This summer I participated in a Bible study with teen girls. We met once a week in a local charity coffee shop for about eight weeks. I allotted an hour and a half for each study, but many nights we were there much longer than that.
Each night I tried to focus on one or more Bible stories that illustrated the topic for the night. For example when we discussed how to spot a “frog”, we read the story of Abigail and her “frog” husband, Nabal. One week we discussed who would be a “prince” and discussed Boaz and Joseph (Jesus’ Joseph).
The rest of the time we spent relating personal experiences and studying material from various books and web articles. The main book the girls studied for most of the summer was the Dana Gresh book, Get Lost: Your Guide to Finding True Love. There is probably enough material in the book to use only that one source, but I wanted to cover other topics so I pulled in other volumes as well.
Whether you want to study with your own daughter or are leading a class or small group on dating and marriage, you may find these other resources helpful, too. This list is by no means exhaustive, but are some of my personal favorites on the topics.
- What Is He Thinking??: What Guys Want Us to Know About Dating, Love, and Marriage by Rebecca St. James
- Wait for Me by Rebecca St. James
- Why Wait?: What You Need to Know About the Teen Sexuality Crisis by Josh McDowell
- For Women Only, Revised and Updated Edition: What You Need to Know about the Inner Lives of Men by Shaunti Feldhahn
- One Month to Love: Thirty Days to Grow and Deepen Your Closest Relationships by Kerry and Chris Shook
- Men Are Like Waffles – Women Are Like Spaghetti by Bill Farrel
- Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? by Gary Thomas
- Peacemaker, The by Ken Sande
- The Five Love Languages Gift Edition: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman
- Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married by Gary Chapman
I am sure there are dozens of other great books out there, but these are authors and books I knew had some important things to say to teen girls about love and marriage from a godly perspective. If you know of other great books on the subject, I would love to hear about them in a comment below.
These are affiliate links to Amazon.com. Should you decide to purchase one of the books this blog will receive a small financial reimbursement for advertising the book. It does not change your price and I would not suggest any book I did not think would be helpful. There is one very well known marriage book I left off the list for example, because I personally feel the author goes overboard with its premise.