In the sermon 'The Importance of Getting Married,' Scott Brown discusses the biblical and cultural significance of marriage. He highlights various scriptures, such as Proverbs 18:22, Genesis 2:18, and Ephesians 5:25, to assert that marriage is a God-given institution meant for most people. Brown critiques the modern trend of delaying marriage and the glorification of singleness, especially within evangelical circles. He argues that the concept of singleness as a spiritual gift is misunderstood and that marriage, as a formative institution, is essential for personal growth. Brown stresses the importance of being 'marriageable,' emphasizing character, inward and outward beauty, and being equally yoked. He also discusses the role of family and church guidance in the courtship process, advocating for a biblically guided approach to finding a partner. The sermon concludes with a call to action for individuals to embrace marriage and for churches to celebrate it as a God-ordained institution.

You have in your program the title of this message that it may be well with you. Well, I changed my mind about what I wanted to speak about. And I was intending to spend the whole message on the fifth commandment, just because of the power of the promise of the fifth commandment, that it might go well with you. We serve a God who desires it to go well with us. And so he gives us everything we need so that it would be like that.

But I decided I wanted to talk about the importance of getting married. I wrote this long message on the fifth commandment and then I shifted. And I think when you think about getting married and the importance of getting married, well I already started with the holiness of God and loving the holiness of God and loving to be holy. But I want to talk about how you're thinking about marriage. And I want to encourage you by saying, you should be pursuing marriage.

And why would I say such a thing? The Bible tells me so. For example, in Proverbs 18 22, we learn that marriage is a good thing. He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord. The very first thing that God said was not good, he said it's not good for man to be alone in Genesis two verse 18.

In Matthew 19 verses four through six, it becomes very clear at the beginning that God made men and women to be married. He created them physically and every other way to be married. It's the normative state of being. We all know that there will be some who will not be married, but it won't be very many who won't be married. In Hebrews 13 verse four, we learn from God that marriage is to be highly respected, to be honored, marriage is honorable among all, Hebrews 13 4.

And marriage is so important that God designed it to be a picture of Christ's love for the church. And so in Ephesians 5.25, we read, husbands love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word. Marriage is so important. Now I realize that we have a broad range of ages of people here so some of this you would have to sort of take as a grain of salt. For example, my own mother is here.

She's going to turn 98 in about two and a half months. So she's a little bit different category probably than most everybody in this room. But we do have a wide range of people here. We're living in a world, we're living in a culture that has drifted far away from the biblical standard. And people are delaying marriage today or they're not marrying at all.

You can go to a place like Sweden and almost no one is getting married. This is happening all over Europe. It's spreading to the United States. In the United States, in nine years, 45% of all women will be unmarried. This is a radical culture shift that's taken place right before our eyes.

When I was 20, when I was 20, 21, 22, everybody got married somewhere between age 20 and 23 at the latest. And now the average age is 28 to 30. These are massive, massive culture shifts. And I think, I know that there are many people in this room probably are frustrated because of the difficulty of getting married. There are not enough men, there are not enough women, There are not enough qualified people here or there.

And we've all had to talk about that over the years. But the problem of getting married isn't just in conservative, homeschool, family-integrated circles. If you read what's going on in the broader culture, it's probably worse in the broader culture. Here's a summary from an article in Atlantic magazine on singleness, and how hard it is to find a partner. Here's a quote.

My friends are experiencing extended strings of bad dates and rejections and false starts. And they talk candidly about their sadness because of the difficulty it is to pair up today. And there are other things that could be said about this, but Why is this happening? Why is it happening even in the Christian community? And I wanna give you some reasons why I think it's happening in the Christian community.

And the first is The church naturally follows the culture. People are delaying marriage. And frankly, many evangelicals have glorified the single life. I remember Francis Schaeffer said, look at where the world is today. The church is about eight years behind it.

And I think a terrible thing has actually happened in mainstream evangelicalism. Evangelicals tend to glorify singleness. I did a Google search on this gospel coalition and the gift of singleness. And all you get really is a glorification of singleness. Here's some of the articles.

Receiving singleness as a gift, upholding the dignity of singleness, dignify singleness, teach children to value singleness. And so we have a broader evangelical culture that's actually followed the trajectory of the rest of the culture. We live all in the same sandbox, and we shouldn't think that we're not affected by that. And I'll just go on record to say something that might sound really controversial. I don't believe there is a gift of singleness.

