In this audio message, Scott Brown discusses the topic of spiritual maturity amongst our children and explains how both boys and girls should treat each other. Parents should exhort and expect maturity from their children. Maturity involves godliness, sobriety, and wisdom.

1 Corinthians 13:11-12 (NKJV) - "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known."

So please turn in your Bibles to Titus chapter 2 and I would like to read this text in a moment. We've been talking about the conditions that God has established that should exist in our homes. And He's said much about home life and how it should be conducted. And, you know, our prayer for our time is that, you know, we especially, you know, the families at Hope Baptist Church, understand the language of scripture and that we find ourselves attempting to apply it as best we can. I was reading an English Puritan who wrote a book in 1627 who said something I felt was very profound and it really relates to what we're doing here.

His name is William Gouge and he wrote a book called, Domestical Duties, which is essentially a commentary on Ephesians 5 and 6. It's brilliant. His insight is enormous. But one of the things that he says in his book is that often we misunderstand the power of a family. And I hope that our time together, you know, considering things regarding child-raising, helps us to understand the power and the importance of the family.

And William Gouge, in a section that I was reading last week, says that you have to understand that a family is a public work. He says this, it is to be noted, of certain weak consciences who think that if they have no public calling, they have no calling at all. So what he's saying is that There's the tendency to think that if you don't have a formal public calling, that you have no calling at all. There's a private calling, that would be the role of a father and a mother. That's a private calling, but then there's a public calling.

And then he continues. And he says, and then they begin to think that all their time is spent without a calling. Now, I know it's true that so many women end up in the workforce, because they feel like they have no calling. They feel like this is nothing. It leads nowhere.

It's just one diaper after another from one irrelevant conversation, with a two-year-old to another. And They think, I need a public calling. I need something more important. I want something far greater than this. I mean, Gooch is putting his finger on something that has existed for a long time in the minds of people.

He says, which consequence, if it were good and sound, what comfort in spending their time should most women have, who are not admitted to any public function in church and commonwealth. So he's talking about what happens when you dream about doing something better. Then he says, but the calling of the family, though it's a private calling, is really a public calling. Because everything you do in the family sends people out into the Commonwealth. So what he's arguing for is that home life is way more important.

Even though you don't have a formal public calling, you're sending people into the public sphere, into the Commonwealth. That makes the calling of the home very, very important. What he says, I think helps us to understand that though we might spend all of our lives in our houses, that all in our houses will not stay there. They will go out into the world. And that makes the home, what the Puritans called, a fountain of society.

That it was a feeder of the civil realm. That it was the provider of help to the church and everything else. So when we do this work in our private families, We're doing something far bigger than just our private family. I hope we're encouraged by that. We understand that it's not time wasted, even though we might be kept out of a public sphere, maybe for our whole lives, but at least for a season.

Now, when you take this idea that work in private families is a public work, you know, you're really acknowledging that the whole purpose of the home is to be a sending organization. We prepare children to be a certain way, to think a certain way, and to act a certain way. And then we send them out into the world. And that's what child raising is all about. We have to be visionaries.

We have to see far beyond the two year old. We have to see where it's all going because they will grow up. It matters a lot what you do in your home. Every hour that you spend has significance. God has given us minutes and hours and days and seasons for all of these purposes.

And so it makes family life very, very important. Now Titus 2 speaks about the various kinds of things that different people in different age groups should be doing. And this has bearing on the subject that's before us, which is preparing our children for appropriate guy-girl relationships. That's what this talk is all about. It's in the family that children are prepared for appropriate relationships.

And then they apply those most prominently in the church. So I want to talk about that whole range of life. Now, so in Titus 2, what we read, beginning in verse 1, But as for you, speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine, That the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience. So A part of child raising is to prepare adults. Our objective in child raising is maturity, Christian maturity.

When we're raising our children, we have to understand what are we trying to do. What are we trying to raise? And here, we're trying to raise people so that when they are older men, they are sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love and patience. So he first starts with older men. Now remember that, remember what he just said.

Because when he gets to younger boys, younger men, it's astonishingly similar. So just take note of that. And then he says, the older women likewise in verse 3 that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things, that they may admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. So he is shifted from the older men to the older women. And I would just like to suggest that when you have a daughter in your house, these are your training objectives.

That they become like this. That you cultivate these things now so that this is where they end up and then he turns in in verse 6 and says likewise exhort the young men to be sober minded. Oh, isn't that interesting? Go back. What did it say about older men?

