Is The Abortion Debate Changing?

IM

I have added an instant messenging widget to my sidebar as a result of my extremely pleasant online conversation with a bunch of rebs today on the live video of Alex and Brett. You can also IM me via youthofeternity@gmail.com.

Alex and Brett Harris – live

i just got done watching Alex and Brett Harris talk about their new book live on their publisher’s website. They said that they will most likely be doing this again soon so keep an eye out on therebelution.com/blog for announcements about it. The video’s only half the goods, the really fun part was chatting live with a TON of rebs, many of which I recognized from the forums or blogs that I read. Here’s the link to the recorded video that I watched live. I look forward to seeing you in the chat room next time! And I look forward to receiving comments on here from the people that were there this time. Here’s the link.

Oh, and a side note: Alex recently got engaged! And probably because he’s got a girl’s influence in his life, he’s FINALLY STARTING TO LOOK DIFFERENT THAN BRETT. Now I can FINALLY tell them apart!

Meaning?

(Completely unrelated to the Teenage Marriage series)

I transcend my earthly form
Through some questions never asked before
Question the need to be a machine
That responds automatically

Some words will trigger certain acts
Just one of the commandments we have learnt
Some acts will trigger certain states
I think it’s time to alter the game

I’m changing
You’re changing
We’re changing from within

Deviate from the form of nothing
Deviate from the norm to something
Deviate from the form of nothing
I deviate, farewell to the tribe

I receive clues that lead me
To answers never seen before
And find the final piece
In the puzzle of reality

Some words will trigger certain acts
Belief in limitations we have learnt
Some acts will trigger certain states
I’m taking back what I gave away

I’m changing
You’re changing
We’re changing from within

Deviate from the form of nothing
Deviate from the norm to something
Deviate from the form of nothing
I deviate, farewell to the tribe

Soul volcano
Now erupting
Lava swallows
What used to be
Soul tsunami
Overflowing
Overriding
Reality

What does this song mean to you?  How do you interpret these lrics? What do you think the lyrisist means by “deviate from the form”?  Do not look these lyrics up, do not try to find out what artist sang this song, just give me your impressions.  Go with your gut. …and if you know what band this is by, do not comment, please. I’m trying to prove a point here, I’ll explain in the comments after several people have replied.

Teenage Marriage – It’s Not That Complicated

Teenage Marriage – Part 1

“Men, if you want to be married, find a godly gal, treat her right, talk to her parents, pop the question, tie the knot, and start making babies.” –Kevin DeYoung, “Just Do Something”

