The sermon discusses the concept of courtship and proposes a set of biblical principles that can be applied in any relational situation. It emphasizes the importance of laying a strong foundation based on Christ and His principles from a young age. The speaker encourages parents to teach their children about biblical foundations and house rules, focusing on the Lord, His word, and His kingdom in all activities. The sermon also explores the continuum of biblical relationships and highlights the importance of inclusivity, purity, self-control, fervency, and self-sacrifice. It concludes by providing a definition of principle-based courtship and discussing the decision-making process in courtship.

Let me say at the beginning that one of the things that I realized, or at least that I've come to believe over the past 10 years, is that some of my earlier concepts of courtship were unrealistic, were overly systematic, and a bit narrow. So let me say at the beginning that I am not rejecting the heart of what courtship is. What I am saying is that courtship as we knew it and discussed it 20 years ago may not fully answer every relational situation and may carry some unintended and unnecessary baggage. So what I am proposing is a set of biblical principles that are applicable in any relational situation including friendships and along that line let me say this as well that most people when they think of preparing their children for marriage automatically think of a task that starts picking up steam in the last years. But if we have younger children, we have, we breathe a sigh of relief, give thanks that at least we have a little while before we have to start thinking about such topics as teaching our children about the opposite sex.

But what I have to say this afternoon actually is the process of preparing our children for relationships, including marriage, that begins at birth. And so that's why I'm proud of you that are of youngest children and are thinking, wow, we are so far away from something like courtship, would be here to listen to this because I believe you are on the best foundational moment because you can start right now with your young children. All right, think of your child as a beautiful building that will take 20 years to construct. This building will have soaring towers and beautiful windows and lavish rooms will be a wonder to behold, But all buildings have to be built upon a foundation, and the taller the towers, the more sturdy the foundation needs to be. And that foundation is Christ and His principles.

So a quick question for you is do you believe that there are principles established by the Lord based upon this character that we are all commanded as his people to recognize and obey and are the rules of your home based upon those principles or do they simply reflect what you think works best or what your parents used to do. Talking about patterns, right, Jason? Could you explain, third question for you, the start, could you explain to your children the biblical foundation behind your house rules and parenting? So I believe that the only way that we will be successful as Christians, whether we're talking about parenting or marriage or any other activity, is if our focus is upon the Lord and His kingdom and his standard, his word is our standard. And that's been, like you mentioned Scott, that's been the theme that I've wanted to communicate during the times that I've spoken to you, which is any success is going to be built upon your vertical relationship with the Lord, your respect for His word, your view of the kingdom and your role in it.

And that's why I shy away from monolithic systems like courtship, as if creating a set of rules and practices will guarantee success for our children. There are certainly some systems that are more biblical than other systems, but you need to be able to say that what you do, even if you call it courtship, is based upon biblical principles and the absolute standards of God's word. Not all situations easily fit into systems, but all situations can be evaluated by biblical principles. Okay? So if you look at your handouts, you'll see what I've called the continuum of biblical relationships.

And you'll notice that the left side represents attitudes that are of the flesh, exclusivity, impurity, uncontrolled, and more. The right side gives the opposite of these attitudes, which is inclusivity, purity, self-control. And I consider this a continuum because we often find ourselves somewhere in between these two extremes. Our goal, however, should always be to move ourselves to the right side of the spectrum. We want relationships that are more sacrificial, that are more fervent, that are more inclusive, that are more God-glorifying, and so on.

We also want processes that encourage us towards the right side of this chart. The left side represents the things that our flesh desires and that our society prizes and models. The right side represents the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and God's called to righteousness. So this is not just about our family's choice of standards and rules. This is a spiritual war.

And God's principles are not options, and fighting for them is about championing something beautiful and ultimate and eternal. So if you look at the continuum, the first item on the chart is exclusivity versus inclusivity. There are only a few God-ordained exclusive or one-to-one relationships in scripture, and the husband-wife relationship is a prominent one. But I want you to note that even this, while being exclusive in that a man has only one wife, is not to be isolated from the world. All other male-female relationships are to be inclusive.

So why do our children desire exclusive relationships that resemble marriages? Marriage is wonderful. It's blessed. Inevitably though, when a non-marriage relationship is operating outside of God's blessing, our flesh and sin begin to pervert the relationship. When we get to be off with someone else and feel that they are all ours, the rest of the world fades into the background and you know what that's like.

