The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Jonathan Sides with the message, Preparing a Two-Year-Old for Marriage. This is a pretty incredible marriage conference. It's pretty incredible when you come to a marriage conference and over half the people at the conference are not married. It's pretty incredible to come to a marriage conference where there are two-year-olds. And given that we knew that they would show up here, we thought, hey, let's have a talk on how to prepare two-year-olds for marriage.

It's very much my privilege and honor to speak to you at this conference. It's an honor to have my family here, my wife, Megan, and my two children, Caleb, who is three, and Lydia, who's one, and then my parents, and two of my brothers are here as well. So this is very much a family marriage conference. If you would open up your Bibles with me. The central text for our talk today is going to be from the book of Proverbs chapter 4.

We'll start with the first nine verses. Hear my children the instruction of a father, and give attention to no understanding, for I give you good doctrine. Do not forsake my law. When I was my father's son, tender and the only one in the sight of my mother, he also taught me and said to me, let your heart retain my words. Keep my commands and live.

Get wisdom. Get understanding. Do not forget nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will preserve you. Love her, and she will keep you.

Wisdom is a principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom. And in all you're getting, get understanding. Exalt her, and she will promote you. She will bring you honor when you embrace her.

She will place on your head an ornament of grace, a crown of glory she will deliver to you. If you're taking notes, I'll just give you a little bit of the structure of what we're going to do today. We're going to spend a fair bit of time looking at this passage, and then after we're done with this passage, we are going to do a very brief and very principled survey of some of the things that the book of Proverbs says about this topic. And then we're going to end up in Ephesians 5. So start with Proverbs 4, then a survey of Proverbs in Ephesians 5.

But before we get there, I have some questions for you, some questions and a story. If somebody were to ask you today, let's say you're a parent, if somebody were to ask you today what your vision for your children's marriages are, is, what your goals for that is, What it will look like when your children go out and find a mate, would you be able to tell them if they asked you today? Of course you would. You're at this conference. You drove halfway across the country to be here.

You didn't come here because you don't have a vision or you don't want to develop a vision, you have one of those. But I have another question for you. If somebody were to ask your children today what your vision for their marriages are, what your goals are. Would they be able to tell me? Would they be able to tell me accurately what your picture for their future marriages would look like?

It's not enough to just have a vision. It's not enough to just have a goal. It's not enough to just look at the future and say, this is how my children are going to get married and what their marriages will look like if you don't communicate that vision to your children. But lastly, it's not enough to have a vision. It's not enough to communicate the vision.

If I were to ask your children today about this vision and they were able to tell me, Would I be able to tell that they love the vision that you have for them? Would I be able to tell that they have adopted it wholeheartedly, and they are seeking to honor you? Let me start with this story I want to tell you. It's a caricature. It's a cartoon.

It's a parable with a little bit of history in there. I was in my late teen years when there was a very important book published. You've heard a lot about a lot of important books published long ago when everybody who wrote them is now dead. This is a much more recent thing. And it's much less important than some of those other books you've heard about.

But it was a very culture-changing book in our culture. By our culture, I mean our little subculture of conservative Christian homeschoolers. In 1997, this book was published, and it started a firestorm. You've heard of this book. Some of you have read the book.

This book was I Kissed Dating Goodbye. And I don't know what you think about the book. It was a book written by a young man who's not married, and it has some flaws, sure. But I'll tell you what happened after this book got published. This book came into a world where nobody knew any better, where people had been doing what the world had done, and they'd been doing it for a generation.

And nobody knew any better. And along came a book where a young man said, hey, let's look and see what the Bible has to say about this. Let's see if there's some other pattern. Let's see if scripture can tell us anything that might inform us for how we get married. And for that I'm very grateful because all of a sudden you saw at homeschool conventions, people started talking about this.

There started being youth conferences about this topic. There were videos. And I grew up when all of this was happening. And so here's the caricature. Here's the cartoon.

I don't know that it ever actually happened exactly like this. But in part, it happened many times. Imagine a father, a father with several children who are of an age when it's about time to start thinking about getting married. One day, the family decides they're going to order pizza. And they order pizza, and the pizza comes to the door.

And this young man, this father's young daughter goes to the door, and she pays the pizza boy, and the pizza boy asks her out. And the dad goes nuts, because he was not ready for this. His little girl, his precious little girl, was not ready for this stage in life. And dad was not ready for this stage in life. He was not prepared.

