00:10:49.140for from them under God, children receive their existence.
00:10:52.700In this case, parents stand in God's place
00:10:55.340and are, as it were, God's hand to join their children in marriage.
00:10:59.520God has given explicit laws concerning this point.
00:11:02.420To omit that general moral law, honor thy father and thy mother, the authority and responsibility which God by his law has laid upon parents to give their daughters to husbands and to take wives for their sons, Deuteronomy 7.3, has the force of a law to prohibit children from taking wives or husbands without or against their parents' consent.
00:11:23.000It has been a custom in all Christian churches throughout all ages for the parent or someone in the parent's place to give the bride to the bridegroom at the time of the marriage, by which the parent's consent is openly acknowledged.
00:11:37.840From Deuteronomy 7.3, we can rightly say that fathers are to give their daughters in marriage and to take wives for their sons.
00:11:45.740In either case, godly parents have a primary duty to ensure that their children enter upon godly marriages.
00:11:52.460Gouge was also wise to promote a biblical view of companionable marriage,
00:11:56.860as opposed to cold, prearranged unions,
00:11:59.840whereby the man and woman share an affection for one another,
00:12:03.160a warmth of companionship, a productive household,
00:12:06.360and parental oversight that grows out of their love for one another.
00:12:10.440Another relevant Old Testament passage is Numbers 30, 3-16.
00:25:06.800unmarriageable women, like women that it would be a curse to be married to and men that it would
00:25:11.020be a curse to be married to what was interesting too i mean i agree with you and we were talking
00:25:15.280about just the collapse of the household um so i've been doing a lot of research uh for an
00:25:20.460upcoming book on the longhouse you and i are working on but it's really interesting because
00:25:24.640when you read a lot of the early feminists they were tying feminism to marxism and really their
00:25:32.380goal they said if we want to destroy western civilization which that is the goal of marxism0.95
00:25:36.580that's what they're trying to do they said fundamentally we have to destroy the authority
00:25:39.860of fathers. So this becomes such an important issue. I also think too, the William Gouge quote
00:25:47.600that you read, I think is so pivotal because as we go back to the reformed fathers and we go back
00:25:53.440to people who are actually studying scripture, for him to say something like parents stand in
00:25:57.660the place of God in authority over their children to find spouses, this becomes so pivotal.
00:26:06.220Obviously, it means you have to have a quality marriage in the first place with mom and dad.
00:26:11.020And we'll get into that a little bit later.
00:26:12.720What do you do when a lot of people don't have that?
00:26:15.800But I do think part of it is that the church gives such bad advice.
00:26:19.480So I saw a reel yesterday from Mark Driscoll, and this is actually something that I've critiqued.
00:26:25.840But he said, hey, young men, there's tons of single women in the church.
00:26:32.160and you know those can be prospective spouses for you but he said there's tons of single mothers
00:26:39.940and he said you should really be considering them now something that i had posted on on x about this
00:26:46.860was when you look at the constituents of who are single moms in america like 80 to 90 percent of
00:26:55.120them are like sexual promiscuity, massive, uh, you never married stuff like this. So what I said
00:27:01.940is actually, I think it's terrible advice to young men to be first and foremost thinking about single
00:27:07.800moms. And I think why Mark is saying that is because our churches are full of them, full of
00:27:12.020them. Yeah. And there's going to be a long road of repentance. Yeah. Um, but this gets into that
00:27:17.000same question of like, who are our sons going to marry? You think about your sons. I can speak
00:27:22.220for myself, the first person I'm looking for is not a single mom who's been divorced or never
00:27:27.020married. No, no, because the, the, the Goldilocks situation that is described often was like, well,
00:27:32.700don't overlook single moms because yeah, I mean, there, there are women who were godly women and
00:27:36.760got married and had children and then their husband committed adultery and abandoned them.
