In this audio message, Scott Brown discusses marriage and preparing our children for marriage. He explains that marriage displays the Gospel. Entering into marriage is one of the most important things a person will do in their lifetime. It is something to be entered into prayerfully. He provides a number of points of how to think biblically about marriage.

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

You know, it's possible, you know, you've heard some things that might be convicting, and, you know, maybe even challenging some of the ways that you've thought about things, but I think we should just always recognize what God is doing in the world. He's reconciling people to Himself. He is sanctifying His people. He's healing His people, and that means that we often hear things that are disturbing. They might be, you know, considered stepping on our toes and things like that.

And, you know, I've been...there's a verse of Scripture and Proverbs I wanted to recommend to you. It's one that's been on my mind a lot lately. One of the real joys of my life right now is that every day, almost every day, I get on Skype and I memorize the book of Proverbs with my grandchildren in the state of Washington. You know, they're like 3, 000 miles away, But it's so much fun and but there's a verse in Proverbs 1 that has just really gotten a hold of me. It's Proverbs 1 23 and it goes like this, Turn at my rebuke.

I will pour out my spirit on you. I will put my words in your mouth." And it's the joy of hearing a word of correction or rebuke from the Lord and then turning, turning toward Him. And when you turn toward Him, He pours His Spirit out upon you. You know, He might rebuke you by His word. He might want to change something in your life, but to turn toward Him in His rebuke is the sweetest thing you'll ever do.

It's the most blessed thing. And He says, I'll pour My Spirit out upon you. There's no loss. There's just only gain when you turn in His rebuke. So I pray that our time together would would just help us to turn toward Him even more.

There's nobody in this room that that couldn't turn more to Him and I pray that that's what happens to us. So let's pray before we begin. Lord, I thank you for gathering us together in this room, in this beautiful home. Thank you for the preparations, the food, the love that has risen up in the hearts of those who've prepared this space for us and have given us such a comfortable and a beneficial environment to meet in. Father, we praise you for your gifts toward us and this gift that we have now that so much has been done for us to create an environment like we have right now.

Father I pray that you would pour your grace out upon this home that you would you would fill its walls with the beauty of Your kingdom, that You would repay them for their kindnesses toward us. Amen. Okay, so we're going to talk about courtship, the whole matter of helping your children get ready to be married and then enter into that time. And I'd like to talk about the importance of the subject. I'd like to talk about some resources that might be helpful to you.

I want to talk about the whole matter of Reformation and how God has dropped us into these cultures in the world to reform us so that we would we would really enliven and change the cultures that we're in. Christianity is a culture-changing, you know, culture-altering force in the world. I want to talk about this matter of getting married and how we think about it and walk through some scripture about that and give you some of our thoughts about it. I'd like to talk about jurisdictions. I'd like to talk about problems that we have in this whole matter and that type of thing.

Now, there's some resources out here that you might be interested in. This is a book that I put together called Preparing for Marriage, and what, it's the premarital counseling of John Calvin. And a few years ago, I wrote a book that tried to document John Calvin's doctrine of the family because what Calvin did in Geneva is he was constantly preaching to families. He preached to single people, he preached to families, and what I went through all of his works that I could get my hands on, and I tried to document Calvin's understanding of the family, because Calvin appeared at a time in history when there was a Reformation going on, and most people think of Luther and Calvin as purveyors of Reformation of the doctrine of salvation. But what most people don't know was that everything was being reformed by Scripture, by Calvin and Luther.

And there really was a family Reformation going on during the Reformation and the whole doctrine of celibacy of the Roman Catholic Church was being challenged. 25% of the population had taken vows of celibacy in Reformation Europe. Imagine that. It's almost like our culture today where people don't want to get married anymore. It's almost like Sweden where people, nobody gets married.

And so you had a culture that had really rejected the biblical doctrine of the family, and the Reformers were recovering it. That's why Martin Luther, how did he get his wife? He was preaching. He was sending tracts into the convents, and one night, you know, there were several women that were rescued out of this convent in herring barrels and one of those women became Martin Luther's wife. And so they were rescuing, you know, women out of this, These wrong views of womanhood and marriage and all that kind of stuff.

