00:07:55.240It's actually going to be a big change of pace from what we've done here in season two, but also, I think, really connect with some of the things that have made our show from the beginning what it is.
00:08:06.420Well, yeah, in season one, we took a pretty expansive view of examining old Christendom and the idols of our day and how to build new Christendom.
00:08:16.580And we really zeroed in on one aspect that was key to building the new Christendom of fatherhood.
00:08:24.080And we'll be zooming back out and taking a macro look.
00:08:54.880So today in this episode, we're going to be talking about really one of the most important tasks of a father.
00:09:00.420And it's a task that, like, quite honestly, we get a lot of questions about, have had many discussions, and I've asked my own questions of older men, and have thought quite a bit about in my own fatherhood.
00:09:13.060I'm sure Dan has thought as well. And as we've worked on pastoring and shaping this community
00:09:17.520here in Ogden, it's one of the big things on our mind. And that is marriage, the next generation.
00:09:22.980Basically, how can we as fathers help our children to marry well? How can we help our sons and our
00:09:30.860daughters to marry well, or at least to put them in a position? Obviously, we can't do anything for
00:09:36.740our children. They have to make their own decisions at some level as they come into judicial maturity
00:09:42.160and they come into this decision-making time of their life.
00:10:11.460So there's an example in my wife's extended family where one of her great-great-uncles or someone was known as being this really great man.
00:10:48.520We've probably all seen situations where a sibling or a friend or someone you grew up in school with or church with marries some guy and then he ends up cheating on her or leaving her with the kids.
00:11:04.360And then he's off somewhere doing crazy stuff and abandoning her.
00:11:08.520We've all seen that time and time again.
00:11:10.400And in the other direction as well, where a man marries a wife and thinks everything's going to be great.
00:11:17.040And then the next thing he knows, she's divorcing him, taking his kids, putting him on the alimony.
00:11:58.000I think this is one of the things that as your kids start to grow, it grows in your mind.
00:12:03.020You start to think, ooh, this is โ I met a guy at County Before Country, Michael Foster's conference in Ohio.
00:12:09.260a few weeks ago and he had something like seven daughters and I and some of them were coming into
00:12:15.340that like late teen years and I was just thinking wow good for you like first of all amazing
00:12:23.440praise God what a blessing and then I thought wow you have to find seven worthy men for these1.00
00:12:32.500daughters to marry them. This is terrifying. Terrifying. When I think of the state of young
00:12:40.060people in America. Well, you'd think that once your young kids are raised, you'd actually get
00:12:44.720sleep. Yeah. No, now you're up praying them off. Yeah. You're up praying, Lord, protect them from
00:12:50.680that idiot. And, you know, that's, that's keeps trying to flirt with her at work. Oh Lord. So1.00
00:12:57.700So anyway, I think a good place to start, Dan, would probably be by making a distinction that's really important in this conversation, and that's on principles versus methods.
00:13:07.400Because I think a lot of what people tend to do in this conversation is โ and particularly people that don't have experience in it, that haven't like actually gone through the process yet or maybe they had a really bad experience in their upbringing and they're just reacting completely the other way.
00:13:24.040And they sort of come up with some method of dating and courtship and marriage.
00:13:30.100It's usually courtship and a model of how the father is to be involved, how the whole handing off process of authority is supposed to work.
00:14:15.760Do you see that there's principles versus methods issue? And how do you think that plays in dating versus courtship? I mean, with Joshua Harris's book there at the beginning, obviously, sort of set a big movement towards this one method being like the be all end all. What are your thoughts on that?
