As long as our culture more or less agreed that we were a Christian nation — to whatever extent we actually were — there was a template for courtship, for marriage, and just generally for dealing with human love. Looking back — and you can see clearly in the old movies — there were severe distortions from the Biblical model. For example, the misogyny of the “heroes” in the old movies is embarrassing to see today. Much the same way the old movies embarrass in the way they treated all minorities. And of course, when I say old movies, they weren’t really from all that long ago.

Now, of course, there’s no consensus that we are a Christian nation, although the question has to be, to what degree can a nation that asserts it trust in God and wants His blessing, can renege on the deal. How does a nation apologize to the Almighty and say, “Well, that was then; we no longer want to be responsible for commitments our ancestors made.” Does the Almighty simply go along with that? Or do all the warnings of judgment on an unfaithful people still apply? But I digress.

In terms of Love, Marriage, Courtship, for those of us who are trying to follow Jesus, it becomes necessary to rethink all the old templates, and re-construct them from the Biblical sources. This time, we have to do it without any help from the culture, and in fact, we have to do it in spite of and sometimes against the grain of 21st Century America. Other believers are trying to do it as well. But there’s no consensus yet among believers about what courtship should look like, what marriage should look like, let alone how we deal with human love in general.

So that’s what this series is about: trying to go back and think things through from the Biblical sources. The bad examples in the Bible help, in letting us know what God doesn’t want, and what doesn’t work. But the directions of what to do and how marriage should work are more helpful. And of course the good examples — which are fewer than you would wish — shed even more light on the subject.

“He who finds a wife finds what is good, and receives blessing from the Lord.” These lessons will be about how a man finds a wife (or a woman finds a husband), and what you do with her when you’ve found her. The series is offered in a rueful awareness that as hard as it is to understand clearly what the Bible has to say about love, courtship and marriage, it’s even harder to put it into practice. So in the spirit of all seeking together to understand what the Lord had in mind when He designed us, this series on Love, Marriage in the 21st Century.