How Did You Meet Your Spouse?

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints.

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I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Durham, Chris Kiesler. We had a fun question sent in to us that we wanted to answer.

It's not as, well, it might be as theologically fraught, who knows, but we had one that we thought would make for a good, interesting podcast, and we are going to go ahead and tell how we met our spouses.

The question reads, how did you each meet your spouse, and how did you know she was the one? What's your best advice when looking for a spouse?

Michael? So I think we should go around each one, tell our story about how we met our spouse and how we knew that she was the one, but then we can kind of go back around and talk about some biblical advice when looking for a spouse.

Well, I met Becca at Grace Free Baptist Church when I think it was in my freshman year of college.

My dad was pastoring in Guthrie, Oklahoma, church plant up there. We had planted a church, and he was running a

Christian school, and my freshman year, I was going back every weekend to free laundry and get some food and participate in the life of Grace Covenant Church there, and we learned that mom and dad, they were gonna be moving to Kansas to a different church, new ministry opportunity, and so dad told me, so you gotta find a church down there local somewhere, and I was like, okay, and so I started looking around for a church, and the first place

I went to, I walked in and people kind of looked at me like I was an alien, and no one talked to me.

No one came up to me. No one gave me a bulletin, nothing, and so I was like, well, enough of that, so, and again,

I'm like, you know, all of a sophisticated 19 -year -old, you know, so I'm like, well, I'm not gonna do that, and I had seen on a church sign, on a church in the general area where the college was here in the

Oklahoma City area, something about basketball. I like basketball, so I went to Grace Free Baptist Church.

This is on the providence of God. I got three handshakes, a hug, and a bulletin before I got in the front door. And his name was

Tom McGarry? And the hug came from my future father -in -law, Tom McGarry, and when

I participated in the worship service, I felt comfortable with the preaching. I felt like I was kind of home, and the pastor was an old friend of my father's.

They pastored together in the same association up in northeast Oklahoma, so that was great, and the folks there just made me feel welcome.

They were glad to see me. I was therefore glad to be there, and I quickly noticed that there was a young woman bouncing around the auditorium and the whole church, big smile on her face all the time, and she caught my eye, thought

I'd like to get to know her better, and so over time I just tried to be where she was, and she was still in the youth.

I think she was a senior, junior or senior in high school, and I was a freshman in college, so I quickly found out how to become a member of the church and then become a volunteer in the youth because that's where she was, and just kind of being around her and hanging out.

So her parents invited me over because they were just trying to be kind, so they invited me over for meals.

Hey, come use our washer and dryer, and they didn't have much, but they just freely offered it, so I took them up on every invitation that I could because I wanted to be around Becca, and she happened to be somewhat engaged to another young man at the time, so I did a lot of praying, and eventually that got set right, and we just started spending a lot of time talking to each other, and we would park near each other in church parking lots.

We'd always have a reason to walk together to the cars and talk and so on, and eventually one time the youth pastor of the church took me out to lunch, and he said, so what's this thing with you and Becca?

And I was trying to explain about how I'm supposed to really wait and observe her character and really learn and be really, really sure.

I'm trying to apply all the loads of wisdom that had been poured down my throat for I don't know how many years.

He's like, that's all well and good, but sometimes young women aren't as patient about these things. I'm like, what?

And she had been making plans to move to Ada and go to college down there and get a teacher's degree and all of this, and I thought, oh.

So anyway, not too long after that, she made sure to mention that she hadn't been to the arts festival that year yet and just waited.

And then, so I said, well, do you wanna go? So I always tease her that she asked me out, and I said yes.

But it was very winsome. She gave me every opportunity to take some initiative finally.

And so we hit it off our first time out. The arts festival closed early, and it was like, well, now what do we do?

And so we went and grabbed some coffee, and we immediately began to talk about how we did not want any kind of casual dating relationship, that this was really entirely in the hands of the

Lord, but we were going to be seeing whether or not that God wanted us to get married. So we were gonna be very intentional in how we conducted the relationship to think about is this going to work well?

Do we have the same values, convictions, direction in life? Does she want to be the wife of a pastor?

Because I've been on that track since I was seven years old. Thing changing now. And she was very amenable to that, and she was very warm to that.

And she didn't know much about homeschooling, but figured it was an okay thing.

She didn't make a, she wasn't overly concerned about it at the time. We just talked about some distinctives and some characteristics and so on.

And so there wasn't much drama, I wouldn't say. In the process, though, there were lots of people who said things like, well, you both are the youngest in your family, so you shouldn't get married because your birth order's out of whack.

And people told Becca's parents they shouldn't spend too much money on our first wedding because the first one never lasts.

And we were too young because she was 20 and I was 22. And you shouldn't get married to your 30s until you had your career in housing established.

I hate this so much right now. We were told all kinds of things like that. And very much, we realized that we were, we didn't realize we were at the time, but at the initial moment, we didn't realize it.

But over time, we realized that we were bucking the trend. We were going against the flow. We were doing something that people thought was a bad idea.