Not the way that people talk about singleness. The apostle Paul said, but each one has his own gift from God, one in this manner and another in that. But I say to the unmarried and to the widows, it's good for them if they remain even as I am." But then he says, it's because of the present distress for a man to remain in the condition that he is in. I think the context indicates that there's a particular moment in the apostle Paul's life. And I don't believe, The Bible doesn't say singleness is a gift.

The apostle is talking about being unmarried. And I don't believe that the way that we've talked about singleness as a gift is correct. It's not the same thing as a gift of faith. It's not the same thing as the gift of prophecy. It's not the same thing as discernment.

It's not the same thing as the gift of prophecy, it's not the same thing as discernment, it's not the same thing as the gift of giving and exhortation. It rather is something that's necessary and it actually happens to be a gift, but I don't think it's a spiritual gift. It's actually hard to find people who have the spirit, who actually have the spiritual gift of singleness. You know, most people, if they think they have it, it's a gift they'd like to give back. Because most people really don't want to be single.

There are some, there are actually some who by natural desires do not have the same intensity of desires and things like that. But I don't think it's a spiritual gift. That's just my view. We can certainly talk about it. Here's another reason, particularly conservatives are not getting married until later.

It's the immaturity of men, unprepared men, men not ready to be providers, men who spent too much time on the ball field, not making money, men who spent too much time playing their Game Boys, and they wasted their youth, and so they're not ready. They didn't want to do what men do. Men are providers, men are conquerors, men are warriors. They're not people who play games. And so you have unprepared men, and so then they don't have the money that they need and the trials that they should have had in the working world to grow them up.

And I don't know if any of you men fall into this category, But I would just say it's time to be a man and do the things that men do and break out of boyhood and break out early. You know one of the things that I've seen over the years is young men breaking out really early. Our church is full of them and they have been ready for marriage early on and they're going out and buying houses when they're 18 or 20 years old because they worked and their daddies didn't let them play around when they were kids. Another reason, I believe, is that women are waiting for the wrong thing. They have unrealistic expectations for men.

We all know that men are not like women and women are not like men. Men think differently, they were actually created to act differently. And you do have women who want men who actually act like women and not men. Men are designed to be leaders. And you have to have women who are willing to follow a leader.

But if you have a woman who wants to follow somebody who's like another woman, you're gonna have a hard time finding that one. Here's another reason. The pool is small. It's always been that way for real Christians. And the fragmentations that have taken place as a result of worldliness are bigger today.

And the pool is small. That's not the worst thing in the world. You don't want to get married out of a big pool, which is a little bit like, it can be like a cesspool. So you want to be in the pool of holiness. That's always a minority.

It's always an extreme minority. Like if you believe that the Word of God is true and you want to follow it, you just made yourself a minority. And the pool gets really, really small when you're that kind of a minority. Here's another reason. Many evangelicals have made missions sort of the holy grail for the single woman.

And they hold this up as an ideal. So the godliest woman is going to spend the next few years of her life on the mission field. And separated actually from the pool. And I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong for a woman to go on the mission field except the particular qualifications. So delaying marriage is a problem.

And I think the theological matter I've already stated because the Bible actually draws people in to be married. That's the normative teaching of scripture. But one of the reasons delaying marriage is a problem or can be a problem, is that marriage is a formational institution. It grows you up really fast. It exposes you earlier to things that you need to face in terms of your selfishness and in terms of your life focus.

And now there's nothing wrong necessarily with getting married when you're older in God's providence. This happens. It is in God's providence. How do you know when you should be married? Well, it's usually when you get married.

I don't know what age anybody should be married, that there's nothing wrong with getting married young, and here's why. Because when you get married young, you learn together, you grow together, and if you, if holiness to the Lord is your guide, is your guideline, then you will grow together. Nobody was ever completely ready to be married. I see a few older people here, were you absolutely ready to be married when you got married? Well, kind of, But when you got married, you learned what love looked like, because you're never really completely ready.

And then children come along, because marriage implies children. Marriage come, or children come along, and then the speed of your maturity accelerates along particular lines. I don't know if you have ever thought how strange it is that that God gives something so sacred as marriage to inexperienced young people. Why does he do that? And then he gives children made in the image of God to these inexperienced parents like they've never done this before.

But God uses marriage and children as a formational factor in a person's life. And so delaying marriage can be a problem because God actually made us to get married and to have children. This is a creation order principle. And I think that's the reason why almost everybody, they really wanna be married. I'm sure almost everybody here really wants to be married who's single.

And we shouldn't act as if we don't care that we're married. There's this idea that you're ready to be married when you don't care. I don't think that's real. I mean, I think there's a matter. If you've made an idol out of marriage and it's all you think about and you're devastated until you're married because you've created this idolatry.

