Mutual Spousal Authority: Simple Courtship

Please turn your Bible to 1 Corinthians chapter 7, that can be found on page 955 if you're using a pew

Bible. 1

Corinthians chapter 7, please stand when you have that. Now concerning the matters about what you wrote, it is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman, but because of temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer, but then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self -control.

Amen. You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

We ask that you would continue to instruct us from this verse, this mutual spousal authority.

We ask that it would shape the way that we approach marriage and appreciate the gift that you have given in marriage.

In Jesus name, Amen. So let me begin by explaining my audience for today.

The past two messages being about marriage more directly, talking about intimacy, talking about having children, you might think of as being directed primarily to married couples.

Today, with a message titled simple courtship, you might think the same. You might think that this is rather directed at the singles.

The reality is that most of the singles here have listened to my teaching on this matter and are aware of it.

So I, as I think about the intended audience for it, while it is for everyone, while it is for both singles and married,

I do think particularly of those here who are married or those who have not heard this teaching at all about what

I'm calling here simple courtship. I believe it is important that you hear what the

Bible would say from this verse about restrictions and positive guidance about how we should go about pursuing marriage, even if you are already married.

This will help you as you instruct others who are not married. It will also help you as you try to lead your own kids through this.

If you have children that you will one day be leading in teaching them how to pursue marriage.

This is also important because I do not intend in any way to have any of the teaching of this church isolated to a particular group of people.

I very much dislike when churches end up grouping people and having distinct teaching for different groups such that they are all not being taught together.

Of course, we as a church gather for worship with all the kids and everything. It's not the kids being taught one thing, the adults being taught a different thing.

It's whole church being taught together. Now, we do have a singles center that we host regularly at the church in order for the utility of trying to help people meet each other, but it is not to isolate who receives what teaching.

And Jesus taught openly. He explained that he taught openly and none of his teaching was secret.

So, I intend for my teaching likewise to be open and not be restricted to particular demographic of this church.

Now, what is it that I mean when I speak of simple courtship?

Simple courtship, simply the idea that the Bible forbids any kind of pre -betrothal romantic exclusivity.

Now, that might be a mouthful, very technical way of saying it. I'll say it again just so you can try to think about it.

Pre -betrothal romantic exclusivity. Another more colloquial way of saying it would just be that the

Bible has not authorized boyfriend -girlfriend relationships. Might be very surprising because it's the standard way of going about pursuing marriage.

It's forming a boyfriend -girlfriend relationship that would then blossom into marriage.

Now, what I don't want you to hear is me making a big deal about vocabulary.

When I say simple courtship, this is not me saying that courtship is the right term and dating is the wrong term.

I don't have a problem with the term dating. Courtship can be misused as well as used correctly.

In fact, a lot of people will promote some kind of courtship model that ends up having the sort of exclusivity, the kind of claim on one another that only belongs to marriage that I'm telling you should not exist.

So just because you're using the word courtship does not mean that you're clear of the danger here. Dating, if all that means is going on dates,

I think that is a good way of meeting somebody. There's really not that many ways of meeting somebody, especially if you find yourself going about it alone, as many people are today, without a without a family structure that's trying to facilitate connections.

Okay, so I'm not saying the word courtship is good and the word dating is bad. I just simply think that this is a good way of thinking of this.

Simple courtship. Simple meaning that it doesn't involve additional attachments beyond the relationships that you already have with one another as brother and sister in Christ.

Simple courtship. Now, just to take a step back as we have each week and thought about the definition of marriage, what is marriage?

Marriage is a lifelong covenant to become one flesh.

Genesis 2 .24 says they will become, they shall become one flesh. Okay, this is the verse from which

Jesus derives his theology of marriage as the Pharisees talk to him and he brings that verse up as answering all the various ideas that they are getting from Moses, etc.

He is saying that they are misreading Moses because Moses, in giving the law, is not giving anything that would be different in terms of morality from that foundation of marriage, that it is a lifelong covenant to be one flesh.

Now, you can imagine that people come up with all kinds of fictions. You can imagine all different kinds and perhaps you are aware of the many different fictions that are called marriage that exist.

You could say, well, I want marriage, but instead of that covenant that God has in mind, mine is going to have two men.

