So you are interested in dating my daughter...

Absolute brilliance from Jared Wilson:

1. You must love Jesus. I don't care if you're a "good Christian boy." I was one of those too. So I know the tricks. I'm going to ask you specific, heart-testing questions about your spiritual affections, your daily devotional life, your idols, your disciplines, and the like. I'll cut you a little bit of slack because you're young and hormonal and your pre-frontal lobe isn't fully developed yet, but I'll be watching you like a hawk. I know you. I was you. You will think you can fool me, and you likely have fooled many other dads who didn't pay much attention to their daughters' suitors, but I will be on you like Bourne on that guy whose neck he broke. Which guy was that? Every guy. So love Jesus more than my daughter or go home.

2. You will install X3Watch or Covenant Eyes on your computer and mobile devices and have your regular reports sent to me.

3. I will talk to your dad and tell him I will hold him responsible if you don't treat my daughter like a lady. If he thinks I'm a crazy person, you fail the test and won't get to date her. If he understands what I'm saying, that bodes well for you.

4. You will pay for everything. Oh, sure, every now and then my daughter can buy you a Coke or something and a gift on your birthday and at Christmas. But you pay for meals, movies, outings, whatever else. Don't have a job? I'm sorry, why I am talking to you again?

5. You will accept my Facebook friend request.

6. If it looks like you need a belt to hold your pants up, I will assume you don't have a job. See #4.

7. Young people dating are putting their best face forward, so if you appear impatient, ill-tempered, or ill-mannered, I know you will gradually become more so over time. I will have no jerks dating my daughters.

8. If I am not your pastor, I will talk to the man who is. If your pastor is a woman, why I am talking to you, again?

9. You don't love my daughter. You have no idea what love is. You like her and you might love her someday. That's an okay start with me, so put the seatbelt on the mushy gushy stuff. Don't profess your undying love, quote stupid love song lyrics to her, tell her you'd die for her, or feed her any other boneheaded lines that are way out of your depth as a horny little idiot. A lady's heart is a fragile thing. If you play with hers, I will show you yours.

10. If you ever find yourself alone with my daughter, don't panic. Just correct the situation immediately. If I ever catch you trying to get alone with my daughter, that would be the time to panic.

11. It may sound like I'm joking in threatening you harm, and while I might not physically hurt you if you offend my daughter or violate her honor, when I am addressing the issue with you, you will not be laughing.

12. You may think all this sounds very legalistic. That's fine. You can be one of the many antinomians not dating my daughter.

Protecting our daughters from a sexualized culture...

Owen Strachan has written a helpful article on the parental (fatherly) responsibility to help our daughters be clothed in beautiful modesty. This is not merely a cultural issue. It is not about being liberal or conservative. It is not about holding to an antiquated Victorian ideal. Guarding the purity of our daughters from a hyper-sexualized culture is deeply theological. Just as Christ is working to present his church to himself as a pure and beautiful bride, so too fathers are to guard the purity of their daughters.

Strachan writes:

Every parent possesses an inherent drive to care for their child. They know that it is right to protect their offspring, whether from the wind and rain or the pedophile and pornographer. Yet because of sin, we naturally fail. The failure of fathers to care for their daughters pops up throughout Scripture. When threatened by the men of Sodom, Lot offered his two daughters to a bloodthirsty mob and is stopped only by the intervention of angels (Gen. 19:1-11). In a stunning repeat of the Sodom incident, the man hosting an unnamed Levite offers drunken "worthless fellows" his virgin daughter along with the Levite's concubine (Judges 19). In one of the most horrifying scenes in Scripture, the Levite finds the concubine dead and cuts her body up, then sends the pieces to all corners of Israel. His abdication of fatherly responsibility, realized in a flash of grief, signifies that darkness has descended upon the nation.

Wearing tight pink sweatpants and push-up bras is not the same as sacrifice, but the two proceed from the same devilish idea. The contextual outworking of the problem causes the same reaction. As we watch the culture train tiny girls to be princesses, princesses to be hot girls, and hot girls to be sexual aggressors, we gasp at such a trajectory. This is not indulging in prudery. That exhalation of breath? It's a profoundly theological response to the effects of sin. The first and most basic of parental duties is to protect one's children in a physical and especially a spiritual sense (Eph. 6:4). This involves training little girls to be modest and chaste, and to exude Christocentric virtue, not to be forward and promiscuous. If these ideals sound Victorian, antiquated to modern ears, they are actually much more historical (see 1 Tim. 2:9-10).

There is another type of father in Scripture besides the wicked men mentioned above. This father finds a little girl dying in the wilderness, crying with no one to hear. He gathers her in his arms and nurses her to health. He clothes her in beauty as she grows, celebrating her womanhood. Because of his protection and care, she flourishes. This father is the Lord God, and his daughter is Jerusalem (Ezek. 16). The text details the faithlessness of God's people and bears first on that biblical-theological matter, but it also gives us a window into how we are to raise our daughters. Our heavenly Father's strength, tenderness, and compassion direct our care for our own little girls, and we desire their flourishing for the glory of Christ as he desires the health of his people.

Read the entire article HERE.

Fathers - Indispensable for a child's good...

There's a fascinating, albeit not surprising article posted at Touchstone concerning the importance of fathers regarding the Christian commitment of their children.

In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father’s influence, from the determination of a child’s sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

A mother’s role will always remain primary in terms of intimacy, care, and nurture. (The toughest man may well sport a tattoo dedicated to the love of his mother, without the slightest embarrassment or sentimentality). No father can replace that relationship. But it is equally true that when a child begins to move into that period of differentiation from home and engagement with the world “out there,” he (and she) looks increasingly to the father for his role model. Where the father is indifferent, inadequate, or just plain absent, that task of differentiation and engagement is much harder. When children see that church is a “women and children” thing, they will respond accordingly—by not going to church, or going much less.

Curiously, both adult women as well as men will conclude subconsciously that Dad’s absence indicates that going to church is not really a “grown-up” activity. In terms of commitment, a mother’s role may be to encourage and confirm, but it is not primary to her adult offspring’s decision. Mothers’ choices have dramatically less effect upon children than their fathers’, and without him she has little effect on the primary lifestyle choices her offspring make in their religious observances.

Read the entire article HERE.

John Edwards and the Mission of the Church

In an excellent article Russell Moore addresses the controversy over former presidential candidate John Edwards and his paternity troubles. Far from sensationalistic Moore uses the occassion to reflect both on the significance of paternity and the mission of the church.

Edwards risked more than his career or his party or even his country. He risked, if the stories are true, his little daughter’s very identity.

And that’s where it matters to us. Because no matter how many jokes are made about the “Brek Girl candidate,” we’re all vulnerable here.

We know from the Bible that a child learns who he or she is in relation to his or her father. That’s why persons in the scriptural story are known as “Joshua son of Nun” or “John son of Zebedee.”

Our personal identities are shaped after a cosmic pattern, a Father from whom fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named (Eph 3:14-15). We reflect a Father-Son dynamic in which a Father God announces “you are my Son, this day I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7).

That’s why Jesus’ Kingdom ministry doesn’t start with a display of sovereignty but with an announcement of paternity. As Jesus comes up out of the waters of Jordan, he hears “You are my beloved Son, and with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).

Every child is made to hear this from his parents, to be acknowledged, to be loved, and to find an identity in that.

This is threatened in our churches, and not by John Edwards. It’s threatened by generations of men, including evangelical Christians, who are just as willing to sacrifice a child’s identity for the sake of what we want.

Read the entire article HERE