So what did dad do? Dad did what he should do. He went out and he searched the scriptures. He went out and he bought the books. And he read the books.

And he came back to his family. And he slapped all the books down. And he said, all right, I have a plan. I have a plan now. I know how we're going to do this.

And it was a good plan. It was a godly plan. It was a plan that had his children's best interests at heart. But there is a little bit of a problem. Because in the 17 years that his daughter was growing up, she wasn't waiting on dad to come up with a plan.

And the world around her wasn't waiting on dad to come up with a plan. Her romantic imagination was being developed, whether she knew it or not, whether her dad knew it or not. And she kind of had a picture for the way she thought things were going to go. And it doesn't match the picture of this plan that Dad brought. You know, it's a caricature, it's a cartoon, but it happened many times.

In some time, Sometimes with this story, what happened was you saw families reformed, you saw lovely marriages that grew out of them, you saw God glorified when fathers and their sons and daughters repented together, and other times you didn't. Other times you saw bitterness and resentment, and you saw broken families because the children were not prepared for the plan that Dad had. And their minds had already developed other ways. This is very common. This is very common in the early stages of the biblical courtship movement.

And if you were around early in this movement and you went to the conferences and you went to the conventions, you noticed that everybody talking about courtship was pretty much in the same boat as his father and his daughter. They were fathers of children who were ready, they were on the doorstep of marriage or on the doorstep of thinking about the real possibility of it, or they were those children themselves who had grown up into young adults. I think we can make this story uncommon. I think that we can make the bitterness much less common than it was. And the way that we do that is we go back to scripture.

Scripture is sufficient for all of life and practice. And I'm going to suggest that scripture provides a framework for when we start teaching our children these things about marriage. That's the topic. That's the focus of this talk. And we're going to start by looking at this passage that I read from Proverbs 4.

Proverbs 4 says in verse 3, when I was my father's son, tender and the only one in the sight of my mother. He also taught me and said to me, let your heart retain my words, keep my commands and live, get wisdom, get understanding. Do not forget nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her and she will preserve you. Love her and she will keep you.

Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding. She will bring you honor when you embrace her. She will place on your head an ornament of grace, a crown of glory she will deliver to you." Now, if you read this passage as a piece of literature and you start dissecting it as a piece of literature, the first thing you'll notice that there are three characters. There are three characters in this story.

The first character is the father. Let's talk about him for a moment. What can you tell from this passage about this father? Well, first, he's very confident. He's confident that he has a grasp of the truth and of good doctrine.

Secondly, you know that this father is passionate in his desire for the well-being of his children. And finally, he communicates both of these things to his children. He's confident, he's passionate, and he communicates these things. And you get that all in just these few verses. The second character you see is the son being addressed.

Now I'll give you an aside. Throughout this talk, I'm going to be mostly talking about the way that parents deal with sons. And the only reason I'm going to be doing that is because that's the way that Proverbs speaks. Now, the things that are said here we can say will be true of the way that you talk to your daughters, especially when they're very small. And we'll look at some of the differences later.

But just because I'm talking about the way a father speaks to his son, I'm not excluding the way that parents talk to their daughters. What do you tell about the son? What can you tell about the nature of the son? Well, first, he's described as being tender and the only one in the sight of his mother. This talk is titled Marriage Preparation for Two-Year-olds, and it's called Marriage Preparations for Two-Year-olds to Get You in the Door.

I don't really know how old this child is. I don't know if this child is two years old. I don't know if they are 12 months old. I don't know if this child is six or seven. I do know this child is tender and the only one in the sight of his mother.

He's not shaving yet. He's young. He's very young. This is definitely prior to manhood. If you were thinking about this with our caricature at the beginning, this child is not on the doorstep of marriage.

He shouldn't be thinking about that. And from a very young age, from this very tender and the only one in the sight of his mother age, whatever that is, The father is telling his son to look for wisdom and understanding. And that brings us to perhaps the most interesting character in this story. There's a father, and there's a son, and then there's wisdom. Do you see this?

Wisdom is not just an attribute. It's not just a virtue here. Wisdom is actually an active part in this story. Wisdom is a character. Wisdom is a woman.

This is consistent with all of the opening chapters, all the way back in chapter one of Proverbs. Solomon has been speaking of wisdom as being a woman. In fact, she's not the only woman who's not a real woman early in Proverbs. You have wisdom as a woman, and you have folly as a woman. And what happens in these first nine chapters of Proverbs?

