In this audio message, Scott Brown discusses how fathers can assist their children to be ready for marriage. In this message, he explains how Isaac became married to Rebekah. We see how Abraham and Rebekah's father were involved in this process.

Proverbs 18:22 (NKJV) - "He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the Lord."

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches is pleased to present Fatherhood. This message is entitled, Fathers Who Help Their Children Get Married, by Scott Brown. It's for us to be constantly reformed in our practices. We shouldn't be the same people five years ago that we are today. I've known people who have changed major areas of their lives according to the Word of God and their friends say, you know, you've changed and it's kind of a taunt, but it ought to be a compliment.

We ought to be changing. We ought to be reforming major areas of our lives. If we're not, we actually ought to ask the question, are we really saved? Now when you see a populace in the church that's not changing, they're the same that they were five years ago, you might be dealing with an unregenerate church. That's possible.

Because God changes the lives of His sons and daughters. He does it graciously. He does it slowly. He reveals sin in our lives by His own will. It's so good that He doesn't just tell us everything that's wrong on the first day of our salvation unless we just lose our minds in thinking about it all.

But we are in a reformational time if we are believers. One of the interesting observations about the Protestant Reformation is that it went far, far beyond the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And it opened up the discussion for biblical truth in every area of life. We saw this particularly in John Calvin's experience in Geneva. An amazing thing happened in Geneva.

Fifteen families moved to Geneva because of the persecutions of Bloody Mary. She was burning at the stake God's people, the Reformers. Fifteen families moved there, and several amazing things happened in Geneva. Number one, John Calvin began to do expository preaching. He preached from Genesis to Revelation.

He was fiercely committed expository preaching. He was so rigidly committed to it that when he was banished from Geneva for a period of about three years, when he came back after being invited back into the city, he walked into the pulpit and he opened up the Bible to the last place that he left off on when he was banished. He believed that the people needed the Word of God, and he in Geneva took the Word of God to every area of life. You know, the Catholic Church had established many unbiblical and destructive practices in every area of life regarding courtship, engagement, marriage, sexual standards, all kinds of things. In Geneva, there was this passion to reform the church and the home and the government according to Scripture.

And so they, in their preaching, attacked the doctrines of celibacy. They attacked the Catholic doctrines that governed marriage. For instance, you know, most people think of the Reformers and the Puritans as sort of uptight sexually. Absolutely not. They were the completely opposite of it.

They brought the Word of God back into the bedroom. The Catholic Church had established 180 days of abstinence in marriage where you couldn't go near one another. That was so unbiblical. Calvin and the reformers railed against it. No!

And they really released biblical sexuality back into the Church. The Puritans are so wrongly faulted as being uptight. Absolutely not. They were the most unuptight people in the culture, but they were bringing sexuality back under the government of God. The Catholic Church had established practices like godparents that the Reformers exploded with their exposition of Scripture.

They had childhood commitments in marriage, marriage being a sacrament. The Reformers just exploded all that stuff through their exposition of Scripture. In Calvin's Geneva, all of these things were addressed. They were very practically addressing every area of sexuality and family life. So here you had 15 families, a church is planted.

Number two, expository preaching is engaged so that the people are being regulated and calibrated by the Word of God. Thirdly, you had guys like John Calvin and John Fox and Samuel Rutherford. John Fox, the author of Fox's Book of Martyrs. Second to the Bible was the most read book in the era. It was in that church.

Samuel Rutherford, the author of Lex Rex, Attacking the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. I have a copy in my library of a first edition of Lex Rex that he wrote, Law is King. It was illegal to carry this book that I have in my library. You were marked for execution if you had a copy of this book until 1690, I believe it was. I have a 1644 copy of this book.

But you had Samuel Rutherford, John Fox, you had John Calvin who wrote Calvin's Institutes. By the way, Institutes is the most devotional, sweet piece of writing I have ever read. It is absolutely wonderful. Calvin's Institutes, Institutes of the Christian Religion. It's a biblical theology, but it's so incredibly devotional.

He just launches off into praises toward God. Here's what else happened in Geneva. Those who had fled Bloody Mary's persecution in England, many of them were Bible scholars. Three in particular. In two years, they translated and wrote the Geneva Bible.

Two years. The Geneva Bible shook Europe. It absolutely changed every community in Europe. When the Bible goes into a culture, into a city, and it begins to spread, beautiful things happen. And that's exactly what happened during the Protestant Reformation.

At the same time, though, the Reformers were being burned at the stake and torn asunder in many, many ways. There was a high price to pay to returning to biblical order in the church and in the home. But people flocked to Geneva to get in on the action of what was happening regarding marriage and courtship and all the things that were being recovered and revived in the culture. It was an absolutely amazing time in history. A little church of 15 families.