Anyway, Calvin had so much to say to young people who were not married that I collected those things in one little book. I don't agree with every single thing he says in here, but it's a testimony of a person who is trying to think biblically about courtship and marriage and preparing yourself for marriage. That's what that is. This is a book that I republished. It's actually a chapter out of a larger book called Helping Them to Choose and it just walks parents through the kind of thinking that I think is helpful in considering how to walk their children up through this process of getting married And I know a lot of you, you know, your children are smaller.

Some of your children are older and you're, it's showtime, you know, on this matter. And you should be thinking biblically about it. Don't just make it up on your own. Don't just do what your daddy did. Think about what the Bible says.

That's what Christians do, and so there's that one there. There's some other resources on marriage and family life. This is the Building a Godly Home series from William Gogue. I think, you know, William Gogue has really, really important things to say regarding family life in the 21st century, and he says things that 21st century writers don't say. It's often helpful to get out of your bubble.

We all live in a bubble. Get out of your bubble, go back to the 17th century and get some thoughts that were a little bit more biblically ordered than the ones that you find swirling around today. So those are some resources. Now I want to talk about the importance of this subject and how we should think about it. And the way that we should think about courtship and getting married is the same way that we should think about everything biblically.

We should think biblically about it and the problem is that we have we have all kinds of cultural values and norms and practices that have arisen out of a lot of non-undiblical thinking. And Christians shouldn't just go into a culture and just ride along with it. We shouldn't be like dead fish who just float down the river over the waterfall. Christians don't do that. They read their Bibles and they reorder their thinking and their lifestyle according to God.

That's what Christians do in the world. Unfortunately, in the matter of courtship and marriage, it's just a little bit too easy to just go with the flow of the culture. If you do something different then you're gonna get some criticism. People are gonna raise their eyebrows and it might get worse than that. But you know How should we think about it?

And the way should we think about it is the same way that we've been talking about thinking about our marriages. And we've been saying that marriage is defined by God because it was created by God. And marriage is a picture of something greater, and so in order to have marriages that glorify God, we have to abandon our own ways and adopt the ways of God. That's how we think about our marriages. So we go to the great passages of Scripture, 1 Corinthians 7 and such, to really understand what marriage is all about.

Now Being married is a central matter of the gospel and the whole purpose of history. And so when we talk about two people getting married, they also picture an element of the gospel. All of history is centered around one thing. A husband rescues a wife. A groom calls a bride out of her life.

That is the gospel. And He comes to her, He speaks His intentions to her, He saves her, He takes her into His house, and he never leaves her or forsakes her and he washes her with the water of the Word. This is the central matter of all of history. Everything in history is really designed to accomplish that purpose in people's lives. And you know that really is the process of even not just being married but getting married as well.

Where you have a you have a man who comes, he speaks, his intentions, he takes a wife into his home, and then he lives a particular kind of life that God has ordained. And we shouldn't think about the pre-marriage thing, part of life, as something separate that the gospel has no impact on. It's easier for us to think about our marriages as having taken their cues from God and the gospel, but what about before that? And I'm here to say the things that happened before that are also under this same kind of thinking. We should think about it in that sense.

And that's why the Bible begins with a marriage, the Bible ends with a marriage. In Hosea chapter 2, God is wooing his bride. That's the premarital experience. And so, you know, that's why marriage looms large in the whole scheme of God's plan for redemption. And He makes a marriage a picture of His own love for the church.

And so, you know, entering into marriage is one of the most important things that a human being ever does, and we shouldn't just leave this to the whims of our culture. You shouldn't leave anything to the whims of your culture. You should always be having your Bibles open and asking, is this the way of the Gentiles? Is this the way of paganism? Or is this the way of God?

Is my thinking so culturally bound that all heaven has been extracted from it? And so we should think about the whole pre-marriage process in that very same way, and we should be a people who are always reforming, that we're always examining the things that we're doing. Now I'd like to talk about, you know, how we begin to have biblical thinking regarding the marriages of our children and how do you do this in the 21st century? And I want to give you a number of critical points that I think is very important that we embrace. And the first point is this, scripture is sufficient.

We should look to scripture And not to ourselves, not to our daddies, definitely not to our culture, but Scripture is sufficient. And the Bible presents patterns, it gives commands, And these are workable and they are applicable to this whole matter. And there are authoritative commands that govern this pre-marriage season in your children's lives. And I'll just mention a few of them. We could probably make a really long list.