00:14:33.060that's interesting question i you know what's funny is in 1997 when the book was published i
00:14:38.340was in youth group nice i was in the youth group i was 12 i was 12 then yeah so i was actually
00:14:45.300in the book i i read the book have you read the book i know you know what i escaped reading that
00:14:50.000book somehow you kissed the good book goodbye i kissed i kissed i kissed dating goodbye goodbye
00:14:55.620yeah i read the book but i was a teenager so i i remembered nothing yeah it didn't didn't make
00:15:00.900any impression at all. I remember nothing. No, this is human instinct, right? This is where you
00:15:05.600get churches, ecclesiology, the church government, where you get the Congregationalist or the
00:15:11.580Presbyterian or whatever, you know, plurality, the Moses model. And people are like, this is the way,
00:15:17.680this is the only way. And it will protect us from things going awry. And so when you approach
00:15:25.000pretty much any human institution this way with a government of some sort saying the government
00:15:31.020itself, the system itself will protect us, not realizing that you could have the most robust
00:15:37.160Presbyterian system, the most robust congregationalist system in a church. And if you
00:15:42.240put wicked men in leadership, guess what? You've got a wicked government and it'll be horrible.0.94
00:15:49.600It'll go very badly for you. And so people definitely do approach the dating courtship
00:15:56.120scene in this way. I haven't had as much direct experience with this because in the culture I
00:16:02.060grew up in was more like encouraging. I guess that's part of the, I kiss dating goodbye,
00:16:06.420but encouraging singleness. Like wait until you're wise, wait until you're called and wait
00:16:12.260until you're mature before you pursue a wife. I got married in my late twenties and I really wish
00:16:18.360that I had been prepared earlier to be married,
00:21:55.440why don't you go and talk to her father and maybe the father sets up a meeting with the other father
00:22:01.200who's also a wise and judicious christian man a lot of christian maturity and they agree yes
00:22:06.840this is a worthwhile hey mary you know the other dad asks mary was it mary joe that i said well
00:22:11.860you said mary joe but then the guy's name with joe and so then you said mary it wasn't mary sue
00:22:17.560mary sue let's say mary sounds like it wasn't mary jane yeah it's not mary jane because that's
00:22:21.820a different conversation and kids don't do the ganj okay don't do it oh man it'll eat your brain
00:22:27.640okay so then the both fathers are involved in this courtship model there's some protection
00:22:33.820this is great there's protection from for the the daughter because her father can be the first line
00:22:40.120of defense where maybe she has no interest in joe yeah she's like i don't i just i don't like him
00:22:45.120for whatever and that's fair she's allowed to not like him right she might tell her dad you know
00:22:48.440what? I'm not interested. The dad can let the other, the other dad know, or they can let him
00:22:52.820down easy, uh, whether directly or through the parents. So you have parental involvement.
00:22:58.000Or she says, I would like to date him. And he says, I know his reputation and he is not good
00:23:04.420or he is good. Yeah. One of those, any of those different situations, the father's involved.
00:23:09.560And then let's say they come to an agreement that there's going to be a courtship. Well,
00:23:13.020from the beginning, the goal is to get these two married or to, they each want their child to be
00:23:17.760married to a godly christian spouse right so then the fathers or the parents get involved and they
00:23:23.160set up some chaperoned talks you know you think little house on the prairie when uh the who is it
00:23:30.820laura is courted by what's sorry i i didn't get that far in the books i lost interest it's been
00:23:37.720a while since i've read them but uh you know you see this play out they're together in supervised
00:23:43.620context. They might have some, they might even, parents might organize the thing where the two
00:23:48.440kids, after they get to know each other, get to go out somewhere and, you know, have dinner or
00:23:52.040something. Scandalous. Scandalous. Eat food together? But it's all supervised. And then
00:23:57.180the thought, you know, the son says, can I, I am, you know, I think this is going well. Can I
00:24:01.240ask your daughter to marry me? Permission? Yep. Here you go. They get, and then there's an overseen
00:24:06.800period of engagement ending in a marriage. And there's a handoff of authority where a daughter
00:24:11.940who's submitting to her father is now given away on her wedding day to submit to her new husband.
00:24:18.580And all of that is amazing. In a lot of ways, if you were to paint a picture of the ideal,
00:24:23.680in my mind, that would be it. It might look something like that. It's going to have a lot
00:24:27.940of cultural differences and all that. But one of the problems with making that model the only
00:24:33.840possible way of finding spouse is that there actually aren't that many human beings in those
00:24:39.880categories today. It's just very difficult for most people to find a family with wise Christian
00:24:46.180parents who are also on the same page there. And the other thing is that even then, that's not a
00:24:53.000guarantee. It's not a guarantee. No, it's not. Both of those, that man and that woman who get
00:24:58.520married, they can go off the rails. Either one of them can fall into sin and can wreck the marriage.
00:25:04.060So it's a good method for sure, but it's not a guarantee, and also it's not โ it didn't come down with Moses on Sinai.