Just think about that for a minute. What could God do with your little church when you establish God's Word as the preeminent source of doctrine and government? When you begin to do good theological work in your church among the people in your church, and when you begin to reform the practices of the church according to the Word of God. What could God do with your church? You just think about that for a minute.

I think about that in our little church. How can God's people in these little churches band together to declare the glory of God in their communities. Well, this is, of course, the purpose of the church. There's a beautiful book that was just recently written, I believe it was published last year, called Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin's Geneva by John Witt. This book just documents original source documentation, pulls from original source documentation, on the different circumstances that were considered and the different problems that happened in Geneva.

Because there were so many problems in families and everything like that, they set up what they call the consistory. It was kind of a... Every week there was sort of a gathering where the problems between people in courtship and marriage and all kinds of things, sexual problems, legal problems, were brought before the consistory. And what those, like John Calvin, who were sitting on the consistory were attempting to do, is to draw from God's Word, to try to give wisdom for a situation. There was church discipline that happened, and all kinds of things that happened as a result of that.

But one of the interesting things that happened in Geneva was they dealt with a number of issues. Picking the right person, courting the right way, the role of physical beauty and attraction and romantic love, how to handle broken engagements and attention to biblical patterns and all those kinds of things. And the genius of Geneva at that time was the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. They attempted to apply Scriptural principles to courtship and marriage. Now, I'm going to give you an outline of what we're going to do here before we get into it.

I'm going to do a quick exposition of Genesis 24 and finding a wife for Isaac as Abraham began a process for that. And then I want to talk to you about some convictions. I want to present some critical questions. I want to give you some personal thoughts on courtship and engagement in marriage, and then I want to ask you the 10 million dollar question. Now, exposition of Genesis 24.

A wife was chosen using a certain set of principles. That's the first thing that we really need to see here. Genesis 24 presents to us, it's really a wonderful example of family life. You've got this visionary father who sets out and he has selection criteria for this spouse for his son, Isaac. And he sets in motion his most trusted servant, sends him out on this quest to find a wife for his son.

You notice the vision of this man Abraham. You see his trust in God. You see the exemplary heart of a father. And you also see the submissiveness of the son in the process as well. This chapter is joined also with the previous chapter, Genesis 23, which documents Sarah's death.

Right at the end of 23, Abraham's wife Sarah dies. And it's very interesting as you read the before and after chapters, you really get this sense that as one generation passes, so another generation rises up and replaces it. And Moses connects the death of Sarah with the marriage of his son, I think just to drive home the transgenerational nature of the covenant and how important it is to pass the baton from one generation to the next. Isaac was 40 years old at this time. The marriage was carefully entered into.

It was a strategic marriage and we see wisdom of Isaac in honoring his father in the process. What we see here first, we see an updated description of Abraham. We learn that he's old. We learn that God had blessed him in all things, and you know of course we know a man can receive nothing unless he's given him from heaven. And Abraham is a great example of that.

We see that God blessed him massively. Then Abraham's servant is commissioned in verses 2 through 10, and an oath is given. And at the end of verse 2, the oath is initiated by this. Abraham says, please put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell. But you shall go to my country and to my family and take a wife for my son Isaac." He was giving an oath, the servant of Abraham was, to Abraham, first of all that she would not be a Canaanite, pagan unbeliever, and secondly that Isaac would remain in the land.

It was important for the covenant, for all that God was doing, for the evangelization of the world that Abraham would bless all the families of the earth, for many generations that Isaac would stay in the Promised Land. The solemnity of the oath is obviously clear, and the specificity of the oath is really interesting. It's sworn to by the God of heaven and the God of earth. This was no dinky oath as we spoke earlier about oaths, not from among the Canaanites. There was just an insistence in this oath that Isaac would not be unequally yoked because he must carry on the faith to the next generation.

Here, As a result of this oath, this servant travels over 500 miles to find this wife, and he goes alone without Isaac. We also notice the character of the servant. The character of the servant is that Abraham sends out his oldest and his most trusted servant. We also see the carefulness of the process. This is in contrast with the engagement processes that we see in our own day.

A boy goes off to college, meets 50 women, one strikes his fancy, and that's the one he'll pursue. If you go out there, you meet somebody you like, you get married, nobody helps you, there's no strategic involvement, Your parents are absolutely not involved in it. That's just the way we do it here in America, right? That's the way it's done all over the world. The criteria in our world is, hey, I'm going to find somebody I'm compatible with.

