Today, this evening, I'm going to talk briefly about the founding of the Marr household, the way that God worked in our lives to draw us together, and some of the decisions that we were led in by the authorities in our lives, as young people. And I'm going to do this along with a little bit of a slideshow here. Now, our story is not perfect. It's not necessarily perfect. I guarantee you, there are Mars in our story. Yeah, Mars with one R, that's right, absolutely. Here's my first slide, the founding of the Mara household. And I'm just going to kind of go through a brief, brief biography. That's yours truly when he was really young. Yeah, that was a couple of years ago. Right. Exactly. I was born into a into a household that had faith in God. My father and mother both had believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. and were serious about their faith. My father had come to faith at the University of Georgia while a student there through the work of the Baptist Student Union. He was later taken in the military during the Vietnam War. He was stationed on the island of Okinawa in the Pacific. And while there, he recognized his great need for discipleship, and he came under the discipleship of a group, a prayer church organization called the Navigators. And they trained him in the Bible. They drilled the scriptures into him. And to this day, there are very few men that I know who know the word as well as my father does. And so when he was done with his tour of duty, he returned to the United States, was honorably discharged, and he went to work for the Navigators full-time at their headquarters in Colorado Springs. My mother was working at the headquarters in Colorado Springs there called Glen Eyrie. And my father was working at a camp that they had called Eagle Lake Camp up in the mountains a few miles outside of Colorado Springs. They got to know each other, were married, eventually moved from Colorado Springs out to Eastern Colorado, which is where my mother was originally from, and began, my grandfather began teaching my dad how to farm. So I was raised a farm boy. That's a picture of one of my dad's combines cutting some of the nicest wheat I've seen us grow. That was a number of years ago. So that's a little bit of the story of my life. I came to faith as a young boy. My parents teaching me the gospel, teaching me and reading to me the word of God and instructing me that one of the biggest things that impacted my life. A couple of the biggest things that impacted my life were when a church planter came to our community from the Southern Baptist Convention. We have no churches in that area that really could be considered fundamentalist churches. And a church planter came from the SPC to our community, planted a church there, and I praised God for it. That had a huge impact in our lives. We began hearing the preaching of the true gospel. And then also my parents began to be involved in a homeschooling program called the ATI. I'm not coming out in favor or against ATI in this message, but they began to be involved in ATI, and ATI trained them how to disciple their children, how to have devotions with their kids, how to read the scripture to their sons and daughters, how to train their children. So, I praise God for those two institutions, neither of which I am involved with today, but both of which have had a huge, profound impact in my life. My wife was raised in Georgia, in Douglasville, Georgia. And when she was a young girl, also her parents homeschooled her, and Finally, when she was about 13 years old, their family left the United States to go to Mexico to work in missions there in Mexico. So this is a picture of my wife and her younger sister, Anna. You'll remember that she visited us a few months ago. And this is kind of the story I'm going to tell you. It's the story of how we came together to have a courtship relationship. and eventually to be married. This is a picture that was taken of my in-laws family. And this picture appeared in the December 1999, January, or December 1998, January of 1999 edition of the Court Report Magazine published by HSLDA. And so this is the first picture that I saw of my wife. I found her on the back of a magazine. And if you'll notice in the picture, there are three older children, and then there's a significant gap, and then there's three children down below. Now, today there are ten children in all, but this was in 98 or so that this picture was taken. They had cut off their opportunity to have children, reversed that, And about five years after, seven years after that reversal, seven years after that reversal, God began blessing them with children again. So we praise God for that. So this picture up here, it was accompanied by an article written by Michael Ferris about their family and about the work that they were doing to promote homeschooling in Mexico. My dad read the article, and he took the article and gave it to me, and he said, son, I'd like you to read this article. I had felt a call from the Lord to go into ministry in some way, shape, or form, and I didn't know what, and so dad was kind of helping me explore some different things, and he said, you know what? You know, we'd read a lot of books about missions, and so we were interested in that. And so, Dad gave me this article to read. I read the article, and began to pray for the Richardsons. Then eventually began to interact with the Richardsons a little bit. And eventually, we decided that I would go down after that farming season. So, the end of October, I finished up my work, and my dad two of my, no, one of my brothers, and about four or five men from my church accompanying me down to Mexico. Here's a picture of the family more recently. Maybe they look a little bit more like that. And that's, of course, Misty at that time. So at that point, we went down