Sober. Older men are to be sober. Younger men are to be sober-minded. In all things, showing yourself a pattern of good works. In doctrine, showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility.

And what does it say about the older men? Reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience. Do you notice the cross over? Do you notice the similarity? There's an intimate organic connection between what young men are supposed to be and what old men are supposed to be.

Now in Scripture There really are only two ages. There are only two age categories. There's the older and the younger. That's it. Now we've stratified society in our own cultural context in an ungodly way.

We've not taken, we've actually not taken the patterns of scripture. We've not taken the language of scripture to ourselves. So what we do is we stratify society and we segregate those in different stratifications. But Scripture doesn't do that. Here we find the older and the younger having extremely similar objectives as far as their lives.

Do you see that? I don't know if you've ever noticed that before. But What does that have to do with us? What does that have to do with Hope Baptist and my family? What it means is that when we train young men and young women, we're training them to be mature.

So we should Exhort and expect the same things that we want to see in them in adulthood when they are in our houses. This is how we understand that Early maturity is important. What is early maturity? It's sobriety, it's reverence, it's godliness, it's patience, it's all kinds of things like that. Let's make sure that we understand that God has given us language to help us to see how we should train our children.

Now, all of these things have to do with guy-girl relationships. All of them do. Everything that's listed here comes down and is applied in the kinds of relationships that you have with the opposite sex in a church. Then he says this, he says, young men to be sober minded in all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good works. And then he makes a list in doctrine, showing integrity, reverence and incorruptibility, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that one who has an opponent may be ashamed, having nothing evil to say of you.

Here's a picture of young men who are sober minded. They speak words of wisdom. They govern their tongues. They don't just say whatever they want to say and do whatever they want to do. And their very lives are...

The way that they're living their lives is so public that it actually condemns those who hate God. That means that your sons should be a source of condemnation to those out of control children in the world and their parents. It says here that they should be ashamed, they should be ashamed and condemned. Now, I don't know if you've considered the impact of a well-governed, godly young person. They are a source of shame and condemnation in the world.

And they will and they will cause a ruckus. They'll cause conversation. Because they are a pattern of good works in doctrine, integrity, reverence, and incorruptibility. Now perhaps someday we can spend, you know, significant amount of time, you know, giving a distinctive treatment of all these words because they're very important. But what I'm trying to establish here at the beginning is that there's a way that young people ought to act and it's very similar to the way that older people ought to act.

Again, when it comes to manhood and womanhood, sexuality, relationships, the world is at cross purposes to God. So we're always going to be finding these contrasts. We've talked about so many of these contrasts today. The devil is smart enough to know that if you get one child, you get millions down the line. Why does the devil attack the seed of the woman?

Because seed is productive. When you get one, you don't just get one. You may get millions for many generations. So the devil understands that when you're dealing with man-woman relationships, with gender roles, with marriage, with sexuality, with guy-girl relationships, you're talking about something of enormous significance because if you get one child, you get millions. If your sons are not sober minded and they're not a pattern and they're not incorruptible and sound in speech, You get many, many, many with them.

And this is why it's so easy for us to say the home is of tremendous significance because it's a public ministry that's done in private. It affects the Commonwealth. It affects nations. So, guy-girl relationships are very, very important. Now our culture tells us that there are no barriers of the opposite sex.

No barriers at all. Scripture actually says something different than that. There are kinds of relational barriers that need to be acknowledged. Barriers are often crossed through sinful immodesty. They're often crossed by young people uniting their hearts when it's really only appropriate to unite hearts in marriage.

The whole dating culture, which is so summarily destructive, which is so evil because it unites hearts, corrupts morals and causes multiple marriages and divorces because hearts are unified and parents promote it. You think it'd be bad enough if they just allowed it, but no, they promote it. And to live in this society means your children are always being asked, who's your girlfriend? And you're made to feel like some sort of a strange monster, some sort of an idiot, some sort of a twisted aberration to nature if you don't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. When are you going to get your boyfriend?

Are you crazy? Are you Amish? What are you? And the result is that we, because of years of sowing these evil seeds of relationships by refusing to acknowledge the boundaries that God has between male and female and the importance of marriage, the importance of unity, the importance of one flesh. We've created a whole culture of fornication Where fornication is nothing to people today.

Where you have very high percentages, I've read different percentages, 95, 97 percent of the people who go to the altar in our society today have already fornicated. That's a cultural shift. We know fornication has always been a problem, because scripture speaks about it over and over and over again. But fornication is an important category. The Bible actually makes it clear that, particularly in Exodus chapter 22 verses 16 and 17, that if a man lays with a maid, she will be his wife.