I'm going to find somebody I'm attracted to, somebody that gives me that feeling you get when you get that feeling that you get when you want a feeling. In our day, the criteria doesn't really go much beyond kind of our own sense of it. And we don't have a broader, more important criteria in mind and nobody else is involved typically. So the forethought that you see here in this narrative is completely missing, and almost every marriage that ever happened in the last hundred years in America, isn't that amazing? But Abraham, Abraham knew with a terribly experiential certainty that marriage was about more than a couple.

It was more than just getting these two people together, but that marriage was also about a transgenerational, evangelistic agenda of God Almighty. And it was for the purpose of giving God glory, it was for the purpose of giving God godly seed, because this war is being engaged against the seed of the woman which is clarified in Genesis 3 15 and this war is won or lost on the results of these marriages so it was just a matter of obedience Isaac must have a wife His wife must not be taken from the Canaanites. And Isaac may not return to the land which Abraham had left. So there was careful conceiving of everything in this process. In contrast, here are four marks of marriage engagements today.

Random Engagements instead of strategic engagements. Number two, multiple engagements instead of highly screened engagements. We could talk about that for a while, but I hope we understand how damaging it is for a girl or a boy to just fall in love and break off over and over and over again. Thousands of hours, thousands of days wasted in these languishings, emails and all kinds of silly things that happen because there is no strategy, there is no help. We could talk about the individualistic inclinations and passions, honored instead of seed-conscious thinking.

Or number four, romantic methodology instead of principled methodology. So most marriages really are born in our day out of random processes, unprincipled methods, individualistic mentalities that lead to something that we call, today, falling in love. And that's the way it works. These random marriages are forged often by the fires of individualistic passion. And here, I would just say we need to recover at least the principles that guided the methods of Abraham, the friend of God.

Now, we always have to be careful to, as we observe narratives and stories, to use principles that keep us faithful to the text. But one thing that we ought to see here is the confidence in God that Abraham had. If you lose confidence in God in this process, hopelessness will grip your heart and panic will begin to guide the process. We don't really see that with Abraham. He believes in God and he sets his servant out on a long journey.

By the way, it was a very significant caravan. Lots of people, lots of camels. It was really just an amazing layout. We see the arrival of Abraham's servant in verses 11 through 14 and we see Abraham's servant, he prays upon arrival. It was a prayer for success.

There was a dependence upon God as he was engaging this whole process. And it just makes you think, how are you ever going to find a spouse for your daughter or for your son? What we see here of Abraham's servant is he's constantly in prayer. This should be one of the ways that we look for spouses is on our knees, you know, praying before God. We often think that prayer is a throwaway, You know, it's not a throwaway.

And this is how this servant made his way into the process. We should just let that hit us for a minute. You know, prayer was critical in this process. It was part of the activity that a father should be engaged in. People often ask, well what am I gonna do?

Pray! That's one thing you need to do is to pray. So here's some lessons that we see here. There's prayer, and then there's looking. We see the Abraham servant is looking in particular places.

He's not just looking any place. Here's what Matthew Henry says of this situation. He says, when he came to seek a wife for his master, he did not go to the playhouse or the park and pray that he might meet one there, but to the well of water, expecting to find one there well-employed. He understood that there were some places that were better than others. It's fascinating to think about the reasons why he went to this well of water.

We'll get to that later. He knew what he was looking for. He was looking for a super-abounding heart of service, and guess what he found? He found a girl like that. He found this amazing girl who was going to water all of His camels.

So He prayed, He looked, He knew what He was looking for, and He was assisting. He was working. He was assisting Isaac. He was assisting by putting the servant into play for him. The father is looking out for the son and he plays a kind of matchmaking role, It's a kind of matchmaking role.

Maybe one thing we can draw from this is that here you have a son and you have a father, and the father understands something. His son needs help to get married. And he takes action and helps his son get married. So it is appropriate for there to be some kind of help in the marriages of our children. When you're helping your children to get married, their awkward moments, their things, I mean, everything's not nailed down.

And so, trust in God is so critical in all of it. Then we see this providential meeting with Rebecca in verses 15 to 20. And you see these great qualities of Rebecca. She's beautiful, and she has a purity about her. She is full of service.

She's wonderfully qualified. Her character is marked by vigorous service. She has a good disposition. She's industrious. She took an opportunity to do something for someone else.

This was the kind of daughter she was. Fathers, you have daughters. I don't know how many daughters are represented in this room. My guess is that there's over 150 daughters probably represented in this room. And you have these daughters and what, you know, how are you preparing them for marriage?

Oh my. First of all, you must be involved. You must have a vision for their character, for their life, for their hearts, and have it clear in your mind and lead them along the way. Don't just leave it to your wife who will be massively helpful to you, but don't just leave it there. Notice the qualities of Rebekah.

