“But I love him/her/them!”
Meaning what
exactly? There is a reason we should be
telling our children they need a Christian spouse but there is also a reason we
see them (and ourselves sometimes) dating non-Christians or at least dating
inactive Christians. What is it exactly
that draws you to that man or woman who makes your heart race and your palms
get damp? Of all the possible reasons
you might be drawn to them, looks (and to this I somewhat add race as well)
should be one of the very last. Proverbs
31:30 says, “favor is deceitful and beauty is vain.”
How someone
looks is vain (useless and unimportant in the long run) because unless they are
supernaturally gifted in that department as Sarah was it won’t last long. Beauty may draw someone to you or you to them
but character and character alone will make it last. Psalm 39:11 says God’s rebuke will eat your
good looks up. Isaiah 28 talks of sin
causing the glorious beauty of a land to be eaten up and wiped away and in its
way refers to the individual as well. To
this we add Isaiah 53 where our own Savior is said to be without beauty in the
natural sense.
What? How can that be? Our own Savior Jesus without natural
beauty? Consider President Abraham
Lincoln. Have you ever seen his
photograph? To be sure he has a striking
visage but certainly not handsome. His
face is craggy and lined with hollow cheeks and a mole prominent in one of the
two lines framing his mouth. It is said
his voice was grating and disharmonious.
His detractors used to call him monkey face and between the hollow
cheeks and curly beard you can see the resemblance.
For all that,
Lincoln was a learned man, a liberator and great motivator. He was a visionary whose Gettysburg Address
is considered one of the greatest speeches in American history. It is said that he pressed through severe
illness, possibly even the beginning stages of smallpox to give the speech. Plain though he may have been, grating though
his voice may have been, Lincoln was nonetheless a man of good character and
beautiful in the eyes of the Lord.
Have you
considered what spoken line makes your knees weak and your brains turn to
mush? Are those words the absolute
truth? Come on, be honest. Are those words the absolute truth? Are they some version of, “You are fine as
new wine in the summer time.” Sound
corny? So do most of the lines that get
us men dates. Proverbs 31:30 says that,
“Favor is deceitful.” We are currently
choosing a president to lead us and one thing I know is that they WANT your
favor. They want you to like them. Are you a Christian? They are Christians. Are you Muslim? They are a friend to Muslims. If you love the color red, they just
decorated their den in that color.
Someone who
wants your favor will do whatever it takes to get it. It doesn’t matter if they must fracture the
truth a bit to get it. That’s just how
favor is.
You might be
asking yourself, “So what preacher. What
are you trying to say?” I’m trying to
say that there are some really great people out there who don’t sell themselves
well because they are honest. Some of
them don’t come across as exciting or special because they tell it like it is
and don’t try to color themselves in broad strokes when the one you are dating
now has lied to you for years. I’m not
saying all men and women seeking a mate are liars, but a lot of them are. Your task is to find out which one is lying
and which one is telling the truth.
Before you
can find the right one, you have to make a life decision for yourself. What sort of mate do I want anyway? Am I looking for someone who will care about
me and help me through the rough times as I help them through theirs or do I
want someone beautiful but bitter whose touch in my life will devour my soul
and diminish my life?
If the man
or woman you are pursuing (or being pursued by) is not placing God first in
their life then there is no hope for a godly home with that individual. It’s bad enough that they have a secular mind
and are not sold out to the Lord but to raise children with that sort and have
your kids grow up twisted… I once knew a
Jewish woman who was marrying a Catholic man.
When I asked her how they would raise their kids she foolishly told me
they would allow the children to choose.
Lunacy! You must raise up a child
in the way they should go. One day soon
enough it will be against the law to raise a child in the nurture and
admonition of the Lord. The men and
women passing these foolish laws will be the same ones raised by the likes of a
Jewish man and a Christian woman who believe in nothing at all.
Each of us
has a responsibility to God to limit our relationships to those He has
sanctioned. It is incredible how many
excuses we can think up when we marry out of our faith. This is by no means a thorough or complete
list of the things I’ve heard:
I’m
lonely. (So find someone qualified to
join you in a CHRISTIAN marriage.)
The brother
/ sister is FINE! (Now, what about
twenty years from now.)
I can get them
saved. (Really? Let me see you do it now with no relational
issues involved.)
My faith
sanctifies the relationship. (Not an
excuse according to God since it refers to relationships entered into prior to
your salvation so don’t bother quoting me the scripture.)