Radical, huh?  Dad handed me Just Do Something a couple weeks ago after quoting that to me.  I thought I was a radical extremist when it came to marriage, but he blew even some of my ideals away.  I had never even considered the fact that it may, in fact, be that simple. Try as I may, I can’t find anything even the slightest bit unbiblical in that quote, or even in his entire chapter on “Getting Hitched.” The closer I examine that statement, the more I realize that it isn’t oversimplified one bit.  Every point in it rings true.  Let’s look at it a bit closer for a sec, shall we?
“Men.”  Kevin correctly implies that it is the man’s responsibility to initiate such a relationship and points out that we men need to take an active role in the proccess instead of just “letting go and letting God.” …All in one word. I’m impressed.
“If you want to be married.” He makes it obvious that he’s not demeaning singleness straight from the get-go or eliminating the possibility of lifelong celibacy.
“Find a godly gal.” This part is a lot more radical than it seems.  Again, he emphasizes the man’s need to be proactive in the spouse-finding relationship instead of just “waiting for the right girl to come along” by using the active word “find.”  Also, “godly gal” brings to the table the indispensable yet often overlooked doctrine that believers must marry other believers. 2cd Corinthians 6:14: ” Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?”
“Treat her right.”  Kevin mentions this before he gets into the courting/dating process. Interesting, huh? I may be looking farther into this phrase than Kevin intended, but he makes (if unknowingly so) an excellent point here.  If we guys want to attract godly young women, we shouldn’t be focused on impressing the girls, we should be focused on honoring the girls.  Be the knight in shining armor.  But get rid of the shining armor. It’s showy and attractive, but that’s not what you want to impress girls with, it’s the fact that you’d die shoving her out of the way of an incoming car without a second’s pause, even if you’ve never met them before.  We need to slay the dragons, yes, but we don’t need to make it into the storybooks (newspapers/blog posts/etc) for our dragon-slaying adventures.  You can be the poorest, ugliest guy on the entire planet, but if you treat girls with courtesy and honor, that’s all you’ll need.  This concept must carry into all of our relationships, not just our ones involving a romantic interest.  If we guys are only civil and polite to girls that we are interested in, then we are projecting a facade to those people, one that will quickly drop after you are married and no longer worry about impressing the other person.
“Talk to her parents.”  This brings to light one of the biggest flaws in the 21st century spouse-finding proccess – lack of parental involvement.  We don’t ask our parents to date someone, we tell them that we are leaving for a date.  We don’t make sure that our parents know about our intentions to court someone before the other person does so they can have a chance to get to know them before approving the union, we bring home a girl that we met in college and announce our intentions to our parents.  This is probably the most radical part of the proccess that I’ve touched on so far (aside from openly denoucing dating).  We shouldn’t be informing our parents of our intentions towards a certain person or tell them that we’ve got a date on Saturday, we need to be asking them if they think it’d be a good idea to pursue a certain person in a dating/courting relationship (Prov 6:20-24).  I don’t need to give an example of the way the culture does it, you already know that, no matter how “uncultured” you are.  But allow me to give an example of the right way to do things.

My sister’s marriage was as close to being arranged as you can get without sticking two people in a room and informing that they are going to get married. One of my adopted sisters got my mom in touch with another mom who had adopted her best friend from the orphanage that she was from.  They started E-mailing (we live on opposite sides of the nation) and telling each other about all their amazing children.  As it turns out, the other mom had a 20-year old son named Micah who was looking for a godly young girl to settle down with.  …Mom’s reaction was “Oh reeeealy??? I just happen to have a 19-year old daughter named Jennifer who is looking for a godly young man to settle down with…”  They decided to have Micah start E-mailing Jennifer and getting to know her, making sure they both understood why. Micah eventually decided that this girl was perfect for him and so he called Dad up to… inform him that he was going to ask Jennifer’s hand in marriage? No, not at all. He called to ask Dad’s permission to simply talk to Jennifer in the context of a courting relationship.  Eventually, he came down to visit her and then asked Dad’s permission to marry his daughter, my sister.  They are now happily married with a 1-year old girl named after another of my sisters, Anna.  Even though I generally dissaprove of long-distance relationships like that, the way Micah behaved in the relationship is a prime example of godly pursuance of a wife (I do not know his interactions with his parents regarding the relationship so I can’t speak negatively or positively on that).  Plus, having an attitude of respect and obedience towards any girl’s parents, whether or not you have any such intentions towards that girl, will probably impress them (especially the parents) more than anything else.

“Pop the question.”  Sounds simple doesn’t it?  The culture tells us that the decision to marry someone should be the most difficult, most mind-wrecking decision we’ll ever face.  It’s all based around the belief that there is “THE One” out there that we will marry, the one guy/girl that God has chosen and raised specifically to be married to us. We’re paranoid that we’ll choose someone else than the One that God has chosen for us and that if we don’t choose Him we’ll be miserable for the rest of our lives.  It’s not that complicated! There isn’t “The Guy” or “The Girl” out there that we must get married to or risk straying off of God’s plan for our lives.  True, God knows what is going to happen and has predestined from the beginning of time the person you will marry, but that doesn’t mean that it’s even remotely possible for you to choose the wrong person.  Any godly person you choose to marry will be a sanctioned, blessed marriage by God.  Any mature godly man and woman should be able to be married happily for their entire lives.  So it really is as simple as finding a godly young lady, treating her right, asking her parents to court/date her, and “popping the question.”  As long as you marry a godly person of the opposite gender, your union will be blessed by God.