These are exemplary qualities of marvelous wives, and we know that Rebekah was a blessed wife. We also see Abraham's servant. He sees the hand of the Lord and rewards Rebecca and asks if he can stay. So he's involved here and look at verse 21, and the man wondering at her remains silent so as to know whether the Lord had made his journey prosperous or not. He's still seeking the Lord.

He's wondering if God is doing this thing here now for Isaac. So it was when the camels had finished drinking that the man took a golden nose ring, wearing half a shekel, and two bracelets from her wrist, weighing ten shekels of gold, and said, Whose daughter are you? Tell me, please, is there room in your father's house for us to lodge? So she said to him, I'm the daughter of Bethuel, Milka's son, whom she bore to Nahor. Moreover, she said to him, we have both straw and feed enough and room to lodge.

Then the man bowed down his head and worshipped the Lord. And he said, blessed be the Lord God of my master Abraham who has not forsaken his mercy and his truth toward my master. As for me being on the way, the Lord led me to the house of my master's brethren." So that's his prayer. And then the text says, So the young woman ran and told her mother's household of these things. I mean this is an amazing moment.

The man Abraham's servant is silent. He's completely floored and then he gives Rebecca a gift and then he asks to stay the night and then he worships God and prays again. This whole journey is just saturated with worship and prayer, which is the way that fathers should use to look more than anything else. And then Abraham's servant tells the story of Rebecca's family, and there's quite a bit of detail on that. And then Laban and Bethuel affirm the selection in verses 50 through 60.

There was confirmation in the family. This is a really neat part of the story. It all seems to be right. Both sides of the family seem to believe that this is something that God is doing. Abraham's servant was ready to keep looking if this thing was not pleasing in the sight of Rebecca's father.

There was honoring of a father's authority in this and Abraham's servant was not presuming upon this but it would be confirmed if the family would be pleased with the marriage. And so there was this confirmation. And here both Rebecca and the servant were dependent on the authority and the headship of that father in the home. So this just proposes to us the principle of confirmation. If you don't have the confirmation of your father and your mother and important people in your life, then you better beware.

You either you ought to slow down or shut it down or wait maybe a long time until God makes it clear. In my mind it's difficult to throw out one single rule on this because sometimes you have ungodly parents, you have different things that are happening, so care needs to be taken for how you interpret some of these situations. But In Calvin's Geneva, you had to have permission from your parents, age 20 for men and 18 for women, or else they would not marry you. There had to be happy collaboration among the parents. I would just encourage you, you know, from the time your children are young, from the youngest all the way up, that you're constantly helping them understand that you as a father need to work together with your daughters in their marriages.

Ask them to trust you. Ask them to grant you the authority that you already really have by Almighty God. Help them to understand the beauty of it, that when that time comes they must enter into a trustful relationship with you in it and that they will listen to you. I've seen so much wreckage from the abandonment of this principle in marriages. And, you know, as for me, generally, my practice is I will not marry a couple unless both parents are happy with it.

And this has not always been pleasing to some of the people that have come to me for marriage, because I've been declined a number of times. But this principle of confirmation is very important. Then we see Abraham's servant responding with worship and gifts. He's just overcome a thankfulness. He bows down.

He worships. His gifts are a result of his worship. You've got a man who's responsive to God. He's filled with amazement at the goodness of God toward Him. He is definitely looking to God for every aspect of this marriage process that He's engaged in.

And then we see the blessing of Rebekah's brothers. At the same time though, deference is given to Rebecca's opinion. You know, here's something we need to realize about this marriage here. It was an arranged marriage, but it wasn't a forced marriage. Do you get that?

There's a big difference, and I believe that forced marriages violate many principles of Scripture, okay? I'm very discouraging to parents who are being forceful in this area, But there was deference to Rebecca's opinion. She could have bowed out at any time. And my understanding of Scripture is that this is right. There must be affection for a marriage.

Is it possible for any old two believers to get married and have that marriage? Yeah, I think so. I really do think so. But I don't think that's necessarily the biblical pattern. Read the Song of Solomon.

How much desire and passion is there toward this thing? You know, there's something about the way that we're built. I think we see it in different places in Scripture where it's not just a clinical, hey, stick two believers together. I just don't buy that. And by the way, in Calvary to Geneva they didn't buy it either because it just doesn't seem to fit the way that relationships and love works.