00:27:40.260And they were lawfully divorced and the church stood by them and disciplined the other, the,
00:27:43.980the other party. And so, you know, consider, but that's not the normal situation. No, the vet,
00:27:49.740the set, when we're giving advice, we need to make sure that we're giving advice into what is
00:27:53.720generally true about a group. So you, you don't give advice based on the 1% or the 3% or the half
00:28:01.280a percent of a group that is exceptional and say, this is how you should generally interact with
00:28:05.940this whole group. You give advice based on what's generally true. And then, yeah, people can go
00:28:11.320investigate and find exceptions here and there that, that, but those exceptions tend to prove
00:28:16.480the rule. Yeah. Right. And oftentimes as well, you'll find that people will tell their own story
00:28:22.500in a way that they, everybody's an exception. No, very few people stand up and say, yeah, I'm,
00:28:29.300I'm in this situation because I was super promiscuous. I slept with 40 different men
00:28:34.380in college. I got pregnant from two different ones and I was, you know, just a total hoe.
00:28:40.640And that was, you know, and now I'm repentant and, and some people will have the fortitude to say
00:28:45.000that. For the men and the women, we'll have the men who were like that and women who were like
00:28:49.740that. But when we're giving advice to our children, obviously the first goal should be to
00:28:54.080establish a thick culture in a Christian borough that is able to speak. We often put it, it's able
00:29:01.340to speak to every part of what it means to be human. And part of what it means to be human is
00:29:05.540that we're sexual creatures who were designed for marriage. Just read 1 Corinthians 7. We are
00:29:10.080designed to be married normatively. Sometimes God gives the gift of celibacy, which is rare.
00:29:15.940We should use this for risky frontier missions and that sort of thing. But part of what it means
00:29:20.800to be human is that we're marrying. We're a marrying thing. So in a Christian borough,
00:29:25.520plan A should be we're producing children from their youth who know these things,
00:29:32.400know what it is to be a man, know what it is to be a woman, and then we're helping them marry well,
00:29:37.120and we're helping them put up the right walls in their early days we're helping them you know
00:29:42.940navigate this difficult time together finding companionable marriages like guge puts it that
00:29:49.520are not these cold pre-arranged like you know you two are the same age here you go you're going to
00:29:55.080get married but making sure that they have companionship and that they're it's a fitting
00:29:59.880marriage and the the relationship between there should be warmth and affection they like each
00:30:04.320other and they want to be attracted to each other and want to get married. And there was something
00:30:09.600you said a minute ago that just, I wanted to know before we move on. It is interesting.
00:30:15.000Gouge speaks of the parents in this conversation standing in place of God. And we hear that today
00:30:22.100and we're so allergic to authority that we, in hierarchy, that we think, oh, that is crazy.
00:30:28.880Like nobody, we want to constantly downplay authority. What you actually need to understand
00:30:33.820though, is that any lawful authority in situations of human hierarchy, in a sense,
00:30:40.080that authority is standing in place of God. Because if it is a lawful authority, it's an
00:30:46.340authority God established. That's what it means to be a lawful authority. And if it's an authority
00:30:51.740God established, then the goal of that authority is to implement God's will for that which he
00:30:57.840governs over. So every single authority, whether it's the civil magistrate or the pastor or the
00:31:04.880father or the husband or the mother and the father over the children, all of those authorities
00:31:10.120should be thinking of their role as I am standing in place of God here, not replacing God, but I am
00:31:17.880the visible expression of God's authority in this thing. And if we would stop thinking about
00:31:25.740dating and courtship and marriage of our children as this thing where it's like it's mainly their
00:31:30.900thing and we kind of exist for arbitrarily as sort of a social custom for someone to ask dad
00:31:36.600at some point can i marry your daughter if that at all and instead be thinking i have a duty to
00:31:44.000manifest god's will for the children and for these young men and young women into this aspect of their
00:31:51.680lives. Well, and it's interesting because I think as you read through these passages and, you know,
00:31:57.400some of it you can find in books, I think a pretty good one is Her Hand in Marriage by Doug Wilson,
00:32:02.200which is one of his older kind of thinner paperbacks, but a lot of good, I think, insight
00:32:06.520there. It is really interesting, just this concept of having the authority, but also that means you
00:32:12.380have this huge responsibility as a father. It doesn't start on the day when your daughter
00:32:18.020brings somebody home and says, you know, daddy, I'd like you to meet this boy that I met at
00:32:22.420college. It's actually that you've spent, you know, almost two decades shaping what they view
00:32:29.420about sex piety, what they view about mothers and fathers and what marriages and households are even
00:32:34.240for. But then reading this book a few years ago by Pastor Wilson, I was really convicted like,
00:32:42.040wow i need to be preparing my sons i have three boys i need to be preparing them to be godly
00:32:48.440husbands i need and that is going to include things like making sure they're sexually pure
00:32:52.880um making sure you know we're not giving them smartphones at 14 and saying good luck yeah um
00:32:59.040we're really thinking through these issues then um you know thinking through what are they going
00:33:04.760to do for vocation they have to be a provider and i'm talking to them about that what are some
00:33:09.380You know, guys in the church, you can start experiencing even at 12, 13 and 14, like work.