I'll give you a short list. Their commands regarding sexuality go to Galatians 5, 13 through 16, and you know, we understand the biblical commands for purity regarding sexuality and things like that. So whatever a family does in preparing their children to be married, the biblical commands and principles of sexuality need to govern that entire process. There are commands regarding community and authority and church life and pastors and things like that. The counsel of godly people in the life of a couple is really critical.

The whole nature of marriage has to be understood. What is marriage all about? If you're not thinking about what marriage is all about, then, you know, your children marrying just about anybody is an acceptable proposition. But if you understand what marriage is all about, then you know how to shape the thinking of your children leading up to marriage. And also to how to evaluate the thinking of the person your child might marry.

Because if they're not thinking biblically about marriage, there will be problems that will come from that. There are matters of the creation order relationships. The order and the authority of family life particularly, you know, is in play on this. So Scripture is sufficient for this. We should try to think biblically about it.

Secondly, and I'm just going to give you my opinion, I don't think that there are any just airtight biblical formulas, cookie cutter approaches for how young people should get married. I think there are principles. But if you look through the Bible, I don't know if you can find some perfect biblical example. They all have their problems. You know, you would, that would seem to follow logically because I mean you think about the way that any of us got married, Was there some wrong thinking?

You know, well probably. You know, almost everyone here is laughing because they're thinking about how ridiculous some of their thinking was and how they've changed their minds about so much of it because the Lord has revealed it to them. But you know there are biblical principles, but I don't know about biblical formulas for this whole matter of courtship and marriage, But later I'm going to give you some specifics of what I believe are really hard and fast biblical principles that should apply to it. Scripture seems to present a diversity of applications, But there just are simply no courtship marriage stories in the Bible that are exactly alike. And my opinion about that is that God has designed flexibility in a process that is guided by hard and fast biblical commands, and so that's how I think about it.

There's a way that you walk in a manner worthy of the Lord in this whole matter, and at the same time we have to be very careful not to just walk in the way of the Gentiles. Another proposition is that the current dating system is unbiblical and it's destructive, and I think this is perhaps one of the things that Christians need to evaluate really carefully. You know, how helpful is the current dating system? And I think we should just try to think about scripture as we evaluate it. You know, think about some of the marks of dating today.

It majors on random relationships rather than strategic relationships. It's a kind of a system where everybody is just kind of subject to everybody else and there's not really much careful thinking about who you should develop relationships with. It promotes multiple relationships instead of really carefully considered relationships. It features the acceptability of just falling in love with 10 different people because you looked at them and they looked at you in a certain way and you had certain feelings and you've ended up with all kinds of romantic relationships. Is this really reflective of the way that Scripture has designed for relationships to develop.

You know, it inflames individualism and rather than, rather than, you know, encouraging, you know, a kingdom conscious thinking, It's driven by emotions, not kingdom values. And it goes off course as a result of that. It establishes a whole romantic methodology instead of a principled methodology. In our culture, you know, this type of thing happens when, you know, people somehow fall in love with each other with a blink of an eye. And there's no substance to it.

There's no direction in life to it. There's no sense of calling. There's no sense of serving the kingdom together. It's just very emotionally driven. It's very selfish, you know, in its orientation.

It produces immoral relationships instead of proactively pure relationships. It exposes to immorality. And hey, the modern dating model really should be evaluated and we should ask ourselves whether the way that everyone has been doing it in America via Hollywood is really right thinking and I'm here to say we need to proclaim a time out here and really see what the Bible speaks principally to us about it. You know, in the dating system you're on your own. You're dating indiscriminately.

You're dating indefinitely. You have no specific plans for the future. It's like recreation. Parents are disconnected from the process. There's kind of a test drive mentality.

It's sort of like, you know, you got to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, you know. But the problem is with all those kisses comes a lot of baggage, that's the problem with that whole philosophy. And it's counsel from the devil, this whole kissing the frogs mentality. And it shouldn't surprise us why the process of getting married and the proposition for staying married is really, you know, under stress right now because we've adopted the ways of the world in this whole thing. And what has happened is our children have been left with a bunch of unworkable destructive methods that haven't helped them at all.

They've actually caused quite a bit of upheaval that they'll have to live with, you know, for the rest of their lives. So, I mean, my encouragement is abandon the whole dating thinking, That's my perspective. And there's so much peer pressure involved in it and it's difficult. You know, how do you live in a world where everybody doesn't think differently about this? You know, what do you do when your children are almost grown and you realize they don't, they've totally embraced the whole dating mentality.