These are the groundwork. This is the basics in parenting, where a father is putting before his son options. He's got two options for almost everything. There are two kinds of friends out there. There are two kinds of paths out there.

There are two things you can listen to. You can listen to your parents or you can listen to those who want you to lie and wait for blood. There are two kinds of feasts. There are two kinds of women. And the good woman is wisdom and the bad woman is folly.

Have you ever wondered why? Have you ever wondered why this is the case? Look at some of the grammar, Look at some of the language here in this section. A father is speaking to his son, and he says, get wisdom. Get understanding.

Verse 6, do not forsake her. Love her. Get her above all else. Exalt her. Embrace her.

Do you recognize this grammar? Do you recognize this language, this vocabulary? This is the kind of thing that you see in country songs. This is romantic language. This is courtship language.

This is a father who's speaking to his son and he says, I want you to go out and I want you to search for wisdom. But he doesn't just say search for it. Throughout the whole time that he's talking about wisdom, he gives different metaphors for how to search for it. Wisdom is like hidden treasure. You have to find wisdom like you're looking for hidden treasure.

In this particular passage, you have to find wisdom like she is a woman that you are courting. In this particular passage, the language that's used to describe wisdom is the language of love. If you will, a father is using this particular kind of language to teach his son, a very young and tender son, how to court wisdom. And the stakes are very high. You know the way that the rest of this goes.

You know the way that Proverbs goes. You're at this conference. You've read Proverbs backwards and forwards. Maybe you do it a chapter a day in your families. The stakes are very high.

Wisdom leads to life. Folly leads to death. I want to move into a survey of the book of Proverbs. And the survey is really to emphasize this point. And if you want, you can title this section, courting wisdom is training grounds for courting a wife.

Courting wisdom is training grounds for courting a wife. What I'm gonna do now is gonna be very tedious. We're gonna look at several different passages in couplets. And what you're going to see is that the language that's used to talk about wisdom is language that is used elsewhere in Proverbs, mostly in Proverbs 31, to talk about the good wife. And sometimes it's exactly the same language.

So the first principle that you will find, where finding wisdom is like finding a wife, is that God's sovereignty in finding a wife is taught by finding wisdom. God's sovereignty in finding a wife is taught by finding wisdom. Proverbs 835 is wisdom as a character speaking and she says, whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, Proverbs 8.35. Look at Proverbs 18.22 next to that. He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.

So if you find wisdom, you find a good thing, you find life, and you obtain favor from the Lord. If you find a wife, you find a good thing and obtain favor from the Lord. It's the same words, exactly the same words. Both of these are gifts that cannot be obtained with money. Number two, the value of a good wife is taught by learning the value of wisdom.

I'm going to give you a bunch of passages about wisdom. Proverbs 8 19, My fruit is better than gold, yes, than fine gold, and my revenue than choice silver. Proverbs 16, 6. How much better to get wisdom than gold and to get understanding? It's to be chosen rather than silver.

Proverbs 3, 14 and 15. For wisdom's proceeds are better than the profits of silver and her gain than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies, and all the things you may desire cannot compare with her. Proverbs 8 again, verses 10 and 11. Wisdom speaks and says, receive my instruction and not silver.

And knowledge rather than choice gold for wisdom is better than rubies. And all the things one may desire cannot be compared with her. You know where this is going. You're at a marriage conference. You've been to homeschool conferences.

You know what the good wife is compared to. You know what she's more valuable than. Proverbs 31 10. Who can find a virtuous wife for her worth is far above rubies." If you look in Proverbs, there are three things that are said to be more valuable than riches. Lots of things are compared to riches.

Lots of things are equivalent to riches. Words spoken in the right settings. These things are valuable. But there are three things that are said to be more valuable than riches. A good name, a good wife, and wisdom.

Number three, wisdom and the prudent wife both speak excellent things. Proverbs eight, listen for I will speak of excellent things and from the opening of my lips will come right things. Proverbs eight, six. Proverbs 31, 26, she opens her mouth with wisdom and on her tongue is the law of kindness. Number four, wisdom and the prudent wife both support rulers.

Proverbs 8, 15, by me kings reign and rulers decree justice. Compare that with Proverbs 31.23, her husband is known in the gates, he sits among the elders of the land. The gates were the seats of authority, They were the seats of civil government. So wisdom helps kings reign. And the prudent wife has a husband who sits with the rulers.