And we just kind of shrugged, just like, well, this is what we want to do. And the Lord provided, and he answered so many prayers for us to get married when we did.

And he has just sustained us, and we have never, ever regretted getting married young and having children at a young age.

And we just praise the Lord for it. Amen. So we've been married a little over 20 years now. Chris?

So after high school, I went down to college in Ada to go to the college down there for music.

I just kind of fell into it. I didn't know music. What am I going to do with my life? My music teacher said, well, you can major in music.

I like music. I guess I'll do that. So I got a scholarship and went down there, and then she was also doing music.

But I was not as fast as her. Some might say slow.

So I was put in a different class than her. We had music theory. So she was put in the real class, and I was put in remedial theory class.

So we weren't in the same class, but I remember seeing her whenever we started out.

And they had us in a big group and they start separating people. And I wanted to go to that class, but I couldn't.

I didn't qualify. So I was in my class. A friend of mine from high school came with me to college.

And so we were roommates at the college. Well, he started dating her, which

I didn't really care for because I had my eye on her. It was also odd because the summer before we went, he came out of the closet and then started dating her.

So I tried to explain this to her, and she did not believe me. She thought

I was just trying to break them up, to which I said, yes, but - Two birds for one stone. That's right, it is what it is, okay?

But that wasn't a thing. So nothing was happening, and she had a boyfriend.

So then I started seeing somebody else, and I was planning on getting engaged. I was saving up for a ring.

And things went south on that, and it was clear that that's not the route that God had for me.

It was not a good path. There's not a good relationship as far as us being together and me following God.

And I had a buddy that kind of stepped in and was there for me and kind of corrected me and corrected her on some of the things she was doing.

So that fell apart, and then quickly afterwards, I was like, well, I like Brooke a lot.

I still like her, so she's available. We were doing theater, both of us.

We're taking our music classes. We're working towards our major. We're also doing theater on the side. And I was pretty fickle, because I was interested in this girl and then interested in that girl.

And then in theater, things get muddled because you're playing love interests and plays and everything.

So then you confuse, oh, we've got this dialogue and we've got these scenes, and then, oh, there's a kiss and all this stuff.

So it gets pretty muddled pretty quickly. And since then, I'm like, I don't wanna do that anymore.

That's not my interest. So it gets pretty confusing. Brooke and I were together for a period of time, and then we broke up, because I didn't know what

I wanted. I was confused, and I thought there was a different girl that I was interested in. But then going back to the question, how do you know she's the one?

It really did come down to, there were several that I was interested in, but I was like,

I don't wanna lose my friendship with Brooke. That was the most important. I can see my life without these other girls.

I'm interested in them. They're pretty or whatever. But really, it kept coming back to Brooke. I can't see going on without her, graduating, talking to her daily.

It's like, I can't continue this friendship with her if I'm pursuing someone else. Oh, that's what that is.

I need to be serious with her. And so I asked her, we'd already been talking, and she knew

I was interested. And so we prayed about it, and we weren't engaged for very long. We kind of knew, oh, this is the direction we're going.

And so we got married, and we'll be married in March. It'll be 16 years we'll be married.

And talking about children and them coming along, I was kind of boneheaded and wanted to wait longer than she did, because like, well, we're married.

We need to get to know each other more. Marriage, having kids, you'll get to know each other pretty quickly by having kids.

So don't worry about that. But I'm glad that God set things up the way that he did because it's all marriage is sanctifying.

Having children is sanctifying. That's the plan. Amen to that.

Well, I'm not going to go too deep into the history. So let's just say

I ended up at the University of Oklahoma, and I was in my senior year when I had my third birth, as it's known in Calvinistic circles.

I started reading a lot of Bunyan, Calvin, Owen, and a lot of Spurgeon apparently later on in that year, my senior year.

And a lot of wild stuff was going on by the time I graduated, or by the time

I was about to graduate. So I joined Barry Road Baptist down the road in Norman, as it was

Barry Road at the time. And then we were in an election cycle, and Trump got elected for the first time that year.

And there was just a bunch of stuff kind of going on in the world, in my world, and at school as well.

But I started going to Barry Road, and Heather was kind of going back and forth between church and OBU.

So I would see her on Sundays, and the rest of her sisters and brother, which she has for the audience.

She has seven sisters, or sorry, six sisters and one brother, eight in total. So I had met everybody in the

Horner circle at least a few times by the time Heather and I started interacting and talking to one another, mostly just as peers, because I wasn't really involved in anything at church yet.

I had a Southern Baptist background, but we were there some Sundays, that we weren't either playing ball or doing something different.

And I didn't know how to integrate into church life. I did not know how to be a part of the body. That was foreign to my existence.

So as I start reading through my Reformation study Bible and the confessions and all this other material,

I'm like, I need to be there. I need to be with these people. I need to be with my people. And the more that I'm doing that, we're having kind of a bleeding of members at Berry Road.