00:25:18.040God didn't give all of these parameters in terms of finding a spouse so that you could say, well, that any other method is necessarily and intrinsically sinful.
00:25:32.620But in, we don't have to look very far in our own families to see, you know, maybe we talked about like marrying a worthless man or, or, you know, a worthless woman or a foolish woman, but maybe, maybe it's not that maybe, maybe they had like a really healthy marriage, but one of the parents on that side is actually worthless.0.80
00:25:55.080Like, would you want to court a godly woman who has a foolish father?0.91
00:26:00.840Like, would you want him overseeing that to that degree?0.99
00:26:05.780Or he's an unbeliever and she's a believer.
00:26:08.100You know, there's a lot of different contexts in where the method doesn't really work as well.
00:26:14.240And the other thing you find out is that one tendency in courtship model cultures, one tendency is actually to overstate the father's authority.
00:26:25.400There's a cultural ditch where you can understate the father's authority.
00:26:29.020It's very common in our culture where the father's like, the daughter doesn't care.
00:26:39.820We want to be fathers with gravitas who have understood real authority in our homes given by God.0.99
00:26:46.520But there is an edge to the authority, and some of these courtship models actually also worked well in contexts where you not only had a mature Christian community in terms of other families, but you had a mature civil polity and ecclesial polity in the community.
00:27:01.240because you run into issues sometimes where maybe two eligible Christians have decided that they've,
00:27:09.280you know, maybe they've courted for a time or whatever. They think that we want to get married.
00:27:12.720And the man asks for permission. Father says, no. And let's say he asks, okay, why not? I'd love to,
00:27:20.380are there some standards I'm not meeting? And is humble. Well, you know, son, you just,
00:27:26.520I don't want my daughter marrying someone in the trades.
00:27:30.220I want her to marry a white-collar guy.
00:27:32.280Is that a reasonable reason to forbid marriage?0.81
00:27:36.020And you find that sometimes church courts and even civil courts needed to step in.
00:27:46.600A couple could take a father to court who refused permission spuriously.
00:27:52.280So in a setting where you probably don't have that possibility, right, where a son, a young man, maybe he's intent upon marrying a young woman and they have genuinely met all of the biblical requirements for getting married.
00:28:10.140There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to pursue marriage and one father just obstinately for some reason says, no, I don't like your face, whatever it is, right?
00:28:21.480Well, there needs to be another authoritative structure that can step in and adjudicate that case.
00:28:28.000And in many situations, that doesn't exist.
00:28:31.340And so we do need to make sure that we don't end up saying, which a lot of courtship, like on the brutes on the ground, a lot of the courtship model can tend towards actually ending up believing that the father has absolute authority.
00:28:45.360That no other authority can step in and say, you're being unreasonable.
00:29:32.140Ray, Google it, and then I trust your judgment.
00:29:35.940So whereas essentially two fathers get together and they're like, yeah, let's arrange this marriage.
00:29:40.920And it's kind of like set up from the beginning to happen that way, and they just direct them.
00:29:45.300Yeah. By the way, that that I imagine produces some some marriages that are probably set up in the best terms. But yeah, there can be great marriages that way. But you can also have a lot of bitterness where, you know, maybe a daughter or son, he didn't want to marry.
00:30:00.020she didn't want to marry that person. And there was a lot of strong pressure. And now you really
00:30:06.660end up robbing everybody because now you have a man say that's married to a wife that didn't
00:30:11.240really want to marry him. She was just pressured and didn't know how to assert, you know, any kind
00:30:16.080of preference. And now she's just married and there's a covenant there and they must be true
00:30:21.400to it, but it might not have been a wise match because you need compassion. You actually do need
00:30:26.900like desire and respect and love at the center of a marriage for it to be a joyful Christian
00:30:33.880marriage. There needs to be desire. So I think there are some ditches when we get to the talk.
00:30:39.700If we elevate the courtship model to the level of a commandment, we err. On the other side,
00:30:47.140we have the dating model, which is ubiquitous in our culture. People go out, they grow into
00:30:52.700adulthood, sometimes not even, you know, 14, 15, 16. I mean, I can attest. Oh, I thought you were
00:30:58.000talking about like 30 year olds that aren't really adults. No, no, no. I actually meant like some
00:31:02.000people start dating when they're dating when they're 14. Oh yeah. Or whatever. But do you,
00:31:06.080do you recommend that? No. Oh, okay. I was just definitely not. Yeah, no. And on this model,
00:31:13.300it's much more self-directed. There might be permission asked, there might not from a father,
00:31:17.560but it's basically go out, find a person you want to get married, go on some dates,
00:31:20.660figure out if you want to marry him. And again, there's no reason why a dating model needs to
00:31:24.980involve sin. You can still get permission from a father, honor his authority, all these things.