Every moment consumed by thoughts of the other person, which outside of the marriage relationship will become more and more for our own pleasure and the desire to be loved and accepted and feel important in the other's eyes. Much of modern dating, for example, is based upon exclusivity. Dating couples tend to isolate themselves from friends and family, create artificial environments of intimacy. When a dating couple runs out of topics to discuss, the temptation is strong to create a relationship that's centered solely upon physical intimacy. And because they aren't operating within the one flesh union of husband and wife that God blesses, they put themselves at risk to make poor decisions because they isolate themselves from the people who love and support them and who have wise counsel to give them.

Some of you may have been in romantic non-marital relationships before you got married and you probably know, remember how it is easy to lose your objectivity despite wise counsel, realizing only hindsight after you have left that relationship, how you willingly blinded yourself to reality. That's why Elizabeth Elliott in her book, Passion and Purity states, unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? So the love we are to have for one another is inherently inclusive and selfless. We know from Christ's example that he was moved with compassion for others.

While he took short times to be by himself prayer, for the most part he dedicated his entire life in ministry to the service of others. He taught that we are to love that same way, that our neighbor is ourselves, we are to serve as he served. And this love, which is the love of Christ, is fulfilled in the fulfillment of others. And that's what we are teaching our children from their youngest years, inclusivity. With regard to a potential marriage, the best context for evaluating someone else as a possible future spouse is in the midst of service and interaction with other people, not the artificial environment of an exclusive relationship.

So let's say that you're trying to help your adult son determine how best to explore the possibility of marriage to one of the young ladies at church. Encourage him to serve alongside that young lady in a group setting. Can they be a part of the team that serves meals down at the homeless shelter? What observations has he made of this young woman and the way that she relates to others? Does she have a heart of service and inclusivity?

Does she sacrifice herself? And as we go along, I'm actually going to occasionally mention an example from our family, namely the relationship between one of our sons, Cory, and the woman that became his wife, Hannah. Cory and Hannah, they grew up together at our church. Our two families helped program various camps during the years, served in the same projects outside of the church, did ministry together. At 16, Corey began to wonder if Hannah might be his potential future spouse.

He came to us at the time and told us about what he was thinking and said there's only one problem. Well, two actually. I'm 16 and she's 14. What would you do as a parent? Well, what we told Corey was this.

We are not asking you to stop considering the possibility of Hannah as a potential spouse. In fact, we encourage you to pray for her and to continue to evaluate the possibility in the light of Scripture. What we do ask of you is to not turn your friendship with Hannah into something exclusive in two ways. One, we ask that you continue to consider the possibility that you might be mistaken. And so we ask that you continue to submit your mind and heart to the Lord as you seek his direction and discernment.

In other words, don't be exclusive in your mind to remove other young women as possibilities. And two, don't be exclusive in terms of conversation and time either. We didn't want Corey to be off talking with Hannah for long periods of time or to treat her differently than he would treat his other friends. We weren't telling Cory to avoid Hannah, but rather encouraging an inclusive relationship. Serve together, work together, talk together in the presence of friends, include other people, all the while praying for the Lord's will and for self-control.

If you look at the next item on the continuum, impurity versus purity, 1 Corinthians 6 says that we are not our own but have been bought with a price, both our body and spirit. Christ owns us in that sense, and the Bible describes us as bond slaves. And that means that we are either slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness, right? We are always under our master. There's never a time when we are autonomous.

Such an important lesson to teach your children. There's never a time that you're autonomous. This is a good example of something that will actually take 20 years to talk about. When I say the word purity, you may be thinking about purity only in the context of sexual morality or immorality, but God requires purity in everything. God's ways and not your own.

That's what it means to be pure. By 100% focused on God's will, God's ways. The degree to which we exalt our own desires and ways over God's is the degree to which we are being impure. So, Romans 6-11 says, Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, which means as a result of that truth of being dead to sin and being alive to Christ, do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey it in its lusts.

So impurity occurs because we believe that we can give 60%, 70%, 80% of our mind and heart to walking in the Spirit and save the rest of ourselves for sin. It doesn't work that way. God wants all of us. In fact, many of us adopt the world's view of purity. Want to know what that is?

You get a good idea when you look at the food and drug administrations, standards for purity in the foods that we buy at the grocery store. And I think they're a perfect illustration of the difference between a worldly and a godly view of purity. Federal guidelines for purity in the various foods that you eat, apple butter. If the mold count is 12% or more, if it averages four rodent hairs per 100 grams, or if it averages five or more whole insects, not of course counting smaller insects or parts of insects per 100 grams then the FDA says that's pure. It can go on your English muffins.