Well, maybe that kind of person needs to learn not to care so much in that way. But the truth is, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be married. It's not a weakness that you want to be married. It's actually natural, God given, and necessary to urge you on to go and be married. So I wanted to make the case that it's really good to be married, and I'm sick and tired of evangelicals who think that the single life is the superior life, because it isn't.

And yes, single people can have very productive, very blessed lives, and can energize their gifts for the greatest advantage of the kingdom of heaven, because that's what all people are supposed to do, whether they are single or married. But if you're single now, just recognize, give your single years for the greatest advantage of the kingdom of heaven. And then when you get married, that will not change. Hopefully it doesn't change, because the single you will be the married you. Okay, I want to talk about the matter of pairing up.

I want to talk about, I'm going to use the word courtship. And I want to talk about principles for the process of getting married. The problem with using the word courtship is that it seems like almost everybody has a different definition. So whatever you think about courtship is, get your definitions right. And make sure that there's agreement with the definitions with those that you are getting involved with.

Now it was right, it was right that a whole generation rejected what had become the dating system because it was completely ungoverned by the Word of God. It was right to reject the dating system because it didn't find the authority of God in the equation. And so that was that was right. I would call courtship a biblically defined, a biblically ordered period of time under the supervision of parents where a couple gets to know one another to determine whether they should be married. And I wanna give you some questions about that.

I don't really care whether you use the word dating or courtship, I mostly care that it's the Word of God that is guiding the principle and the practice. So I'm gonna give you several questions to ask And this actually goes back to what I was going to speak on initially, and that was that it might be well with you, that you honor your father and mother. I think this is the first principle. Am I honoring my father and my mother? You write, you know what this is the fifth commandment in Exodus 20 verse 12.

Honor your father and your mother that your days May be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you then the apostle Paul repeats the principle using a little bit different language he says children obey your parents and the Lord for this is right honor your father and mother which is the first commandment with promise. And then he says that it may be well with you and you live long on the earth. In Proverbs one verse eight, we read this, my son, hear the instruction of your father, and do not forsake the law of your mother. They will be a graceful ornament on your head and chains about your neck. You know, there's a fascinating section in the last book of the Bible in Malachi chapter four.

Malachi is describing what happens when the gospel is spreading. When Jesus Christ comes and people are being converted, and something happens as a result of conversion. And he says that he, God, will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. This is the last verse in the Old Testament. That something happens in the heart of a father.

That father turns his heart toward his children and cares for his children and I think takes takes biblical responsibility and biblical authority in his children's lives. But also the children's hearts change too. Instead of running off in their own direction, their hearts turn toward their parents. This is a miracle power of the gospel. And what this means is when the gospel comes to a family it reorders their relationships and their hearts are turned toward one another.

They receive one another. They love one another. And the parents are toward the children and the children are toward their parents. They're not resisting their parents authority. Honor is a central quality of marriage.

Peter told husbands to honor their wives. Paul told the Ephesian church that wives should respect their husbands. This is a manifestation of hearts turned toward one another where you have honor. It's very dangerous when children reject the counsel of their parents when it comes to marriage. And I've seen this happen a few times where children are willing to blow up their families for the next 10 years because they did not listen to their parents.

And they went off and got married anyway, any who they wanted to marry. And maybe they did count the cost, but the cost was hard. And I think this just goes back to those that honor their father and mother, it will go well with them. And when you come to the time of getting married, this is a time to draw near to your parents and hear their counsel. They may not be right on absolutely everything, but you do not wanna step out of the blessing of hearts turned toward one another.

So the first question is, have I honored my father and my mother? That's the first principle of courtship. And God gave you your parents to help you get through this season of life of getting married. You know, my view has been that men, particularly, should not be flirting with women without the permission of the Father, because the Father is her head. If you're a man, you're not her head.

Her father is her head. And God gave fathers and mothers as protections. Fathers and mothers they're always older, they know more, they can see around corners, they can see things that you don't see And children just need to recognize that. They're seeing things you don't see. And if you don't understand that, you're gonna get run over by that freight train behind the wall.

So parents, they love you more than anyone else. They raised you. They changed your diapers. This is not the time to reject their counsel. This is the time to listen.

Maybe they'll ask you to wait. I've had a front row seat on many situations where parents ask their children to wait, and they waited. And God bless them. I've had a front row seat on many situations where parents asked their children to wait and they waited and God blessed them. I've had a front row seat where parents asked their children to wait and they couldn't wait.