Okay, that's not marriage. You say, well, I want something like marriage, but instead of being a lifelong commitment, a lifelong covenant, it's going to be for five years.

That's not marriage. You could do what they did often in the Old Testament where they have concubines and you say,

I want marriage, but I don't want the duty of giving an inheritance to the children because if I have a bunch of different wives, that would be too expensive for me and I do want some of my kids to have a good shot of making it in the world.

That is not something that we are authorized to do, to come up with a different kind of covenanted commitment.

Now, imagine someone says, all right, I want something like marriage. We're going to have a claim on one another so that we're going to owe our affections to one another, but it's not going to have intimacy.

It's not going to have marital intimacy. It's also not going to be lifelong. It's just going to be at will and to top it all off, we're not going to call it marriage, so we're in the clear.

Well, that is not authorized by God, and this is precisely what boyfriend -girlfriend relationships are.

They are ways that people make a claim on one another that God has not authorized. Look at our verse, 1

Corinthians 7, 4, For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does.

Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. A good way of thinking about the claim that is being made here when it says authority is also a kind of ownership.

There's a kind of ownership over each other, not just bodies, but romantic affections that permits a cultivation of a holy jealousy.

Okay, it is right for a husband to be jealous for his wife's affection that she not give it to any other.

This is how God speaks of his relationship with Israel, occasionally picturing it as a husband and a bride that he is a jealous

God. That is why he does not want his people going after idols. Similarly, the relationship between Christ and the church is one where there is a holy jealousy.

Christ does not want his church serving any other husband. So it is in marriage that there is a claim that God has given man over wife and wife over man such that they can have a jealousy for one another, that their affections not be given to one another, whether bodily or even beyond bodily, just in romantic talk and affections.

These are not things that we have a way of making a claim on apart from the mechanism which

God gives. You can't have half of marriage and then take it either calling it marriage or not calling it marriage.

You either have marriage or not marriage. Those are really the only two options.

Now next week we will talk about betrothal to explain how that claim can be made prior to prior to marriage in the sense of a consummated marriage, but apart from that covenant, there is no way to make a claim on one another.

Think about the different exemplars of marriage that God gives us in Scripture. God gives us two exemplars for marriage.

There's Adam and Eve and there's Christ and the church. Okay, there is the the foundational marriage of the old creation and the foundational marriage of the new creation.

Were there any claims on one another prior to them being covenantally committed to one another?

There was not. Now you might find that a stretch because maybe you're not used to thinking about marriage from those foundations and they seem so different from normal marriages that maybe they don't count.

But consider the different examples that you have in Scripture. Where in Scripture do you even have an example of such a thing where a couple has a claim on one another, a legitimate claim on one another that is not marriage?

You have plenty of examples of fornication and things like that, but those are recognized obviously as sin.

The closest thing I can think of to something like this is in John chapter 4.

Jesus said to the woman at the well, Go call your husband and come here. The woman answered him. I have no husband.

Jesus said to her, You are right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands. And the one you now have is not your husband.

What you have said is true. Jesus doesn't speak of her cohabitating, although she probably is.

Jesus doesn't speak of her fornicating, though she probably is. He speaks of her having a man.

Having, possessing, having a claim on someone else that she does not rightly have a claim on.

Okay, this is pre -betrothal romantic exclusivity. This is this idea that one can own another.

One can have a right to that affection, that romantic affection from another, apart from the means that God gave to make it licit, to make it right and proper.

Marriage, of course. And once again, remember the command in Hebrews chapter 13 verse 4.

Let marriage be held in honor among all. One of the ways that something is held in honor is that you don't have any false imitations of it.

For example, if you were to hold the military in honor, you wouldn't go around wearing a uniform imitating the military.

You would be arrested for this, for impersonating an officer. This would not be honoring.

It is not honoring to God to make idols of him, little images of him. These are things that dishonor him.

Likewise with marriage, if you make little images of marriage, that is not honoring to him.

It is detracting the actual value away from marriage. And this is part of the problem.

To go through a number of problems that are created by boyfriend -girlfriend relationships, relationships where there is a claim on one another that God has not authorized, just think about the quality of those relationships.

