Moving Toward Marriage

ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents passion and purity with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled moving toward marriage [Music] our series is called passion and purity my first talk was on a young man in love i told you a little bit about how jim elliott and i fell in love in college and surrendered our feelings for each other to god and it was a long and agonizing wait before god actually brought us together a time of five and a half years before he brought us together as husband and wife then my second talk was entitled virginity is an irreplaceable gift and in this third talk i would like to be as practical as down to earth as i possibly can in giving you some guidelines as to how to preserve that virginity or if you've already given your virginity away how you may return to chair to chastity how to return to chastity and purity and bring your love life under the lordship of jesus christ and so i've entitled this talk a man moves toward marriage maybe i should say moving toward marriage because i certainly will be giving some hints for women too but i i am deeply concerned about the way men are going about this whole business of what we used to call courtship i don't even know whether there is such a word anymore but the letters i get would indicate that the whole dating scene is absolute chaos from what college students are telling me whether it's secular universities or christian colleges the scene seems to be in just as big trouble in either case and i think that it was josh mcdowell i may be misquoting but i think it was josh mcdowell who did some kind of a survey that indicated that the sexual morays of secular colleges were exactly the same as those on christian campuses now that is pretty appalling and i do hear stories that would corroborate that first hand and one of the things that seems to characterize the baby boom generation the people that were born between 1946 and 1964 is an unwillingness to make a commitment i read that the baby boom people were very good at committing themselves in groups for example the student protests during the 1960s and the riots and those kinds of things woodstock would be another example they were great at group commitments but any time it involved an individual choice and a decision they become paralyzed so even though the college students now are younger than the baby boom generation i think we've all been affected by some of the things that took place back in the late 50s and the 60s so one of the one of the names that has been applied to baby boomers is the postponed generation everywhere my husband and i go we meet the most beautiful christian women just elegant feminine dedicated to the lord and they're getting on toward 30 35 40 and there don't seem to be any men we get letters from these women we do get some letters from men too i've had a number of letters from young men who tell me that they're hoping that god is going to give them a virgin but they don't think there are any left and the women that have come across their paths have been very far from being virgins in fact one of them described them as barracudas and they're out there to get their man well this is a tragic situation obviously marriage is the will of god for most men and most women and i think that we can generally assume that each one is each one needs to take it seriously and to do a lot of praying about it now i think i can speak for most of the young women that they are doing the praying they're doing a lot of very plain and fancy praying that the lord will bring christian men into their lives and give them the gift of marriage but i find it it seems to be rare for a young man to be taking seriously as a matter of responsibility before god his adult job his adult duty to become a man to put away childish things to settle down and become a husband and then a father now as you know i have spent some time with primitive tribes in south america and in each of these tribes there were certain rituals or rites of passage through which a young man had to go in order to be recognized as passing from childhood to manhood i have never heard of a primitive tribe that has a word for teenager and when i was growing up i was never a teenager because there was no such thing that term was coined during the baby boom generation when we became so conscious of these enormous numbers of children because the population really did explode at that time that we had to give names to these various age groups but as i read my bible i noticed that there are children and there are adults but there are no teenagers and i think it's significant i think it's very significant that jesus made a clear break with his parents his earthly parents mary and joseph at the age of 12. and you remember that they when they went to jerusalem and went back again were on their way home they had traveled three days the parents when they discovered that jesus was not with them they went back and sought him sorrowing throughout the city and finally found him sitting there a twelve-year-old boy confounding the rabbis and the scribes with his knowledge of the scriptures i don't think we can dismiss that scene as not applicable to ourselves jesus was god of course but he was still human and he still had to be a child and he had to be subject to his parents but you remember his answer when mary said to him why have you done this to us we have sought you sorrowing and he said didn't you know that i must be about my father's business and at the age of 12 we need to start treating our children as responsible and if you have not taught them to be responsible for the first 12 years then it's going to be very difficult job but i'm speaking today about male responsibility in the matter of marriage i'm not going to leave you women out i'm going to give you some hints as well but i think of the alca indians for example a tribe that i lived with and every every girl had to learn to weave hammocks and make pots and plant manioc and catch fish with her hands by the time she was 8 years old or 10 years old she could do all of these things perfectly you can imagine the consternation and the total perplexity of the alka indians when they saw this not only full grown but really giant foreigner in their midst i was taller than the tallest man and my and the tallest woman was about up to my shoulder when they realized that i could not make hammocks i couldn't weave hammocks i couldn't make clay pots i couldn't catch fish with my hands i couldn't do anything that a normal adult woman could do or even a ten-year-old girl they had to take responsibility and the boys learned from their fathers to make blow guns and spears to shoot blow guns and they had to take their share of going out and looking for meat so they were not children from the time they were 10 years old and on now that seems very cruel in our very laid back and postponed