Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship

Living to glorify God means doing everything... for Him, His way, to point to His greatness and to reflect His goodness.

Women need to remember that if nature has made them plain, grace can make them beautiful, and if nature has made them beautiful, good deeds can add to their beauty. Grace will make you beautiful and will attract truly godly men to you. Make godliness and inward beauty your priority.

During courtship, guarding each other's purity and refraining from intimacy are the acts of lovemaking.

Do you see a theme emerging? Women like flowers; men like food!

The face that Moses had begged to see—was forbidden to see—was slapped bloody (Exodus 33:19–20). The thorns that God had sent to curse the earth’s rebellion now twisted around his own brow.… “On your back with you!” One raises a mallet to sink in the spike. But the soldier’s heart must continue pumping as he readies the prisoner’s wrist. Someone must sustain the soldier’s life minute by minute, for no man has this power on his own. Who supplies breath to his lungs? Who gives energy to his cells? Who holds his molecules together? Only by the Son do “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). The victim wills that the soldier live on—he grants the warriors continued existence. The man swings. As the man swings, the Son recalls how

In fact, the Bible tells us that the union of man and woman in marriage points to the climatic final scene - when Christ returns for His church, the bride He died to save (Ephesians 5:31-32).

A bagel shop isn't the most romantic spot to tell a girl you like her. But that night romance wasn't the priority. Our time there wasn't intended to be mushy. I didn't propose marriage or say I was madly in love with her, and she didn't swoon. What I did tell her was that through our friendship I'd grown to respect her.

No matter where we are today or what mistakes we've made in the past, He has given us everything we need to glorify Him right now.

And He was the one who invented marriage so that the blazing fire of romantic love could become something even more beautiful - a pulsing, red-hot ember of covenant love in marriage. Why did He do it? For the same reason that He made sunsets and mountain ranges and fireflies! Because He's good. Because He wants to give us a million different opportunities to see just how wonderful He is.

We should never use spiritual activities as a way to grab for more intimacy than is appropriate for our relationship.

We can't change by fancy methods. We can't change by mere willpower. But God's Spirit working in us can help us to "will and to act according to his good purpose" (Philippians 2:13).

John Calvin wrote, “The evil in our desire typically does not lie in what we want, but in that we want it too much.