God has given all the benefits of marriage, those conjugal rights that we talked about two weeks ago, in order to reinforce the quality of the relationship.

There are all kinds of difficult things you have to deal with in a romantic relationship, and God has most graciously given one of the greatest pleasures in life, if not carnally speaking, the greatest pleasure in life, to man and wife to keep them together as they ought to be.

This is an incredible gift. And so if you try to go about a romantic, meaningful relationship without the tools that God has given to make such relationships prosper, do not be surprised when they fall apart.

And then, on top of that, there's all the heartbreak that comes from these things. Proverbs 4, 23 says, "...keep

your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life."

Are you keeping your heart with all vigilance if you are not guarding your heart, if you are making attachments with others that God has not authorized in a way that is at will, such that they can be broken at a later time without any kind of covenanted commitment?

What happens in these many marriages, many divorces, and it is frequent at churches where these relationships form, boyfriend -girlfriend relationships, that when there is one of these many divorces, it's decided that this was such a painful thing that one of those two people has to go to a different church.

There's no way you could keep being in each other's presence because that's really awkward, right? That is good evidence that this is not the way that God intended for us to go about these things.

And then, on top of that, it devalues marriage for both you and for the other.

If you think of romantic affection as something that is easily gotten without a lifelong commitment, you will devalue that romantic affection when it comes to you in marriage.

Now, I know that if you're a good Christian, you understand that you should not be, there should be no sexual relations before marriage, and you're trying to keep that highly valued in marriage.

But if you treat romantic affection as something that is easily gotten, that's a significant part of marriage that you are devaluing and treating as something that's easy to have.

And then, think about what you are doing should you not end up with that person for your future spouse who then, thinking right jealous thoughts, has to know that you were shared by someone else, even if it was merely with romantic affections.

Think about your future spouse. Think about that one that you would form such a relationship with, their future spouse.

You don't want to do that to either. And then, think about what you're doing for the opportunities you have.

There are many opportunities that one would have to pursue prospects for marriage.

But if you go about everything such that it only happens, that exploration only happens through exclusive relationships, then you are not able to talk to others in a brotherly and sisterly kind of way that would be most effective for discerning quickly what

God would have you to discern, which is who should you actually marry. To use an analogy from computer science, if you have a computer that has multiple cores, right, you can, most people know, you know, computers have occasionally multiple processors.

Most of them do these days. If you have just one job that's running serially, then it goes very slowly if you have a lot of tasks.

However, if you have a number of tasks, you can do and do those at the same time. It goes a lot faster.

If the goal in learning whether or not you would marry someone involves forming some kind of romantic affection, building that up, and then watching it either fail or blossom into something more, then are you going about this efficiently at all?

You are not. You are you are wasting a lot of time, and you are wasting a lot of or you're engaging in a lot of hurt as well.

It is said you have to kiss a lot of frogs in order to find a prince. But I'm here to tell you that you don't have to kiss a single frog.

There is also the fact that this delays marriage, as I've just indicated, but think more what's happening, that in those relationships, if you are satisfying desires that are meant to be satisfied in marriage, you know, even if, like I said, you're a good

Christian, you're saving sexual relationships for later, a lot of those emotional desires that you have that should be satisfied in marriage, if those are being satisfied outside of marriage, because you're building up romantic affections with another, you will not feel the need for marriage, so that you will delay it.

And this is what so many people do. This is why this is so common. It's because people delay, and what they do, what do they do?

They fill in the gap with this kind of relationship. Now, the world does it with sexual immorality, and so in some ways, they're better equipped to do it, but the

Christians do it without sexual immorality, and so it seems especially foolish in that sense.

While in one way, of course, it's more God -honoring not to engage in sexual immorality, in another way, it just seems more foolish, because it's more evident why these relationships will not do well.

And then not only that, but if the goal is to discern by building up the affections, then you have to go through that whole process of building up the affections, rather than keeping it simple, just finding out whether or not the other person understands the purposes of marriage, whether or not they would be well -equipped to be an appropriate partner in marriage, as a husband or as a wife.

Now, there are all kinds of objections that people would give to this. The first is that it seems like it would be difficult for discerning who it is that you're supposed to marry.