00:31:28.840I think it's important for us in this initial part of the conversation, when you're thinking
00:31:33.000about marrying off your children, dating versus courtship, all these things, what are some
00:31:36.580principles that are going to be true regardless of the method that's used to find the spouse
00:31:43.880at the end of the day? What are some principles non-negotiables? I'll give you an example,
00:31:47.240And then I'd love your thoughts, Dan. So one example, and I'm going to give the most obvious. Your children must marry Christians. That's a principle. We're not going to be unequally yoked. There's a command there. And so my children โ and I think there's also sub tiers to that where it's like I am a Reformed Presbyterian Christian man and my daughter's Reformed Presbyterian.
00:32:11.220So it would probably be unwise for her to marry an extraordinarily charismatic Pentecostal young man who handles snakes regularly.
00:32:58.540Wise counsel is needed because everybody knows, having been in a relationship before, especially guys with a woman, and I'm sure I've never been a female.0.61
00:33:07.580I don't know what females think, but they seem to be smitten with men at certain points in their lives.
00:33:13.280And when you start using attractions and emotions to make your decisions, quite often, I don't know, you don't tend to make the best choices.
00:33:23.220You might end up led away by your heart flutters.
00:33:27.500But your heart flutters. That's a nice way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. So it is important if you don't have a wise father to have a pastor. Yeah. Or somebody that has accountability and ownership now in your relationship. Yes.
00:33:44.400So that that person with an uninterested third party, as far as like, you know, the heart flutters, as you call it, can judge with wise judgment to make sure that neither one of you are actually making a grave error.
00:33:57.940I mean, a lot of that goes into like premarital counseling.
00:34:00.820Maybe you don't realize this, but, well, you realize this, Brian, but dear listener, you might not realize this.
00:34:07.780Most, I would say, premarital counseling is not even necessarily a benefit to future husband and wife.
00:34:15.740But a lot of it is going to be the pastor vetting one another to see if you guys are actually a good match.
00:34:22.160Yeah, the first thing I'm trying to figure out when I'm counseling somebody for marriage, premarital counseling, is should they be married at all?
00:34:31.480And I tell them that first meeting, I might tell you not to get married.
00:34:46.400There's wisdom in a multitude of counselors.
00:34:48.160I think another principle that's related to this is that your whatever method you use, it must honor the structures of authority that God has established in the world.
00:34:58.460So that means the father and the mother need to be involved.
00:35:02.480And with the asterisk that that must that principle must be applied with wisdom.1.00
00:35:08.060If the father is a crackhead idiot who has made a wreck of his life, you shouldn't you would be a fool to take his counsel.1.00
00:35:15.720You need to actively actually disregard his counsel. So this doesn't mean that that non-Christian or apostate or actively in sin father who refuses to submit to church to any other authorities, to church authority, that he has some kind of absolute authority on the level of God. No. All human authorities, all lesser authorities below the authority of God are contingent. So they all are subject to authorities outside of themselves.1.00
00:35:43.600I think a good barometer that goes along with these two principles that we talked about is that if you're tempted to hide your relationship from these wise authorities, then that should be a red flag.
00:35:55.200You're probably โ I mean we've all done something, relationship or otherwise, maybe investing or something else to where you're like, man, I hope nobody finds out I'm about to do this because it would be kind of shameful.
00:36:13.600I think another principle, you know, so we're talking about wise counsel. We're talking about honoring the authorities God's built into the world, marrying equally yoked. I think another good principle would be that whether you date or court or you're encouraging your children to do one or the other is that you need to make allowances for the sheer power of God's creative design for sexuality.