Number Five, both wisdom and the prudent wife are characterized by rejoicing. Proverbs 8.31 and 8.30 and 31, pardon me. Then I was beside him as a master craftsman and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and my delight was with the sons of men." Proverbs 31 25, strength and honor are her clothing, she shall rejoice in time to come. Number six, Wisdom and the prudent wife are both proactively merciful. Wisdom and the prudent wife are both proactively merciful.

Proverbs 9, 4-5. Wisdom says, whoever is simple, let him turn in here. As for him who lacks understanding, she says to him, come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mixed. The good wife in Proverbs 31, 20 extends her hands to the poor. Yes, she reaches out her hands to the needy.

Wisdom and the prudent wife are both described as competent homemakers. Number seven, wisdom and the prudent wife are both described as competent homemakers. Proverbs 9, verse 1, wisdom has built her house. She has hewn out her seven pillars. And this is right before she sets the feast.

Where do you go in Proverbs 31? I mean, you could go verses 13 to 16, verse 19, verse 21 to 22, Let's just pick 21, but you can go all over the chapter for this. She's not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household is clothed in scarlet. Compare that with Proverbs 24, 3. Through wisdom, a house is built, and by understanding, it is established.

I like this one, number eight. Wisdom and the prudent wife are both good cooks. Proverbs 9 to she has slaughtered her meat, she has mixed her wine, she has also furnished her table. Proverbs 31 15, she also rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and a portion for her maidservants. These are eight ways that wisdom and the prudent wife are the same.

You can make the list longer if you start looking for negative examples. You can contrast the prudent wife with folly. Look at how folly is described in Proverbs 9. Start in verse 13. A foolish woman is clamorous.

She is simple and knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house, on a seat by the highest places of the city, to call to those who pass by, who go straight on their way. Whoever is simple, let him turn in here. Us or him who lacks understanding, she says to him, stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. But he does not know that the dead are there, and her guests are in the depths of hell.

This is not the prudent wife. Proverbs 31, 27, the prudent wife watches over the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. So what can we say from this? What do we learn from this tedious little survey? Well first of all, note it's not an exhaustive list.

There are more of these connections that you can make, descriptions of wisdom and descriptions of the good wife. You can make even more connections when you start talking about the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. So this is just a hint that the language that choose to talk about wisdom is the same language that choose to talk about a good wife. And the language that choose to talk about folly is the same language that choose to talk about the harlots. Think back to Proverbs 4.

We're going to connect the dots a little bit. Proverbs 4, a father is telling a tender son to get wisdom as the principal thing. And the way that he talks about it, the way he talks to his very young son is to court wisdom. He's supposed to court wisdom. He's not merely preparing his son to be a good businessman when he talks about wisdom.

He's not teaching him how to succeed in politics or to understand abstract philosophical concepts. He's doing something very purposeful, very explicit. The father in Proverbs 4 who says that you should get wisdom, that you should love wisdom, that you should embrace wisdom, is preparing his son for the task of being married long before his son is ready for it. This boy is clearly far too young to be married, but the father is setting a pattern. The father is setting a pattern with this tender son, who might be two, who might be six, who might not be speaking yet.

Scripture gives us these kinds of patterns. Scripture doesn't leave us to our own devices. And you have 30 chapters in Proverbs where a father is teaching a son how to get wisdom. 30 chapters where a father is saying, here's what wisdom is. I want you to go out and find it.

Here's what folly is. I want you to go out and avoid it. So for 30 chapters, you have a father speaking to his son, get wisdom, get wisdom, get wisdom. And then you've got one chapter where a mother says, let me tell you about women. And when the mother comes in, in Proverbs 31, and starts telling her son about wisdom, she's not, I'm telling her son about women, she's not saying anything new.

The Book of Proverbs is one where you've got 30 chapters of a father saying, get wisdom, and a mother coming in and saying, everything your father told you about wisdom is true of women. Everything your father told you from when you were a very small child, everything your father was doing to shape your character, all of that applies. We have to follow this example and not wait for our children to be of a marriageable age or close to it before we introduce them to the concepts and the principles that we would like to see them live out, that we would like to see them apply as they go about finding a mate and getting married and doing the things that married people do. The third section of this talk. Well, exactly how do you do this?