So the more I'm getting involved, the more people are moving away. And I'm like, what is going on? So my entry into actual church membership, like functioning church membership, is watching just everything dissipate.

So it was weird to do that, but it was also like, as people leave, now

I have to take more responsibility, even if it's just minor. Here, there, here, there, do something. Every time

I'm showing up, I can put my hands at something. So that was actually really good for me, because I couldn't just jet out the door after service is over, which was my natural inclination at the time, being the navel -gazing, introverted, end quotes, kid that I was at the time

I wanted to get to theology, go home, digest it on my own, not interact with anybody, even though I knew

I needed to be there. So there were kind of those conflicting interests there. But we had sort of a similar thing that we have like flock groups here, small groups.

We'd show up to an elder's house or a deacon's house, and the pastor took an interest in me, because I was a younger guy, and there wasn't a lot of younger guys at the church, and there wasn't a lot of younger guys coming in at the church.

We shared the building with a different church as well, and they had a bunch of college -aged men.

I would call them women of the other sex, but they were males. And so they had a lot of that.

And I know there was a lot of tension in the fact that we were aging. It felt like there was a lot of tension in him that we were an aging group of people and not a growing group of people, and they were just kind of.

And it was very, it seemed very seeker -sensitive. Skinny jeans, fawning over, that sort of a thing.

And so we had that in one building, right? They had it on the other side of the building. We had the other one on our side of the building.

So it was really, all of this was a weird dynamic now that I'm talking about it. But I'm in his flock group, and Heather's in there as well.

And there is a very diverse group of people there, especially when we're talking about where they're coming from on how they read the word, how they think about the word.

And I am a baby Christian, but I was voraciously, I read quite a bit,

I listen to a lot of things, so I was voraciously eating up content and quickly picking up kind of what he was putting down in a lot of cases.

And Heather realized that from across the room. And she started to gravitate towards me more and more.

She would say that it's the looks. I still don't see it, but she does apparently. And she was gravitating towards me more and more as we started talking about theology and how

I was really warming toward specifically a Calvinistic view on soteriology, on how

I was trying to be at least measured in the way I was going into other places in theology and what

I was reading. And so she was always wanting to know what I was reading, listening to, what I was thinking.

So we kind of naturally were able to grow close because she is just not,

I wouldn't call her forward, but she is extremely warm woman. And when she finds somebody that is like -minded, she's like,

I need to attach to them because they are both virtuous and they love the

Lord. And that's what she thought she was seeing and that's what the Lord was growing me into. She started, we started to grow closer as more people left because I had to start getting involved in audio and music and visual stuff, which

I'm still not good at, even though I had to run it for, I don't know, two years towards the end with her.

And I mean, we literally were, when I showed up, I think we were running like 150 members.

By the time we were done, we were down to like eight or 10. Yeah, like, so it was a, it was just like a,

I'm not gonna say demoralizing, but it was a humbling thing to have like happen and to think what you, because what you start doing to yourself, which is not humbling in my opinion, but you start doing this, well, what did

I do? What could I have done better? And you start putting a lot of that on yourself. And I think that in a way is a selfish way of thinking about it rather than the

Lord, the Lord took that lampstand away for whatever reason. That was his plan. It's not what you did, but that was kind of how it was feeling.

And as we're going through this process of all this happening, Heather and I start to grow closer as we're back in the booth.

She's doing a lot of the visual stuff and setting up kind of the electronic side of the service.

She starts hanging out with me and my brother. And like, it kind of felt like the horners kind of descend on you in a certain type of way.

They show up as a group, they just descend on you. And Heather, for whatever reason was, she was the spearhead to all of that.

And she was just driving at me the whole time. And being completely honest, I knew what she was after.

And I did enjoy her as a friend, but I was keeping her at bay for selfish reasons, for, and a lot of the baggage that I held over myself, where I knew what

I had done in the past. I knew what I had been. And I knew this woman was too good for that.

You know, that's what you have in your mind, right? Like, I have been this. It would sully her to be with someone like me.

And that's what I had in my head. And I also was prideful enough to think that I had done so bad that I didn't deserve marriage anymore.

You know, we were talking about, you were talking about how you thought you were, people thought you were too young. I thought I was past the point of no return, right?

Like, I think I was like, when we first started kind of hanging out, I was like 25. And had all the public school, all the baggage of public school relationships, all the baggage of junior college baseball relationships, and then four -year college relationships.

And I mean, I wasn't like a womanizer by any means. Like, I think I dated like four girls total, but I was a product of that arena and everything that came along with it.

So I knew what I was, and I felt terrible in a way just associating with her and being good friends with her because it was just such a, it seemed like a mismatch, right?

But the Lord had done something to me, and I was not taking that into account. The Lord had cleansed me from a lot of those things, had cleansed me and delivered me.

So, but we're chugging along and we're getting to know each other. More and more people are leaving. The pastor ends up leaving.

Julian takes over as the only other elder that was there at the church at the time. He starts preaching, Julian being

Heather's father. He starts offering counseling and discussion time after lunch on Sundays.