there and we spent a week down there. The whole group of guys spent a week down there working on a project. We were doing a little construction project on a home for them to live in, in a fairly remote area. And this is my wife and her younger siblings. Of course, she wasn't my wife at that point. Now this is their home, the home that we were going to work on. If you'll look in the middle of the picture, there's a vehicle parked next to a house that has a very steep roof. That was where they were intending to live, and they were in the middle of the process of remodeling that. And this is in a very remote, remote area of northern Mexico. It's only about 30 or 40 miles from a couple of major metropolises, but those 40 miles are very rough 40 miles, and you can't drive over the tops of the mountains. So, you have to go about a three-hour drive to get to this place. Now, my father-in-law was frequently accused by different people, and in all seriousness, of trying to keep anybody from getting his daughter. Keep anyone from marrying his daughter. And that wasn't his goal. That wasn't what was going on. God had led him to to begin to work in a certain area, and they still have a small church in this area. But there's a point I'd like to make here. No matter where you are, if it's God's will to provide you with a husband or wife, God can do that. No matter where you are, if it is God's will to provide you with a husband or a wife, God can do that, young person. And we don't need to get All worked out about it. God can provide. God can provide. So there was my wife working with her family, working alongside her father and mother in the missions work that they were doing. And one day I began to interact with her father and then eventually one day we showed up on the scene. This is a picture of a couple of the men and I, my brother and a friend. We were working on the roof of this home. Another picture of me working on that home. And there, another picture a few weeks after they left. They left, they left me down there, and there would be weeks where I would see no one who spoke English. So I started to pick up on Spanish, and eventually picked it up pretty good. Within about six months or so, I was able to give messages, maybe eight months, I was able to give messages in the church in Spanish. Now here's a picture of my wife and I right here in the, I think you can see us there pretty well, along with a group of men that are there. My father's sitting next to me. And if you'll see, we're kind of leaning opposite directions. See, we didn't want anybody to get any ideas. So when we were sitting there at the table, she leaned this way and I leaned this way so that no one would think anything. And that probably wasn't a good idea. Put an exclamation point there. Here's a brief overview of the works that Mike still... Mike is my father-in-law. Mike Richardson is his name. He continues to do in Mexico. This is one of the couples in the church down there. She has since passed away. So that was their home. That's a fairly poor home for the area. Climate is much like the climate here at Fresca. Very, very nice climate. As you look at those pictures, you can see that it's a very, very rural setting. Here's one of my roles in the church. I was given this role within two or three weeks of being down there. leading the singing, even though I knew almost no Spanish. But in a very brief period of time, I was given this role of leading the singing. And that's the building they were meeting in at the time. It was just a kind of lean-to tin shed with a 55-gallon drum for a pulpit, and open on one side. My in-laws also have a ministry to homeschooling families in Mexico. They organize a a number now of homeschooling conferences. They since developed a board. At this time they didn't have a board that was over at the, but they were only doing about, they were doing one conference per year when I went down there for the homeschooling families of Mexico. They were also producing a magazine. A major part of my role when I eventually moved down there was to learn to operate the printing press to mass produce these magazines. At that time they were producing about 500. Today, they're producing around, I believe, 6,000, mainly all over Mexico, Latin America. I don't think there is any continent other than Antarctica that it doesn't go to. So this is a picture of a more recent conference that they had down there. They usually have about 1,000, 1,200 different homeschooling, 1,000, 1,200 people that are interested in the topic of homeschooling. They have a number of speakers come down from the United States here to address the families on the topic of homeschooling. This is a homeschooling speaker, Norm Wakefield. He was down there a few years ago. And there's Misty and I during a conference time, my first conference time down there. And then after the conference, at this particular conference, Greg Harris was the speaker. There's Misty sitting next to him in our church. After the conference, the speakers usually come up and preach at the church up in the mountains. So there's a picture of Greg Harris. He was going to preach that day. OK, so is this really courtship? Basically, what we did. was that I worked side by side with the man who's now my father-in-law for about two years before we began any sort of formal relationship. And Misty and I became friends. We became friends. And I became friends with Mike and the rest of the family. I lived with him a good bit of the time. A good bit of the time I lived elsewhere also. But the whole time, working with him. In this picture, this is actually at our wedding, and it's kind of just a posed picture, but when Misty was 6 to 18, 18, she gave this key to her father as a token. This is really an application. This isn't the real thing. This is just it, but this is the real