Welcome again to Things Unseen.

Earlier on in the week we were talking about Christian books and bringing up our children.

And I was thinking about books written by gurus who have a very definite formula for how you do that,

and suggesting that we need to be disarning and in some cases very cautious about them,

because there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to either marriage or family life.

Scripture is full of great principles,

but what I've noticed is that sometimes gurus turn their own applications of those principles into the principles themselves. And that's a very bad way to handle scripture.

And it can also lead to off-center guidelines for marriage and family life.

I'm actually inclined to say the same thing about books on courtship and marriage. There's no one-size-fits-all.

And certainly in more recent decades,

Guru's ideas about courtship and married life

often seem to have more to do with Hollywood than with Scripture.

It's often struck me, for example, that the courtship in the Song of Solomon wasn't exactly

plain sailing. And sometimes that's the case with us. So we need to be cautious about prejudging

the ways of God with individual Christians and learn to be confident in God's faithfulness

and His sovereign providences in our lives.

But what is marriage, after all?

You remember how Genesis 2 describes the first courtship in marriage.

Adam was on his own.

He saw in Eve someone he recognized as in a special way

belonging to him, someone who was like him, someone who would complete him, someone in whom

he felt he could be fully himself. Actually, Genesis says, although I know it doesn't sound

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