And Rebecca's brothers, they bless her and they understand her role and they bless her and said to her, Our sister, may you become the mother of ten thousands, and may your descendants possess the gates of those who hate them." Hey, these brothers understood, at least they understood something about marriage, you know. They were blessing their sister. What an example this is for brothers to have an understanding of the role of women to encourage sisters, their own sisters, in the ways of marriage. Train your boys to understand marriage so that they can encourage their sisters in the biblical principles regarding marriage and also that they can look out for them and protect them from particular situations. But here these brothers, they're just affirming the unity of the mind of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

These brothers know God, it seems like. They're just encouraging their sister to go be a fruitful mother, to express the strength of God through the having of children from one generation to the next. Something that we need to do too. We need to be as excited, at least as excited, about these brothers, about this process that God has engaged us in. Then we see this marriage of Isaac and Rebecca in verses 61 to 67.

Rebecca and her maids arose and they rode on the camels and followed the man. And they continued on the way. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field in the evening. Wonder what he was meditating about. And he lifted his eyes and looked.

And there the camels were coming and Rebecca lifted her eyes and when she saw Isaac she dismounted from her camel for she said to the servant who is this man walking in the field to meet us. And the servant said, it is my master. So she took a veil and covered herself. And the servant told Isaac all the things he had done. And Isaac brought her into his mother's tent.

And he took Rebekah. And she became his wife. And he loved her. So it's a great love story. It starts with Isaac's empty household at age 40 and it ends with he loved her.

It's just marvelous. There's so many things that we could draw from this. You know, love is more than a pretty face. It's part of a drama of God working in the lives of family members and God's desire to bless the world with children from one generation to the next. God does provide, God does see a father, does love his son and helps him get married.

A son loves and honors his father and accepts the provision that has been given to him. And Rebecca leaves her homeland. You know, Rebecca is fearless like her future mother-in-law, Sarah. Sarah was not frightened by any fear. She called Abraham Lord.

She did trust God. She wasn't a perfect woman, but she was definitely a marvelous saint of God. And Sarah left her homeland, and then now Rebecca leaves her homeland. They're cut out of the same cloth. What a blessing it is to raise daughters who would be wives like this, who would be taken out of their father's households, and then to give their whole hearts to their husbands and to follow them to the ends of the earth.

That's what Sarah did, and we're going to find out, too, that that's exactly what Rebecca did as well. Well, let's come to some applications here. First of all, I would just encourage us to follow the best aspects of this example. There are many examples you can follow. If you find a better one, follow it.

These stories are given for our examples. I don't believe this story is here so that we repeat in detail every element of it. I think that there are principles, there are things in it that call us to other passages of Scripture that are helpful to us. For sure, parents ought to enter into the process of marrying their children. They should be prayerful.

They should deploy resources in the finding of their mates. We shouldn't be passive. You know, there's a lost generation of singles out there who were never encouraged to get married. They grew up in our churches and they were told, these women were told, hey, concentrate on God, do not even think about marriage. We said the same thing to boys.

Go get your career, forget marriage. I would say, no, we should help our children get married. We should encourage them to get married. Go do the Christian thing. Get married, have children, and let the blessing of Abraham roll.

For fathers not to be passive in it, but to encourage them. I would just say too, be affected by the trustful and the worshipful and the thankful childlikeness of Abraham's servant. And then to pray for the marriages of our children and then to trust God for providential meetings and then like these great brothers glorify the fruitful lifestyle and keep it rolling from one generation to the next. And, and don't forget this, do not forget this. Are you ready?

If things aren't going right, God may need to send you an angel just like He did with Abraham. God is willing to send an angel to help you. He has a lot of angels, so fear not if you need it. And Abraham apparently needed it, And an angel came. And I do believe that God will do whatever He has to do to bring it about.

Okay, I'm going to give you some convictions here that I have. First of all, I believe that Scripture presents patterns that are workable and applicable. I don't believe the Bible is silent on the issues of courtship and marriage. The word courtship does not appear in the Bible. It's probably not the right word.

I don't... People use different words for this and I don't get really get wrapped around the terminology here. I think you might just talk about biblical principles for marriage or bringing couples together. I would really rather talk about it in that term, because courtship might mean one thing to this guy and another thing to another guy. Hey, that's one thing you'll find out.

People define these terms really differently, so don't get too hooked up to the words because people think differently about them, and it can get you in a lot of trouble, dads, too. If you're working and the definitions aren't exactly the same, you might find out too late that you weren't talking about the same thing. I believe that Scripture presents patterns that are workable regarding sexuality, regarding community, regarding creation order relationships, and how honor and authority and headship all work into it. Number two, I think that the patterns of dating and its underlying principles are worldly. They're bankrupt.

They're fraught with faith-deluding, marriage-destroying, evangelism-hampering elements. It needs to be reformed. It needs to be scuttled. It's not worth it. It's doing much damage.