00:33:14.580The men in the church are going to get to know you and then they're going to be the guys vouching or not for you in the future when, you know, the girl's father calls around and says, what kind of worker is he?
00:33:24.660Because those are things a father should be interested in.
00:33:27.800Cultivating relationships with other families over the long haul where you kind of get to know, I like the fruit of this family or I don't.
00:33:35.600and this is, you know, would be an amenable relationship all the way to the point, uh,
00:33:41.400which I did recently. My son was just recently married my oldest. Um, but even getting to the
00:33:47.060point where, you know, you're talking with a dad and saying, Hey, I think my son's interested,
00:33:52.780you know, is there a reciprocal interest? He goes and asked the daughter. She says, actually, yeah,
00:33:59.040there is an interest. And then, you know, and then fathers are overseeing that process and
00:34:03.640setting boundaries. We'll talk more about that in the, in the Patreon show. But just this concept
00:34:09.060in our culture, I think we have such a rank individualism where even, even on matters of
00:34:15.600faith, we say, well, it's up to the children to decide for themselves literally whatever they
00:34:20.020want carte blanche. When they're 18, they're on their own. It's also interesting, Brian,
00:34:25.120you mentioned this, but tied to Abraham and covenant succession, the way that the scripture
00:34:29.880thinks about covenants is to you and your offspring. And the way that Abraham obeyed that
00:34:36.200promise was to get really active and diligent and go find a wife for his son. So I guess if you
00:34:42.600would just speak to why the covenant aspect is so important, as opposed to everybody is just an
00:34:49.520individual Adam floating around, making up their mind on all these matters for themselves.
00:34:53.320No, this is how God has operated from his first dealings with our first human parents,
00:34:59.300Adam and Eve, through Noah, through Abraham, through Solomon, David, we could go through
00:35:06.080the list all the way up to the Lord Jesus and then his apostles and how they instructed
00:35:11.140households and how they thought about households as a covenantal unit, that the promises were
00:35:17.480to you and your children and to all who are far off.
00:35:20.300It's not just to you and then to the nations kind of generally, it's to you and yeah, and
00:35:26.160your household, your offspring, your sons, your daughters, and then to all those who are far off.
00:35:32.500And so we see them acting consistently with this whenever they're heralding the gospel
00:35:36.180to those who have never heard it, like the Philippian jailer, or you can go through example
00:35:40.840after example in the New Testament, where they're saying things like, there's one example where
00:35:46.060Peter is speaking to the jailer, and the jailer, his family's not even there. And Peter says,
00:35:54.700you know believe in this gospel i've just told you and you will be saved you and your household
00:35:59.180they're not even there like peter has no evidence that they'll all be inwardly persuaded of the
00:36:05.200of the gospel so what is he doing there well he's just he's saying i believe that god the way that
00:36:13.260he's always dealt with man he's going to continue he didn't change his mind he's going to continue
00:36:17.280dealing in that way it's covenantal it's covenantal there's covenant succession where the the normative
00:36:23.100pattern is that yes, God as judge does deliver, deliver the iniquity of the father to the third
00:36:29.840and fourth generation, but also God as merciful King, um, also visits his faithfulness to the
00:36:37.220thousandth generation of those who love him and keep his commands. And right there, we want to
00:36:42.720immediately introduce, um, uh, a big wedge because that promises to those who love me and keep my
00:36:50.420commands. And so there are commands to be kept. Like the Lord said, if you love me, you'll keep
00:36:57.940my commands. That promise involves active obedience from fathers, from mothers. It involves
00:37:05.120active obedience on our part where we don't just say, I have true inward faith myself and my
00:37:11.800children. Good luck. I cast them on the providence of God with no active obedience on my part.
