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

by Marshall Segal

Boundaries are necessary, because on the road to marriage and its consummation, the appetite for intimacy only grows as you feed

While it’s rarely quick or convenient, gaining the perspective of people who know us, love us, and have great hope for our future will always pay dividends.

instead of constantly searching for deeper reasons to live and do everything we do. And because we settle for less, we often miss most of what the Bible has to offer.

God has told us how to live and how to love. Our job is to listen and listen and listen, and then maybe try to make sense

what it means today. People who read the Bible that way stand out in the world, and they make wise decisions in dating.

The longer you long to be married and aren’t, the more likely you are to think the problem is with you, that you have to change or try something new.

If you’re mainly looking to yourself to get married, you’ve put the pressure in the wrong place.

people who love you and follow Jesus have serious reservations about your relationship, you should probably have serious reservations too. Don’t rely only on your own instincts (or your significant other’s) to give you confidence that he or she is the one.

Marriage isn’t necessary for my happiness or significance here on earth.

That last sentence is true and important, but I fear our generation might be overlooking some significant things about what marriage really is and why, at least for many, it’s worth all the time, patience, and even heartache.

Some of us have given up on marriage because it doesn’t seem all that great anymore. Others have given up because we want it more than anything, and we’re tired and beat up from trying to find

it. We quietly, even subconsciously, moved marriage ahead of God on our wish list, so we’re often miserable while we wait around for our husband or wife. But until we have found our happiness, significance, and belonging in the right places, we’ll never be ready to be married.

They blamed their emptiness, loneliness, and joylessness on marriage instead of seeing that it was never meant to satisfy their deepest needs.

There are lots of bad reasons to get married, and the worst is that we think he or she could be what only God can be for us.

Unless, of course, Jesus is the point of our marriages and the power to sustain them.

Marriages endure and thrive on unchanging, selfless mutual commitment to each other and to something bigger, stronger, and longer lasting than the marriage.

Christian marriage, therefore, is an opportunity to show the world something—even better, to show them someone—strong enough to keep a marriage together and make it unbelievably meaningful and happy.

If God does call us to marry, we will have to relearn how to love.

Marriage had to be the big and beautiful goal of our dating before we were ever ready to date well.

God made many of us to want these things and therefore wants us to want these things—with the right heart, in the right measure, and at the right time.

The human heart is wired to want intimacy, but it is also wired to corrupt intimacy—to demand intimacy in the wrong ways or at the wrong time, and to expect the wrong things from intimacy.

to do what feels good instead of caring for the other person;

Intimacy makes us vulnerable, and sin makes us dangerous. The two together, without covenant promises, are a formula for disaster in dating.

There are lots of contexts in which romantic intimacy feels safe outside of marriage, but it never is. There is too much at stake with our hearts and too many risks involved without a ring. Without

And if we want to get married, we need to pursue clarity about whom to marry.

Careful, prayerful, thoughtful clarity will produce healthy, lasting, passionate intimacy. Any other road to intimacy will sabotage it, leaving it shallow, fragile, and unreliable.

We skip the classes, the instructor, and the tests, and just wing it. Why are we so ready to be so reckless? Because we crave intimacy, often more than we even desire marriage.

We’re looking for God in one another and in our future together.

When God is our greatest joy—our greatest desire and greatest priority—we can begin to trust the desires of our hearts.

Only then will he have the perspective to love you well, in dating and in marriage.

but he cannot love you well unless you are not his first love.

But if his love for you is an expression of his love for God, he will be supernaturally

focused and equipped to love you in all the daily needs and circu...

Because physical beauty and charm are naturally appealing. But without faith, they’re fading, and fast.

Christians should be cultivating hearts that are more attracted to faith and character than anything else.

He creates an opportunity, or he takes one away. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away (Job 1:21).

God withholds something good from us, it’s not because he wants to hurt us (Rom. 8:28). Never. It’s because he wants what’s best for us.

Don’t assume that a good desire confirmed by good friends is good for you. Trust God enough, in his all-knowing and unfailing love for you, to let him make his will for you clear in all three ways (height, width, and depth) before trying to move toward marriage.

What new things have you learned about each other lately? How have you each grown in your relationship with Jesus since you started dating? Are you both committed to abstaining from sexual immorality? What flags, if any, have others raised about your relationship? What things are keeping the two of you from getting married? Are you each being driven by your own desires or by God’s desires for you?

In what ways is your relationship different from relationships in the world?

Sex doesn’t breed those things. Do you know that? Sex, as God designed it and gifted it to us to enjoy in marriage, breeds life, hope, and love for Jesus. Counterfeit sex—distorted sex, plagiarized sex, self-gratifying sex—steals the life and pleasure it was meant to give.

That’s the love we need in marriage—sexual selflessness, generosity, and patience—so that’s the kind of love we should be searching and waiting for in dating.

But if we only ever think of it as a gift to us, we’ll be prone to take it for granted or open it too soon. We also need to see that sex is war—not a battle of the sexes, but a war between good and evil.

The sex Satan sells is a counterfeit—a melting wax statue of the real thing. Instead of communicating the beauty and glory of God, it demonstrates the dangers of opposing him and corrupting his good gifts. Sex that rejects God rejects its own goodness. It misses the true point and pleasure of sex entirely.

Sin promises to please, but subtly and destructively wounds.

It

doesn’t satisfy our hunger; it only breeds it. Sin promises to produce happiness, but it only creates and multiplies pain, sadness, regret, and shame.

“Flee from sexual immorality. . . . Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body”

When we keep our clothes on and our hands from wandering, we celebrate the immeasurable mercy he carried on a back destroyed with lashes.

When we wait in dating, we declare again that he really is risen from the dead and reigning in heaven. Our sexual purity will either make the cross look real and valuable, or it won’t.