Exactly how do you prepare your children? What are the specifics that you do for your tender young ones? As Mr. Brown told you at one of the very early talks, none of your speakers are going to give you ten-step programs. There's no paint by numbers for this.

Your children are different than my children. Your children are in different circumstances than my children. But we can find some patterns in scripture. We can find some ways of doing this. Recall again Proverbs 4.

This is a father speaking to a tender child, but this is not baby language. This is not dumbed-down grammar. The stuff that he's saying in Proverbs 4 is right out of the fifth commandment. Fifth commandment says if you honor your parents, your days will be long. Proverbs 4, the father says, Keep my commands and live.

Do you speak to your children this way? Do you have this mature form of language? Do you speak to them with a language that is perhaps more mature than you think that they understand? I have a three-year-old son who last night was coloring and playing with toys during the entire talk about the Gospel. I don't know how much my son absorbed, but after the talk he said, The man told us about a ram who had its horns caught in the thorn bush.

I don't know what else he got. But they're paying attention. They're picking things up before you think that they're ready to pick things up. Lest you think that this is just an Old Testament thing? I want to try and show you that what's being done here in the book of Proverbs, what's done in Proverbs 4, what's done comparing wisdom and the good wife, hasn't changed at all.

If you will, let's look at Ephesians 5. But you have to back up a little bit, just a little bit. So Ephesians 5, We've been starting in verse 22. But the context goes back a little bit before then. The context for the section in which you find the description of the husband and the wife starts a few verses earlier.

Starts in verse 15. There's a little bit of a prologue, and after this prologue, Paul tells people how to behave when they're in churches, how to behave when they're in covenant community. Then he tells wives how to behave, then he tells husbands how to behave, then he tells sons and children how to behave, and then he tells slaves how to behave. But he gives this little preface. Tell me if you've heard it before.

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time for the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. This is the context. Paul is saying, prior to this, Paul said, you used to walk in darkness, you don't walk in darkness anymore, you walk in light. Therefore, I don't want you to be fools anymore, I want you to be wise, and these are the ways I'm going to apply it.

Wives submit to your husbands, this is how you be wise, as to the Lord. For the Husband is the head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church, and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be to their own husbands and everything. Husbands, here's how you be wise. Love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her.

That he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of the water by the word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot a wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the Church. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband." You've heard this several times. You've heard it referenced in nearly every talk you've gone to at this conference. I'm not going to belabor it, but I want you to notice one of the things that Paul's doing here. I want you to compare what Paul is doing here with what's done in Proverbs, where you have these doctrines, these instructions about wisdom, that are then interpreted, they're translated later in life to talk about women.

Have you ever looked at Proverbs 5 and just gone through and tried to list all of the doctrines that Paul is applying? These are all major doctrines. They're big, fat doctrines that the Puritans wrote big, fat books about. And Paul grabs all of those big, fat doctrines, and he comes, and he drops them on the kitchen table and says, this is your marriage. He grabs them, and he puts them in the living room and says, this is your marriage.

He takes them to the bedroom and says, these doctrines organize your marriage. Look at the doctrines that are here. Verse 23, you have a Christology. Christ is head of the church. You also have a soteriology.

Christ is savior. In verse 24, you have an ecclesiology. The church is under subjection to Christ. In verse 25, you have the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Christ gave himself for the church.

In verse 26, you have doctrine of sanctification. Christ sanctifies the church by the word. In verse 27 you have glorification. Christ works glorification in his church. This is also an eschatology.

Christ has a plan for the church. The church will be without spot and wrinkle. She will be glorious. In verse 28, you have the second of the two great commandments. First commandment says you shall love God.

The second commandment is that you should love your neighbor as yourself. And this one says you ought to love your wives as you love your own bodies. Verse 30, you have the doctrine of the incarnation, Christ came in flesh and bones. You also have the doctrine of perichoresis, the doctrine of indwelling. Somehow or other we are members of Christ's body.

And there's more there. And I know you didn't, if you're taking notes, you didn't get them all, and that's okay. Just trying to overwhelm you with what Paul's doing. These are really weighty doctrinal matters that you can write confessions on, and you can make them very abstract, and Paul is saying these things are not as abstract as you think. Your doctrine of salvation is going to affect your doctrine of the church.