What do you do? What do you do when your mother and your grandmother and everybody else is angry with you because you're challenging this system, you know, as if somehow, you know, you've, you know, you've thrown away the Holy Grail or something like that and, you know, these are real problems and so how do you do it? Okay, I want to give you, I want to give you five, you know, sort of, Principial guiding lights in this whole thing to help us think biblically about the process. And it really answers, you know, answers the question, how do you lead your children in such a way so that biblical commands and principles are honored? That's what I want to try to answer and I'm going to give you five of them, five data points.

The first is honor and jurisdiction, honor and jurisdiction. I earlier said, you know, that in the dating system you're pretty much on your own. Parents are totally disconnected from the process, and I'm here to contradict that. I'm here to say that is so wrong to allow that kind of thinking to continue in our minds because in Scripture it's very, very clear. Children are to honor their father and mother and they are to obey their parents.

Children who are in their parents' houses, you know, have this responsibility. And so a couple must honor parental authority and responsibility. The Bible makes it very clear that fathers are heads of their sons and daughters. You can go to Ephesians chapter 6, 1 through 4. You can go to Numbers chapter 30.

I've preached some sermons on Numbers 30. I'd encourage you to listen to them because they really speak of the way that authority works in a household. And so, whatever you do in this whole matter should acknowledge the presence of an authority in the life of that couple. And there are various ways that I think that we apply that. One is that parents have something to say about who your children, who the children hang around.

Parents have something to say about those whom they should or should not be interested in. And I would just encourage you to create a culture in your home where there is honor for your authority in that matter. Children are immature. They get stars in their eyes. They have wrong, because they're young, they have wrong ideas about things and they may not recognize dangerous potential spouses like you will be able to discern.

You're wiser than they are. That's why you are their parents and so I want to say that we should abandon this whole individualistic, parent-free environment in the whole matter of courtship and getting married, which is really the primary feature of the whole dating system. Parents really, you know, are cut out of the deal. I can't tell you how many young women, Deborah and I have counseled over the years, you know, who come from Christian families. And these young women come to us and they say, my dad doesn't want to have anything to do with talking to this young man who's interested in me.

He doesn't think it's his job. He just wants me to make the decision. I mean, this is a mentality that has thoroughly saturated evangelical thinking. And why has that happened? Because evangelical thinking is not guided by the Bible.

Evangelical thinking has absorbed the culture and particularly in this area of honor and jurisdiction. I mean one of the ways that I applied that in my own life with my own daughters is that I made it very, very clear to my daughters and everyone around me that it was really inappropriate for a young man to try to woo one of my daughters without coming through me because I am the head of my daughter And no young man has the right to bypass me because I am her head. You are not her head. You are not in the position to be able to move her toward yourself without my permission. That's just the matter of headship.

And so, you know, there's a structural headship of the household that is appropriate and a couple should cheerfully place themselves under that authority in terms of the timelines, in terms of the requirements, in terms of the constraints. And the reason is I'm wiser than my children. I accept that. And I also have been given a responsibility by divine command. And they have been given a responsibility by divine command to honor my authority and to obey.

So, You know, this one principle would help young people avoid multiple, many divorces, problems, falling in love with 10 different people inappropriately if this were restored back into the thinking of the Christian community. And I would just encourage you to consider honor and jurisdiction as a critical matter to guide the process of getting your children married. Here's another, counsel. Wise counselors who know the couple should be consulted and there should be a general affirmation that this marriage is a good thing and what God has done with all of us is he has put various authorities in our lives to speak into our lives. He's given us pastoral leaders.

He's given us, you know, wise family members. He's given us friends who are truly godly. You know, and you want to go to the godly ones. It's, And I'll just make this parallel. You know, if you want to learn about money, don't go to the guy who has none.

You know, if you want to learn about money, go to the one who's managed his money well. That's the person you want. You want to go to the business person who's made it happen, not the person who has always failed. And I think it's the same way in this whole matter. You should go to wise counselors who are biblically ordered, who love God, and who have demonstrated success in these matters.

You know, this is one reason God has given qualifications for elders in local churches. And they are supposed to be people who manage their households well. And the Apostle Paul says, if you can't manage your household well, how can you manage the church of God? So it's a critical matter. God sets up role models in the church.