00:36:41.660meaning that you have to understand that a man was designed to desire a woman sexually and a
00:36:49.180woman was designed to desire the man sexually and they're designed to want that's a good thing
00:36:53.500and there's a category where paul says if you burn it would be better to be married than to
00:36:57.700burn with lust he's acknowledging that there's a category where that good thing is very powerfully
00:37:02.860good but it also has a lot of gravity and so teaching your children this you know as you date
00:37:08.580or court, if you're maybe at that age yourself and listening to this podcast, you need to give
00:37:13.280yourself in moments of sobriety, you need to be honest about how powerful that temptation will be
00:37:19.700to go and sin or to make a wreck of things with premarital sexual activity and contact or whatever
00:37:27.740it is, crossing lines. And so fathers need to be honest with their children about that,
00:37:33.680And they need to be establishing walls for the son and the daughter and for the, you know, the potential spouse, future spouse or whatever it is, the boyfriend, the girlfriend, whatever you call it in your model.
00:37:46.960The father needs to be involved in the level that he is actively checking in, guarding, saying, son, now, like, let's be honest here that you're dating a beautiful young woman and you want to be married.
00:42:04.040And God redeems sinners and cleanses them from their sin and makes them new creations.
00:42:09.720So I'm not saying discount, you know, a man like that, that had less than ideal parentage, but that is something that you must be aware of.
00:42:19.200Yeah, we're formed by our surroundings, by our past experiences, by our family, by our culture.
00:42:25.000And so it's important that we equip our children, our sons and our daughters with the right questions.
00:42:29.580If we, to the degree that we can be involved, we can be asking these questions as well of another father or of the, you know, if I'm, obviously I've hoped to be involved in any young man, you know,
00:42:39.340courting or wanting to date my daughter. So I would love to be able to sit them down, take them
00:42:42.540out, ask them some questions, knowing what questions to ask and what questions to have to
00:42:47.520note for your children to ask are big. Do you, do you have any questions off the top of your head?
00:42:52.640Yeah. Like do you, do you, or have you ever looked at pornography? I think it's a huge one that a
00:42:57.200father should probably ask first if it's, if at all possible, if not, then that question needs
00:43:02.180to be asked by somebody. And I'm talking about from a daughter's perspective. Do you, are you
00:43:06.600a virgin? Have you ever had sex with anybody? I would be asking those kinds of sexual purity1.00
00:43:11.440questions. I would be asking theological questions. Tell me what kind of church do you go? Hopefully
00:43:15.980it's the same church, obviously, but in the ideal, but what kind of church do you go to?
00:43:19.900How did you come to your theological convictions? Do you believe we should baptize, that Christians
00:43:24.060should baptize their children, that the infants of believing parents should be baptized? Do you
00:43:29.400believe that women should be pastors? I mean, like there's a whole range that sexually,
00:43:34.900theologically, what kind of job do you have? How much do you hope to earn?
00:43:39.140How much have you saved up right now? Do you have any debt? What are your plans for your career?
00:43:43.900How many children do you want to have? What do you think about educating children?
00:43:48.000Is there a proper method, principles there? And your daughter's suitor is going to be,
00:43:53.520well, I listened to the King's Hall, so I know all the answers. Of course.
00:43:57.360The King's Hall won't be around by then. I'm just going to let you know it's not going to be like
00:44:00.86015 years. Let's be honest about longevity of podcasts. But yeah, I mean, there's a, there's
00:44:06.120a question. The basic thing we're trying to do is figure out the character and the convictions of
00:44:10.880the person in front of you as help as a father, as well as teaching our children what things to
00:44:16.760value. Yeah. I think there are other principles that you can, uh, I guess you said it like this
00:44:23.600in a, in a Q and a, a canary in the coal mine. Yeah. You know, there, there are a few of those
00:51:47.000Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit more particularly about boys versus girls here and young men versus young women, because obviously we have slightly different aims for our sons versus our daughters and preparing them for marriage.
00:51:59.700And I'll give an example and then ask your thoughts with sons, particularly starting there.
00:52:04.200One of the things, obviously, that we're trying to train our sons to recognize, like we just said, is a godly woman.0.95
00:52:12.380One that they're attracted to, that they can know is a virtuous woman they can entrust to raise the children with and be faithful to.
00:52:20.440So I'm telling my kids, like, okay, as they grow up, my sons need to learn, like, they need to be protected from certain archetypal dangers in a woman.
00:52:33.060One of them would be like a hoe, to just put it straightforwardly.