Why is it that if you are going to learn that someone would be a good spouse, shouldn't you spend a lot of time getting to know them at that level?

First of all, I think that that idea comes from an assumption that the heart of marriage is mostly found in leisure.

I think a lot of people are thinking about compatibility, primarily in terms of enjoyment of leisure together, sharing the same hobbies, things like that.

A good productive marriage, which is about building up the home, is not so centered on leisure. A lot of people treat marriage in such a way where they make leisure such the heart of it, that it's like if you had a cake, where the cake is just this layer, and then the icing is all this, where if leisure is the icing on the cake, they've made it mostly icing, very little cake.

It's not a good way of thinking about it. And speaking with another person, knowing their church, etc.,

what other people say of them, these are all more than sufficient to determine if someone is going to be an appropriate spouse.

All that is sufficient. People might object, what about the appearance of this?

Doesn't this have the appearance of sin, that you would talk to multiple people about getting married?

I think that the assumption that's happening there is that it involves creating romantic affections.

And if that's the assumption you're working with, then yes, it will have that appearance, but it doesn't have to. You can go about this in a brotherly and sisterly kind of way, not building up romantic affections with one another.

The idea is not to have many boyfriends and girlfriends. The idea is to have none, to have none.

And what if you find someone who doesn't understand this and expects you to engage in that kind of exclusive relationship where you have a claim on one another, such that you're cultivating jealousies.

Should you grant them that relationship, just to accommodate their understanding, to let you know that you're a loyal person?

You shouldn't do it. You are not authorized to do it. And that is the last objection that people might have.

How would you, how would you demonstrate your loyalty, etc.?

Well, loyalty, another way of thinking about that is self -control, and this approach demonstrates self -control far more than the other approach does, to avoid all kinds of pre -mature romantic exclusivity, to avoid those kinds of relationships where you're granting yourself things that weren't meant to be granted outside of marriage.

Now, given all that, what should you do as a man or a woman who is single, who is pursuing marriage?

As a man, as you talk to women, this is a good thing to talk about relatively early in the relationship so that she would have an understanding of what the idea is.

For women, same thing, that you can let the man know that you don't believe that any kind of claim on one another is appropriate before marriage based on this verse.

Now, it's a little harder as a woman because if you are candidating to be a follower in the relationship and you begin it by leading the relationship, that's not really the best way of candidating for the role of a follower, for the role of a wife.

So I would encourage you in that situation to encourage that man to be around those who understand this sort of thing that can then disciple him so that you aren't being the one leading him, but rather he is being led by those who would be appropriate to lead him.

I don't think you need to walk away from every one of these opportunities just thinking that there's no possibility.

It is appropriate to to form those kinds of relationships with others who would disciple.

Okay, now what if you have a history of you've had boyfriend -girlfriend relationships, you don't know what to do about this, you think that this seems like a kind of heavy thing being laid on.

Once again, as I've said last week, as I've said the week before, there is grace in Jesus Christ. There's a

Latin phrase, o felix culpa, which means, oh happy guilt. It's the idea that on discovering some guilt of yours, while on one hand it does not mean that we should continue in sin so that grace may abound, as Paul says, there is a truth that as you discover your guilt and you go to Christ, you know his mercy more greatly.

This, knowing his law more deeply, is an opportunity to rejoice in what he has done in giving his incredible mercy.

So I would encourage you to do that and then likewise to teach, to teach others his ways.

Psalm 53, excuse me, Psalm 51 13, which speaks of sexual sin.

David says that he will teach sinners the Lord's ways. This is his repentance.

This is his joy to do, to go about teaching others how the

Lord would have us to go about relationships, how the Lord would have us to go about the life that he has given us.

God has given us incredible mercy, has given us incredible gift in marriage. This is a difficult topic, but it is one that needs to be addressed in our era that has gone so wayward in how it approaches relationships.

If you have any questions, please feel free to talk to me afterward about it, of course. With that, let me go ahead and pray.

Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you for your goodness to us and giving us the blessing of marriage.

We pray that we would be a people who honors marriage in all that we do. May we honor marriage even as we pursue it, even before marriage arrives.

In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, please turn to hymn number 278,

Jesus with I. Go ahead and stand when you have that.