My example
will change them. (Hasn’t worked so far
has it. What makes you think living in
the same home will change things?
Sinners tell one another that the good mates are all in church you just
gotta get the religious stuff out of them. Who is going to change who?)
There are no
saved men / women out there. (Not
true. God always has someone for those
who are actively seeking. Scripture may
say that a man who finds a wife finds a good thing can be speaking of a
nurturing woman who will make a good wife and not merely a Christian
woman. Becoming a Christian does not
make a woman wife material. It doesn’t
make a man husband material either. That
is a whole other level of readiness.
We just
click together. We fit. (What you seem to be saying is that you have
more in common with a sinner than with a saint.
Perhaps you fit so well because you need to draw closer to God. In all honesty you shouldn’t fit that well
with someone unsaved. It’s a problem and
frankly it’s your problem.)
As I say,
this is just a bare scraping of the surface.
None of these excuses are valid.
Another
point I’d like to make is that too many people fail to prepare THEMSELVES to be
the husband or wife God has called them to be.
If you come from a single parent home you have no example to follow of a
Christ centered marriage. Getting a
scriptural foundation as a man or woman for marriage is absolutely
necessary. In a perfect world you would
pick this up by watching your two (2) parents and they would have received it
the same way and have supplemented their basic training through thorough study
of marriage text in Scripture. Without
this two-parent basic training you not only have to learn ‘theoretically’ what
is required of a husband or wife in marriage but also overcome all the damage
caused by that lack of proper upbringing.
Yes I know
some of you are screaming at the screen right now and telling me your mother
(or father) did just fine raising you alone.
The truth is they did not. They
may have been the best parent in the world and still could not raise a child
the way two loving male and female parents could. Why?
Because your responses from infancy to adulthood would all be skewed by
the lack of a participating parent. Even
your individual parent’s responses to daily life would be different. God’s best choice is for two people who love
Him with their whole life should meet one another and love each other with
their whole life and raise children in that love.
In reality
when you marry after two or three generations of single parenthood you bring
all the reinforcement of that history to bear AGAINST your unified ‘couple’
marriage. YOU aren’t comfortable with
the proper roles because you have little or no experience in them and the
unsaved society which does not want to ‘own up’ to their failure in serving God
will try to tell you that your single parent upbringing is just as good as a
two parent (heterosexual) house. It is
not.
Men and
women are different. We think
differently. We act differently
depending on the situation. Each of us
brings different strengths and weaknesses into the relationship. When those relationships are out of line with
the Word of God then the children grow up damaged and lacking.
Culture is
how you have been raised from generation to generation and that culture becomes
normal to you. If your culture stresses
the normalcy of a one-parent home then that becomes part of culture. The parent in this culture is unlikely to
stress the Biblical plan as the only lifestyle because it will point a finger
back at themselves and force them to admit they have missed God in this
matter. Coming from a two-parent
household I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to adequately impress upon
my children the ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENT that they establish a two parent Christian
household without holding my own failure in that area before them.
There are
social, racial, financial and other reasons that make it difficult to do what
God requires and yet, He really doesn’t want to hear any excuses. God just wants you to do the right
thing.
God does not
expect you to fail. He has given you the
tools to succeed. Society used to hold
you to a higher standard, which made it harder to go against your parent’s
rules.
Society and
your parents used to say “Do not have sex before marriage.” Now society says you are nuts to marry before
testing the goods. Society and your
parents used to say “Do not marry an outsider, an unsaved person.” Now they coin a four-letter word, “love,” and
say that word makes everything all right.
These people have totally diluted God’s definition of THAT word. Society used to say that an unwed mother or
father was a negative thing, which forced you to at least try to make your
marriage work if you had one. It used to
be till death do us part and now we marry till the thrill is gone.
If you do
not like this or it makes you feel bad, tough.
It’s real and it’s honest. This
isn’t even an exhaustive lesson on this subject; it barely scratches the
surface. God says to marry before
sex. God says to marry another believer
who loves God with their whole heart. He
says, “Do not marry an unbeliever.” God
is not ambiguous about it. He says what
He means and means what He says.
Will God
love you if you slip? Yes. Will He forgive you if you marry someone
outside of your faith? Yes. Will it cost you in ministry and in
life? You can take that to the
bank. It will cost you dearly. God’s rules aren’t to make our life harder;
they are to make it more productive, loving and fruitful.
It’s your
choice beloved. I hope you make the
right ones.
Bishop J
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