They're not perfect, but they at least substantially have to be men and women who have managed their households well. So you want to go to people like that. Elders are designed to be examples to the flock in their family life. They're not perfect, as I said before, but they are examples. They form an exemplary pattern that can be learned from.

And so As we think about helping our children get married, this principle needs to be embedded into their thinking and in your thinking as well to go to wise counselors. In Genesis 24, you find the story of Abraham finding a wife or his son Isaac And one of the things that you find there is affirmation. There's affirmation among all the parties. There's a cheerful entering into it. You know, what If the parents don't affirm the match, my view is that everything should slow down to really understand what's at the bottom of it.

There are times where you'll have an unbelieving parent, a wrathful and wicked parent, who's going to stand in the way of a godly marriage. Every once in a while, you might see that. But most of the time, even a non-Christian parent has discernment about his children. And even non-Christian parents should be listened to and one of the ways that I apply that is that I I don't know if I want to say never, but I never have, I never have married anyone, participated in a wedding where the parents were not for the marriage. If the parents are not for the marriage, I'm in slow down mode.

If a couple wants me to perform their wedding ceremony and their parents are not for it, I'm not going to tell them I won't perform your wedding, but I will tell them let's slow this down. Let's don't do this now. Let's find out what's going on. Let's see what the objections really are. And this matter of affirmation is really critical.

As you raise your children, you know, raise them with the idea that it's a good thing that you as parents have authority in the matter. You should take that responsibility of authority and take it with humility, take it with, you know, all of the government of God's commands upon your thinking and your communicating about it, but counsel is really a critical matter. Rather than these marriages just arising from independent kind of thinking, where a father says, sure honey, if you like him, bring him home. That's a far cry from seeking, you know, wise counsel and careful evaluation. Here's a reality, people aren't always what they appear to be.

And often you need other people to look and see things that you can't see and children need that. Children need parents to do that. And I think one of the most harmful things that the modern dating culture has given us is a parent free process. Don't do that. Here's a third, equal yoking.

There has to be a process of evaluation to establish whether there is equal yoking. In 2 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 14 the Apostle Paul speaks about this matter of being equally yoked. The Apostle Paul is not simply speaking about two Christians oughta marry. He is speaking about that, but it's deeper than that. There needs to be a process of screening or interviewing in the part of the couple to understand if they have, if they are equally yoked.

And so it needs to be verified. So there needs to be an opportunity to get to know one another. And so that there's enough understanding of one another that the couple can labor together. Yoking is, the equal yoking imagery that the Apostle Paul gives is not something that everybody in the 21st century understands because, well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an animal husbandry term and it has to do with oxen pulling a cart and so it's a matter of labor. Marriage is a matter of yoking for labor.

You take dominion for the kingdom of heaven. Marriage is a labor. It's a labor of love. And so two people have to be able to labor together. Well, with oxen, you just can't put any two oxen together.

You can't mismatch the personalities. You can't have a large one and a small one. Even the same size might be a wrong match. You can't put a, you know, a donkey and a rabbit in a yoke. It just does not work.

The labor won't be, it won't work out that well. And the imagery that the Apostle Paul is bringing regarding yoking has to do with the ability to labor together, and that means that a couple has to verify that they they want to do the same stuff. They want to serve the kingdom of God in the same way. They can see how they can work together for the rest of their lives. And so there has to be a process to understand whether a couple can labor together.

It's just because they have feelings for one another doesn't mean that they should be laboring together for the rest of their lives. And feelings come and go, but labor is always there. And, you know, one of the most marvelous things about marriage is that you marry someone and you mingle your energies together and you work. You work with your children, you create a household, you live in a community, You do stuff. And it's such a joy to do that.

And it's part of the dominion mandate that you read about in Genesis chapter 2. And that, you know, God issues a command for husbands and wives to take dominion over all the earth. So marriage is a labor and there should be a way for a couple to come to the realization of whether they want to labor with that person for the rest of their life, not just how do they feel about them. That's important, but it's not the only thing of importance. In our modern culture, we have exalted feelings over fitness for laboring with one another.

And, you know, with our children, we wanted to see that our children could see the joy it would be to labor with that other person for the rest of their lives. That they had their gifts were matched, their desires were matched. You know, all of our children were different and they, you know, they had kind of different kinds of labors with their spouses. And I could see how one daughter kind of needed a husband like this and another daughter might need another husband like this because they were going to labor together. So there needs to be a way where a couple can determine that this is the only person they would ever want to labor with.