Coffee beans. These will be withdrawn if an average of 10% or more are insect infested or if there's one live insect in each of two or more consecutive containers. Because the FDA says people just don't like getting too many live insects with their coffee beans. Mushrooms. A store owner cannot sell mushrooms if there is an average of 20 or more maggots of any size per 15 grams.

That is not very much of dried mushrooms. Less than 20 is okay. Hot dogs. You don't want to know. So that is the world's view of purity.

The FDA knows that if it required no insects, no maggots, no rodent hairs, there wouldn't be any food to sell. But God says that purity of the heart is to will one thing and one thing only, and that is His ways and not your own. It's not okay to be 60, 70, 80, 90 percent committed to God with 10 percent given to the rodent hairs of impurity in your life. You can't live two days with your mind focused on Christ and five days without. And so going back to the example of Corey and Hannah, over the next few years Cory was thinking more and more about the future of transitioning out of our home and into his own household.

He became more and more convinced that Hannah was the right person. Throughout this time we're having multiple times during the week of conversations with our son about his heart and his motives and his actions. Psalm 119 asks, how can a young man keep his way pure? And the answer given in that Psalm is by living according to God's Word. So we continue to direct him to Christ and His Word as we were acknowledging at the same time an increasing fondness for Hannah.

We told Gori this is a time that he might later regard as one of the longest times of his life. But it was a time at which he could and should grow in his dependency upon Christ. We were not encouraging intimate love before its time, but rather we were encouraging a true love for all the members of the body, a selfless and sacrificial serving love. And we told Corey, purity means that a man is not only concerned about his thought life, but also about his example to others. We're constantly asking him whether he thought his actions were appropriate and a good model for other young men.

We said that a pure man is also concerned about the purity of women, and he protects women. So purity is more than just shielding the eyes, it's also shielding the tongue. And thinking about the purity of others. And if purity is willing only the ways of God and not our own, then purity would have Cory ask how God would want his interaction with Hannah to bless her and to bless the entire church. We also told Cory, Proverbs 20 and 11 says that even a child is known by his deeds, whether what he does is pure and right.

And Proverbs 3 and 35 says that the wise shall inherit glory, but shame will be the legacy of fools. So not only did we want Cory to understand that his choices would affect his own reputation, we wanted him to understand that his choices impacted the reputation of others, including those in authority over him, such as his parents and the leaders of our church. And I hope you can see why this whole topic is so much more than just talking about preparation for marriage. It's about a biblical worldview, right? A biblical worldview with regard to all kinds of relationships.

And a worldview is something that you teach your children their entire lives. It should be at least a weekly conversation. I'm not a daily conversation with your children. I think we may be mistaken if We think that preparing our children for marriage means that we keep them focused upon academic school work and then when they're 18 or 20 or 17 or whatever it may be, we suddenly broach the topic of relationships and start planning a list of possible courtship candidates. If though you do find that you've reached these later years with your children without having laid the foundation, do know not to despair.

Start having biblical conversations about relationships now. You may not be able to convince your children necessarily to think differently, but God's Word can. Sometimes amazingly quickly. His word is sharper than a two-edged sword. So God is in the business transforming hearts and minds.

Pray for your children, ask the Lord to turn their hearts towards thinking rightly about relationships both now and in the future. And your children aren't thinking about the opposite sex. That is a reality. God made all of us to be relational. The question is not whether your children will be thinking about the opposite sex, but how.

And the issue for you as parents is not avoiding the topic as if it doesn't exist, but having healthy discussions with them from the time they're young and training them towards these principles that are on the right side of that continuum, displaying the fruit of the Holy Spirit in their lives. Ideally, by the time our sons and daughters reach their teen years, they should have had years and years of development and inclusive relationships, self-sacrifice, self-control, purity, and so on. So let's take a look at the next pair on this chart. We don't have time to look at them all. There's uncontrolled versus self-controlled.

That term self-control is often misunderstood. Most people when they think of self-control think of a person who acts in moderation. Nothing too extreme. Others emphasize self-control must mean that an individual holds down his natural appetites. I want that cookie, but I'll restrain myself.

That's self-control. Do you know how the Bible defines self-control? It defines self-control as being passionate about the things of God. Maybe that seems odd, but let me show why this is true. Ephesians 419 describes what it's like to be uncontrolled.