00:37:16.580well isn't it so interesting i totally agree with that it's so interesting with abraham
00:37:20.680and i love his just his faith here that he says god made me a promise he will surely do it
00:37:27.180therefore i'm going to get to work yeah and and he says to the servant and the lord will be with you
00:37:32.980yeah and then the servant goes out and he's he's like i love the servant el is eliezer he goes
00:37:39.300out and he's like gets there on his camel and he's he's just like he he just got into town
00:37:45.380and he doesn't think to himself like I really got to go search I got to like have a committee
00:37:49.860I got to have tryouts he's just like God in his providence is going to do this I'm tired boss
00:37:54.720so he prays he said that was a journey and he just prays Lord like whoever the first lady is
00:38:00.220that offers water to my camel let that be the one sure enough the Lord is just you know infinitely
00:38:05.960kind it's so that that part I might be getting you know maybe I'm just reading into that a little bit
00:38:12.220But I've always thought that was really funny that he was so confident in God's because God had made it clear that that was who they were to marry from.
00:38:22.440And so Abraham and the servant both operated in faith and said, no, there's a there's a wife here.
00:38:27.540And I think there's something there for us in faith.
00:38:30.700if you if you're in the right community if you're connecting with the right communities and you're
00:38:36.860where you know you're looking to the the orchard where this kind of fruit grows then you should
00:38:42.700think for your children with a kind of faith that you just say no there's a there's a husband here
00:38:48.000there's a wife here yeah and i would also say to people because we've had this question
00:38:52.380there is faith and then there's what you can see so when we came to refuge we were thinking through
00:38:59.160this too. Like who are my sons going to marry? Um, and at the time there really weren't like
00:39:03.900teenage girls or even girls like my son's age. Right. Yeah. You guys from the older kids.
00:39:08.500But I remember having preached through Ruth before we had come and thinking about Naomi
00:39:14.460and Ruth. And all they did was they looked and they say, God's blessing Bethlehem in the midst
00:39:21.140of a famine. They could see where God's blessing was. They didn't see how it was going to work out.
00:39:28.500There wasn't a readily available, microwavable answer sitting on the table.
00:39:32.840But they both reasoned by faith and they said, we can go, let's put ourself where the blessing is.
00:39:39.000And I remember reading that and thinking, okay, I don't actually see spouses right now,
00:39:43.380but I can see that God is blessing the work of this church and blessing its people.
00:39:48.260And I can put myself where I see blessing happening.
00:39:51.580So then we came and just by the grace of God, through the conference, we met this wonderful family, pastor down the road, Reformed Baptist pastor.
00:40:00.940And, you know, over time, he and I both built relations with the families, got to know each other.
00:40:11.420So I look at that and I think there's a lot of people who look at Ogden and they go, well, I don't see, like I visited once and I don't see the lady.
00:40:20.420I didn't see the one with the sign over that said, your son's wife, your daughter's husband.
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00:58:32.240a registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
00:58:35.280I have a son who's 12, and he's one of my sons, and he's got his first out-of-the-house.
00:58:41.060You know, I've paid him to do stuff, do this job.
00:58:43.020I give him all my boys and girls, too, even, in different fitting ways.
00:58:48.400Like, Hey, I'll give you 10 bucks if you can do this really well. And then, you know, one of them
00:58:51.480maybe come back and I say, you didn't do $10 worth of work there, son. Like you got to go,
00:58:55.620go finish that. And then I'll, I'll pay you. And you know what a boss would have thought of that?
00:58:59.960You know, if you were working down the street for so-and-so in the church, you know what he
00:59:03.980would have thought of that, you know, two hours of work you did, he probably would have thought
00:59:07.020it was worth about 20 minutes, you know, or a great job, really diligent. So my son's got his
00:59:12.180first out of the house where he, he rides his bike, you know, mile or two away from our house.
00:59:18.400to another, to a household in the church that needed some services every week. He goes and does
00:59:23.080some stuff for him. And then he, you know, he, I said, you, you figure out what he's going to pay
00:59:28.680you negotiate with him. He way underbid it first, first of all, but then he, uh, you know, he goes
00:59:35.580and does it, comes back, make sure you're doing a good word, ask, how am I doing? And, um, it's
00:59:40.560such a small thing. Yeah. But when I think about, if you go back to your world as a 12 year old
00:59:46.160and think, did that feel like a small thing? No, no. That felt like a, Ooh, there, it takes
00:59:52.740courage and diligence and it's going to be hard and you're nervous. Cause you don't know either
00:59:57.800of us in a grown man, you'd be like, yeah, you go over there, you do the job you did. Is it done?