You know, they found that person and they want to go and serve God together. You know, one of the beautiful examples of laboring together in the Bible is the example of Priscilla and Aquila in the New Testament. And this is a really neat couple. You know, The apostle Paul says that they risked their necks for him, this husband and wife. It was Priscilla and Aquila, they had a church in their house.

You know, I can just picture it sort of like this, you know, the labors, the, You know, the preparations to have a church in your house are significant. And, you know, they were working a little bit like, you know, this couple labored to provide this opportunity for us here. They loved to labor together, and so much so that they had a church in their house. Now they were a theological couple as well and they instructed that great orator, Apollos, in the gospel. He was unclear about the gospel and this couple sat him down and proclaimed a clearer picture of the gospel.

So they were a theological couple, they were a couple that loved the Saints, and they brought them into their house. They were a bold couple, they were courageous, and they risked their lives for the Apostle Paul. What a great couple. Well you know they were laboring together, and they were mingling their energies together to do the things that they had a vision to do. Well everybody isn't going to have a church in their house, but what are you going to do?

What are your children going to do? What kind of vision, what kind of life do they conceive of together as they work? So there has to be a way of establishing this matter of equal yoking. You know, love includes mutuality and affection. Love isn't just, it's not just a decision.

Well, it does include a decision but it's not just a decision. It has to do with affections. It has to do with goals and ways that you want to live and, you know, this is one of the marvelous things about young people, they have great thoughts about the future. Well, they should have an opportunity to test those to see if they're fit together. You know, I've seen from time to time kind of an overreaction to the dating system where a couple doesn't really, They really don't know each other very well.

They really haven't taken the time. Maybe they saw somebody across the room and they said, yeah, I think I'd like to marry that person. And it may have happened in a kind of a Christian context and theological views were lined up and they believed the same things. But without really getting to know one another, if you don't have a way for young people to get to know each other, then you're kind of pretty much left with a pretty face and a doctrinal statement that's going to give you the justification for getting married. I'm actually against that.

It's a little bit like a Vegas wedding, you know. It's fast paced and it's based on a bunch of superficialities. And I know there are stories of people who, you know, who maybe they were matched by their parents, you know, Sundeep can probably testify to how that can actually work, you know, and but the Bible speaks of equal yoking and to establish equal yoking, theology is not enough. And so in order to protect, you know, the future of your children, help them to understand this matter of equal yoking. Help them to understand what marriage really is.

It's not just a feeling. It's just not just hanging out. It's really a labor of love. And children need to see what that looks like and then find a spouse that matches them so that they can labor. So that's equal yoking.

Here's the fourth, love and mutuality. There has to be a way to establish whether there's love and mutuality. A couple should have a genuine and tender love for one another, a passion for the marriage, not to be forced into it. You know, from time to time I've encountered couples in counseling with them before marriage And I find out that one of them is really not all that excited about it. They have very little joy in the idea of it but they think they just ought to do it.

And there's a lot of pressure from the outside. Maybe from parents, maybe from peers, but there's not really a lot of happiness in it. And so When I encounter that, I tell them that I'm going to be really reluctant to perform a wedding where both parties aren't just, you know, crazy happy about it. I want to see that. I want to see the look on their face.

I want them to know that they really, really, really are so happy about this whole situation. When you have someone who doesn't enter into it joyfully, I want to suggest that it's possible that it's a gigantic contradiction to the Gospel because Christ loves His church and Christ loves His church and His church joyfully embraces Him. The whole matter of the Christian life is a matter of joy. And I could spend a lot of time developing this. I actually preached a sermon on it last week out of Isaiah where it really, the whole fabric of the new birth is joy.

And you can trace this all throughout Scripture that the fundamental character of salvation is joy in the Lord, and if there's no joy, I'm worried. I'm really worried, So I want to see a couple have joy in one another. I guess it was maybe 10 years ago we bumped into a couple like that and we really encouraged them to reevaluate and they did, they did reevaluate it And they decided not to get married. And guess what? Ten years later, they're really happy.

They're really happy they did that because they ended up getting married and they were actually very happy about it when they did. That was a way better deal. And So love and mutuality needs to be tested. And, you know, as we react against the whole dating culture that just sort of lets your feelings flow and there's just no sense of order to it at all, we can overreact and take all the love and all the emotion and all the romance out of it. I want to use that word romance carefully, but...