He is obligated to marry her. This whole pattern of serial fornication that doesn't result in marriage is really something totally contrary to scripture. If you go to Deuteronomy chapter 22, you find that if a man lies with a woman, the father has a right to say, you're married, and he can't divorce her for the rest of his life. That's what the Bible says. There in Deuteronomy chapter 22, we know for certain that God holds fathers responsible for the virginity of their daughters.

And if they're accused of not being virgins at the time of their marriage, they have to have proof of it. And the terrible judgment against fornication is that the daughter is actually stoned on her father's doorstep. The implication is the father is responsible. The father must protect the virginity of his daughter. He actually is charged by God to know whether or not she is chaste and to have evidences for it, to protect it.

And the responsibility for it lands directly on the doorstep of the Father. And a terrible thing happened. The judgment and the calamity from a culture of fornication is very significant. Now, all of these things that I've just said by way of introduction have to do with guy-girl relationships because there is a connection between what the older are to do and what the younger are to do in relationship. And we've just seen it in Titus 2 as a paradigm.

Now I want to discuss a number of practical matters that local churches always find themselves dealing with in one way or another. And I want to first talk about appropriate private communication between young people of the opposite sex in a church setting but not just in a church setting in a wider setting as well. Is it appropriate for young women and young men to text one another? Is it appropriate? Is it appropriate for young women and young men to send emails to one another?

Is it appropriate? Are those two kinds of things appropriate? What kind of barriers should there be? What kind of nuances are there in the discussion that need to be brought forth. And I'm sure what I'm going to say is going to generate some discussion a little bit later on.

Let me just suggest this. If I was texting another woman, what do you think my wife would think about that? Or if I was constantly sending emails to other women and having Sort of a private relationship You know, hey, how are you doing today? Well, I just went to the store. Ooh that was so cool.

I wish you were here to see it. What would you think? What would my wife think? Let me tell you if somebody came upon my text account in our church and found out that I was texting women and saying how are you doing today? I would be thrown out of this church in a second.

The men of this church would not tolerate it. Because there are barriers between men and women that are appropriate. It's not right for me to be sending emails to women in the church saying, how are you doing? I'm having a nice day. That is not appropriate.

Do I have an a-men? Do I have an affirmation? Can we get feedback here? I mean, I think that's obvious. Right?

So let's jump up and down. Yay, yay men. But the problem is this, we have no problem with our sons sending young ladies emails and texts. We have no problem with that. Why?

Because we've lost our marbles. That's why. We're not thinking about distinctions of relationships. And if our children are doing it, they're not thinking clearly. Because If you would be uncomfortable with me doing it, you should be uncomfortable with you doing it.

Now, if we gathered up all the email accounts of the young people in this church, would we be willing to excommunicate them for dancing around and having nice casual relationships with one another. Well, I just don't think that's what we would do. But we need to acknowledge that there are appropriate barriers to relationships that are required because of the nature of marriage and the quality of oneness that marriage requires. That's why it's not appropriate for me to send emails or texts to other women saying, how are you doing today? Because I'm luring them in.

I'm bringing them into a relationship that's not appropriate. And I just want to suggest to you, and you know I'm not the governor of your home, I'm the governor of my home. And I believe there are enormous dangers in doing this. So this is appropriate private communications. Are these things appropriate?

Do they break down barriers and boundaries that really ought to be there? Let's talk about appropriate public communication. What would be appropriate public communication between young people and a church? What I would just like to suggest is that the only appropriate communication that should happen between those of the opposite sex and church is that which is clearly governed by by the many, many commands that are in scripture regarding the use of the tongue. So it should be pure speech, it should be reverent speech, it should understand, It should be speech that's appropriate for the relationship.

You know, seasoned with salt, appropriate for the time. I would just like to suggest that it probably shouldn't include teasing and innuendo and things like that. It should be sober speech, respectful speech. The speech that's spoken of here in Titus chapter 2. Exhort the young men to be sober minded in all things, showing yourself to be a pattern of good works in doctrine, showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility, sound speech that cannot be condemned.

Sound speech that cannot be condemned. That's the kind of speech that's appropriate. Most of us understand when our speech is condemnable. Our conscience, hopefully, has been trained by scripture so that we understand when our conversation is inappropriate. When there's inappropriate conversation, Those should have been taught in the family and in the church what kind of speech is inappropriate so that they know what to do to flee the conversation when it's inappropriate.