01:00:01.880Whatever. But to them, they're like, they're nervous about 50 different things. Okay. I could
01:00:07.460have gone and negotiated. I could drop them off every time I could like make it my problem. But
01:00:11.420I'm like, no, son, you got to you have to make it your problem if you're going to go do this.
01:00:15.940These are just small examples of fitting sexed piety, virtue winning formation opportunities, thinking so that by the time my son is 18, 19, 20 and beyond, you're ready to commend him to another family.
01:00:36.200Yeah, and then the value, too, in a community is, like, for Benjamin, by the time he was, you know, seeking marriage, you also have all these men in the community who are like, yeah, this is a good man.
01:00:47.020Like, you know, there's that whole process, which is really good.
01:00:50.720One of the things I want to ask you, this kind of gets into, I think, complementarianism.
01:00:55.420But with Josh Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I saw this a lot growing up where a lot of these principles aren't bad, like parental involvement.
01:01:03.220saw this a lot with like focus on the family they had a lot of good you know principles that they
01:01:08.340would give for you know no sex before marriage or something uh but it also kind of none of that
01:01:14.660stuff really stuck with my generation it seems like um and and i the reason i tie it to
01:01:20.260complementarianism is because i think a lot of it didn't go far enough i think it was
01:01:24.140kind of shallow i think they were halfway houses where you took egalitarian principles and you kind
01:01:30.020of tried to amend some of it. Yeah. You baptized feminist first principles, but you know,
01:01:36.380even the thing with Josh Harris, like I remember after, you know, it was a big debacle after he
01:01:40.060got divorced, his wife was, you know, ex-wife, I guess at that point was talking about like,
01:01:45.400yeah, I was promiscuous like before marriage. And even when I was married, I would think about all
01:01:50.400those men and, and then I'm going to leave and whatever. So I look at that and I'm like, okay,
01:01:56.540I feel like there was a lot of woodenly applied principles, people who maybe didn't understand
01:02:04.140the deep root, like people weren't reading William Gouge.
01:02:07.680They didn't, the fundamental error, like where I see the biggest gap is that our evangelical
01:02:14.900culture, including a lot of complementarian culture, it doesn't understand fully the nature
01:02:21.440of a man and the nature of a woman and what they were created for, what their positive
01:02:26.180duties are and how those positive duties relate to their nature, how God made a man and how God
01:02:31.820made a woman. And so we're kind of like a couple stories up the building, um, working in building,
01:02:38.080but we don't understand the foundation. Not a perfect metaphor, but do you get what I'm saying?
01:02:44.160Like, I think that's where a lot of the error is. We're not making men fitting for their nature and
01:02:49.520governing in accordance with the nature of men and women. So we do dumb stuff like this. We send our
01:02:54.620daughters off to college. And that's just stupid. I mean, it is just stupid to do that. You shouldn't0.98
01:03:00.540do that. Well, and especially if you, like, if you read the passage in Deuteronomy and you
01:03:05.640understand that there's really two people who would have authority over a young woman, first
01:03:10.420her father, and then through the transfer at the wedding, her husband, her husband. So even this,
01:03:16.140I mean, it really gets under the skin of the feminist because, and a lot of feminist men,1.00
01:03:21.440I mean, to where they're going, wait a minute.1.00
01:03:24.500So a daughter can't just leave home and do whatever she wants?
01:03:27.540I'm reading this great book right now called Kristen Laverne's Daughter at the recommendation of my wife.
01:03:32.460She's been telling me to read it for like a year.
01:03:34.680And it was written in probably the 1920s by this woman whose father was a historian or an expert on basically medieval Christian Catholic culture.
01:03:44.500And the book is set in the 1300s in Norway.
01:03:47.540And one of the I'm about 60 percent through the book.