key. This key was just a token Representing her heart. Saying to her father, I'm going to give my heart to you until God brings along the man that I'm going to marry. So this is the key to my wife's heart. With that said, I'll stick it back in my pocket. And you know, she desired to keep her heart pure for the man whom she would marry. And so, I found out about that key within a few months of being down there. I frequently saw this key in my father-in-law's keychain and wondered, what's that key to? And so eventually I just asked him one day on the way home from church, so what's that key to? And he said, oh, that's a very special key. And the conversation ended right there. Until we got home, and we got home and he said, OK, Nathan, I'll tell you what that key is. That key is the key to Misty's heart. I said, oh, OK. So anyway, we'll go back to the key in a little bit. But the important principle is that we need to have our hearts given to the people they should be given to in the time they should be given, don't we? You young ladies need to be very careful with your hearts. You young men need to be very careful with your hearts. Guard your heart with all diligence, for out of it flow the issues of life. David prays, Unite my heart to fear your name. We fear God out of a united heart, don't we? Okay, so is this really courtship? What happened? What we did was this. Let me just explain here. We developed a good relationship, a strong relationship. I eventually went to my dad and said, Dad, Misty and I seem to be getting a kind of a close relationship. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what I should do here. And dad said, well, you know, maybe this is the Lord's will, so let's pray about it. And so we prayed about it, and my dad gave me permission to speak with Mike about it. about what I was feeling and, uh, uh, didn't talk to him about it. So, a couple months after my dad said that to me, I, I, uh, uh, approached Mike on the topic, and I said that I was interested in his daughter. And, uh, and so, uh, he said to me, okay, and he gave me a few And he seemed to be open to it, and he gave me a few goals to reach over the course of the next while. And he said he'd like me to do a few things. So over the course of the next several months, he and I talked about it frequently, talked about my progress in completing the assignments he had given to me. We would visit about these topics fairly frequently over the course of the next several months. At this point, Misty knew absolutely nothing. Now, Misty and I had developed a fairly strong relationship, and this was a difficult time for her. It's very difficult to guard your heart when you are in frequent contact with a person that you would really like to marry. I'm not saying it's impossible to guard your heart. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying it is very difficult. And it can become more and more difficult. And it was becoming more and more difficult for her. With me being at church every Sunday and frequently there with them as a guest in their home. During that time, She really focused on replacing the thoughts that would come up with scripture. Replacing those, you know, it's easy to just fall into that mode of just thinking about this person that you'd really like to be with, because you'd really like to be with this person, you'd like to visit with them. I mean, when there's a relationship like that, and I think we all know this, We like to spend time together, we really do. And so, during that time, she really had to work on replacing those thoughts with memorizing scripture and meditating on the word and prayer. And I had to do the same. And she says that, suffice it to say, she memorized a lot of scripture during that time. She was memorizing the book of Proverbs during that time. I think she memorized about the first 14 chapters or so. The first 20 chapters, she says. The first 20 chapters of Proverbs during that time. She was working hard on it to keep her mind occupied. That's a good thing for you all to think about with your kids. Keep their minds occupied with Scripture. And we've got to learn, it's an important skill in life to control our minds, isn't it? It's an important skill in life to control what we're thinking about. To take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. That's an important life skill that we have to develop. And if we don't, we're going to have a very difficult life. We're going to be double-minded and unstable in all of our ways. So this is a picture of Misty and I on the other side of the room where I proposed to her. So back to our narrative. We developed, Mike and I were visiting about this fairly frequently. Then one day, Mike said, OK, I think it's time for us to go up to McAllen, Texas, and get a ring. So we drove up to McAllen, Texas. One, I don't know what day it was. We drove up there, got a ring, came back. He said, I think the time for you to talk to Misty about this is getting very close. And so one Friday, we had church services Friday evening and Sunday morning. And one Friday evening after church, he handed me his glove. And inside the glove was the key. And that was the indication to me that tonight was the night for me to talk to Misty about it. And so I took the key out and I gave him the glove back and dropped the key in my pocket. And that night, after everyone else went to bed, Misty and I were in the kitchen. Now, you have to understand, this is a very small home. I mean, it's probably a total of 500 square feet and there's seven people, eight people in the house, something like that. So it's very small. There's a kitchen, a bedroom, and an upstairs bedroom. And so Mike and Pam went off to bed, and I got up, got a drink, as was my custom, and she was expecting me to leave to go up to my place, but instead I sat back down, and