Because Hollywood has so deluded us about love with romance, okay? That's a whole another subject. But we can so overreact that we take all the happiness out of it. And that is a contradiction to the gospel. So there has to be a way where love and mutuality is tested.

And then fifthly, purity. A couple's purity must be maintained according to biblical definitions and protections, And these kinds of protections should be put in place. And let's just be honest, we live in an environment where there are no protections for sexual purity in the dating kind of scheme. There aren't at all. And so if you establish any kinds of guidelines, you look like a weirdo.

But here's my advice, establish the guidelines and be a weirdo. Because you're not being weird to God, You know, you're being weird to an immoral world. That's what you're being weird to. And, you know, often in our desire to please other people, our man-pleasing tendency will cause us not to put things in place that we should put in place, to help young people, you know, keep sexually pure during that time. And so we should be testing all things in that sense.

You know, when it comes to our dating culture, I think we need to be really honest. Not very long ago, some studies were done indicating that 95% of marriages in America were marked by premarital sex. 95%. And the statistics that come out of Christian colleges are not quite that high, but almost that high. Don't think sending your child to a Christian college is going to fix this problem at all.

Because the ethic of those institutions has embraced this whole dating culture. And there are many, many harmful effects. You know, the common denominator makes provision for the flesh, as the Apostle Paul says, make no provision for the flesh in Romans chapter 13 verse 13. You know our young people need to do what the Apostle Paul said to the Ephesians in Ephesians 4 22, flee youthful lusts, flee fornication. That's 1 Corinthians 6 18.

To flee isn't merely just refraining from sexual intercourse. It means staying as far away as you can from the possibilities. That's what fleeing means. And, you know, this is why the Apostle Paul said to the church in Thessalonica, he said, for this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you should abstain from sexual immorality that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel and sanctification and honor not in passion or not in passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God, that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we are also forewarned, and you testified, for God did not call us to uncleanness but to holiness." Now a father is responsible to protect his daughter's virginity and in Deuteronomy chapter 22 verses 15 through 19 what we find is that the parents are actually required to speak to their daughter's virginity and are actually required to give evidences of it. They're there to have such a close and intimate knowledge of their daughter's sexual exposure that they can give a testimony as to whether their daughter is a virgin or not.

At some point, read Deuteronomy 22 verses 15 through 19 and see what the context is there. But, you know, protecting children's purity is done on a number of different levels. You know, what they wear and what kinds of things they fill their minds with, what kinds of films they watch. There are many, many ways that we participate in the pollution of our children in particular ways. And so, you know, we need to be very, very clear about matters of purity.

And whatever happens during this, you know, pre-marriage season, there should be proper protections for purity. And that really does begin in the home. It begins in the things that are appreciated in the home, the kind of entertainments that are appreciated and the kinds that are rejected. Here's a reality. You're not going to find much support for the biblical view of purity in Hollywood, anywhere in Hollywood.

And my counsel to you is get Hollywood out of your house because Hollywood is getting into you and when it gets into your children you're not going to like it that much and because the consequences are significantly negative. Okay, So I have, let's see, this schedule, I have messed up this schedule. I'm only a very, I haven't made much progress in what I wanted to say this morning in this session. So let me just finish with this. As Deborah and I tried to be guided by biblical principles, here are some of the ways that we applied it, and I'm not saying this is the only way to apply it.

I'm just saying that here's how we tried to grapple with the Word of God in it, and regarding, you know, steps, you know, in the pre-marriage process. If you want to use the word courtship, I think that's fine. It's not a biblical word. Maybe the word courtship is helpful because it's different than dating and something different needs to be done, but people define it differently. People define these words so differently I almost hesitate to use them, But whatever it is, the laws of God should govern each part of the process.

And there were three phases for us in keeping with the previous principles that I just communicated. There was an inquiry phase. There's an inquiry phase, there was what you could call a courtship phase, a more serious phase, and then there was an engagement or betrothal phase. Those are the three phases that Deborah and I tried to walk our children through. In the inquiry phase, you know, during this time a father, you know, listens to, if he's talking about a daughter, he's listening to inquirers a father's job, you know, in this phase is to qualify men who are either acceptable or unacceptable to marry that child.

