meant God would make himself visible to him (though not completely, because he was not allowed to see his face). Thus, we can see that the glory of God is made visible or knowable when the truth about God is made known.
Many other parts of Scripture support this definition of glory, but none better than Jesus himself. Jesus glorifies God the most because he is the visible image of the invisible God (John 1:14-18, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3).
This is why God has made us in his image (Genesis 1:27). We are made to glorify God (Isaiah 43:7), thus we are made to reflect him. And here is where we come to the answer to the question we started with, “Why does it please God for us to have children?”
God is our Father. God is our creator. When we have children, we are bearing his image, which is to say we are glorifying him. It’s no surprise that after Genesis 1:27 tells us that we are made in the image of God, in Genesis 1:28 we are then told to be fruitful and multiply.
With that said, to really glorify God in our actions, we must have the same motive as God for his actions. When God created humans, he didn’t do it out of need or emptiness. Rather, he did it out of his love and fullness. In the love relationship of the Trinity, he was full of love, and thus he made others to enjoy his love too. Love always creates life. It would be unloving to not share his goodness with others; thus, God made us so we could enjoy him. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism says:
Question 1: “What is the chief end of man?”
Answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
Thus, when it comes to bearing the image of God in marriage through parenting, God didn’t design children to be a solution to marital problems. If you think having children will solve some issue you two are having, you will be sadly mistaken. In fact, children will often make your problems worse by putting added pressure on the marriage. So rather than wanting a child out of need, children should be the natural overflow of the love between a husband and wife. Your desire for a child should come from a place of fullness, not emptiness.
Of course, there will be a sense of emptiness when you don’t have a child that you desperately want. But that longing is rooted in a desire to give love, not just take love. That’s a healthy longing. It’s not healthy to be unhappy inside and imagine that having a child will somehow fulfill you.
Love always creates life. Therefore, if you and your spouse want to have a baby together as an overflow of your love for each other, this is a great sign that God is leading you to have your first child.
3. If You Want to Have a Child and You Don’t Hear a No or Wait from God, This Is a Good Sign God Is Leading You to Have Your First Child
It’s natural to want to hear a clear yes from God whenever you are making big decisions in life. However, love is a risk. While many of you may sense a clear yes from God when asking about the timing of having your first child, sometimes you might not. Sometimes God might not give you a clear yes because he wants you to embrace the risk that is required to express true love.
Will it all work out? Will you be able to have a child? Will the child be healthy? Will you have enough money? Will having a child cause problems in your marriage? If you want to express the highest form of love, you can’t need answers to these questions before having a child. Rather, you have to look at these types of questions and say, “No matter what happens, I’m ready to love and sacrifice for another person.”
Therefore, you don’t need to hear a clear yes when asking God about having a baby. I believe you just need to not hear a no or a wait. In some instances, the Lord may lead some of you to delay this desire a bit for reasons only he knows.
But if there is no good reason not to have a baby and you don’t sense God telling you to wait, then you should take the risk and try to have your first child. When in doubt, always do biblical things.
“Should I evangelize to that person?” “Should I give money to that missionary?” “Should I join that small group?” Pray about these things. But if you don’t hear anything clear, you should do them because they are biblical things to do.
Likewise, having a child is a biblical thing to do. So if you don’t hear a clear no from God, that is a good sign he is leading you to have your first child.
Genesis 1:27-28, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply . . .’”