Says they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity with a continual lust for more. So the Bible tells us that with each indulgence of the flesh a person feels less and less satisfied while he or she at the same time is persuaded that just a little bit more is the only thing that can fulfill so sin is crying give give or feed me right but it never says enough and if our own insatiable desires were not enough the world and Satan come alongside of these ungodly passions and intensify them. Promising fulfillment, never delivering. Self-control is not about setting up restraints and boundaries on our flesh like trying to hold this inflated beach ball down underneath the water of the pool. Okay, and trying to barely keep it down.

I've got self-control! Right? The scriptures actually command us to have desires and to be passionate people. When you read Jesus's letter to the Laodicean Church, what does he complain about the people? They're lukewarm.

He wants sons and daughters to be zealous for the things of his kingdom. He wants us to hate our sin and then to be so moved by our gratitude for his grace and our love for him and for our neighbor that we seek first the glory of God with a great passion that is self-control. It's a redirection towards the right things. So friends, here's one thing I want to, just a little bit of a tangential parenting thing. When you take away things from your kids, don't just take them away, replace them with things that are better.

Keep redirecting them towards things of God's kingdom. The other way, all you do is you teach them, oh, these are the restrictive standards of my home and I can't wait till I get to be an adult and set my own standards. But when you replace it with something better, you acknowledge that your children have desires, but you are training them towards desire and the things of God, and realizing these are the things that bring true joy. Listen to what John Piper once said, really what Jonathan Edwards and others before him have said, life is just always a constant recycling of great ideas. He wrote, the reason that all of your efforts at conquering sin fail is that the power of sin comes from the promise of pleasure and is meant to be defeated by the blood-bought promise of superior pleasure in God.

Does that make sense? The reason that all of your efforts at conquering sin fail is because the power of sin comes from the promise of pleasure, which is not bad in itself. It's just that you were meant to be seeking the superior pleasure in God. So he finishes, we will match promise for promise. Nothing in this world can surpass in value and depth and height and durability the pleasure that God promises.

Those are good words. Those are true. That's what it means to replace what is bad with what is good and better. Now closely related to uncontrolled self-control the sporadic versus fervent, and that'll be the last one I'll cover on this chart. Sporadic refers to the individual whose actions are governed by emotion without forethought.

This is a person whose level of commitment waxes and wanes based upon how he or she is feeling or what they believe that they want from or can control in a relationship. But the Bible admonishes us to love one another as Christ loved us and we know that Christ gave up his prerogatives We know that he submitted Himself to the life of a servant that he died on the cross in our place and Paul says in Philippians 2 That's the kind of love that's the kind of attitude that you want to have. So biblical love is fervent. It increases more and more because it's not based upon impulsive elements of emotion and perceived needs of the moment. It's instead based upon the desire for the betterment of others, even if that means sacrifice to ourselves.

The key idea is that love gives even a great cost to itself. Jesus's cost that he paid infinite, but God loved us to the degree that he would send his only begotten son as a substitute for us, right? In 1 John, we learn that we too should give at great cost to ourselves. And one of the best ways you can prepare your children to be fervent in their relationships is to teach them to be people who sacrifice themselves in pursuit of the betterment of others, regularly incorporating your children into service projects, teaching them to be hardworking with a diligent work ethic, productive members of the family and church, dealing with heart issues that reveal impulsivity, that reveal laziness, that reveal self-centeredness. All of these have an important impact upon relationships later in life.

Because Christ showed true love is not measured or governed by feeling. He went to the cross when what? He ultimately did not want to go there, right? He prayed multiple times in the Garden of Gethsemane. He didn't feel like enduring the beatings and dying upon a cross, giving up his life, but he laid his feelings before the Father, gave himself over to the Father's will so that his feelings were not his master.

And Jesus's example shows us that love must be under the Holy Spirit's control. God chose to love us. Jesus chose to lay down his life for us. The danger of believing that you fall in love is that it also means you can fall out of love Just as unexpectedly and I'm glad that God's love for me is not that way I'm glad that God's love for me is fervent that it's consistent that it's reliable It's predictable And so we need to throw out the misconception that love is this strange force that kind of blows us along like a leaf, Right? We cannot justify doing what we know is wrong by saying that love grabbed hold of us and made us behave irresponsibly.