she was, so she got up, she started watching the niches, and she said, you know, she thought, I wish she'd leave, because we don't need any any, you know, more temptation or more temptation to be thinking about each other than we've already got. But I said, well, I said, I've got something here for you. She had a rough day that day. I said, this will either make your day better or it'll make your day worse. And I put my hand in my pocket and I took out that key and I handed it to her. And at this point, her father had not, and her mother had not talked to her at all about the fact that I had talked to them. They hadn't talked at all about it. So I got to break the news to her. And so I handed her the key, and I said, and she immediately thought that her dad had dropped it somewhere and I'd picked it up. And she started to feel just a little bit frustrated. But I said, I love you, and I want you to be my wife." And then I said, so, you think about it, I've talked to your folks about it, I've talked to my folks about it, you think about it, you talk to your folks about it, you pray about it, and ask the Lord to lead you in this area, visit with your parents about it, and I'll see you later. And I got up and I walked out, and the next time I was here it would be Sunday morning. So I left, that was Friday night, late, I left, I had to go do some work on Saturday. I came back Sunday morning, and she came out, and she gave me the key, and she said that it would be an honor to be my wife. And so this had been something she'd been praying about for a long time, and that it would be an honor to be my wife. And I praise God that she said that. I praise God for that. So, I initiated the formal relationship. My father and I discussed the matter. My father gave me his go-ahead to step out and talk with her father about it. I talked with her father about it in honor of his position as the one in authority over his daughter, the one who has the authority to give his daughter away, and asking for that privilege. We laid out some ground rules. pretty early in the relationship, then I would really encourage all of you who are considering courtship for your children to think of some ground rules that would be applications of the principles regarding courtship. And so we have the principle of purity as an outworking of that. The question of is this courtship kind of comes to the comment that we had no time, no formal time where we were building a relationship before we were engaged. We just went straight through to engagement. We went straight through to engagement. So is it courtship? Is it not? I don't know. It doesn't really matter. It's the establishment of a godly Christian home. So that's my point. And so, I digress. What was I thinking about? Okay, ground rules, ground rules. So, we laid out some ground rules. We already had a commitment. I mean, we were engaged to be married. We had agreed to be married. You can't break that off easily. We knew each other very well. We already knew each other very well. We knew we wanted to be married. So, we knew we weren't taking any real risk here. So, we laid out some ground rules. Ground rule number one, we laid out the ground rule that there would be, that this was going to be a hands-off relationship. A hands-off relationship. I think, I believe this is an important application of the principle of purity. You can't stare at a woman without lusting for her. Can you touch her without lusting for her? I would say absolutely not. I stand against dancing with women who are not my wife. I stand against that. And so we did a hands-off courtship where We can hold hands under one circumstance that we were praying. So during prayer time, I could hold her hand. So we prayed quite a little bit. But you should pray a lot whether you can hold hands during prayer time or not. So this is a picture of us in a common situation where we were visiting together. It's important for couples that are going to get married to have some good visiting time one-on-one. So we did our one-on-one visiting time usually in the evenings after church on Friday, the evening on Saturday after work, and maybe some on Sunday. And my parents-in-law were in the next room over, no door in between us, pretending to be asleep, while we sat at the table and visited. We went through a series of studies by Larry Burkett on finances, and we'll do that study during this time. So just a few more pictures of us during that engagement period. And so we were engaged February 3rd. I asked her to marry me February 1st. February 3rd we were engaged and we were married on April 20th. So that is one of the prettiest sights a man who's about to get married can ever see. He's standing up there in the front and surrounded by whoever is standing up there in the front with him. And the doors open and in steps the man who will be his father-in-law with the woman who will be his wife on his arm walking in to give her to you. Wow, that's a good feeling. So they walk down the aisle and there's a picture of her giving me the key. We had a fairly informal kind of a ceremony, where in Mexico, when you get married, you can only be married by the justice of the peace, by a judge. That's the only way you can be married, the only way you can be legally married. So a judge had to come and we had to sign about, I don't know, probably each had to sign about 30 different papers for our marriage. So that was an interesting aspect of a wedding that you don't usually have here in the United States. Here we are singing a congregational hymn. I encourage, you know, to have it to be a time of worship towards the Lord. To not be man-focused. Be focused on the Lord, worshiping Him. Of course, I sang to my wife. And I won't sing that song for you all, because I really don't remember it. And this is our first kiss. So, and you know what? I