society where children are permitted to be children up until the age of thirty-five i mean when you see a man who is completely absorbed with dirt bikes for example or those high-wheeled trucks that go through mud you know you see them on tv i i can't believe my eyes but nine times out of ten they're men in their late 20s 30s 40s playing hang gliding scuba diving dirt biking and all the rest of it there is something radically wrong with our society and my heart goes out to all these dear christian women that i know who are trying to be obedient to god's order not go out looking for a husband but waiting on god and it's not easy to wait only on god scripture says my soul wait thou only upon god and many of them are living their lives waiting on the men and the men are not visible not available courtship has fallen on hard times dating seems to be almost non-existent in fact sometimes i'm asked what is a date well back in my day we all knew what a date was a man did the asking a man decided where you were going and a man of course picked up the tab and just last week i was in nebraska and speaking to a singles class in church and one of the questions that was raised in the question and answer period was what is a date and one girl said well you know sometimes i pick up the tab and i said to her don't you ever do that again because in a sense you know you're really denying the man his masculine responsibility which is to take charge to take care of you and if he is the one who does the asking then of course he picks up the tab and if he hasn't got the money to pick up the tab he can ask a girl out for the first date that i ever had with jim ellie at the same kind of a date it was a coke and he called me up at the dormitory and he said how about a coke date and that was it that was the only date we ever had except going to a missionary meeting in chicago and the only money that he had was enough for the train fare to get to chicago he did not have enough money to buy me a meal or even an ice cream cone and i appreciated that i understood that and i certainly understand the difficulty that young people have in having any extra money and yet it's amazing how much money they have when it comes to buying a new cd or whatever else they seem to want you know those designer genes or something so some practical suggestions having given you all that by way of introduction i have 11 things that i'm going to give you by way of a a method that i really believe works if you want to move toward adult responsibility and as i said in my first talk i'm not going to claim that this is the law of sinai i'm not going to say that i can give you a scripture verse for each of these 11 things but i am going to say that there are principles behind these and that i have personally seen the validity and the success of this method my father is an example to me of godliness and just recently i've been working on a book which is going to include both my father's and my mother's brief biographies by by way of introduction to what i consider the making of a christian family the book is on that subject and i had really forgotten i'm sure i must have heard the story but my father's been dead since 1963. i had forgotten the story of their courtship and as i read through my father's diaries i discovered that when he met catherine gillingham who became my mother he also knew margaret haynes and charlotte bunting and somebody else and so in the diary entries i'd find margaret one day and charlotte the next day and catherine the next day and margaret but it was never a date it was never a date it was only i saw charlotte bunting in church or i walked home with charlotte bunting or i was invited to margaret haynes's home by mrs haynes which is certainly a proper way of going about introducing your daughter to nice men or catherine gillingham came over while i was at margaret haynes's and for several months i keep reading about margaret and charlotte and catherine well then he gets invited by margaret haynes to maine to what used to be called a house party in those days and margaret was the hostess and there were going to be several young people there my father was one of the earlier arrivals and as they were standing on the dock of this summer place on an island in maine the boat approached the dock the gang plank was put down and down the gangplank came catherine gillingham and my father stood there on the dock next to margaret haynes and he said to himself there is the woman that i want for my wife this was thursday afternoon on saturday he asked my mother to go for a walk and she assuming that he meant the whole gang she said sure let's all go for a walk so she invited everybody and they all went for a walk and saturday night he came along and he asked her again if she if she would take a walk with him and she did exactly the same thing again so in desperation on sunday he said may i take you to church alone and she thought what is it with this guy you know i mean he must be he's margaret haynes's friend and so she consented rather with perplexity and puzzlement and he proposed to her they had never had a date they had had many opportunities to observe each other from a distance and jim elliott and i only had two dates one was the coke in the student center one was the missionary meeting but i knew there was no question in my mind that this man had the qualities and the character and the godliness that were at the top of my list for the things that i was looking for lars and i met a couple when we were in india whose marriage had been arranged as virtually all indian marriages are they were christians and both sets of parents were christians but their parents had arranged the marriage with no consultation of course with the couple themselves the man had seen the bride from a distance before she had never laid eyes on him until they were married and after in the wedding ceremony then her veil is removed and she sees her groom for the first time and she told us how god had worked these things out and it was indeed a very beautiful marriage that they had and when i hear stories about the arranged marriages which is what most of human race throughout most of human history has had don't forget in the bible they were arranged marriages the score of success is a whole lot higher than the do-it-yourself method we have here so i would love to go back to arranged marriages but i'm not going to suggest that i was with a couple the other night who had such beautiful children and i said i'd like to arrange some marriages with my grandchildren and they said well my four children are already spoken for by so-and-so anyway the first thing that i would say to a man who wants to do business with god about this is you must make a choice the choice that i talked about in my first talk is it going to be god's will or mine if you have not made that choice then i can't help you with anything else that has to