“Tie the knot.”  …Get married.

“Start making babies.” This one made me smile and grimace at the same time.  I smiled because of his amusing, not-so-subtle effort to non-offensively say “have sex,” but I also grimaced because I’ve been realizing lately how many people consider children an optional part of marriage.  A godly husband must be committed to raising children, and a godly wife must be committed to having them.”Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.  Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth.  Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!” -Psalm 127:2-5a.  This topic needs a lot more space than I have left in this part so I will close up and come back (Lord willing) to this topic later on in this series.

Kevin’s section in his book on marriage is simply amazing and definitely worth the price of the book.  But in case you can’t afford it, or you are too lazy (or “preoccupied,” if you prefer) to read it, I’ll sum it up with another quote from that chapter: “I know this may sound crass, and your parents might not appreciate the advice, but guys, if you like a girl and you’re both Christians and your friends and family aren’t alarmed and she actually likes you back, you should probably get married.”

Thanks for bearing with me as I find every possible rabbit trail to venture off on in this series.  I know that this is somewhat of an introductory style post,a nd I already did one of those, but the good thing about this one is that it is divided into maneagable topics that I can elaborate on in individual posts.  So feel free to think of this as the second part of the introduction.

Teenage Marriage – Introduction

As I enter my late teens, a question that has been on the forefront of my mind is how young one must be to start courting/dating.  Obviously, it cannot be much (if any) earlier than the age at which one should consider marriage, since that, ultimately, is the purpose of a courting/dating relationship – marriage.  The average marrying age these days is in the mid twenties for both men and women (27 for men, 25 for women, according to the 2007 U.S. Community Survey). However, as Christians we must look at everything in a biblical light, and bring all cultural standards to the Bible to see whether or not we should embrace them.  Especially standards that originated in the secular culture.  The culture, both Christian and secular, screams at us teenagers to not take marriage seriously in our dating relationships until we’re over 18 or so and have been dating for at least a year or two.  Dating is, as one of my non-christian friends defined for me, like a circus.  You try out all the different forms of entertainment the circus has to offer until eventually you find one that you are satisfied with.  We are told to date people based on their attractiveness or popularity, not their suitability to be a life-long partner.  This is why the age of marriage is so high – people go through dozens of “girlfriends” and “boyfriends” before they find someone that they’d be willing to spend their life with.  And for every single one of these, they give a piece of their heart away. When they eventually find someone they want to marry, they have nothing special to give to them; they’ve given it all away in their numerous past relationships.  And I’m not talking about purity here, I’m talking about everything that can be given away in a dating relationship – first kiss, the unique pleasure of holding hands while walking through a park, falling hopelessly in “love”, getting to spend time alone with the most important person in your life (a date),  all of these have been experienced so many times with so many people that by the time you get married, the husband-wife relationship isn’t that much more special than that of a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.

…But what if this didn’t happen?  What if our goal in life were to only have one such relationship?  Only one girlfriend/boyfriend.  The same person that you gave your first kiss to would be the same, the only person you’d fall hopelessly in love with, the same person you’d walk through the park with, holding hands.  Your heart would never be broken, your trust never thrown away as if it was garbage, your purity never even threatened, your hopes never dashed to the ground from a break-up.  More on topic, you’d be married much earlier in life. Of course, if I left it there, I’d be sure to have dozens of people protesting: “Sure, you’d get all the benefits of only having one such relationship, but you would still marry at the same age.  It’s a maturity level issue, not a how-many-people-you’ve-dated issue.” Agreed, it’s a matter of maturity, both mentally and spiritually.  But if you weren’t involved in the whole dating scene, not constantly worried about whether that cute girl/guy in the corner “likes” you, not constantly worried about looking nice so that you can impress a possible future romantic interest, and were instead focused on becoming a man/woman of God, imagine what would happen. The hours every day that you’d spend with your girlfriend or boyfriend would instead be spent in learning how to become a godly wife or husband.  The time you’d spend worrying about what a certain person thought of you would instead be spent on what God thought of you.  With this mindset, you’d become mature enough to get married much, much quicker than if you wasted your time dating.  If you were concerned at 13 and 14 about becoming a good wife or husband, then you would be ready for it far, far before your mid-twenties.  I’ve come to realize that there is also something sadly wrong about what the culture thinks is required for marriage.  The more I go to the scriptures for answers instead of the culture, the more I see that the culture, and yes, I’m talking about the christian culture, has got it wrong.  I’m not saying that we need to just completely reject everything the culture does, but we need to take what they do and measure it up against the Word Of God.  And we shouldn’t go to the Bible looking for justification of what we are already doing, we must instead go to it with an open mind, trying to find out what we need to do, without even taking into consideration what we and those around us are already doing.