Who's the only guy to show up? Me. And so we basically start making this as like a meeting, a weekly meeting where I'm visiting with him about theological stuff, things that I'm seeing that frustrate me or that I'm not understanding.

Not from him, but just kind of out in the world. I mean, we're talking about like right in the smack dab middle of the rise of wokeism, and it just made me livid.

And I just did not want to deal with it in a measured way whatsoever, and he wanted to measure it out to like the nth degree, so we were just on opposite poles.

But I loved him and I loved the counsel that he gave and I loved the time that we had together. And at that time, I was probably doing a deacon's job the entire time.

I mentioned my friend Robert to you guys before. He had MS and couldn't do a lot of things on his own, so I was getting him out of bed and putting him to bed quite often because I had a couple jobs that allowed me to do that.

And so it was deacon work. It was kind of like home care service work, but just doing it as a functioning deacon without the title.

And through that process of growing in friendship with Robert, growing in friendship with Julian, growing in friendship with Heather, Heather and I were starting to hang out more and more and more to the point to where it was like, just get married, guys.

Just get engaged and get married. And everybody thought so. And I just wasn't. Just put my hands up and denying the reality of it all and really forcing myself not to like this girl even though I was doing everything that a man would if he liked a girl.

So she got to the point where, and she had come and talked to me a couple times, like, what is this?

And I like you and I think we would be good and I think we should get married. And she just lays it out on the line, just like point by point, bullet points me.

And I held her off, held her off, and then finally she was like, we can't hang out anymore. We can go to church, we can do all this stuff and we can't hang out anymore.

So I made it two weeks of that. And Daryl, my brother, looks at me and says, you're miserable, you like Heather, just date

Heather. I think it was like two or three days after that, Julian preaches on Communion with the

Spirit and I am going through Owen on Communion with the Spirit. And I'm starting to realize things about how the

Lord has cleansed me and he has given me the Holy Spirit as a helper and as a guide, as a constant help and comfort all the time and I had a lot of stuff kind of just lift off of me that were burdens, a lot about my past that were the walls that I was keeping up to pursue this.

And so that goes away, so he preaches that and she didn't wanna text. And meanwhile, this wasn't just hanging out, like we can't talk, we can't text, she's had enough of me because it was making her miserable to be around me all the time and have nothing, no real tangible movement towards what you're supposed to be doing.

So I was denying what we were supposed to be doing, Heather was wanting to take it all on. He preaches that, Daryl talks to me, a lot of things came together and by Wednesday of that week,

I texted her, I said, hey, you should come hang out. And then I'm warm on myself, I'm being warm with her.

So everything in our life had happened on a Sunday together, right? And I'm like, I wanna ask her forgiveness right now for everything that I've done and then ask her to date toward marriage.

I'm like, no, you gotta wait till Sunday, you gotta wait till Sunday. I'm just all like, and I know that's just weird way to do it but I was like, no, we're doing this, we're gonna wait till Sunday.

And so by Sunday, I'm like, hey, can I talk to you after church? And like, she kind of goes white. Like, cause she doesn't know what to think.

All this has been a whirlwind for her. We weren't talking, we were hanging out. He wants to talk to me now after he's hung out with me on Wednesday and been way more warm than he's ever been.

What is going on? So she's frustrated when we go into this meeting. And so I talked to her on Sunday afternoon and I said, please forgive me for everything that I've done, for the ways that I put all this off.

And if you can forgive me, would you date me looking toward a future marriage?

And she just like, it was like a, probably an emotion of like, I want to like, well, not choke, but like,

I want to like grab hug, like bear hug him. And also like, she had a bunch going on. And so she said yes and try to control herself.

And you can tell, you can tell when Heather's trying to like control herself before she like just explodes out. And then she goes, can

I hug you? And that we, we hugged and we were able to, she like, she, she hugged me.

And I don't know if she like let go of me the rest of the evening as we were in service, but it was extremely sweet.

I'm glad I waited till Sunday and didn't do it that Wednesday night, even though it probably gave her a little bit of grief through the weekend, but that's okay.

She can have that every now and then, but that's how we met. That's how I reconciled with her after being an idiot.

And we were engaged probably a month after that. And I'm thinking, you know, like the public school kid or like the, like just the normal American that I am, like, oh, about a year and then we can get married type of a thing.

And Julian's like, so as we go into the next Sunday meeting, so, so when, when are you guys going to do the, or I guess that's what it was.

I had like plans for a little while to wait to get engaged and then married by about a year. And he's like, so what are we thinking?

Like, I'm like, oh, what? I don't know. You tell me. And so he, he very kindly nudged that along and Heather and I talked about it and we got engaged in August and we were married by November.

So we had a two month engagement and that's all we needed because we had known each other for two years and you didn't have to know more than that. But yeah, that's how we met and how we were married.

Well, that's awesome. I loved hearing your stories on that. And the follow -up on that question is what kind of advice, right?