01:03:50.300but one of the main themes so far has been fatherly authority, marrying well, our sinful
01:03:57.220passions being subdued or not subdued by wisdom. And one of the errors that even a good father in
01:04:03.760the book makes is that he sends his daughter off. He has, she's been betrothed to this good man
01:04:10.140named Simon, Simon, but they, the, I'm listening to it and the ladies like Norwegian. And so
01:04:15.880she pronounces it seaman which is uncomfortable for me but he's like this great he's a good godly
01:04:23.460man very mature very responsible good father good family good work ethic all this stuff but he's not
01:04:29.900like flashy and you know she's a young woman the father's done a good job of betrothing her to this
01:04:36.900man good fitting companionable match whatever and then um he decides he makes this fatal error he's
01:04:43.880going to send her off to a convent for a year during this betrothal because of some issues or
01:04:48.620whatever. She had had some issues at home with local people and some drama. And so she's like,
01:04:54.040I'll send her away for a year so she can kind of escape this drama. So now she's in this nunnery.
01:04:58.100And in the course of the nunnery, when she's supposed to be overseen by all these sisters
01:05:01.960and nuns, she runs into a knight named Alan. And you can guess, I mean, I won't spoil the whole
01:05:12.100book but the the whole book is about the decisions that she makes and one of the central themes is
01:05:17.720a vow that she makes to mary well i am kind of spoiling it she makes a vow to the knight
01:05:25.980who seduces her more or less and it's it's an approach there's very there's no
01:05:31.060inappropriate stuff in the book at all it's very very well done um but you get the point well
01:05:37.060enough but you get the point you know that she communicates what is taking place she makes a vow
01:05:42.620and her father never hears of this vow until much later and there's this second key failure
01:05:52.120where he fails to do the proper nullification of the vow yeah that's a good point too i think
01:05:59.760when you as a father when you abdicate you're still you're still ruling yes so it's bad
01:06:07.340leadership and he's a good lead like in this situation a lot of his deception that the daughter
01:06:13.060right he doesn't know he doesn't know all of it but but it just shows like this one decision and
01:06:18.620it's so interesting to me that even though it's in the 1300s and this was not an unusual thing
01:06:23.000to happen yeah for a maiden a virgin young daughter to be sent to the convent for a time
01:06:27.620for spiritual instruction and things like that for a period of time before a wedding or in
01:06:33.260betrothal or whatever. But it's a similar thing where he says, yeah, you can go for this extended
01:06:39.640period of time out of my household. And then lo and behold, what happens? Well, she is basically
01:06:46.420placed in a position to rule herself and she immediately makes extraordinarily bad decisions0.99
01:06:53.260with her and there's no male authority that's governing the decisions yeah this is actually a
01:06:59.780common theme through jane austen and through her books like you think of sense and sensibility
01:07:05.200um i think you have willoughby and the daughter is like she's really into willoughby because he's
01:07:11.460like recites poetry and he's seducing her and he ends up being a womanizer who just uses women to
01:07:17.740his advantage producing illegitimate children or whatever and then you have i think colonel
01:07:22.780brandon somebody will correct this if it's wrong that's all right first and foremost will be my
01:07:27.020wife she's like you don't remember come on i know but i think it's colonel brandon and he's like
01:07:33.140a very distinguished gentleman he does have a lot of wealth but he's not flashy
01:07:37.740and so she ends up falling for willoughby willoughby and in the end of course you know
01:07:44.660she comes to realize his name's willoughby yeah i know red flag so then she comes to realize okay
01:07:53.100this stable guy who you know is quieter why are there so many stories where oh it turns out that
01:07:59.540the stable guy you thought was not as sexually exciting turned out to be what would have been a
01:08:05.120great husband and instead you went with the guy who's really really actually has no virtue right
01:08:10.900Right. And then like the dad had died. So there's nobody guiding affairs and stuff like that. And so like women are left to themselves and it goes poorly. So, yeah, to your point, I do think that fathers especially need to think through really tough issues. Like, would I send my daughter to the University of Georgia or Tennessee or whatever it is, just because that's a cultural thing to do where she is going to become a used mattress?