And they blew shrapnel all throughout their family and all through their churches. And why this commandment to honor your father and mother? That it might be well with you. Here's another question. Have I protected from sexual sin?

These are principles of courtship or whatever you wanna call it. How do you do that? Well, you do it in different ways. You spend time in groups, you spend time with family. Here's my advice, you abide by a curfew, nothing good happens after 10 o'clock at night.

You know, you can play with fire and burn your house down. And you know, premarital sex and pornography will make sexual intimacy much harder when you get married. It's just the way it is. Here's a third question. Have I received the affirmation of my family members, like here, I'll say it this way.

You should be really cautious about marrying somebody that your brothers and sisters don't like. You should be really cautious about marrying somebody that your aunts and uncles don't like, okay? You're like in danger zone when everybody in your family is objecting. You're in danger, and God is trying to protect you through this family that God gave you. Here's another question.

Have I received the affirmation from pastors and wise counselors who actually know me. Because what God does, He establishes various layers of authority and wisdom in your life. Of course, your parents are sort of the first line, but then if you're in a church, and I hope you're all in a church, you have pastors and you have godly men and women in those churches. And it's really helpful if you listen to them. The Bible says that all authorities have been given by God and you just have to recognize that the authorities in your life have been placed in your life because God put them there.

Here's another question Just to determine whether this is the right time to get married, am I living Christianly? You know, where am I focusing my energies in my life? Am I hanging around people who are just nullifying holiness? Am I hanging around people who are just magnifying silliness in my life. You know, men, they need to stay away from unproductive men.

Women need to stay away from silly women. Why? Because living Christianly is the great preparation for marriage. Here's another question. Are we equally yoked?

Are we equally yoked? This is not the same, exactly the same thing as Christians marry Christians. Well, Christians should only marry Christians. That just should be so obvious. Scripture makes that very, very clear.

But you might disagree with this. My perspective is that Any old two people might not be the best for one another because of equal yoking. And the apostle Paul uses this metaphor in the New Testament, equal yoking, and he's talking about animals who labor together. And the yoking has to do with, there's a complementarity of yoking. In other words, you don't put a musk rat and a musk ox in the same yoke.

It just doesn't work. In fact, I mean, even in farm animals, you shouldn't put two cows of different personality in the yoke together. It'll be a mess. Same thing with horses. There has to be some way of walking together without always being in conflict.

So the yoking metaphor is a metaphor of labor. So marriage is a labor. You're working together. It's one of the neatest things about marriage. You get to go create this whole new world and it involves houses and children, it involves all kinds of things.

And there you are, you're building together. You know, one of my favorite examples of this is Priscilla and Aquila in the New Testament. Here's this couple. They were like a theological couple. They counseled Apollos in sound doctrine.

They had a church in their house. Paul says, they risk their necks for me. Just a super inspiring couple that they were serving together. They were obviously equally yoked and they were carving out a life. And so are you equally yoked or are you going in the same direction?

Do you like to work together? You know, Abraham's servant went and found a woman who was industrious and she was hospitable and she was generous. She was a good catch. And so she got scooped up. But being equally yoked is more than just, are you a Christian?

I mean, Abraham's servant was told, do not take away from the Canaanites. Don't take away from the unbelievers and the worldly people of this world. Okay, here's some questions. So those are several questions to ask if you wanna be courting or whatever you wanna call it. Here's some personal questions for women.

Am I a marriageable woman? Am I marriageable? A woman should do her best to create a life so that she is marriageable. Both are very important. The Bible speaks of inward beauty and outward beauty, both.

A virtuous woman who can find. In other words, you have a woman who is active in things that are important and that are good. She's not wasting her life away on silly things. If a woman is undisciplined, she reduces her availability in the eyes of men. If she is slovenly, She's just cut down the pool.

If she doesn't take care of herself, she doesn't take care of her body, she does things that make her not healthy. These things are not helpful. A woman should be sure that she's not limiting her desirability by her preferences. I'm not encouraging women to be obsessed with outward beauty. This can be a huge, huge problem.

Here's another. Am I a marriageable man? Because men can make themselves hardly marriageable at all by the way that they operate. Is he self-governed? Or is he like the guy in Proverbs 25, 28 who has no rule over his own spirit.

He's like a city broken down without walls. In other words, he can't get things done. He doesn't, he's not faithful. He's not on time. He's not employable.

