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Encouraging Christians to build strong families, exploring some biblical foundations, and re-engaging with culture with a hopeful, faith-centred vision for family life.

This is my second in a series, highlighting some key aspects from each chapter of my new book, While We Were Sleeping: A Wake-up Call For All Christians (2025). Chapter 2 kicks off with an inspirational testimony from Warwick Marsh, one of the founders of the Canberra Declaration in 2010, and, with his wife Alison, the visionaries behind Dads4Kids in 2002. Three pivotal paragraphs from Warwick’s testimony:

We speak our marriage vows thinking it will be happily ever after, but in Australia today, one in three marriages ends in divorce. And that’s only counting marriages. Many couples don’t even marry anymore, and these attempted long-term relationships are three times more likely to end and breakup. Our children pay the price. We’re facing a massive breakdown of family life in our society. This was never God’s intention. God is a family God. He created marriage to be till death do us part.

Family law has been taken over by the cultural Marxists for the last 50 or 60 years. It’s horrific. It reflects Karl Marx’s hatred for fathers quite beautifully, but it breaks God’s heart. Marriage is meant to be something very precious. It’s meant to have tension, intentional tension, between male and female. Their very difference creates the challenge. And that challenge can only ever be resolved daily, through acts of love. It’s the story of dying to self. As Jesus said, ‘Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.’ (John 15:13)

The challenge is for the man to lay down his life for the woman, but the woman’s challenge is to listen to her man and respect him. That can be really hard if her man is not worthy of respect. But if they can work this out most of the time, they will have children who won’t grow up in broken homes, smashed around like I did. They can multiply that love into their own children and then into the nation.

Building a Family

Families don’t grow by themselves; they need dedication, commitment and self-sacrifice. Mary Eberstadt is an American researcher and writer. In conversation with John Anderson, Mary said:

Politicians should look at every possible experiment to make it easier to get married, easier to have families, and easier to have families of size… One of the most frustrating things in the United States, for which we have very good laws, is obscenity, and yet there are no prosecutions for the creators of pornography. We need to go after this, it’s a proven contributor to romantic trouble, to marital breakup, and it is often cited in divorce cases.

American parents seem to be waking up to the problem of what is being taught in American public schools, this is all to the good.

The privileging of motherhood would be a great thing to bring back. Hungary is experimenting with some very interesting ideas. For example, women with four or more children do not have to pay income tax for the rest of their lives.

While We Were Sleeping, here in Australia, there has been near silence on the family; the cry has always about the rights of the individual or a minority. (The Family First Party under Lyle Shelton being an invaluable exception). Society seems to have accepted that shattered families are simply our daily reality, one in three marriages ending in divorce, quoted Warwick Marsh.

However, there is encouragement. Stephen Turley, in his study of demography (the study of changes in the number of births, deaths, and marriages, etc, in a particular area over a specified period of time), quotes from Eric Kaufmann’s 2002 study of American demographic trends, which suggested ‘religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world.’ (Self-identified non-religious women only had 1.5 children per couple, compared with conservative evangelical women who had 2.5 children, replacement fertility being defined as 2.1 children).

Consequently, the socialist left, supporters of homosexuality (Chapter 6), gender transition (Chapter 7), abortion (Chapter 8), euthanasia (Chapter 9) and the fear of climate change (Chapter 12) are having fewer babies than replacement and will breed out, while conservative evangelicals who trust in God are going forth and multiplying! (Genesis 1:28)

The Rights of the Child

Katy Faust is the founder and president of the children’s rights organisation Them Before Us, a global non-profit. In 2021, together with Stacey Manning, they published Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement.

The same-sex marriage agenda got these ladies involved, as they were angry that the so-called rights of adults were being recognised, while immense harm was being inflicted on the children, who became pawns to be traded in the marketplace of feelings. It is ironic that one of the hallmarks of the progressives has been their stand for the rights of minorities, yet they have set back children’s rights by decades.

Dying to Self

For me, the biggest take-home from this chapter on family is the principle of dying to self for the flourishing of family.

Often, as followers of Jesus, we don’t ‘present your bodies a living sacrifice’ (Romans 12:1) as Jesus clearly did when He died for our sins. Only when we die can Jesus shine through us. The apostle Paul acknowledged, in the last days, ‘men will be lovers of themselves’ (2 Timothy 3:2), so true. Marriage is the ultimate death of two that one might live; the Scripture says that ‘the two shall become one flesh’ (Mark 10:8).

For half a century, I have treasured this anonymous depiction of dying to self — it always catches me out:

1. When you are forgotten, or neglected, or purposely set at naught, and you don’t sting and hurt with the insult or the oversight, but your heart is happy, being counted worthy to suffer for Christ… That is dying to self.
2. When your good is evil spoken of, when your wishes are crossed, your advice disregarded, your opinions ridiculed, and you refuse to let anger rise in your heart or even defend yourself, but take it all in patient loving silence… That is dying to self.
3. When you lovingly and patiently bear any disorder, any irregularity, any unpunctuality, or any annoyance; when you can stand face to face with waste, folly, extravagance, spiritual insensibility…and endure it as Jesus endured it… That is dying to self.
4. When you are content with any food, any offering, any raiment, any climate, any society, any solitude, and interruption by the will of God… That is dying to self.
5. When you never care to refer to yourself in conversation, or to record your own good works, or itch after commendation, when you can truly love to be unknown… That is dying to self.
6. When you can see your brother prosper and have his needs met and can honestly rejoice with him in spirit and feel no envy nor question God, while your own needs are far greater and in desperate circumstances… That is dying to self.
7. When you can receive correction and reproof from one of less stature than yourself, and can humbly submit inwardly as well as outwardly, finding no rebellion or resentment rising up within your heart… That is dying to self.

I pray that our families might be filled with joy as their dominant characteristic. Fathers, what about Proverbs 5:18 (MSG):

Your spring water is for you and you only, not to be passed around among strangers. Bless your fresh-flowing fountain! Enjoy the wife you married as a young man! Lovely as an angel, beautiful as a rose — don’t ever quit taking delight in her body. Never take her love for granted! Why would you trade enduring intimacies for cheap thrills with a prostitute? for dalliance with a promiscuous stranger?

From this committed bedrock to our marriages, let’s build strong families, giving our children a secure, lasting and firm foundation for the adventure of their lifetime.

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