01:08:33.420and then she's even if she finds a godly husband and things end up going well it's like you're
01:08:39.660going to bring all this baggage even if even if your daughter manages to be one of the few
01:08:45.220who escapes conformity to the culture of the women surrounding her you have to understand
01:08:50.140if you send her to a university like this that the people she is surrounded by are that yes and
01:08:57.460the gravity of that culture is attempting to conform her and she was created again to the0.79
01:09:03.780to the creational nature of the woman she was created to be won and ruled by a man
01:09:09.560what it's interesting too uh when benjamin started this process of you know dating um
01:09:16.060we were meeting with his father-in-law now and i he's just pastorally very wise and one of the
01:09:22.920things he said to my son in that meeting which i just thought was great it's a reflection of what
01:09:27.020we've been talking about with biblical principle, but he said to him, I'm putting some of these
01:09:31.640rules in place to guard both of your sexual purity. And he said, I want you to know one
01:09:37.000of the greatest gifts I can ever give you is a sexually pure woman in my daughter. And so I'm
01:09:44.040going to protect that and safeguard that for you. It's not out of a weird asceticism. No.
01:09:49.560It's because of the high value of the marriage bed that a father should do this. And I thought,
01:09:57.080What a great thing to say, you know, I'm giving you this.
01:10:00.780One other error I think that has to be corrected because you start talking about Gouge and parents being involved.
01:10:06.820And people immediately think, oh, so arrange marriages.
01:10:10.420And then they automatically think of like the worst example you could think of, which is like, you know, you see this in the movies where old kings would be like, son, I've pledged you to marry the princess from France.
01:10:22.100And they hate each other and they get married.
01:10:28.160Gouge even has a section in Domestical Duties where he talks about this, and he says, if a father comes to his daughter, and he says, I think, or his son, and he says, I think this would be a good spouse, let's try to pursue this.
01:10:44.200And Gouge says, a daughter can say, I have no affection nor desire for him.
01:10:48.880And the father says, I think you might be missing something.
01:10:51.100guge says the daughter should try and see if feelings arise and affection maybe she's misreading
01:10:59.300it but he says ultimately if she prays about it and she just says to her dad like i cannot marry
01:11:05.580this man then the father should listen to his daughter as well so it's not as if you're going
01:11:11.300to say hey completely against either of your wills no no you're saying like again in our in
01:11:18.440our situation i think this is ideal where you say like hey i think this this girl and your son goes
01:11:23.600well yeah and then you ask the daughter and she goes very interested yeah and then they meet and
01:11:28.540they have some interaction that the fathers are overseeing and then you know you go through that
01:11:34.620and both kids are like yep two golden thumbs up let's can we get married next week right no not
01:11:40.380quite not quite yeah but they're super excited things are going well so i think that is
01:11:44.960companionable marriage. The Puritans were really good on this. The idea of deep, affectionate
01:11:51.440companionship, there should be genuine love. Gouge talks about the warmth and affection
01:11:57.380that you have early in courtship. And then they were talking about betrothal. And then in your
01:12:03.440marriage, he said, this will see you through many hard days because you have a deep, warm,
01:12:08.840a cherishing and an affection for one another. One layer to that I think is worth exploring a
01:12:14.040little bit here in this conversation is some categories where a young man and a young woman
01:12:19.620can grow in their ability to attract a high quality spouse and basically set themselves up
01:12:32.100to have a higher likelihood of success in establishing that kind of companionable
01:12:35.080relationship. And these are things fathers and mothers should also be shaping in their sons and
01:12:39.340daughters. So practically one, one place that comes to mind, if you're having a really hard
01:12:46.080time finding a Christian spouse, a godly spouse, and you've done the things like you've gone,
01:12:51.160maybe even you've relocated, you're in a community where there's, there's fruit on the tree. You just
01:12:55.460keep getting rejected. It's not working out or you've tried everything. And you know, you've
01:12:59.580approached five people you would have been interested in or 10 people. And none of them
01:13:02.660are interested in you. I think of the categories of my physical, my body. I think of the categories
01:13:10.000of my virtue, my character. I think of the categories of my personality and my bearing.