Daughters need to have trained responses. When someone, when a young man is speaking to a girl and is flirting with her, daughters need to be trained to say, you're not ready to be married, you cannot talk to me that way. You cannot talk to me that way, I'm leaving and I'm telling my father. Those are the kind of trained responses that should... Have you trained your daughters to do that?

The truth is they're silver-tongued young people who can advance a conversation to an inappropriate level. Imagine if some married man in a church had some conversation with another woman. Again, the implications are significant to consider. So there's this whole principle of readiness. There's conversation that's appropriate for one time of life, but it's not in another time of life.

There's a kind of conversation that's only appropriate between me and my wife. No one else should ever have that same kind of conversation. And I just want to make the proposition that the same is true with young people. There are conversations that you should never have as young people. There are boundaries, there are barriers.

There's this whole principle of marriage that should inform all of our conversations between parties. Let's talk about the principle of discretion and timing in speech. We live in a world where people think that you're actually obligated to say whatever you think. Share your feelings, let it all hang out, be honest with me, tell me everything you're thinking. Well this is not right.

Everything is not worthy to be shared. Some thoughts should not be verbalized. A thought Verbalized has power and because of the power of thoughts of verbalized care and discretion are very, very necessary. It's one thing to think something and it's another thing to verbalize it. Young people should not be verbalizing things that are inappropriate even though they're thanking them even though their minds are screaming at them I think you're so cute whatever it is your mind is screaming at you and you better keep it there I'll give you a personal example My own son came to me when he was 13 years old and he said there's this girl Monica Suzanne Daming that's how he said it And I think I want to marry her.

Now he verbalized that to me, but no one else. It was not appropriate. It would have been wrong because it creates expectations, it creates all kinds of things that would be totally inappropriate for the time. It was the wrong time for that to go any farther than with his father and his mother. It would have been incredibly inappropriate.

It's inappropriate when young people who are not ready for marriage are teasing one another about she has a boyfriend and he has a girlfriend. This is not right. This is wrong. This is ill-timed conversation. It should not be happening in our church.

As elders, we do not want that kind of conversation happening in this church. We really don't. And if we hear about it, we'll talk to you about it. Because we don't think it's appropriate. It's conversation ill-timed.

There is an appropriate time to speak more broadly about these matters. But it's not appropriate when you're not ready to be married. The Bible says, he who finds a wife finds a good thing. But there's an appropriate time to talk about it. In the whole matter of finding a spouse, Scripture has a number of forests that are clear about that process.

All the laws of purity, all the principles of sound speech should be engaged. All the principles of jurisdiction and authority should be brought into the matter. For example, you know, God has placed parents in authority over children. The authority of parents always has to be acknowledged in matters of courtship or betrothal or any of the things that might surround the whole area of the process of young people getting married. Now, the reality is that Scripture does not give us a formalized process.

Scripture doesn't give us, you know, five steps to finding your spouse, or, you know, ten things that you have to do once you begin a betrothal or an engagement or whatever kind of language you want to use. Scripture just doesn't do that. It does give us broad principles of purity, authority, jurisdiction, appropriate conversation, things to consider regarding unity and all that kind of thing. As far as I can tell, there's no exclusive pattern. In one case, a father chooses a spouse for a son.

In another, a servant goes and seeks a spouse. In another case, like Boaz and Ruth, a man pursues a woman and she responds in an equal pursuit. There are all kinds of different ways that this happens. So we shouldn't be looking for one single way, but there are a number of principles that should govern every way that's there. That's our perspective on this matter.

So God has given us principles to govern all these kinds of relationships. And let's be very clear about this. We know that young men are to treat the young woman like sisters. So that should help us understand what that relationship is like. That doesn't mean that every single aspect of a brother's relationship with his sister fits.

There's certain parts that don't fit. He says these things to us and he understands that there are some distinctions. But it's a brother-sister kind of relation. In other words, it's not a romantic relationship. It's not a physical relationship.

It's not a flirtatious relationship. It's none of that. But there may be certain parts of a brother-sister relationship that are not appropriate in the church between young men and young women. And that when we consider how we manage our families with guy-girl relationships, here's what I want us to really understand, is that what we want them to be is what we're training them for. And that the young men should be sober because when they become the old men they should be sober.

And that's a really important principle for all of us. And that even relationships in the single years have patterns and parallels for those that come later. So we have to be very careful not to cross those boundaries. For more messages, articles, and videos on the subject of conforming the church and the family to the Word of God and for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated churches where you