00:52:36.560A harlot, if you wanted to Bible it up.
00:52:39.100You know, people get so mad when you say hoe on Twitter.1.00
00:52:45.960It's a denigrating word for a certain type of woman that the Bible is just unblushingly repeatedly says, hey, whatever you do, son, don't go down her door, right?0.94
00:52:55.980So I think one of the big things we're doing is we're teaching our sons to identify the sexually immoral woman or the loose woman or the allure of the woman who is the loud woman.
00:53:08.660She doesn't have a gentle and quiet spirit, but she does know what she has to lure, and it's her sexuality.
00:53:15.960So that's one thing as I'm thinking of raising my sons that I'm protecting them.
00:54:14.260So it becomes easier at that point of filtering mechanism, if you will, to identify some of these character deficiencies.0.99
00:54:21.460Like if she is a hoe, like, well, it obviously automatically kicks out because it doesn't meet your vision for what a wife needs to be in order to accomplish your mission here.1.00
00:54:31.780And so she has to be able to raise children.1.00
00:54:51.240You know, so I think the aim is really, really important when you're filtering out spouses for your children or if you're single, you know, your future spouse.
00:56:58.080Like, what is the job description of a wife?0.89
00:57:00.440What is a job description for a husband?
00:57:02.220And then there are certain qualifying, disqualifying things, like you said, like a loose woman would not help you accomplish your mission.1.00
00:57:11.080She flirts with everybody in the school.
00:57:13.260She flirts with, and on the daughter side, it's like, what we're doing is we're trying to teach our sons and teach our daughters how to have an ideal that's not completely impossible and unattainable.
00:57:56.800No, no, no. Women, because their capital is so high right now, because feminine beauty is commodified. And right now, it's especially valuable in the human capital.1.00
00:58:11.340Yeah, in the sexual marketplace. And so women tend to have higher standards than reality, is what you're saying.1.00
00:58:18.380There's a calculator. I can't remember what website it is, but you can put in characteristics you're looking for in a spouse, and it will tell you what percentage of the population is eligible.
00:58:54.320We're teaching our sons what to recognize in an ideal woman, our daughters what to recognize in an ideal man, and we're teaching them how to evaluate those things themselves, what kind of questions to be asking.
00:59:07.980I think a father's involvement at this level is really important to be asking your โ let's say your daughter is getting in some kind of โ she's interested in getting to that age and she's interested in marrying a particular young man or something.
00:59:21.180hey what do you think about this what kind of job is he interested taking interest like a father
00:59:27.100his most important role here is taking interest and initiative to being right there helping his
00:59:33.220child clear away the emotional fog or uh you know twitter patient and ask good questions and be
00:59:42.020sober-minded so how do you think a father gets to that point where his daughter is open enough
00:59:49.340to actually talk to him about these things
01:08:29.720There are a few families that we've talked to at different conferences, and that's one of the aims of the conferences is networking across the country and making connections with men that they trust and then mining their congregations for high-quality families and spouses for their kids.
01:08:47.900And I think that networking can be really powerful with that.
01:08:51.060Now, courting or dating or whatever becomes really challenging because it's now at a distance.
01:10:04.340Is there anybody in your church that's this age range that is looking for marriage that you as a pastor would recommend for some kind of courtship or anything like that?
01:10:18.440Yeah, it's just you being, take initiative as a father and don't put it all, don't be like, yeah, daughter, here, go to college, have fun. Man, do you know what happens to women in the colleges? They just are mattresses, a lot of them. Like, it's horrible. They just become passed around, manipulated by guys who are really good at picking up women. And you're not there. Take initiative. Like, go out and try to find those communities, go to the conferences, do the thing.
01:10:44.060And a lot of it's the value of these sort of events are actually around the people.
01:10:49.120They're not, I don't really care a lot.
01:10:50.900Most of the time, about 90% of the talks at a conference, I want to know who's there.
01:10:55.860Wow, that was a radical statement that I definitely agree with.
01:11:37.440A lot of people find themselves in this because of homesteading fantasies where they find a place where 100 acres is really cheap and they say we're going to homestead.
01:11:46.160I'm not alone in saying โ you can talk to a guy like John Moody who knows his way around homesteading.
01:11:50.900I mean he's working with Joel Salatin and he's involved in this really into productive Christian household stuff.