01:13:17.080I think of the categories of my achievements and accomplishments. And if you can go through
01:13:21.900those categories and improve yourself in them, you just will improve your odds. So as an example,
01:13:28.120if you have found yourself over and over failing to find a spouse and you've there've been people
01:13:34.280you've interested in and you take an honest assessment of yourself and you say yeah i'm
01:13:38.680i'm 40 body fat you need to lose weight you need to discipline yourself and you need because you
01:13:45.420will be more attractive you will it will prove greater character and that just will be a hindrance
01:13:50.560for a man or a woman if you have some large correctable defect in your physical appearance
01:13:57.620that's a real you need to do that yeah i think it's a real common one it's often uncomfortable
01:14:02.180i know pastorally because you'll have young people come to you and say hey why am i striking out so
01:14:07.460much okay let me let me help you and i would say generally there's kind of like two main categories
01:14:12.300that we experience at least locally and and i would say we i say local but we talk to a lot
01:14:19.220of people through the conference yeah and so people are coming to the singles mixer totally
01:24:28.800Well, I think being able to, like, let's say you're a father with a son.
01:24:33.040If your son has a porn problem, there is no way on God's green earth that you should be allowing him to go be like flirting and asking girls out.
01:27:44.240If you're not yet a member, you can become one.
01:27:45.720I think the lowest tier is like five, six, somewhere in there, uh, for Patreon dollars a month. Uh, we do also have a $10 a month tier, uh, get access to all exclusive content. So check that out. Well, hopefully it's really helpful for people. And I'm looking forward to that discussion.
01:28:01.100yeah absolutely any closing thoughts brian yeah i mean just those last two categories that if you're
01:28:06.940if you can improve yourself i would say social grace is one and then achievement accomplishment
01:28:11.840is the other one yeah social grace is just do you know how to interact with a human being
01:28:16.860and getting feedback from people who know you like you could be an attractive godly person
01:28:24.320and then absolutely kill yourself in your prospects with no social grace, but it's,
01:28:31.100you can learn these things, their skills. Yeah. And you need coaching. Yeah. And you need coach.
01:28:35.780And then on the last category of achievement, I'm thinking of achievement, fitting your sex.0.99
01:28:42.960So for a woman, if you are those first three things, you have social grace, attractiveness,
01:28:48.660you are um godly and in bear yourself well in the church and then you add to that that you are great
01:28:57.740with children and that you have seven different skills that are going to contribute to a productive
01:29:03.640household well yeah that so that's those are big ones i think yeah for my daughter-in-law um what
01:29:09.940was so attractive i think to my son and but also as a father to me about like oh this is a godly
01:29:14.560woman uh her mother is a wonderful homemaker yep homeschools nine children um but you could also
01:29:21.440watch her and i was like so what do you do during the day well i help my dad with the business
01:29:25.320yep um i help homeschool my younger siblings and you could just watch and it's like anytime we
01:29:31.680were around other people she was like oh that mom's trying to get in the food line i'll go
01:29:35.720hold her baby and really enjoy it active and you're just looking at that and you're saying
01:29:39.580okay like like she i think she made us bread or cookies one time and i was like benjamin you're
01:29:44.840like how do we make sure nobody else finds out about this my son and for a man too if a man is
01:29:52.040even if he's 19 20 years old and he says um these are the skills that i've the accomplishments that
01:29:59.480i've achieved this is how i conducted myself in my education i was the top of my class or i did
01:30:05.200really well. I excelled here and I saw this gift and then I pursued this business or I work with
01:30:09.620this guy. This is my goal. These are my goals. Here's what I've done concretely to achieve them.
01:30:16.020And it's like, so you've got all of that. And in the achievement area, I would add one last
01:30:21.400warning. And we get this, we talk about this a lot on BrightHearth because I think it's a warning
01:30:26.240that young women need to hear the most. They sometimes, particularly if they have a good
01:30:33.280dad or good community they think a man is not ready for marriage unless he has all of the fruit
01:30:38.400experience and curriculum vitae of a guy who is 40 you're looking for trajectory you're looking
01:30:46.180for character you're looking at competence today and but if a guy's 20 he's going to be 20 he's
01:30:51.040not going to be making you can't say i'm only going to marry a man who's making 150 000 a year
01:30:55.840or more at 20 or 23 or maybe you will find a man like that, but you, but so is it, is it
01:31:03.400fine to ask a young man or through your father or someone to find out what is the ceiling of his
01:31:09.480career? And you could say the ceiling of his chosen career path right now is $52,000 a year.
01:31:14.840He's a public school teacher at second graders. You know what? I just don't know if he can,
01:31:19.020if he can support a godly household that, that matters. But if you go, okay, yeah,