don't regret one little bit. having a hands-off courtship. I do not regret that one little bit, and I don't regret not kissing my wife. I don't sit here eight years later and say, boy, I wish I would have kissed my wife a few times before we got married. I mean, that's just not the way it is. I am so grateful that I maintained that level of, that we maintained that level of separation physically during that time. I'm so, so very grateful. And I don't regret it at all. And this is my father-in-law reading a charge to us at the end of the ceremony. And I'd like to read that to you all. Misty, ever since that foggy morning on March 27th, 1980, When I drove your momma to the hospital, God has been working His good will in your life and preparing you for this day. You have served God and your family well. I love you and I am proud of you. You are now entering a new stage of life and I want to once again remind you of Ephesians 5.23. It says, For the husband is the head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church. Misty, just as you have loved, respected, honored, and obeyed me, your father. I charge you to love, honor, respect, and obey Nathan, your husband. Nathan, scripture tells us in Ephesians 5, 28, that husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. I charge you to do that throughout your life. Love your wife, my daughter, with all that is in you. I would like to end this time today by blessing you, not with my words, but with the words that God himself spoke two times. Speaking to Adam and Eve, in Genesis 1.28, God says, Then God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. Again, God spoke in Genesis 9.1. It says, So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. Nathan, Misty, do not succumb to the pressures of the world or families, but always hold dear to your heart the words of David, in Psalm 127.3, which say, behold, children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is his reward. Nathan, I charge you now to go and apply the words that Solomon wrote in Proverbs 518. Go and rejoice with the wife of your youth. So my father-in-law read that to me, to us, as they sent us out. There's some pictures of us together as families, my family on one side, my wife's family on the other. And they sent us out with a shower of rice to go out on our honeymoon. So, when your young people get married, don't expect them to live in the Taj Mahal. This was our first abode. And we lived in that house for the remainder of our time in Mexico, about three more years. We added on a little bit to it. It wasn't ours, but the owner permitted us to add on a little bit. And rent was $50 a month. And it's about, it's a pretty standard block house in that area, about probably 500 square feet or so. 330 square feet, I'm sorry. Very good. And it was the highest up house in the town. The road going up to our house looked like the surface of the moon. I mean, it was way worse than this little road going down here. And we'd wear our tires bald and no time to clap. So, but we were grateful. We loved our new family. And God was good to us during this time, during this particular time. My wife and I had three miscarriages before God eventually gave us children. And it was a difficult time. It was a time of rejoicing and a time of difficulty. But, even though they don't live in the Taj Mahal, they should have spectacular views. And this is the view from our house. It was the highest-up house in the town. Nobody wanted to live there. They were all... Actually, the people there were kind of afraid of the evil spirits that were up that way. And so... But we lived there. And it had some really, really nice views. And there is my wife and I and Misty after... And... No. My wife and I and Rosie. After Rosie was... When Rosie was a little baby. So that is basically the end of our story. It's not a perfect story. And if you disagree with anything I've said, please tell your children, you know, I think what Mr. Morris said was good in this way and this way here, why this isn't quite what we want to do as a family. Feel free to go ahead and do that. That's great. The three main convictions. Take control of your mind. Proactively guard your heart. I believe very strongly in hands-off courtship. You're not going to regret it. You're not going to regret a hands-off courtship. And then male initiation of the formal relationship. The man is to be the leader. The family relationship, according to 1 Corinthians chapter 11, is a hierarchical extension right out of the Trinity. Man is the head of the woman, Christ is the head of man, and God is the head of Christ. So if we start our relationship off with the woman taking the initiative to initiate the relationship, we're starting our relationship off upside down again. And once we start a relationship off upside down, it's hard to right the course and get it right side up. It takes a lot of repentance. It takes a lot of work to do that. We want to start our relationships off. Right. We want to start relationships off right side up. So I encourage you in these in these applications. And if anyone has any questions for me regarding applications, please feel free to talk with me later about about what we did here. And I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Let's pray. Gracious Lord, we thank you, Father, for being so good to us. God, You have blessed me in so many, many ways, and I praise You, God, for that. O God, I do not deserve the least of Your mercies. I am a wretch in and of myself, but in Jesus Christ, I'm a son of God, and I thank You, God, for that. I pray, God, that this story, though imperfect, will have an impact on those who have heard it, Father. For Your honor, for Your glory, and for the expansion of Your kingdom, and this in the next generations. Thank You, God, for Your goodness towards us. Amen.