It's something, principles that are implemented in normal. Dating and relationships are extremely worldly, And because they don't acknowledge the head of the household, they don't acknowledge sexual purity, they don't acknowledge a number of things that we could spend a lot of time talking about. Number three, I don't believe they're airtight biblical formulas to guide every single part of the courtship process. There are scriptural principles to guide every aspect of the process, but Scripture seems to present a diversity of application. The courtship or marriage stories aren't exactly alike.

Like, is there another one just like this anywhere in the Bible? No. There isn't. So let's not say this is the only way. You know, lest we all go buy camels, hire servants, send them on journeys.

Well, it's certainly a legitimate way to do it. But this is not a command for you to go do that. You know, and particularly the nose ring part. I just don't relate to that. I just don't know if there are airtight formulas to guide every part of this.

Here are five unbreakable courtship principles or, you know, bringing people together in marriage principles, whatever you want to call it. First of all, the couple must honor parental authority and responsibility. This means that a daughter or a son should see themselves the way that God would have them be seen. And that is that they're not independent agents running around. They have a head.

In Scripture, there's no intermediate state where a daughter particularly is off running independently. There are two states for daughters in the Bible. They are under the headship and the care of their fathers, or they are given in marriage and they're under the headship of their husbands. Everything in Scripture indicates this. The normative path of life for a daughter is protection, her whole life long.

And there's not a time when it's being withheld from her and she's sent off to be subjected to all kinds of other influences. I'm totally against doing that with daughters. I don't see any evidence that that's done in Scripture. I don't see any encouragement for it, but here's what I do see. I see that a father is the head of his daughter and his son, and then a father gives his daughter in marriage, and he puts her into the care center of her husband.

Daughters are meant to be cared for. It's up to fathers to ensure that their daughters are cared for every day of their lives as much as they can do it. And there are so many sorrows and collapses in the lives of daughters because fathers never got this principle. And the tragedies are just beyond belief. So, the couple must honor parental authority and responsibility.

Second, that means suitors are not allowed to woo my daughters without my permission. That's what that means. I don't want guys going and trying to pluck the heartstrings of my daughter unless I know that they will treat her well. I want to know his character. I want to know his life.

I want to know what he's thinking before he can start plucking her heartstrings. Because we know that women are vulnerable. They're very vulnerable to tenderness and attention and things like that. And so a father must protect his daughter from any old guy. The way I work that out is that suitors are not allowed to relate with my daughters without my involvement in it.

I want to avoid premature Twitter patients. I want to avoid multiple mini divorces. I want to avoid all the time waste that's involved in that. So unless a young man is willing to cheerfully put himself, you know, under my authority over my daughter, the deal's off. Wise counselors must be consulted and they should affirm the marriage.

Again, I don't think that everybody in the whole world has to affirm this marriage, but there needs to be a consciousness of the community as well. I would look for confirmation among the elders of the church and key godly men who know the couple. I would look for the nod of approval. Again, not perfectly. You know, None of us are perfect in our understandings of everything, but I think I'm looking for the high sign pretty generally in the community for a marriage.

And if I don't get it, then I just want to go back and sort of review things and try to find out what's... Is there anything wrong here or what? A process of screening is necessary to establish equal yoking and compatible values. That's another unbreakable principle that I operate under. Unequal yoking is a disaster.

The warnings are absolutely severe in Scripture. The terrible things that result from unequal yoking, marrying the Canaanites, is legendary. So unequal yoking is something that we would want to avoid. So a process should be engaged to understand if there is equal yoking. The next is the couple should have passion for the marriage and not be forced into it.

You don't want one of the parties to be saying, Well, yeah, sure, I'll, If you say so, I'll marry him. Okay? You don't want that. I don't want that. I want to see certainty, a vision, a passion, a can-do-no-other.

Yes! I desire this marriage. I'm looking for that. Now, I do realize people are built differently and things like that, and that has to be considered, but I'm looking for a passion for the marriage and not just, hey, this is a great idea, you know, he's open, you know, he's available, he likes me, I guess I'll marry him. I think that's contradictory to what marriage is all about.

And then purity must be maintained. So in this pre-marriage process, the way that the relationship works must preserve the sexual purity and the virginity of a daughter or a son. And that means that agreements need to be made about how they speak with one another, when they're with one another, and things like that. My experience in working with couples like this is that they really do desire this. They want the right thing, and so they are willing to create and accept principles and guidelines.

When my wife and I, before we were married, what we found is nothing good ever happened after 10 o'clock. So that was the deal. I was 27 years old, and now I'm 10 o'clock. I was out of there. I was gone.