What kind of advice would you give to someone who is looking for a spouse?

What's your best advice? Well, I think our best advice would be the biblical advice. I hope that our listeners would be fairly aware of that you shouldn't be unequally yoked.

How can two walk together unless they are agreed? There should be some time spent in understanding and with wisdom and also our first affinity and loyalty is to Christ.

So can, is our relationship with Christ, my relationship with Christ and this woman's relationship with Christ, is that bringing us together?

Is that unifying us? Are we in agreement about, in general agreement about what marriage ought to be, what family ought to be, how to raise children?

If I'm a Lutheran and she's a Pentecostal, it may not work well. What are our expectations concerning the church?

There's all sorts of things to consider. There is a necessary time to get to know one another and see where each other's convictions are and so on.

I think that's important. There's going to be some changes but the man needs to be able to lead his wife and I've seen just too many stagnant kinds of marriages that are not growing in the

Lord because the man just says, well, whatever she says, you know, whatever she believes,

I'll just go with that and that's a pretty sad affair. So he doesn't need to be able to lead his wife spiritually.

Is that what she wants? Does she want to be led spiritually? And that's a big question.

So some people have worked through that. Some people already. I remember that in going to Grace Way Baptist Church, once a month they would have somebody in, they have a breakfast and they would do discipleship for men and they would talk about how to be a husband, how to be a father, how to be a spiritual leader in your home and they would pour into and I would just soak it all up.

I was there for everything. You're having a discipleship meeting, I'm there and usually there was food, so that was great and I just wanted to learn everything

I could and at a certain point, I realized, like, you know what, I'm ready for this. I want to be married and what does that entail?

What do I need to do? Do I need to get a better job? Do I need to work harder? Do I need to change some things about me? Whatever it is,

I want to be married and of course, I had my eye on Becca but I wanted to follow the

Lord's will in that but I needed to be not, like Dylan kind of what you talked about, it's like not to have my head looking at me.

There's not a lot there. Why am I staring at myself all the time? That is not a good idea and no woman wants to be in a relationship with a man who is staring at himself all the time.

That is ridiculous. The man needs to be settled in Christ, not arrogant but settled in Christ so there can be some confidence there and he just needs to get his head up and look at the horizon and say, all right,

Lord, I kind of know where I'm going. Help me get there. I want to work, I want to labor, I want to serve and I want to be a man,

I want to lead and that's a good place to be and it can be a very simple expression but I think that the more self -focused you are and trying to work on you, that's not a great way to get ready for marriage.

Do you need to be sensitive to rebuke and to the conviction of the Holy Spirit and repentance and so on?

Yeah but do not make your main subject matter yourself. I think with that, so you can get caught up in the navel gazing, the self -reflecting and I've got to fix all these things first.

You can also get caught up in playing games so if you weren't brought up with an eye towards marriage and it's just the dating scene which is what

I got caught up in and it was just, well, we're just having fun. We're hanging out. Marriage is, you know, it's out there.

It's something that I'll get around to versus don't get involved with people if you're not interested in marriage, if that's not what you're trying to do.

If you are interested in marriage, then find out what those steps are and take those steps instead of focusing on yourself or getting distracted by other things.

I would say have counselors, have people that can pour into your life that you can ask them, do you think

I'm ready? What needs to be improved? That you can say I'm interested in this person, people that you can go to and talk to about that but yeah, the focusing on self and thinking

I've got to get myself ready or fix myself before I get there, that's what a lot of marriage is.

Marriage is the means towards sanctification I found in a lot of that. Yes, sure, there's things that you need to have ready before going into marriage but a lot of the character type things, you're gonna be working on that your whole life and God says that the wife is a helpmate.

He calls her a helpmate for a reason because she's your helper and he provides the Holy Spirit to you and hopefully, if you're thinking about marriage, then you should be moving in that direction so that God would, he who finds a wife, finds a good thing.

That's right. So I've heard someone say, find out her name and ask her if she wants to marry you.

Don't make it a huge thing. Obviously, you want to get to know her character, talk to the people around her, her father, the people who are over her but don't prolong it because again, don't get caught up in the dating scene and doing all these other things.

If you have a desire to get married, then take those steps and don't prolong it.

And that's the thing, you'll be praying the Lord will show you an opportunity to pursue a wife and if there is none that you see is available, you need to talk to your spiritual leaders about that and how to go about doing that.

There's gonna be some unique opportunities and some connections. I have pastor friends who have young ladies in their church or young men in their church that they need to make a connection.

Families need to go out and have dinner together. They need to invite people over to their homes. This is something that needs to happen between small churches or within the same church.

And as a young man, you need to state your intentions concerning a young woman to her father and he's going to have some things that he thinks will be important for you to consider and to think about and how he would like this to go forward and you need to talk to your elder.

Now, if you're gonna be efficient about it like Dylan, your elder and her father are the same person.

I really nailed multiple birds with one stone. You did, you did. Well, not only that, I was gonna, you guys are doing a really good job of laying out the theological side of things beforehand but I was gonna try and talk about practical things.

