Women

Relating

Is there “the One”? what do you look for? Preparing yourself. Neither of you should be dependent upon anything but God for your identity, value, purpose.

Younger men need to be taught how to relate to women. As men, they are called to protect, provide and lead women.

At their stage in life, younger men do not generally have many opportunities to provide or lead; however, they have many opportunities to protect. They easily grasp the need to protect women from other men. But it is important that your guys understand that they themselves can easily harm the women in their lives and that they have a responsibility to prevent themselves from doing so. One of the effects of the fall on women is a tendency to look for their identity and acceptance from men rather than God. The women these younger men date can easily and quickly grow attached to and dependent upon them, and this attachment can cause a lot of harm when the relationship ends, as it likely will. They can protect their girlfriends by avoiding behaviors that will invite those women to become more attached to them than the commitments that have been made will support.

Providing for your wife and family requires an education, learning the skills and information you will need to build a career. It requires making longer term plans and holding to those plans. It requires managing money wisely. Many younger men have never made a budget. Many have never tithed. Teach them those disciplines.

You should talk with your guys about what they should look for in a woman as they look for a wife. She should walk with God. She should be independent – it is unhealthy for either the husband or the wife to be dependent upon the other for peace, satisfaction, identity, acceptance. She should empower and inspire him to be a better man of God. She should be someone he wants to empower and inspire to be a better woman of God.

No woman will complete you or fix you. If God is not enough for you, then everything else will fail you.

Love

Following Shakespeare, love and marriage have been romanticized to the point that our culture sees love as only emotion and marriage as only about love and our happiness. Somewhere out there is the one and when you find her, you will fall in love. She will be your princess, the one who satisfies your soul, the one for whom you would defy the gods and sacrifice everything else of worth or value to keep. Every moment with her will be sunshine. And if the sun ever stops shining, obviously she was not the one, so it’s best for both of you to drop it and go find someone else. I hear that bars, especially loud, dark ones with flashing lights and fat beats, are good places to look.

If the Law demonstrates anything, it demonstrates that love is primarily behavior that flows out of commitment, and only secondarily the feelings that are sporadically evoked by that behavior. Actually that simplifies too much. Generally feelings (erroneously labelled “love”) prompt the commitment to act lovingly, and then the actions flowing out of that commitment (actually “loving” someone as opposed to feeling love towards them) lead to more and often different feelings. In trying to unpack a Biblical understanding of love with younger men, I’ve found it helpful to walk with them through the latter half of the Gospel of John where Jesus intertwines love for God, obedience to God and knowledge of God in ways that make the three inseparable.

There is not the one out there and younger men should not be looking for a girl to fall in love with. They should be looking for a godly woman whom they want to protect, provide, lead, serve, know, and partner with for life. Their desire to do those things for her and their willingness to commit to her should not be based upon feelings, but rather upon their understanding of who they are as men before God.

Most discussions of love and marriage should include reflections on the implications of the theories about and future responsibilities found in love and marriage to the ways that your guys relate to the women around them today. The ways they treat their moms and sisters. The ways they treat younger women in the church. The ways they date and treat the women they are dating. How all of that prepares them for marriage, shapes them into men who will be worthy of the women they will want to marry.

Sex

It is important to have open conversations about sex and pornography early on in the mentoring relationship. Waiting too long to broach these topics can lead to them becoming too awkward to talk about. You have plenty of experience with both and you can remember (somewhat) what it feels like to be their age. Talk about what you know. Talk about where you failed and how those failures brought death and separation from God, and others, into your life. Talk about how God has brought you through those things.

Sexual immorality is often made to be the thing when working with younger men. It is not. It is just one sin among many. There are other important things. God will deal with this sin in their lives gradually and in His time as with all of their other brokenness.