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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (Prov. 18:1).
Lots of people know lots of things about us. But most of them don’t really know us.
Isolated Christians are dead Christians before long.
We are to become more connected, more dependent,
He knows us better than we even know ourselves, and he will deceive us to death if we let him.
God AND Satan knows us better than we know our selves
Are we willing to hear the hope of God from someone who has not experienced or cannot comprehend our current heartache? If we’re unwilling, then our pain has driven us into isolation, and Satan’s succeeding in his plans for our suffering.
Your first step in finding the community you need should be to join a local church.
Tell them Christianity is not a tiny corner of your life; it is your life.
Lie 6: I’m flaky and unreliable only because I’m still single, and you can’t really expect single people to make or keep commitments.
Those of us who haven’t settled down feel the freedom to move from one thing to the next, to leave old responsibilities and obligations for fresh, new things.
There’s no unchecked life like the not-yet-married life.
Marriage can offer the up-close-and-personal accountability we might not have in our singleness. Self-control, though, is a fruit of the Spirit, not of a spouse.
However harmless or private it may seem, it is not.
Refuse to procrastinate in killing your sin, and run after the one who wants to make you new.
But the Bible is clear: prayer is not a side dish for followers of Jesus. It’s the oven.
What makes marriage worth having is that you, your spouse, and those around you see more of God and his love in Jesus.
See more of god through the marriage than what it would be single
that marriage really is less about compatibility than commitment. After all, there has never been a less compatible relationship than a holy God and his sinful bride, and that’s the mold we’re aiming for in our marriages.
Therefore, the search for a spouse isn’t a pursuit of perfection but a mutually flawed pursuit of Jesus.
The greatest danger of dating is giving parts of our hearts and lives to someone to whom we’re not married.
While the great prize in marriage is Christ-centered intimacy, the great prize in dating is Christ-centered clarity.
The purpose of our dating is to determine whether the two of us should get married, so we should focus our effort there.
Wait to date until you can marry.
Has his or her faith in Jesus been tested enough by trials to be confident it’s real?
My advice—take it or leave it—is to wait until you can reasonably marry him or her in the next eighteen months. It doesn’t mean you have to marry that quickly. The important part is that you could, if God made it clear this was his will and his timing for you.
Instead of making marriage your mission, make it God’s global cause and the advance of the gospel where you are, and look for someone pursuing the same.
Don’t let your mind marry him before the rest of you can.
The trajectory of all truly Christian romance ought to be marriage,
Satan wants to subtly help us build marriage and family idols that are too fragile for our not-yet-married relationships.
Guard your heart and imagination from running out ahead of your current commitment.
the appetite for intimacy only grows as you feed it.
Even praying together or talking for hours upon hours on the phone can create unhealthy and premature overdoses of intimacy.
While you might be the one with the final say, you might not be the best person to assess at every point.
Put the pressure on God and not yourself.
A lot of the heartache and confusion we feel in dating stems from treating dating mainly as practice for marriage (clarity through intimacy), instead of as discernment toward marriage (clarity and then intimacy).
Instead of experimenting with marriage, we should be pursuing clarity about marriage.
You need a husband or a wife who could be married to you for fifty years and still go to the grave loving Jesus more than you.
God does make his will clear by clarifying things in our hearts, but he also makes his will clear in other ways too.
Sex was meant to be selfless, to be a gift we give to our husband or wife, and to him or her alone.
He wanted us to see the thorns in his head, the open flesh in his back, and the nails in his wrists, and to run like crazy away from sin.
Every act of obedience, in life and in dating, is a free act of defiance in the face of Satan’s schemes and lies. We’re not just guarding ourselves from him, but we’re seizing territory back from him.
Will we bind ourselves emotionally or spiritually to someone in a way we should only lean on a spouse?
Good friends will be able to tell if the one you are dating has drawn you closer to Christ or away. And they will be able to tell if you’re depending on your boyfriend or girlfriend in unhealthy ways.
He just confidently assured me that I would never regret something we didn’t do in dating but we’d probably regret the things we didn’t wait to do—even if we ended up getting married.
We think we’re leaning on others as we wade into all the material online, but we’re often just surrendering to our own cravings and ignorance.
if you’re looking for questions to have others ask you, here are some important ones:
If we do not take our responsibility to God seriously, we’ll never take our accountability to others seriously.
If we can come in and out of relationships without pain or remorse, something is likely out of sync.
Sometimes the best thing we can do for our future spouse is not date.
God feeds the unemployed birds of the air (Matt. 6:26). God grows the flowers of the field and makes them beautiful, even though they’ll be cut, stomped, eaten, or frozen in a matter of days or weeks (Matt. 6:28–30). How much more will this Father care and provide for his blood-bought children?
One way God provides for us through breakups is by making clear—by whatever means and for whatever reason—that this relationship was not his plan for our marriage.