If you're wanting to expand your generations further on, look for twins. Each Hamilton boy apparently figured this out because I married a twin and then my brother happens to marry her twin.

Our little brother is marrying a twin as well. So we have a decent shot of twins in the future for Hamilton children.

All joking aside, yeah, no, I think this goes to a point about having Titus II counselors on both sides and I'm so thankful that the

Lord has given us this text to say older men teach younger men, older women teach younger women.

In doing so, you have surrounded yourself as a young person with many counselors who can help you in sometimes like out of left field practical counseling that you would not have considered yourself or even that you've ever heard before but it is extremely, extremely helpful, especially maybe even to your personal situation because these people know you.

These people know her most of the time. You know, if you're in the same church, which we were. So they knew both of us. They knew which signals were being given off by either person and they also knew where each one of our spiritual lives were at when we were with each other or when we were away from each other and they were looking at our own personal happinesses as well.

I think having a wealth of counsel and at that point, you know, we were a dwindling church so the wealth of counsel was like two or three guys but man, was it indispensable for me for picking the woman that I'm gonna be with the rest of my life.

You know, they talk about the two biggest decisions you make in your life is accepting that call from Christ to bow the knee to him and repent and believe and then which spouse you're gonna marry and I don't see any lies there.

It has been extremely important who I have married and counsel has been a major side of that and because what

I had done, I don't know about you guys but what had happened to me was counselors that used to be counselors for me had faded away in a hurry because I didn't have coaches anymore.

I was not under my dad's household. There was a lot lacking in male counsel for me and so going there and honestly having the church do what it did,

I was kind of just under the pastor's wing at the time sort of but I kind of could float but when we had more and more people leave,

I couldn't float anymore. I had to do things, I had to be around people and you know, thank the

Lord that those guys saw this text and said I gotta counsel this young man even though he doesn't want to hear the counsel most of the time,

I have to counsel this young man and you know, from Robert, I don't know how much we even ever agreed on anything theologically at all.

Like I mean, that guy, he could find a way to argue with me on every point that I tried to make and he had a bigger bookcase to back it up than I did so I mean,

I just, I struggled with him all the time and it was great and it was fun but I had those two men that were able to push me where I needed to be pushed and like Michael said, eventually take some initiative because I wasn't seeing it.

Well, I think you're talking like counselors and men that can pour into your life. I think we can set our own parameters or come up with our own rules on how it needs to be done.

You might have the dating culture or the courting culture and everyone's got these rules and don't walk a girl to her car by yourself or whatever people come up with but if you've got people around you that can guide you and that are talking to both of you and say you're trying to lay down signals and she's not picking them up, well, she's got someone to tell her he's interested, that's what he's doing or vice versa that people know you've expressed your interest to someone that's not her and they're able to tell it to her and she's like, oh, well,

I'm not interested and then it's not a confrontation because you've got other people that are involved in the process.

It's not just you in a bubble trying to figure it out. Yeah, if there were any regrets for me on any of this in life, this side of stuff where you're trying to look for a spouse, it would have been that I didn't have counselors earlier.

You were kind of expected in the dating culture that we grew up in, public school dating culture, you were expected to figure it out, kid.

It's like you turn 18, get after it. Yeah, even if I had someone older to talk to me about the will of God, is she the one, how do

I know if it's God's will that she's the one? It was some guys talking about like John MacArthur and different stuff and it's like be in the word.

He tells you what he wants you to do. He tells you to pray, to go to church, he tells you to follow him, repent, all these different things he tells you to do.

He doesn't tell you where to go to college, what church to go to, what woman to marry.

If you're following after him, those other things will fall into place because you're in his will and then having those counselors around you to help with some of that pragmatic stuff, practical stuff, you're in his will, he's gonna take care of that.

So it's not like I've got to get this right or I've missed everything. And part of that desire that God would through a vision you know, part heaven, come down and drop you her jersey, here's her name and number, you know, she's the one.

Go find her. Yeah, part of that is part of this pendulum swing against the whole dating scene and the casual misuse of these relationships.

The pendulum swing against that is to say, okay, well, I'm only ever going to pursue a woman in thinking about marriage and seeking a wife.

I'm only gonna do that once and it's gonna be only the one girl. So it's gonna be 100 % success rate.

Now, tied into this are all manner of temptations of I don't want to risk myself, I don't want to humiliate myself,

I don't wanna get it wrong, I always wanna be right. I don't want anybody to come and say you did that wrong. I don't wanna embarrass myself.

All these protective things are hiding behind this super spiritual wall of,

I'm waiting for God to reveal his will. Okay, God has described what a good woman is in the

Bible and he didn't make that a mystery. Okay, and if you don't know how to find those passages, talk to your spiritual leader, okay?

Okay, so if you can profile what a good woman is, then get your head up, look around and find yourself a good woman.

Now, is she available? Okay, start talking with her, be around her, okay?