It just had to do with a desire to have things right. So those are my unbreakable courtship principles. Everybody doesn't have to accept these. And I would love to discuss them with anyone. One thing we need to understand is that the breakdown of the church and the home are at the root of this problem.

In the church, fathers don't have a vision for their godly, loving, Christ-like headship in the home. Daughters don't understand their roles as defined by God, so they're confused and they follow every wind of whatever doctrine they might hear or see from their friends. And it makes for really tough times. Recovering biblical order in the church is helpful to this whole process. Here's some questions.

Are you in the process of becoming long-term thinking Christians? Are you thinking you, your son, and your grandson all the days of your life? Are you thinking that way? That's really part of the backdrop of thinking biblically about marriage. That you're not just thinking about your son and your daughter, but you're thinking far down the line, and you're prayerful, far beyond your own success, your own career, your own way, but you are literally investing in the next generation.

You've seen that bumper sticker, hey, you know we're spending our children's inheritance, you know, that makes people laugh, but you know what, that is an incredibly, massively unbiblical way of thinking, okay. We invest in the next generation. That's what Christians do. The pagans spend their inheritance. The Christians give it for the next generation to make them strong.

It's a pagan idea and yet we, you know, are affected by it in different ways. Think about Rebecca's brothers. Wow, they had it. They had the vision. So we should start working early on a well thought out plan instead of just letting things happen.

Here's a question. Are you living a local church neglecting lifestyle? I find people, some of them in the homeschool movement, they don't have much space in their hearts or their minds or their schedules for the local church. They're dissatisfied with it. They neglect it.

They're done with it. So it's a throwaway to them. Now, let me just be super-duper brutally honest about this. I struggle with having compassion on people who don't love the Church. I really do.

It makes my blood boil. People who don't love the church end up having a bunch of different problems. Here are two of them. First, they're out of sync with the heart of God. You know, God sent His Son and shed His blood for the church.

Yeah, yeah, that church down the street. Yeah, the big Baptist Church down the street. He shed His blood for that church. We need to just really understand that. It wasn't just for me, it was just for us.

It was for this church that's imperfect in so many ways. It's sinful to be overly critical of the church and not be part of the solution. Second, people who neglect the church subject themselves to some unintended, heartbreaking problems. You know, if you've exempted yourself from the church, you won't have the relationships that God intends. You may have to accept an impact that you don't like very much.

There may be relationships that you will be deprived of because of your church exempting behavior today. You know, a family came to our church a few years ago, and the father worked on Sundays, never came. He never would arrange his schedule for the people of God. He didn't care much for the local church. He had this very sweet family, and the father died a while back and it just grieved me.

You know, if that family had become part of our church, if that dad had become part of our church, We would have taken care of that wife. They would have been ours, but you know they belong to nobody. When a dad doesn't love the church, he sins against his family. You know, men who do not covenant with a local body leave their families totally exposed. If their wives become widows suddenly, life is rougher for them.

So covenant with a local church. Be a part of the solution. Once you join that church you're gonna mess it up because you're a sinner. Yeah, you gotta understand that, but make it your aim to be deeply involved in the Church of Jesus Christ. So you know have you made it your aim to know men?

That's another thing. The men that you know God may use to be the sources of the spouses for your sons and your daughters. Here's another one. Are you living an age-segregated lifestyle? How's that?

How many of your friends are 13 years old, you old gray-haired guys? Or how many of your friends are 16, or how many of your friends are 24 years old. What a lot of men do is they don't disciple young men. They're just looking at the other old guys in the church. They're Geezer oriented, basically, and they're not caring for developing relationships with the young men in the church.

It's a mistake. It's dumb, okay? For two reasons. Number one, God has called. We're a family.

Those guys, those young guys are my brothers, for one thing, and I owe it to them to be a blessing to them and a friend. I need them, they need me. Just on a discipleship level. We all should... We shouldn't just be operating on geezer level.

It's a bad deal. Are you calling the boys into the brotherhood? Are you calling the boys into the life of the men of the church? You ought to be doing that. Don't live an age-segregated lifestyle.

It's a bad program. Have a lifestyle of friendship with younger men. It should be a staple of a man's life and his work in the church. Live a lifestyle of age integration. Here's a question.

Are you a marriage mercenary? Are you a godly brother? If you have older daughters, particularly, you might start panicking. And you're wondering, how is this going to happen? And so, you become very strategic in your relationships.

You know, you're not really a disciple maker. You don't really love that young man. You're just looking for a son-in-law. You know, that's not right. You know, it's interesting.

