What Happened To My Courtship

Back in the Godly Fellowship series, I mentioned that I was courting a young woman, praying about her, and seeking the advice of godly kuyas and ates from my church. I really wanted to write a "Preliminary Thoughts on Courtship" post describing what I have learned about a variety of topics - her, myself, God, the courtship process, our cultures, and so on - during the process.

For context, please permit me to write a short timeline of the events that took place. Last April, she took a truly providential business trip to the US. Initially, her company had selected other people to go. Yet that changed, and they chose her and several of her friends instead for the trip. The company initially slated them to go to a different state, halfway across the country. Two more changes later, the company sent her and her friends to my state for four weeks.

One of my kuyas at church is from the same city as this young woman. Their fathers are pastors and know each other well. My kuya's father, who has since returned to the Philippines, was in town for a short while and preached at my church on the day that I met her. He told me that he had someone for me to meet, a pastor's daughter. Initially, I said no. I was not looking for anyone to date or court. Late in 2007, I had repented of recreational dating and started to read good theological books and pursue God harder than I ever had before. But my friends convinced me to go meet her, and I decided to go with them.

That day still goes down in my life as a memorable day. I do not regret my decision to meet her. She is a quite beautiful, usually very nice girl. We had good godly fellowship from day one. And I started thinking in terms of the first question in the Desiring God article "Questions to Ask When Preparing for Marriage": "What do you believe about everything?" That Saturday, my church was having a special worship service. She, two of her friends, and one of my best friends came with me. Both of my pastors preached. She heard good, sound preaching on worship and liked what she heard. The next week, my seasonal allergies arrived and left me sick for a week and a half. Her company extended her stay for one week because at least one person in her group had arrived in the US after she did and they wanted to have all four of them come home on the same flight. I went out with her and her friends several more times during that week. While we were in an observation tower at an amusement park, we made our courtship official. The next Friday night, I took her to a large, peaceful park where I enjoy hiking and then out to dinner at one of the nicest malls in the area. We talked in the hotel lobby for a bit and then exchanged probably the tightest, most emotional hug I have ever had. That was the farthest we went physically. She waved to me as I drove off, and when I was out of sight of the hotel, I wept enough that I could barely see to drive.

We stayed in touch very regularly for a while after she went home. We would chat online five nights a week, and on Fridays after work we would talk on the phone for three, four, five-plus hours. It was an almost sacred night of the week for me. On my work calendar, I marked myself busy every Friday night and told my friends that if they wanted to spend time with me, they would need to do it on Saturday or Sunday. Friday nights were her time. We read through Joshua Harris's book Dug Down Deep together and talked about what we were reading. Throughout the summer and early fall, we became a lot closer to each other even though we were half a world apart.

Then her work told her that she was in line for a promotion. She was already working about 9-10 hours a day with a long commute on top of that, but in October her client increased her goals while she was also spending an almost full-time effort training new hires. Twelve hours became a short work day for her. This took a huge toll on her spiritual life, and our conversations lost depth as well. Our doctrinal differences became much more apparent, with one of my pastors becoming the new senior pastor of my church and my church's becoming much more focused on expositional preaching and the hard demands of Christ's Lordship over our lives. I was finding that, while she initially agreed with a lot of what I said, as I started to tell her what my pastor was saying, she had little to say and did not really agree with it. Around the same time, I was regularly in touch with her family, who would frequently tell me about prophetic dreams and visions, which they see as binding but often do not back up with Scripture.

As the long hours continued, we stopped chatting online. Another guy at her work, who is not a believer, became interested in her. She would not let him court her, but she never gave her commitment to me either. I stayed in touch with her mostly through her family and occasional phone calls during lunch or on Friday nights. And as I learned more about her doctrine from her family, the Holy Spirit (the one who regenerates dead hearts and convicts of sin, not the one Benny Hinn talks about!) convicted me and left me with a total lack of peace. In February, my pastor showed a video of Benny Hinn's services in church and explained how unbiblical they are. He is also well aware of the organization overseas that my friend and her family are part of and told me that they do similar things. Her family was constantly telling me that I need to fly across the world to attend that group's conferences. I told my pastor that there was no way that I could be part of that and I was going to end the courtship. For several weeks, I did not contact her at all except for one phone call. We both decided to end the courtship in early March.