be between you and god will you do what god wants you to do the second thing is to begin praying if you have not already gotten down to business on your knees before god let me suggest that at least by the age of 18 you should be considering yourself a responsible adult young people want to be adults at 15 or 16 when it comes to getting a driver's license don't they but paying the bills that's a whole nother thing voting and buying liquor and getting a driver's license they want to be adults real soon but i think in god's economy it's perfectly clear that god arranged the reproductive system so that it works by the time you're 11 or 12 or 13. does that tell us anything at all about god's attitude towards children and adults so at the age of 18 at the latest you ought to be serious with god about this thing and praying and as i told you earlier i started to pray when i was 16 that god would never allow me to fall in love with a man that i was not going to marry and god answered that prayer the third thing confess your sins if there have been sexual sins certainly those need to be confessed and laid out before god and i'm speaking of confessing them to god if they have been sexual sins then you certainly need to ask the forgiveness of the individual against whom you have sinned but you can start over and god will cleanse you and give you back your chastity number four serious prayer about the matter of marriage number two is you must begin praying about your whole life's plan but if in fact it appears that god's will is probably marriage for you and as i said i think most of us can assume that it is god's will because the majority of people do marry then you must grow up paul said when i became a man i put away childish things and put away your obsession with entertainment and sports and leisure time and realize that the serious business of life involves taking on a family and being able to support that family and that's very serious business i've been reading some of the biographies of the 19th century especially looking for the stories of their courtships and it is amazing how often the story is very similar to my father and mothers now i didn't finish the story of my father he proposed to my mother she didn't give him an answer she was absolutely thunderstruck she hadn't the slightest warning whatsoever so she said well i'm going to have to pray about this and think about it and she made him wait for six weeks before she gave him yes but during that time they really didn't see very much of each other i read a biography of a man named charles alexander who was the song leader with dl moody for part of his career d.l moody also traveled with ira d sankey but charles m alexander was a hymn writer and also one of his accompanists and song leaders and charles alexander was traveling with dl moody from the time he was about 20 until he was 27. so they were all around the world and they had very little time in any one place so charles had virtually no chance to get to know any women but he was very eager to find a wife and he'd been praying all along that the lord would give him a wife but he had a long list of qualifications when he got to be 27 he was in england and this whole matter kept coming before him and he really wanted to find a godly wife and this time he got down on his knees and he said lord here's my list this is what i have been looking for and i haven't found her now lord i'll take your list you give me the wife that you know is appropriate for me maybe if you gave me this list she wouldn't be the right one so lord i'll take the woman that you want to give me and very shortly thereafter there was a very attractive young woman on the platform with him and mr moody he noticed her he was impressed with her dignity her femininity her beauty or something i don't think that was even mentioned in the biography whatever it was he was attracted to her and she stood up and gave a testimony he did not know her name but he said to himself that is the woman i want to marry a godly woman her testimony had proved to him that she was on the same wavelength that he wanted to be on himself he went back that night to the mansion where he was staying and it turned out that his hostess was the aunt of this young woman he asked for an introduction he took her out for dinner the next night or maybe two or three nights later and he proposed and she married him now when i tell stories like this people think there is no way that that could ever work in this day and age but i'm talking about a young man who has prayed for seven years and he has not been dating during that time he has simply been praying and watching and waiting number five i would say you need to define a date now unfortunately we do not have rituals and rites of passage which signal the passing from childhood into adulthood i think we lose a great deal by that the only thing that even comes close would be sports and i think one of the reasons that american men are so obsessed with sports is because they have no other way of proving to the world that they are men if they had the rights of passage that primitive tribes have they wouldn't need to prove anything would be very obvious so you need to define a date which is a very poor substitute for the rights of passage but it seems to be the only thing we've got left in our society and it ought to be a time when a man recognizes himself as a gentleman and this woman as a lady and it's a way of signaling and i'm not saying that these are the words that he would use in inviting her on a date but simply a way of saying in effect i'm a gentleman and i would like to treat you like a lady for one evening and i'm not recommending that you do any dating at all until you've done the kind of praying that i'm talking about the date that i've told you about that charles m alexander had with his future wife is a sensible one but it should be considered as an approach to marriage for this reason i am opposed to dating among teenagers especially one-on-one i think it's fine to have lots of group activities which are supervised by the church or by your families but you need to be very clear that brother and sister relationships which are good terms to describe our spiritual relationship that is not a an appropriate term to describe what you and i both know is something quite different from brother and sister when we are sexually attracted to one of the opposite sex that's when you want a date and i'm speaking of sexually attracted in the very broadest sense it doesn't mean you date somebody because you want to go to bed with them but i think there's a lot of self-deception and dishonesty about relationships oh well she's just a sister or he's just a prayer partner or it's just a platonic relationship 99 times out of 100 according to the correspondence that i have and the conversations that i have with young people in these quote platonic relationships one or the