As if she's a young lady, you're gonna go talk to her father at some point about the potential of you getting to know her a little bit better, okay?

And you can be forthright and say, I don't have any particular designs on your daughter. I'm a young man,

I'm trying to follow the Lord and I have an ardent desire to be married and I've noticed some excellent qualities in your daughter.

I'd like to get to know her a little bit better and to see if there's some potential here. You know her far better than I do in what she needs and I respect you as her spiritual authority but I was wondering what you thought about that, okay?

How can you go wrong if you're talking to your elder and you're talking to her father and you're looking to progress in a way that is fully in submission to the proper authority and doing so in a biblical way?

You're not toying with her heart, you're not doing something illegitimate, right? Right. Well, and like, oh,

I have to think of an opportunity or a way to be around her. We've already involved your pastor, her father.

They can find ways to get you two around each other without it seeming like a rigged thing where she has to commit to something or say no to your face.

You could, they can, they know what to do to get you two together to talk. If the podcast survives four or five years and a young man is doing some research on my daughter, so I'm telling you how to go about it.

So wait, are we against rigged or arranged things or? Necessarily no. Okay, okay.

No. No, but I know a lot of young women who got into situations where their fathers weren't involved, there were no other men.

So they were stuck in the position of having to tell this guy off, tell him no. Instead of, there were other people that were involved ahead of time that were aware of the situation and they could let the daughter down gently or let the man down gently, say,

I don't think she's really interested. And then it's not a rejection by her, it's just a, we don't think so.

And then you pray and you continue with counsel. So one of the things I'm pretty appreciative about here at Sunnyside is that we are thinking about these things rather frequently.

And we all have kids growing up together, interacting with one another, because if you did what

Michael just suggested you do in your run -of -the -mill SBC church, that dad's gonna look at you like you're crazy.

That does not happen. And if it did happen, he wouldn't know how to react. He might not know how to respond or move forward, going forward.

He probably had his patriarchy card revoked. Well, yeah, I mean, but that's like 80 % of households right now in America.

So what we're talking about is rather rare. And I'm thankful that we're here because it's not as rare here amongst the group of believers that we have here at Sunnyside.

Yeah, so I was talking about, I had dated someone else before Brooke and that father was pretty belligerent towards me.

Brooke's father, even after I had kind of stepped back from her because I didn't know what I wanted in life,

I didn't know what I was doing. He spoke to me, counselor, as an elderly Christian man.

And he said, this is what it means to live like a Christian. Putting the daughter aside, are you a

Christian man? Are you following after Christ? That's what's important right now. You seem confused.

Let me walk beside you and help you in that. Regardless of the outcome of all of this, let me help you in that.

And just to have a man who's like, this is bigger than that, this is a huge decision, but I see you're a young man struggling.

And I'm glad to be at church with other men that are like that, and I hope to be that way, to be able to see young men and young women and say, hey, let's get you with someone that can help you, someone older that can give you counsel.

Amen, well, we really enjoyed talking about our wives, meeting our wives, and how you might meet yours one day.

But we're gonna move on to recommendations, Michael. My recommendation is a little book by Graham Goldsworthy called

Homeward Bound. I may have recommended it before, but I think it's an excellent example of biblical theology, and as Graham Goldsworthy takes you through the

Old Testament into the New Testament and talks about the themes of rest, the theme of rest, and how it's connected to the theme of land in the

Old Testament, how rest and land go together in the theme of the Sabbath, and then how this theme is fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ and how he is given to us as our rest, as our inheritance.

And it's an excellent little book, Homeward Bound. Chris? I would recommend a book called

Love and Respect by Emmerich, I think is his name, Dr. Emmerich, and he goes through biblical texts on love and respect, obviously the command, husbands, love your wives, wives, respect your husbands, and how that plays out.

He breaks it down, and there's some psychology in there, but ultimately, he gets to the point of we do this under the

Lord. If you start feeling like you're part of the crazy cycle and things are spinning in the wrong direction, instead of focusing on what they're doing wrong or what you're doing wrong, look to the

Word, look to other counselors, and ultimately, you're doing this unto the Lord. You're loving her unto the

Lord. You're respecting him unto the Lord. So I thought that book was very helpful.

Amen. I don't have any content recommendations this week, which is,

I know, abnormal for me, and I could, but they're so niche that I would feel sorry for you having to listen to the pitch.

So I'm gonna go ahead and recommend, if you are a young man, and you are navel -gazing as I was, or if you're not, but you lack male counselors in your life, a multitude of male counselors in your life, do what you can, whether you're married or unmarried, to find older men to teach you.

They have gone through many of the things that you have gone through. They have been in the Word longer than you have.

They have a richness that you not only can draw from, but you are meant to draw from.

It is the older man's responsibility to teach you. It is your responsibility to be taught by the older man.

So do not neglect an opportunity to not only just be around peers who love the

Lord, but also among those who are older than you, who are more seasoned than you, have more gray hair than you.