He's a time waster. He doesn't keep his promises. But, or, does he have the kind of character that would make a woman want to marry him. Because if you're a man, you should live in such a way that a woman would want to marry you, the way that you are, just by observing your life. And that has everything to do with character.

What marriageable men do is they build a life and they build spaces that a woman would want to move into. Because, you know, women want to be with responsible men. Now, why men do not meet women? Why? Why are men often not meeting women?

Often it's they're afraid of rejection. They have to get over that. They're fragile. They're insecure. They're just so afraid that they're going to get rejected.

And but here's the reality. Very few people marry the first person they have affection for. For most people, it takes a time or two or three or maybe even more. That's reality. And men need to sort of suck it up and recognize that's how it works.

You know, you have men who they've, let's just say they pursued three women and they weren't interested. And their fathers weren't interested either. And they felt like they didn't get straight answers from the Father as to why they couldn't pursue their daughter. When this happens to you, and it will probably happen to you if you're a man, this is not the time to complain because God is working, because God is sovereign, God is maturing you, God is actually probably most likely protecting you. He's probably protecting you from someone that you shouldn't be marrying.

And he did it through that father or he did it through that girl. And a man just needs to recognize that God is sovereign and he needs to learn from the no when he gets a no. And he shouldn't be going around blaming the father and complaining about the father. Sometimes fathers are wrong. Sometimes fathers are immature.

It happens. This is a fallen world. Don't be so fragile living in a fallen world like this. But a father, he often sees things that he doesn't like. And you might not ever know what it is.

And this is the time to actually rejoice that God is in control, that God is directing your life. You know, are you unnecessarily delaying? And what I wanted to say tonight is I wanted to encourage you to resist the impulse to delay. And here's a reality and it's it's it's a little bit terrifying just to say it and I've never I've never said this before but the longer you delay the smaller the pool gets And I'm not saying this to scare anybody. I'm not saying this to make you panic.

I'm not saying this to say you missed the train, but it's just a reality that you have to face. The pool gets smaller as time goes on. And like I said before, that's happening in the broad secular culture. And it's happening, I think, to a lesser degree in conservative cultures like ours here. Why do people delay?

Number one, opportunity did not knock. That's one reason they delay. God didn't bring anybody. Not yet. Well, you know, women have a harder situation because they are responders, not initiators.

Women shouldn't be go running around trying to find a man. Men are the initiators. And so that puts women in a much more difficult position. They have to wait. But people often delay because opportunity didn't knock.

Here's another reason, selfishness. They had unrealistic expectations. They had their bucket list. They had their manhood or womanhood bucket list that really wasn't actually connected to things that had to do with biblical love or biblical character or any things like that. Maybe it had to do with just appearance or a personality type that you're looking for.

I don't know how many times I've walked with young men particular, and they're looking for this personality type that just fits them. And then that one doesn't work. And then there's another, and then another person, kind of like that personality type that they always thought they wanted and needed. Oh, this person is just so outgoing and so effusive or whatever it is, so intellectual. And then after a while, after beating their head against the wall, They actually marry somebody that was totally different than what they envisioned.

Because a lot of times in our immaturity, we don't really know what we need. And we have this marriage bucket list, you know. But what's most important is character. That's what makes a marriage. Character born out of holiness is the secret to everything.

So you wanna look for a holy woman. It's dangerous to rush into a marriage. It's dangerous to delay marriage because you're too selfish. It's dangerous to delay marriage because you're too selfish, it's dangerous to delay marriage because you're too foolish. And you wanna be married so badly, you will do anything and you'll take anybody.

Those are all dangers. So it's really important in this time of history that we live in, that churches and families celebrate marriage and they create a culture that celebrates marriage and babies and weddings and things like that. Because that's the way God planned it. And it may be that some of us in this room need to resist the cultural trend in some way or another. And I don't know how this applies to every person in this room because I'm sure some of what I've said doesn't apply to everybody in this room.

And I recognize that. But this I know, God made most of you to be married. And so, as a woman, you should seek it in a way that's appropriate for a woman by taking good care of yourself and becoming the kind of person who's marriageable and men do the same thing. And above all else, behold the face of Jesus Christ and be transformed into his image. Because holiness is the ground of everything that you're looking for in your life.

So be holy, for God is holy. And do what you can to love the holiness of God and being holy. So that's my prayer for you. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for giving us instructions.

We Thank you for putting us in this world at the moment you've put us here. We thank you that you are in control of every man and woman. You're in control of every synapse of every brain in the world. And that You know all the single people in this room. You know their names.

You know what they need. And so Lord, I pray that you would pour out your blessing upon them. Amen.