So it has now been more than two months since the courtship ended. Our one-year anniversary would have been several weeks ago. Recently, she contacted me to inform me that she is now in love with her unbelieving suitor. This was very painful news to take.

God has been teaching me a lot through this. As I have been learning from Him, I have been writing. For the next several posts, I hope to show you, as my reader(s), what He has taught me in hopes that you may exercise wisdom.

Daughters and sons of Jerusalem, Washington, Manila, and every other city, I charge you, for the sake of the name of the King of Glory, the purity of the members of the Body of Christ, and the protection of young men and women's hearts:

"Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires,

Though it demand all cost of you and fires

On this fallen sphere."

This Entertaining Truth, Part 5: Having Great Theology Does Not Equal Repentance And Belief.

I mentioned in a recent post that I visited a Biblical megachurch for their Easter Sunday service this year. The church had a baptism for three people that morning. In at least one of the testimonies, I saw a theme that seems common in youth who grow up in Biblical churches: Kid grows up attending Biblical church with parents. Kid gets old enough to make their own decisions, falls into a sinful lifestyle, leaves the church, gets into all sorts of trouble. At some point, kid hits rock bottom and God saves them, and kid returns to the church they grew up in - but this time, as a true believer.

Reformed churches tend to stress catechizing children - doing this, not with the guarantee of "this will save them", but in hopes that through diligent plowing, the truth will take root in their hearts and they will be genuinely saved. This is a great thing. But it often backfires as God shows us that we are not saved by our own effort or the effort of our parents - "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13, ESV). Parents can be raising the "perfect" children, discipling them well at home, having them sit under the preaching of a modern-day Spurgeon Sunday after Sunday, training them like Pavlov's dog to come up with the right answers to every theological question whenever you ask, and have them not really know Jesus Christ. And as they sit under true Biblical preaching week after week, they will search for more and more loopholes around that truth. And if they are listening to a preacher who knows how to close all of those loopholes, they will learn to appease their parents by continuing to hear it while, all the while, deeply hating that truth in their hearts and seeking every possible way to rebel against it.

I grew up as one of those kids who would fire off a whole chapter of Awana sections every week. As a wee lad, I was good at word-for-word memorization. I would finish my books with half a school year left to spare, then complete Scripture memory packets and, at least once, started memorizing a whole book of the Bible. I was the Awana leaders' dream, but I couldn't say much about what the verses actually meant. I wasn't much of a Christian - if I was even one at all at the time. "Repent" was just a word that sounded cool and spiritual. "Application" in sermons that I heard was a foreign language to me. In the background, I wanted to be in another world, whether an imaginary world or a real world where Game Time never ended. And in high school I just wanted my music and my movies. My desire wasn't for God; it was for fun. I didn't want to be part of any small groups where people would actually hold me accountable for growing in sanctification; I just wanted to hang out with my friends and do the minimum to appease their desires to see me bear fruit. And in college, when I started to listen to internet radio, fun meant listening to mostly disgusting comedy routines for hours on end with the excuse that a good clean routine would come on once in a while. Through headphones, you can deceive a lot of people. "What are you laughing at?" "Oh, nothing." Christ had to die for that "nothing" - and for the lie that it was "nothing". You can live casually until you see sin's gravity. But a blind eye can't even begin to see the infinite severity of even one sin against an infinitely holy God.