other is going to fall in love and get their heart broken so be very careful now number six i'm going to recommend that you quit dating all together now that sounds outrageous and when i said this last week in nebraska i was thrilled to death when i finished speaking the leader of this singles class stood up and he said i want to corroborate what elizabeth has just said not that she needs corroboration but he said i want to give you my testimony and he told us how he had really messed up the lives of a couple of girls by breaking their hearts and he said i finally realized that my whole attitude was wrong that i had never submitted this business to god and so he decided to quit dating and to get to know god and so he said for the next nine years i did no dating i only prayed and he said when i was 29 the lord brought the woman into my life without ever any dates and he didn't give us he didn't go into detail as to how he did meet that woman but i was so grateful for his testimony because i thought here's a contemporary not an old lady standing up and saying it works it does work even in the late 20th century number seven learn god's order i haven't got time to go into that but you can read about it in my book let me be a woman in the mark of a man remember that as a woman you are not to go chasing the boys my mother said don't chase them and keep them at arm's length those are the only two rules she gave me i kept both of them remember that god's design for men and women is harmony not competition complementarity not interchangeability number eight and perhaps this is one of the most important things find some prayer support and counsel from some older christian if it can be your parents all well and good so much the better but i can't tell you how my own life has been blessed by spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers in addition to my own parents who prayed for me one spiritual mother in particular an old lady that i met up in canada prayed for years that the lord would bring jim and me together i had poured out my soul to her shared all my feelings with her about him and although she had never met him she began to pray that god would bring us together my parents prayed for four of the specific spouses of their six children they didn't know the other two in advance but for for years they prayed for four specific people that they would marry their children and those four people married those children now that says something to me and none of us got into chaotic situations in advance so find some prayer support from somebody who may be older than you at least older than you spiritually somebody who knows how to keep his mouth shut and somebody who can give you godly counsel by all means if that person has a suggestion take it very seriously because that person has some perspective on you and on the other person that you can't possibly have they may know you better than you know yourself and if they suggest somebody and you think him you know her i could never go for him or her you just might be mistaken that that could be god's choice and remember that god's will for you means joy number nine is observation watch the person from a distance a church is a good place to watch them from a distance a college campus a neighborhood and granted there are it is difficult nowadays to know how to do this but when abraham sent his servant to look for a wife for his son isaac the bible says that the servant watched quietly and prayed silently and i think that is a very good rule imagine abraham sent his servant to find the wife and the servant found the wife of god's choice by watching quietly and praying silently observation then when you do get into conversation let it be friendly and casual as it would be with a member of your own sex you don't immediately jump into talking about sex and how many children you're going to have and what you think about marriage and i am up to here with young men who take a girl out and want her to put all the cards on the table they want to know everything about her then they want to know how she feels about them then they want to know if they've got a chance if they should ask her to marry them before they take the risk of rejection which a proposal is a young man came to lars and me and he said he'd been in love with a girl for two years and he hadn't proposed to her yet and we said why not and he said well because i don't really know how she feels and laura said i'll tell you the best way in the world to find out how she feels tell her i love you will you marry me you will find out very quickly how she feels you have no business finding out unless you have said i love you and will you marry me and my father told my four brothers don't ever tell a woman you love her until you're ready to immediately follow that statement with will you marry me so that's number 10 conversation avoid intimate subjects it is none of your business number 11 if you date draw the lines in advance about how far you're going to go now jim and i decided that we were not going to even hold hands and i can just imagine some people watching me and saying now don't tell me that this lady is going to stand up there and tell me it's a sin to hold hands no i'm not going to tell you it's a sin to hold hands but i'm going to tell you that it is one method that does work if you never hold hands you're never going to kiss if you never kiss you're never going to hug if you never hug there's never going to be any further progress toward bed and after all it was god's intention wasn't it that the first touch between a man and a woman who are attracted to each other should be exciting and that that touch leads to something else and that leads to something else that was god's intention and so i would ask you this question do you know the safe place to draw the line can you be absolutely sure that it is safe i couldn't tell you how many young people have said to me well i just don't know how it happened you know but somehow or other we ended up in bed and i lost my virginity i say no you didn't lose it you gave it away so i can guarantee that if you follow the rules that i've just given you you will never end up pregnant by mistake nor will you ever end up being the father of a child that you did not intend to father moving toward marriage for women let me just say this you must surrender all your desires you must be a lady you must pray you must offer up your feelings to god and you must wait only upon god and in closing i want to give you a few verses from psalm 37 trust in the lord and do good depend upon the lord and he will grant you your heart's desire commit your life to the lord trust in him and he will act and verse 7 wait quietly for the lord be patient until he comes god bless you you

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Id: IZU27tPjEGI

Length: 32min 57sec (1977 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020