In this series, what I hope to accomplish is to show you from the Bible how the cultural standards for teenage boy/girl relationships are wrong. Teenagers can and should be mature enough to be married.  Dating, as the culture defines and practices it, is unbiblical (aka: a sin). And that includes the way most Christians use it.  A lot of Christians attempt to justify dating by saying that they will only date Christians. This too, is wrong.  Any such relationship, no matter what method you use, must be done with the aim to only do so once. That is what is wrong with dating – having multiple relationships.  Dating and courting (or whatever method you choose) are the processes used to find a spouse. When you date someone, you must approach the relationship with that in mind.  And that is what makes dating wrong, because all it is is culturally glorified adultury.  It is just as much of a sin to break up a dating/courting relationship as it is to divorce your spouse.  I know these ideas are radical, but I am confident that I can prove to you through the sacred scriptures that they are right. This is what the evangelical leaders of last generation have been telling us for some time, but we’ve been so self-sufficient and prideful that we think that we, as teenagers, are smarter than the 50 and 60-year old pastors out there telling us that we’re doing it wrong.  `

Teenage Marriage Series To Be Revised

After reviewing my first post in my Teenage Marriage series, I have decided to start over on the whole endeavor.  I never actually answered the question asked in my previous post, the formatting was seriously flawed, and, while it worked well as a stand-alone post, it could not suffice as an introductory post into a series.  I started working on the series from the beginning again, with Joshua helping me, and it’s turning out much, much better than the first one.   I have finished the Introduction, I will post it as soon as I get a grade on it from my mother.

“Teenage Marriage” – Part 1

“Teenage Marriage” – Part 1

Should teens marry? There is a cultural perception in today’s culture that the marrying age is 20 and above. Should that be so? Is that a right attitude? Is that a reasonable expectation? What effect does that mindset have on the culture? What are the benefits to marrying early? Late? As I enter my late teens, these questions weigh heavily on my mind.  I write this essay with a twofold purpose: 1) To help myself better understand the question at hand as I study it, and 2) To help others better understand it by reading my thoughts on the issue and by discussing each part with me as I post them on my blog.

According to the U.S. Census Community Survey in 2007, the average age of marriage for men was 27, with women being only a couple years behind for an average of 25. Yet throughout history, men and women have usually been married by their late teens, some even marrying as young as 12 or 13. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was most likely only 13 or 14 years old when she married Joseph, and that was not at all unusual in their culture and era. Yet today, that age has been doubled. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, as always, when we are faced with a question of the righteousness of an act, we must turn to the infallible scriptures for guidance. However, after searching through a topical reference bible for passages relating to marriage, I have not found a single reference regarding the age at which one should get married. There is no hard and fast rule as to when we should get married. But is there truly no help in the Bible for the second-most-important decision in our lives, the first being salvation? No, for God provides us with plenty of help in this regard, it simply is not in the form of rules, but rather principles.