There is a huge danger in wanting to bear only a minimum amount of fruit for the Lord. It is quite possible that, in effect, in this desire, someone is really saying, "I'm really bearing thistles, but let me spray-paint them to look as much like figs as I can, in my fleshly power, so that, from a distance, more spiritual people will glance at me and say, 'That guy is doing his job for the Kingdom', and they will want me to be their friend. But, oh, how I fear the scrutiny of those who want to look closely at my heart. They will realize, 'He's saying the right words, but his heart is far from Christ. If he were to leave this world right now, God would look on him as his Judge and sentence him to an eternity of eternities in hell, while this hero of deception has everyone, most of all himself, believing that he would be in heaven.' I must do everything I can to keep people from judging me like that." And all the while, they say loudly to others, "I am a five-point Calvinist." They carry a big Bible in a word-for-word translation. They know how to evaluate preachers: "He is a talented exegete and sesquipedalian, but I do not listen to him because we differ on infra- versus supralapsarianism. I would much rather listen to sermons by [fill in the blank]." They sing worship songs only to affirm, "That's... correct. That's... correct. Hey, that ain't right!" But where is the genuine fruit, the genuine rejection of your own sin (not only other people's), and the genuine affections for the Lord?

You can believe in your head without believing in your heart. The more advanced an unconverted person becomes in theology, the more they might become able to trust their own knowledge and say, "Look at me. I read Edwards. I'm definitely in." But that is not trusting in the finished work of Christ and realizing deeply that He had to die even for the pride of propping up your own religious accomplishments. God alone is capable of doing that in the heart of an unconverted person, who by nature hates Him. The Israelites did not have to speak of their own qualifications to look at the bronze serpent on a pole. They only, in their desperate condition, had to fix their eyes on that frightening creature that looks like the same thing that killed their families and friends, and they would be saved from death. And today, you cannot save yourself from spiritual death by knowing which theologians to quote when. Godmust open your eyes and turn your head to look on Christ in His frightening perfections, frightening because Christ is everything you are not and the Lord is thoroughly offended by even the good things you do in your own flesh. But the Father sent His Son, who laid aside His glory to die a gruesome death for your sins on this earth. The unconverted crowd looked upon Him with ridicule, as if to say, "He is not our King! We were expecting dashing good looks and the end of Roman rule, and instead we got this donkey-riding man from Nazareth. Whatever good ever came from there?" But the poor in spirit know: "In this Savior, who died for me, there really is a certain salvation, 'certain' in the surest sense of that word. And, as Spurgeon said, 'How can I [even] trifle with the evil that killed my best Friend?'" Forget yourself; look on Christ and live. Seek Him while He may be found. Turn away from your sins, to Christ, and believe in this gospel.

I do not write this with anyone in particular in mind. If I saw someone in my life acting like this, I would go to them privately and tell them rather than blogging about it. But maybe God will use this to wake someone up. The Lion is not tame, and His truth is not a toy.

On Laymen's Usefulness to the Kingdom

Recently I tweeted, "Who disheartens me more? People who want me to waste my life or people who think I need a seminary education to not waste it?"

I did not write that or this with the intention of appearing to be someone who makes a career out of criticizing the church; God has taught me a lot over the past year about how I should love the church instead of doing that. I write this instead out of love for the body of Christ and a desire to allow all of its parts to contribute what they can, for the glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We can be very good at times at saying to the other parts of the body, "I don't need you."

On one hand, many in the body of Christ are content with wasting their lives and helping others to do the same: working to provide themselves with as many of their material wants as possible, spending their spare time gaming or watching television, ending a Bible study after half an hour so that they can go eat ice cream, ignoring their own and others' spiritual needs for things that are not needs at all.

On the other hand, others tend to be the theological equivalent of an armchair quarterback. They fill up Biblical megachurches that burgeon with great doctrine, where every week they receive a course in systematic from the pulpit but they don't consider themselves or me to be qualified to teach others the truth of Scripture because they have never been to seminary or earned a long list of doctorates.

Here is a question: How useful are you if your head is full of sound doctrine, God has given you the ability to teach it to others, and all you do for the body of Christ is put away chairs in the fellowship hall, if even that? And furthermore, you tear down anyone who has a desire for the "higher gifts" but is not qualified in your view (regardless of Scripture's view) to use them?