Your understanding of your doctrine of marriage, your understanding of the gospel is going to affect your understanding of marriage. Your doctrine of eschatology is going to affect your doctrine of marriage. Paul is saying right here, if you will, that a successful marriage, a wise marriage, is largely the application of sound doctrinal principles while living out of the Gospel. I'll say it again. A wise marriage is largely the application of sound doctrinal principles.

There's all sorts of places we can go with that. But let's stay on topic. Do your children, do your tender little children, have sound doctrinal principles? Do your sons know the gospel? Do they know who Christ is and what he did?

And this is the great thing about Ephesians 5. Let's do a little aside. Everything that God created was for his own glory. Everything that God created was for his own glory, but he didn't tell us how everything that he created brings him glory. We do not know how giraffes bring God glory.

He has not revealed that to us. He hinted at what Leviathan might do in Job. We don't necessarily know how every government that has existed brings God glory. But Ephesians 5 is fabulous. There was this great mystery, and Paul opened up the mystery, and you know what marriage means.

You know how marriage brings God glory. You know what the purpose of it is. Everything that God created points to some kind of heavenly reality. We don't know how all of them point to heavenly realities. We do know how marriage points to a heavenly reality.

And it points that way like a play does. Every marriage is a play, and there are actors in it. And the husband in the play gets to act. He gets to play the part of Christ. And he'll always fumble and he'll always mess it up, but that's the role he's been given.

And the wife in the marriage gets to act. She gets a part to play. She always gets to play the part of the church. Do your little children know their lines? Do they know the parts that they're supposed to play?

Do they know what they're supposed to be imitating? Does your son know the gospel? His salvation's at stake. Don't get me wrong, that's incredibly important. That is of supreme importance.

Does your son know the gospel? Because this is not just about his salvation. His success in marriage is going to depend on his ability to understand and apply the gospel. When your son is young and tender, his understanding of the gospel is going to be a very small one. I have a three-year-old son.

His understanding of the gospel right now is that Jesus washes away our sins. Do we have sins? Yes, we have sins. Do you need Jesus to wash away your sins? Yes, I do.

How does he do that? With his blood. That's about what my son knows as far as the gospel. But the gospel is so much bigger than that. And as he grows, he's going to learn so much more of that.

You go and you look at chapter 1 of Romans. Paul says, hey, I really, really, really have wanted to come to you to preach the gospel to you in Rome. But I'm not able to. So here's a letter. Romans, the entire book, all of the doctrines in it, all of the applications in it are gospel.

All of those things are things that you can apply in your marriage. All the history there, it's all gospel. How about your daughters? Now, I go to a church where we do not believe that it is appropriate for a woman to hold church office. And you might think, well, if that's your belief, if you don't think it's appropriate for a woman to hold church office, why does she need to know anything about church government?

That's her role. That's the part she's been given to play. She'll never hold office in a church. She's got something much higher to do. She has to be the church.

She has to be the church in your home. Does your daughter know what it means to be the church? Does she know what a good church looks like? Does she know how a good church functions? If you want to do something really interesting sometime, take Proverbs 31.

And you've done Proverbs 31 so many times. You've studied it. You've memorized it. You know what's in Proverbs 31. And you've always applied it to, well, this is how I could be a good woman.

This is how I could find a good woman. Have you ever looked at Proverbs 31 as far as it relates to the church? Have you ever said, hey, how could my church be like the woman in Proverbs 31? How could my church look to clothe those in her household with scarlet. Because this is what Ephesians 5 does for you.

Ephesians 5 is the great interpretive key for marriage. Everywhere you see marriage talked about in the Bible, you know that you're talking about Christ in the church. Proverbs 31, woman, the ideal woman, is a picture of the ideal church. Do your little daughters know what they need to know about the church? Have they studied church government?

Have they studied doctrines about the church? In some, do your children know what marriage is? We live in a culture that doesn't think that marriage means anything anymore. People just happen to get together because they want to get together. And there's just sort of this tradition that it's been men and women.

And those traditions are being challenged. The only way that we can come back with it to these arguments is to say that marriage is not just this tradition. Marriage gets at the very deepest realities of the created world. It gets at the way that God relates with his people. Your children have a very heavy task to bear.

They don't need just a successful marriage where they get along and they're happy. They have to be pictures of the gospel when they grow up and get married? Are you training them to do this from a young and tender age? Look at one last short passage. Proverbs 23, 26 to 28.

My son, give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways. If you've been in the homeschooling community for a little while, you've heard talks about this. You've heard lots of talks about this. You've bought the tapes, the CDs. You've heard the sermons.

