Courtship requires parental authority

As I begin to write this, I am flipping back through the pages of my mind to about four decades ago to a television show called “The Dating Game.”

I can remember being bored with the one or two episodes I watched, but then again, who could blame a 5- or 6-year-old boy whose life revolved around Legos, erector sets and episodes of “Adam-12?” As I grew older I began to notice these creatures called girls. Oh, I had always known they were there, but right about the time that my voice began to deepen and my Adam’s apple to grow, I started to notice that these girls were becoming young ladies. While I would never revisit that game show of my childhood, or even care to know of its demise, my life has been forever changed by that young adulthood ritual we could well call the American dating game.

Looking back on my dating years, all I can say is that like many other young people, perhaps even most young people, many mistakes were made. While I care not return to these pages in my life for the shame they induce, I will say that as my wife and I began having children, we were honest with ourselves and decided that we wanted better for our children. The truth is that nobody can change their past, but you can change the future. And it was right about that time we began to hear about a thing called “courtship” going around in Christian circles. Apparently we were not alone.

While courtship is more of a concept than a system of hard and fast rules for the developing of a lifetime relationship, there are several principles you will need to consider as guides should you wish to implement this in the lives of your children.

And the very first principle is that of authority. When it comes to the subject of marriage, which is the ultimate purpose of both courtship and the dating game, you have at least 16 years to prepare your child for this phase of life. If you have not established a relationship between you and your child where he or she will submit to your authority as a young adult, then you are wasting your time and theirs, and all you will get is frustration. Don’t even start. If you have wasted the last 16 years of your child’s life letting him or her rule the roost, then you might as well just be happy with how they choose to play the dating game.

You need to understand that authority is the foundation for all of society, and according to God’s word, it begins in the home. The Fifth Commandment that God gave to Moses is, “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” In case you haven’t noticed, America has a problem with authority, and the truth is those who are rebels in our society today were first rebels in their homes, and their parents would not stem the tide.

The reason you need to be the authority in the life of your child is because the essence of courtship is that the parents are in charge, unlike dating where the young people are in charge. And what’s more, your relationship must be such that you get their voluntary submission, because as they get older, not only is it legally harder to make them, but there are a whole lot of other people out their in positions of pseudo authority who are trying to tell your children to dump their parents and do what they want.

Now, while there is more that could be said about authority than space will permit, I must suggest who should have this authority: The young lady’s father. It is his permission that should be sought to begin the courtship, and his for when it should be changed into marriage. It will be the father who will walk the daughter down the aisle, and the father who will give her away. And between the two, though the young man may feel as though he cannot live without her, it is the father who has worked to provide for her all the years of her life, and therefore it is the father who has the greatest interest in that young lady’s life, and he just may need to say, “No.”

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla; contact him at 357-4229 or ron.hamman@gci.net.