That is one of the reasons we ended up at Sunnyside. We had bounced around to other churches.

We knew that most of the Reformed churches in the area had a younger demographic. Michael was preaching.

We had listened to a few past sermons about soteriology and a few other things that we thought we needed to be at the church that we were going to.

So we were on board with that. We showed up. I saw all the gray hair.

I saw multiple families with multiple generations had been introduced to these families. And then the cherry on top was

Michael teaching through his post -millennial few in class.

And I was like, oh, okay, this is it. So getting in a place where you have the opportunity to be taught by older men, it's extremely important.

If I could piggyback off of yours a little bit, younger men finding older men, I would say if you're an older man listening to this in podcast,

I would encourage you to find a younger man because they're looking and they may not know how to approach you.

The Bible says older men teach younger men. The command is to you to go find them.

And because of our culture and all of that and masculinity is trashed and all this, and it can be easy to feel like you don't have a role, but you do have a role.

And the Bible tells you what it is. You may feel awkward. You may feel like, well, I don't have anything to teach them, but that's just simply not true.

You have experience. If you've been walking with the Lord, you've been walking with him longer than that young man has been.

So find a younger man to pour into. And you are gonna learn from each other. I think one of the bigger issues right now that we're coming across that hasn't really proliferated throughout most other churches is a generational strife occurring right now, especially in theological circles between older men and younger men.

If you are in your local church, you do not treat young men, you do not treat older men like you would other older men on the internet.

You do not do that at all. And older men, you also do not treat younger men like you would younger men on the internet.

There's a lot of respect lacking on the internet. And it can be this to where we're just lobbing grenades over the wall at each other constantly.

One of the dampening effects in my life to all that nonsense, because I can get just as worked up as anybody else about all this stuff for varying reasons that are usually not theological, but I have them still.

And one of the dampening effects has been coming to church, interacting with older men, learning from older men, and trying to let that shape me more than anything else in my days during the week, especially everything online.

That's not as, I mean, it's a real place, it's a real forum, but it's not dealing with people. It's not loving one another, it's not being with one another, and that has to be taken into account too.

But we'll move on to what are we thankful for, Michael? I'm thankful for reflection on the providence of God.

I think it was Thomas Watson said that providence is a Hebrew word best read backwards. And when we reflect on the faithfulness of God, the long suffering of God, and reflect upon the success, the inexorable, continual success of our

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, not only in the personal life, not just in me, but in my wife and my children and in the church, we just see a record of the faithfulness of God.

We see a record of how well Jesus saves. And I'm thankful for those reflections.

Chris? Speaking of older men, my dad came over today and we knocked out a cabinet so that we could fit in a dishwasher that's been sitting in my garage for weeks.

I took today off, I knew the weather was gonna be nice and I wanted to get some stuff done. So I said, hey, are you off work today?

He's retired. Can you come over and do some work with me? And he did, he came over and I was like,

I don't even know what tools I'm supposed to use to get this thing out of here. I don't know if this outlet is working.

So we had several things. I had a back door that wasn't working. Five minutes there and he's pulled this hinge out of his back door and he's like, well, it won't close because this is this way.

And so five minutes there, he's got the back door fixed. And then we work on knocking out this cabinet and sawing things up and pulling things out and pushing things in.

And it was just really nice to be with him and to learn from him. And then just, he's in a different stage of life.

He just got done with back surgery. And so he's healing from that. But just to have those conversations that are different than when you're a child, but you're still learning.

And so I'm very grateful to have my father and to be able to do those things with him. Amen. Well, I am thankful for just simply the weather that we've had recently, today specifically.

The sun's come out, it's warmed up and my dad would light me up for saying that because he just doesn't like the warm weather.

And I traditionally haven't either, but I've learned to love all the weather that the Lord throws at us.

But particularly sun coming out and warming up, my wife sends me, I don't know, 500 % more photos and videos of all the kids being outside.

Yeah. And you can only take so many pictures inside that are like fun for her to take.

There's great stuff that happens during the day inside when it's cold and icy or snowy or whatever.

But man, whenever the sun's out and you can turn the kids loose, stuff just happens. Like today, we had a

Muscovy duck that either used to be ours and wasn't for a while, come back and is just sitting out there on a clothesline

T -post right at the top. And then Heather's sending me a video of this and I said, that looks a lot like our old duck.

I said, I don't know if that is or not. I said, let's see if it, I said, throw some food over there across. And she's like,

I already did. He hasn't, or she hasn't moved. She texts me back and it's another video and that duck's in the cage.

And the duck was in the cage when she left today. So I was like, well, the Lord gave us a duck today. And if it's laying, my goodness, what a blessing that is.

But yeah, it was just the weather and the warmup and kind of the getting going into spring.

And I'm slightly dreading it because that means I have to start spraying lawns on top of my other full -time work.

So that just puts more juggling into play. But I still really enjoy the weather that we got and that we're going to be having moving forward.

So I'm super thankful for that. And that wraps it up for today.

We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Having Not Read.