Here's a sensitive question we get not infrequently in the inbox, and this time it comes from a nameless female listener who simply asks this.

Pastor John, is it a sin to be pregnant before marriage?

Pastor John, how do you go about answering such a sensitive question?

One way to reframe this question would be to ask, are the effects of sin seen?

But when I thought that, I thought, no, even that's not precise enough.

Is it because pregnancy before or outside of a marriage covenant may be owing to a woman's sin or may be owing to being sinned against like rape?

Or both, like if she engaged willingly, and he engaged willingly, they're both sinning.

She's being sinned against by a man who should take better care of her, and she's sinning by willingly participating.

But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, 18, flee from sexual immorality, the old translation fornication.

No, from 1 Corinthians 7, 2, he's talking about extra-marital sexual relations because he says, because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

In other words, sexual relations belong only in the safe, holy, beautiful sanctuary of a marriage covenant between one man, one woman, while they both live.

So the presence of a child in the womb, outside marriage, is either the result of being sinned against in rape or the result of sinning.

Now, back to that original reframed question. Assuming that this new mother of this unborn child did sin in having sexual relations outside the marriage covenant, is the presence of this child in her womb sinful?

Sinful is pregnancy or the child sin, she asks.

The answer is no.

And let me surround that, no, with three observations to give some seriousness and Christ-centered hope to this mother with an unplanned pregnancy or to whoever else may be listening that way.

Observation number one, that there would be a stigma that attaches to pregnancy outside marriage is I think a good thing.

We have almost entirely lost it today because of the normalization of sexual immorality and because of putting people's feelings above a call to holiness.

But having said that, it is crucial that every Christian and every church make clear that any stigma that attaches to pregnancy outside marriage is because the pregnancy signifies previous sin not because the pregnancy is sinned.

And if there has been no previous sin, say in the case of rape, that should be handled really delicately and tenderly but not, I think, in the church merely privately.

So I say again, appropriate stigma attaches to a previous sin as its basis and to a present pregnancy only as a possible pointer to that sin.

And the reason that's important and hopeful, hopeful is what follows in my second observation.

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