Covenant is the foundational principle in how God has deployed and God embodies in his covenantal character, even within himself, the triune God, but also as he relates to humanity.

It's a very modern approach to any sort of marriage relationship. There's no real commitment. We're just kind of basically friends, but with some potential intentions.

I think at some point the elephant in the room here is for young people, it is extremely hard to find a worthy spouse right now for both young men and young women.

The Lord had answered all my prayers for a husband and ironically I was like swearing off boys. I think it was probably a month or two before that.

Is love a completely subjective thing that's validated only subjectively, or is there real evidence of Holy Spirit-infused objective love that is rooted in Christ, not just in your emotional experience at the time? Marry somebody who is a believer because I guarantee you if you are in a church community,

you've been there for years and years and you know somebody who is married an unbeliever

and they've been praying for their spouse,

they would tell you they would not

have made that choice if they could have made that choice.

Selena, love is in the air.

Okay. That's not how I thought you were coming out with this episode.

It's always in the air when you're around. Thank you. You're so kind. Oh, but we're coming out of the winter, right? I know we got engaged in December. We did. I think a lot of college, what, how do I say this? Young lovers. Young love gets engaged in the winters, what I'm trying to say. Okay. So if you're home from college. So they can plan for a wedding in the summer? Exactly. Okay. That's what I'm trying to say because springtime, summertime, that's when all the weddings happen. Yeah. Right? And so this is a marriage podcast. And so there's a chance that you're listening to this as someone who is headed into marriage or you know somebody who's headed into marriage. And I think it behooves us to get our minds right, to get our hearts right, around what heading into marriage is. Right. And so to that end, we're going to talk about this idea of dating. Is that even a thing? Courtship, betrothal, engagement, all these terms. And namely, five considerations for the young among us or the engaged among us to have as you're headed into

marriage. Because once you enter the covenant, it's a covenant, right? It's not something that's

just convenient. It's not a contract. It is a covenant

between you and your spouse, your husband, your wife, and the Lord, and in some sense, to your family,

to your community, that you're going to keep this thing together. So it's important that we have,

we think about it before it starts and not after it started. Right. These things. So welcome to the podcast. My name's Ryan. This is Selena. We're the Fredericks. We've been doing this for the better part over a decade, actually. We've been married 22 years. If you don't know, we have four daughters. And it is our joy to be a voice in your ear about 30 minutes a week, just reminding you that marriage is great. Marriage is worthwhile. not because we say it is, but because God designed it for his glory, for human flourishing.

And so we want to be the encouragement in your ear reminding you of that weekend and week out.

And of course, we'll go to the Bible a whole lot.

But everything, even if we aren't going right to scripture, everything is governed by the underlying reality

that God is God. He gave us marriage and it's good. And so welcome to the podcast. Thank you for

joining us. If you've been a consumer, if you will, of the podcast for many years, that's awesome.

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