You know, some families, they just get instantly hospitable when their daughters hit a certain age. Don't you understand that? I mean, let's not be too hard, okay, on this, lest we find ourselves condemning ourselves at some point. I'd be a little eerie of accepting an invitation for dinner by a man who has daughters who are over age 16. You know, if I was a young man, I'd really wonder what's going on.

We just need to understand that we ought to have genuine relationships with the young men in our church and in the community. We often get it all mixed up. Here's one. Have you unreasonably kept your child from marriage? In Calvin's Geneva, there were a number of cases where fathers were too restrictive, and they were actually chastened by the consistory for withholding marriage from their daughters.

They were restrictive, withholding fathers. Nobody was good enough for their daughters. And they were chastised in Calvin's Geneva for doing it. It's possible it could happen to any of us being too picky or being too passive. There are two ways you can do this.

Well, here's one. Have you raised picky children? Have you raised overly picky children who just pick this, pick that? And they don't have biblical wisdom. They don't have insight.

But they get wrapped up on irrelevancies. And so, their pool of available marriage partners gets really super dinky, way too small, on minutiae. Here's how this happens. You're sitting around the table and you're being over critical of men and you're making commentary about he walks funny or how he talks funny or how he has funny ideas, over critiquing, focusing on people's flaws. That can make for picky children.

Amen. So be really careful. Hey, this is why, you know, killing a culture of gossip at your dinner table is so critical. Because you will raise picky gossipy daughters and sons who will miss this person who might have this funny trait. And instead of it becoming a trait of endearment, it becomes an offense.

This happens to us. A friend has an unusual quality, and instead of it becoming an endearment, it becomes an offense. Someone has a particular personality quirk that really is neat in some area, but it's kind of off-center a little bit, and it turns into a reason we hate the guy. It shouldn't. We should just appreciate we're just made so differently and things like that.

But you can raise a child that's too picky on minutia. This makes us men who unreasonably keep our sons or daughters from marriage and just being hypercritical. Here is a quote from this book on Calvin's Geneva, where children marry without their father's or mother's permission at the age permitted above and it was established by the court that they have done this lawfully because of the negligence or excessive strictness of their fathers. Let the fathers be required to grant them a dowry or provide them such a share or position as they would have given if they had consented to it." This was something that was written in the midst of a real situation in Calvary Geneva. The translation is, force the guy to let her get married.

Okay? That's the translation. Put pressure on them. Some guys need pressure. Here's another one.

Young men, are you in the game? This is just a message to young men. Hey, throw off the chains of childish, stupid activities. Become a man. Become a man early.

Become a valuable, manly worker doing real important things. Don't waste your life on games. Don't waste your life on trivialities. Be very careful how you spend your time. You're building a life.

Get ready for marriage early. Be ready to rumble with this woman God's going to give to you. Press for early maturity and accomplishment. Also this, young men, do you realize that older men are watching you? Did you know that?

So, rise up! And be a man. God has created you to be a man who carries weight. Carry it early, as early as you possibly can, and distinguish yourself. I hear some personal thoughts.

Keep your mind on Kingdom purposes. All thoughts should be regulated by Scripture. How important is attraction in Twitter patient? I think mutual attraction is important. There are a number of phases that I think are important in this whole process.

There's kind of an inquiry phase. There's a courtship phase, if you want to call it that. Then there's an engagement phase. These particular times have their own responsibilities and regulations. There's an inquiry phase.

A father listens to acceptable inquirers and he works to qualify. And he can ask anything he wishes and he's not obligated except to just learn about this guy and what he is all about. And then a more serious phase would be the courtship phase, where there's a more formal relationship. The couple meets, and they can begin to get to know each other and find out if there's a match or not. And they should be free to break that off at any time.

And the couple has more freedom to talk and get to know one another. And you know what? Heartstrings might get plucked here. So this is dangerous. But nobody does this without some kind of danger.

Everybody knows that. And then a more formal, some people call this betrothal or something, whatever word you want to use. Here marriage is planned. Some say it can never be stopped. Some say that only the most severe situations could stop it.

You make that decision. You know, what we did with my daughter and her marriage to Peter was just really just exactly like that. I had a long process with Peter. He was involved in writing, really, position papers on a bunch of different issues because I wanted to make sure before he spoke to Kelly on a serious level that he was the kind of man that I knew she was looking for. So we talked about marriage, children, life vision, politics, you know, his financial status in detail, You know, debt, entertainment, sports, sovereignty of God, the church, civil disobedience, music.

You know, I looked at his computer. I want to see his computer. You can go a lot of places in this world from your chair. So that's really important. The National Center for Family Integrated Churches is dedicated to proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life and to the establishment of biblically ordered churches.

For more information, resources, and products, please visit our website at www.ncfic.org. Thank you. Thank you.