This is a key verse for parenting. But if you read the next couple verses, do you know what follows? For a harlot is a deep pit, and a seductress is a narrow well. She also lies in wait for a victim and increases the unfaithful among men. I've been trying to paint a picture, and I haven't told you the bad news yet.

But you know it. You know it already. Over here are your children, your precious, tender little children, your little babies. And here are you, and over here is the world. And the world wants your children, and they are very clever.

They have ways of getting at your children. They have publishing houses, they have magazines, they have schools, they have music industries and movies, and they want your children. And they want to swallow them up. They want your children and they want their romantic imaginations and they want to swallow it up. And you can think, And you can think, I'll wait till my child's 15, 17, asking me about a girl to start telling them about these things.

But the world's not waiting. They're not sitting there thinking, oh, I'll wait till you've given your children what you think they need before I start talking to them. They start talking much earlier. If you do not have the hearts of your children, the harlots will. If you do not seek to protect your children's hearts, then somebody out there will be seeking to destroy them before they can give away their hearts in purity of marriage.

If you parents are not seeking to shape your children's romantic imagination, somebody else will be. So when are you going to ask for your children's hearts? When are you going to ask for their heart in these matters of marriage? When they're of marriageable age? Why are you going to risk this?

Why are you going to risk letting somebody else come in and have the first shot at shaping your child's heart, shaping their imagination, and shaping it away from you? You should follow the pattern of scripture. You should speak to your sons while they are still young and tender, the only ones in the sight of their mother, and get their hearts. Don't be concerned that they may not initially understand what you say. They'll catch more than you think.

They really will. And don't be concerned about all of the things that you must tell them when you start young. Marriage is a very complicated thing. Marriage takes wisdom. And God has given you time.

God has given you time to start pouring these things in. And look at the pattern that you have in Proverbs, where a father starts young with his son, and he starts giving him principles, and he starts shaping his character. And then along the way, they say, look, everything that we've been telling you, everything we've been doing, it applies in your marriage, too. It applies for the ways that you go about treating a wife. In my own home, we're doing very simple things.

I'm not giving my son a courtship pattern that I want him to follow. I'm not giving him the 10 steps that he must do in order to approach a young lady's father. I'm doing little things. I'm doing things like, Caleb, do you see? Do you see that wonderful thing that your mommy did?

Don't you want to marry a woman like your mommy? Will you trust daddy to help you find one? I have a little girl who strings two words together at a time. She doesn't speak in sentences or paragraphs yet. The things that most bring her joy in life are when she gets to wear her froggy pajamas.

But we get to talk. And the things that we say is, isn't your mommy wonderful? Don't you want to grow up and be like mommy? Don't you want to grow up and have babies like your mommy does? Will you trust Daddy to help you find a husband someday?

And as they grow up, the details of that are going to get fleshed out. The message will stay the same. It will stay on those points. But things will get fleshed out. They'll get more details.

But here's what we're trying to do in our home. Our children are never going to grow up having us spring something on them here. Now, I grant, hey, we've only been at this three years. There are families here who have been at it for a quarter of a century or more. So we don't really know all the details.

We don't really know everything that you're supposed to be doing. I encourage you to go find those ones who've been at it for a while and go ask them, What do you do? What are the things that you have told your children to prepare them? What are the things that you wish you told your children looking back? Go ask them.

Don't ask me. I've only been at this for three years. But what we're trying to do right now is we're trying to raise our children such that they grew up never knowing that daddy didn't have some idea, that daddy didn't have some kind of a goal, and that daddy didn't have their best interests at heart from a very young age. Because things are very serious. My children have to bear in their marriage the picture of the gospel and there is no time that is truly to start teaching them for that.

Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we do thank you for the children that you've given us, the young and tender ones that you've given to us at a young and tender age. We pray that you would watch over them, that you would protect them from the world, and that you would equip us as parents to fulfill our duties that you've given us, that we might ask for their hearts and that they might give them to us. We do pray for the mates that you have prepared for them in your own good pleasure. We pray that you would prepare their hearts right now for finding a mate, for treating a mate as you have shown us that your son treated his church.

Heavenly Father, we pray for the remainder of the conference that we would be continually changed and sanctified by the things that we learn here. In Jesus' name, amen. Messages, articles, and videos on the subject of conforming the Church and the family to the Word of God and for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area log on to our website ncfic.org.