Not Yet Married: The Pursuit of Joy in Singleness and Dating

by Marshall Segal

If Christian dating—the intentional, selfless, and prayerful process of pursuing marriage—sounds like slavery, we don’t get it. If low-commitment sexual promiscuity sounds like freedom, we don’t get it. Jesus may ask more of us, but he does so to secure something far better for us.

The way we love a husband or wife, as imperfectly as we will love him or her, says a lot about the kind of love God has for us, but it will be nothing compared to the real thing—an eternity of peace, joy, and life purchased for us by our Bridegroom at the cross.

Because of that, Not Yet Married is not a book about waiting quietly in the corner of the world for God to bring a spouse, but it is about mobilizing you—a growing generation and movement of single men and women—out of shame, selfishness, and self-pity into deeper levels of love for Christ and more consistent and creative ministry to others.

I wrote about singleness and dating, because the most important things I learned in singleness and dating were not about dating or marriage. They were about life and God, about finding real purpose and real satisfaction deeper than any romance.

We’re in the pursuit of joy, not marriage. Before anyone could ever make us happy in marriage, we have to have already given our hearts away.

My drug of choice was more socially acceptable, even encouraged. I was recklessly trying to feed my heart’s hunger for God by running after romance and intimacy.

God wired appetites—intense biological, emotional, sexual, spiritual, unavoidable desires—into every human soul so that he could fill them. He wants us to be full, not empty; to be loved, not lonely. One of my favorite verses in the Bible says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11).

With time, I've grown to disagree with this conclusion. It's too simplistic. I don't think God lacks the capacity to fulfill desires but often, they can go unfulfilled despite a person seeking God wholeheartedly. Perhaps those desires are genuinely for the object: sexual desire for sex with a human, emotional desires for intimacy in the form of physical conversation. Yes, we should seek peace and close-ness with God but it usually will not quell desires for relational things. For some (thankfully not all), walking with God can mean unfulfilled sexual desire or a certain measure of loneliness for a season or a lifetime.

Why do we create things that image or look like others—our parents, our best friends, our favorite athletes or artists? Because we want to see them, and we want others to see them.

So how do we live for God and his glory? We don’t make God glorious or add any glory to him. We simply draw attention to him and his glory—to the beauty we see everywhere we look, to the infinite power and wisdom we read about in the Bible, to the stunning grace and mercy we receive in his love for us.

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And the people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God.3

Conversion is about commission, not just salvation, because we’re not saved to be saved, but saved to be sent.

This is eternal life, that they may know you the one true God... Philippians 2, Matthew 28

Because we treat the lifesaving, destiny-shaping news of the gospel as if it offered only some suggestions for a healthier and more successful life.

He isolates us from the people around us—those who can encourage and challenge us in our walk with Christ, and those who need us in their lives. He distracts us, persuading us to pour ourselves into school, or work, or entertainment. But

Instead of hearing Jesus talk about his death and redefining greatness in terms of sacrifice—in terms of coming in last for the sake of love—they fought to be first.

Most of the time, instead of pursuing greatness through sacrifice, I find myself expecting God to make life a little more comfortable, or relationships a little easier, or ministry a little more fruitful, or affirmation a little more regular.

But he says, instead, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43–44).

If we aspire to be great, we need to give ourselves to the small, mundane, easily overlooked needs around us.

practice now. We should think of a few people or families for whom we

We might call it resting, but too often it looks, smells, and sounds a lot like we’re wasting our singleness—at least it did for me sometimes.

Everything just mentioned can be done for God’s glory, and it all can be a dangerous distraction from it.

Distraction has always threatened faith in Jesus—long before cable television, the first iPhone, and Candy Crush. Jesus said that some will hear the word of God, “but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8:14).

In that way, distractions can decide our destinies.

“My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13).

It does mean you will have to spend lots of time focused on your spouse’s needs and not on your personal devotion to the Lord or on using your gifts to fulfill the Great Commission.

Are we minimizing God's plan to the Great Commission? Surely the work done for marriage can inherently be worship done to fulfill God's good plan?

marriage, you will see and experience the gospel in ways you never have before, and you will probably have fewer opportunities to pray, read, and serve than you did while you were single. It’s a good trade—I love being married—but it’s a real trade.

Ask Mom, Dad and Sarah

Singleness has the potential to be a garden—or a gym, or a kitchen, or a school—for undistracted devotion to Jesus unlike any other season of our lives.

We should be passionate, persistent, and anxious for them to see that he’s better than anything this world offers and that living for anything else only leads to awful, conscious, never-ending pain and punishment.

Life is short, Jesus is coming, and heaven and hell are real. Simple, weighty truths like these are our weapons in the war against distraction.

And because he’s clever, he spends a lot of his time among the disappointed and afflicted.

When we are disappointed or afflicted, God is calling us to war.

He is lovingly and violently shaking us out of our complacency and entitlement to awaken us to the realities of life deeper and more important than our circumstances.

(Luke 22:31–32).

before he boldly died

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Pet. 5:6–7).

Instead of defiantly hurling our affliction back at God with bitterness or fear, humility hands every anxiety back to him with affection and confidence. Humility refuses to treat God like an incompetent or unsympathetic boss,

What really makes any life worth living today is the presence, protection, and pleasure of the almighty, all-satisfying God.

Everything you experience—expected or unexpected, wanted or unwanted, pleasing or painful—is God’s good plan to make you his own (John 10:27–29), to give you himself forever (Ps. 16:11), and to use your life to reveal himself and his glory to the world around you (Isa. 43:25; 1 Cor. 10:31).

Make him your greatest treasure and ambition and see everything else that happens to you in the light of that infinite pleasure and security. Learn to love the life you have with God, even if it is the life you never wanted.

As we move out of the home and out from under our parents’ authority, we take on more responsibility. We also typically become less accountable to others.

Independence can breed isolation, and isolation separates us from the grace we need and sets us against the first and greatest calling on our lives.

“Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (Prov. 18:1).

Hebrews says, “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:12–13).

Christians are not to be less connected and less dependent as we grow and mature. We are to become more connected, more dependent, as we wait for Jesus to come back.

God can use us to encourage and challenge one another in all kinds of ways, including text messages, tweets, and Snapchat stories, but the massive fight we’re fighting is most effectively fought face-to-face and life on life, because we will always be prone to project a different picture of ourselves, a version of ourselves that we like, instead of the real us. The temptation is still there in face-to-face friendships too, but it’s so much easier to hide online. Consistently putting ourselves together in the same room immediately makes us more vulnerable.

We will reject whatever someone says about our pain, even when it’s simply repeating God’s words to us, simply because we don’t believe that that person—author, pastor, parent, friend—can relate to what we’re going through.

When everyone else your age refuses to be tied down and resists being accountable, submit yourself to a body of believers.

These relationships, born and built in the gospel, offer us all kinds of love and intimacy.

The gospel frees us from going to work to prove ourselves, and it frees us from going to work to serve ourselves.

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isa. 55:2).

Singleness is a horrible and popular excuse for persisting in sin. In our pursuit of marriage, we often permit ourselves to fall into holding patterns in our growth and maturity.