That's not love, that is, instead what Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians, passionate lust. So we express true love in obedience to the Lord and fervent devoted service to others. Going back to the example of Corey and Hannah, when Corey was young we had encouraged regular participation in service projects, hard work ethic. We discouraged him from thinking of himself as a consumer in the church, wanted him to be a productive member even when he was young. We dealt with heart issues that revealed impulsivity and self-centeredness and laziness.

And we were laying, we believed and prayed that the Lord would bless this foundation because we knew it would be a vital attitude in marriage. You don't just train children academically and then you have this little window of time period after all we're going to suddenly start talking about the other sex, we're going to talk about courtship, get them married, and all of a sudden they're going to have everything that they need for a strong marriage. It starts from the beginning. So we told him that he was not his own but belonged to Christ and his foremost priority was to serve the Lord in this war around him. I said, I don't have time to go through the two remaining principles.

I've mentioned indirectly, I should say self-sacrifice several times. And of course, we must all do all things to the glory of God. And it's really God's glory that makes all the right side of the chart worth it. And these six pairs don't form an exhaustive list. This too is not a system, right?

This is a start of what could be a profitable effort on your part to go through and find these things that describe the fruit of the Spirit in your adult child's life. And so given all that I've said now, I want to propose this definition that's on your paper of a principle-based courtship. And I'll describe it as courtship is a period of investigation in which a man and woman purposefully and prayerfully seek to discern God's will with regard to a possible marriage while preserving inclusivity, purity, self-control, fervency, and self-sacrifice, all to the glory of God. That definition remains broad enough to cover a variety of different circumstances while still preserving the essential elements of purposeful investigation for marriage with imbibical parameters. And at the same time, it is specific enough to note a few important factors.

First courtship is a period of investigation regarding possible marriage. Eliminated, therefore, are relationships that go beyond friendship but have no intention regarding marriage. Does that make sense? This is regarding possible marriage. Also implied by that is the fact that a man and woman are investigating this possibility of marriage and that they are actually ready for marriage.

The Bible speaks of a man preparing his field before bringing home a wife. And this is a way of saying that a man must be capable of supporting and leading a wife before he contemplates marriage. Some of our sons didn't have consistent reliable jobs or understand what it meant to lead and that was when that was the case they did not have any business thinking about preparing and searching out a possible marriage. Another important implication of the definition is the idea of a period of investigation. In other words, a courtship has an end.

It's not just this open-ended dating type of relationship that takes place under our roofs. Sometimes what we do is we look negatively upon dating, and then we open up the concept of courtship and we make it dating under our roofs. The courtship should be finished when the investigation is complete and The proper question to ask is have all the important issues regarding a prop of possible marriage been discussed If so, then the courtship is successful Courtship successful at that point whether it leads to marital union or not. I'm emphasizing this part because what often happens is the moment somebody starts investigating a possible marriage, it goes all over social media, doesn't it? So and so are an item, or so and so are thinking about this.

And then the pressure becomes intense to think of success of courtship as being we move to engagement. But that could be disastrous, friends, if that's the definition. Because a man and woman need not feel pressure that their courtship would be a failure and a disappointment if they were to decide not to marry one another. There also needs to be the ability to go back to the inclusive, pure relationship that I've been describing that started before they began that period of investigation, what happens instead so much of the time? It goes on social media, there's a pressure to move towards engagement, it doesn't happen, and then these two can't hardly look at each other anymore.

Right? And speaking of deciding not to marry one another, you may be wondering upon what basis a decision to advance to engagement is made. Well, ultimately, that decision should be made by the man and the woman in the courtship with the aid of wise biblical counsel. Should be based upon biblical parameters, some of which we've been discussing. We always told our children to first consider the faith and the spiritual maturity and the character of the one they were thinking about marrying.

Then we asked them to consider compatibility. We tried to help them anticipate the types of challenges that their specific culmination of personality and interests and backgrounds might bring to a marriage. We aren't saying that that was a deal killer, just saying this is what it will be like. You guys are complete opposites in terms of temperament and personality. This is what your relationship could potentially, you know, the challenges that you might face, but the Lord is good.

The Lord can bless. But then having trained them their entire lives in the principles that I've described earlier and trusting that they are seeking God's kingdom first and that the Lord will bless them with wisdom, then we can pray for them as parents knowing that they've received our counsel, knowing that we've received the counsel of those that are wise counselors around them, and then let them decide. I'm not saying this is the only possible model, but I'm saying it's the way We helped our children through this process. It's what I believe after all of these several decades of wrestling with courtship as a system versus thinking through biblical principles that this is the healthiest, most biblical approach.