And, you know, a father has a right to ask any question he wants of these young men or young women on the other side. And, you know, at such a time when a father is satisfied that a young man is acceptable, then Deborah and I would move to another phase. And in this first phase, I guess our main hope is that there's some knowledge of one another. It's really ideal to be in a local church where you're working together and living together. It's real life together, so you just know, you know, you just end up knowing people as a result of the normal, natural, casual environment.

I think that's the very best way. If it's possible, I know it doesn't always work that way with you that you're in a local church. But in local churches you see real life together. You know, you're hearing the same preaching, You're working together, you know, as a church and I think it provides kind of a really good non-threatening environment for young people to get to know each other. So that's that first phase.

The next phase is a little bit more serious. Call it what you want to call it, you can call it a courtship phase, but the assumption in this phase is that there's some real interest, you know, these two are really interested in each other and they really want to get to know each other on a deeper level. And so, you know, there are matters of really determining equal yoking and things like that. To see if those young people really are fit for each other and if they really do love each other and they could live together. They should be talking about serious matters.

They're, you know, the details of their testimony, the details of their thoughts and opinions about particular things, practical lifestyle areas, theology, churches, everything like that. It's a time to really inquire of that. So it's kind of an exploratory time and the view is toward a marriage where there's openness to it. I don't want to enter into this kind of a phase unless there's some kind of openness at least, you know, to marriage. I don't think it's a time where people are committing to each other, but it's a time of more formal inquiry and relationship.

It's interesting, you know, this worked out differently with different ones of my children. With one of my daughters, you know, I'd travel all over the world with this one young man and he was like a spiritual son to me. I knew everything about him and so when he came to me and asked for my daughter, I didn't have any questions. I knew where he was parked on everything. I didn't need to go through any of this process at all for me.

It was, sure, yeah, if you'd, if she's reciprocal to it, I'm fine, you know, because I already, I didn't have any questions, you know. It's not like that for every situation. It wasn't like that for some of my other children. But it was for this one here because I already had significant knowledge and my daughter had significant knowledge of them as well. We've been together in church for years.

So, you know, I think it depends on the relationships and the couples as to whether even something like this happened, happens. I mean, with them, there wasn't really much of this inquiry. It had already been done. It had already been done in life. And so there wasn't really much to do after that point.

How long should it take? I don't know. As long as it takes, you know. And here's my recommendation. You know, take longer rather than shorter, You know, so that you get beyond the stars in your eyes phase.

You know, a lot of times you'll have daughters, particularly, they've really kind of protected their hearts. They've tried not to fall in love with every guy, you know, that they had some interest in. And so then when there seems to be somebody, they just fall right over, you know. And I guess my counsel would be, don't let them fall too fast. You know, you might want to slow this, you might want to be the bad guy and slow the thing down just to give them some time.

You know, from time to time I find myself encouraging fathers, hey, You know, don't be embarrassed. You can slow this down. You know, you can, this is one of your roles, you know. It might be right for you to do that. And that can be really hard because once that train starts moving, boy, it's really hard to stand in front of it.

And then there's a phase where there really is a, it's really time where a couple recognizes that they really do want to be married and they begin planning for a marriage. And, you know, in our culture we call it, you know, the engagement in times past, it was called betrothal. You know, I think these two words, you know, should be, you know, should be carefully understood And that's a, the whole matter of betrothal or engagement is a long discussion. We could talk about it if you'd like to. But I'll say this.

Our culture has taken marriage so lightly that it takes engagements really lightly. And so you have people who will make such a shallow commitment to marry that they're willing to go to a wedding and walk off the platform and say, I just changed my mind. And that's taking an engagement really lightly. And You know, in Scripture, you know, there's a pattern for betrothal in which once you make that commitment, it's as good as if you're married. We have trivialized betrothal in our current society.

And We've trivialized engagement because we've trivialized marriage and we don't view the commitment as such a binding commitment. And so when somebody says, yes, we're going to get married, we take it very lightly and they can jump out of it at any time all the way to the last minute. You know, I remember a case not very long ago, maybe six or eight years ago, where the couple goes up to the front of the church, they take their vows, they walk down, she gets into the lobby and says, I can't do that, I can't go through with this. Well, you already did. You already did.

You just made a covenant in front of all these people and you can't take it back. So anyway, we take it very, very lightly. We take covenants very, very lightly. And the covenant of marriage is a very serious covenant.