All a Christian really needs to be used by God is a willing heart and a teachable spirit. Last night, a guest speaker preached at my church's Saturday night service for youth and young adults. He is college-age and has not been to Bible college or seminary. But our pastor has been discipling him, and he did a great job last night teaching us expositionally from John 17. I know I was blessed and challenged by his message. Yet many people would look down on him and would not have let him preach in their churches because of his age or the fact that his training was informal.

For every Biblical megachurch that has arrived at some lofty level, where the pastor has become a big name in Reformed circles, where thousands of people are able to gather after the service and discuss the finer points of the limited atonement over coffee, countless Biblical, Reformed churches exist where the work is just getting started or has grown slowly.

In my church, the work is growing steadily but not without cost. We began as a Filipino church plant, Reformed Baptist but emphasizing "Filipino" more than "Reformed Baptist". We became a great place for Filipino Christians who were just traveling through or recently settling in our area of the US to meet each other. As you may imagine, in uniting around "Filipino" more than "Reformed Baptist" we had many more non-Reformed Filipinos than Reformed Baptists. A new pastor joined our church last spring and took over our Senior Pastor role last fall. (I am not saying that either of my pastors is better than the other; they are both faithful servants of my Lord, and I love both of these men!) He shifted our church's emphasis to historic Reformed Baptist doctrine and has boldly proclaimed to us a gospel that costs us everything: our old way of life, ambitions, desires, everything; a gospel that makes the world oppose us. Most people do not want to hear that. So many of the old members of our church have left, some to go to churches where they just get an emotional high and hear what they want to hear. Praise God that He has brought many new people to our church, or there would not be many of us left.

On Easter, I did not write a new blog post because my church had a sunrise service. That was our only service for the day. Already awake, several of us decided to attend another service later that day. I decided to drive over an hour to one of the Biblical megachurches and hear about our Lord's resurrection from a well-known pastor. It was one of the most incredible church services I have ever attended. The worship was euphoric, singing songs with deep theological truth, with hands up all over the room! The sermon was on point as well. It really made me look forward to attending a conference later this year with some of the people that I met there. I also got to fellowship with two of my college friends who are members of that church.

God also used that service to, once again, confirm my calling to minister in my local church. Yes, it is good to go to a Biblical megachurch once in a while. I found that very encouraging and refreshing. Yet God has given me a Biblical church in the geographic area where He wants me to live and work during this season of my life. The work of ministry that He has given me to do is within my local church, to teach whenever I have the opportunity and serve as I can in the young adults' ministry, the men's ministry, and in the church as a whole. Starting the work is hard, and sustaining it when it does not grow as fast as we would like or I do not see all of the benefits I want to see from it is harder. And yet this work belongs to God, who alone determines its standards for success and its outcome. Those willing and qualified to be part of it work, knowing that God's Word does not return void and we do this for a God whose glory will never fade away. "Not unto us" can be a dangerous prayer indeed, with discouraging results if we look only to ourselves, but "for every look at self, take ten looks at Christ", and He will give us the strength to keep working.

My calling to travel to the Philippines still remains very much alive. Going to a church where I see many Filipinos allows me to fulfill my calling to the ones that live here, but I really want to go there and serve. But of course, one person (not from my church or Filipino) told me recently that I would basically be useless there because what their young men who want to do ministry really need is a seminary education, not just a layperson willing to show them, as much as possible, what right doctrine is. I'll let God determine that. All I know is there is a need to teach men there what true doctrine is because, although so many people in that country call themselves Christians, many heresies, false gospels, and false prophets have a very strong hold there and many people who think they are saved are on their way to hell because of that. Yet the desk where I sit right now to write this post has several wonderful theological books on it where I am learning much more truth than I am able to live out. Since I do my vocational work in America, I would not be able to stay in the Philippines for very long if I were able to go. But if I, even a sinful wretch as I, could go be an encouragement to those who can stay there and carry on or start that work, that trip would pay off in eternity.

Lord, for the sake of Your glory alone, please put me on that plane. Let me never say in the end that I have wasted my life or this calling.