1) Should teens marry? Marriage is a lifelong commitment (“become one flesh”) (Gen 2:23-24). Therefore, it is not something we must rush blindly or hurriedly into. Two people should not get married unless they are both capable of separating themselves from their parents in order to live together and provide for themselves. I think this is one reason that the average marrying age has legitimately increased – much more is needed by both people in order to live on their own now, as compared to 2000 years ago (or even 200). We need to be able to take out loans on houses, manage complicated financial matters, have a high school education, etc.  One of the biggest prohibitions to getting married early is that you must be at least 18 to sign most legal documents. In most of history, basically all that was required was that the man could build a house, farm his land, and lead his wife. A lot of Christians today believe that the guy must be able to financially support a family in order to get married, thus raising the minimum possible marrying age in order to save money and have a stable, well-paying job. Some go farther and say that the guy should have a college education (or if their profession doesn’t require one, to be well established in their respected field of expertise), which raises the marrying age into the mid twenties. However, some hold that we need only be spiritually and mentally mature enough to manage a wife/household, and have a good grasp of the basics of time management, finance, family management, etc. They would say that two people in their late (and even mid) teens could get married. A willingness to work together through bad and good times, and a firm trust in the LORD is needed in that case, because the two would have to work harder to be financially stable, and the wife may have to work to help support the family, especially if one or both are still in high school or college, since they’d be paying their own school expenses as well as basic required living expenses such as rent, clothing, and food. A willingness to go through with this type of marriage speaks highly towards the two people’s maturity and strength of faith.  One of the best things about this approach is that part of the time which most people would normally spend developing their life-long habits and interests is spent with their life-long partner. By your mid-twenties, most of your preferences and habits have become a permanent part of your personality, and could cause significant friction if you were to marry another person of the same age but different interests. Favorite foods, music, clothing styles, etc, are all shaped in our teens to early-mid twenties, and these interests are heavily influenced by our closest friends. And since our closest friend on earth is our spouse, the younger you marry, the more likely you are to like the same things as your partner for the rest of your life. It would be a lot easier to find someone to marry if you have this mindset, since you aren’t nearly as strict in what you look for. If you’ve listened to heavy metal for 15 years, you’re going to have a hard time living with someone who only listened to classical music for the same amount of time.

As I close this point, I want to deal with one section in the paragraph above.  I said that two people should not get married unless they are both capable of separating themselves from their parents in order to live together and provide for themselves.  This is the biggest factor in deciding whether or not a person is mature enough to get married – if they are prepared to live independently.  Living in your parent’s house while married because you are incapable of living on your own is not an option. If you cannot do this, you should wait before getting married.  I said earlier that nowhere in the bible does it say at what age a person should get married.  On the issue of independence, however, the Bible is perfectly clear.  Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”) is seen a total of 4 times in the Bible (also found in Matt 19:5, Mark 10:7-8, and Eph 5:31).  In Matthew 19, Jesus speaks on this topic to the pharisees with a little more detail: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Mat 19:4-7, ESV). The independence of a married couple from their parents is a clear command given by God and must be a non-negotiable principle in the proccess of finding a spouse.

:-)

Good news! Buried in our automated network backups, I found the file in which I had been working on my series on teenage marriage!  I ended up losing some work, but recovered almost all of the first post.  Now, after going over it again and adding another paragraph and some scripture references, I have it ready for posting.  Unlike the rest of my stuff, where I write all or most of the series before I post the first section, I will post these as I write them, since part of the reason I am writing this is to better shape my own views on this subject.  I will incorporate what I learn from the discussion in the comments into the future posts, and even reply to some of the questions directly in the post as points.

:-(

Yesterday, my computer died. With that computer, I lost all the work so far on my series that I have been working on (I think, I may still be able to recover some from remote backups.) So, (obviously) the series will be suspended until further notice, as will all blogging. I will NOT be getting another computer, and will only have limited time on the family computers, and I do not know how this will affect blogging. I will probably still continue, but posts will be rarer.

~Soli Deo Gloria!~
~Trey Edwards~

(I will still read and respond to comments)