Category: Preparation for Marriage

1John 4:7-8 (NIV)
“7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

When God’s love is anchored within us, we have an abundant resource to draw from. This makes all the difference in all our relationships, but especially so in our significant relationships with men. The Big Story of Life is God’s love. The introduction is that God loves us and wants to be with us. The main storyline is that He has made a way for this to happen through Jesus Christ, who is the central character and subject of life from the beginning to the end. It is important we recognize that nothing moves us forward with any great degree without beginning every action with the knowledge of God’s love and the motivation to move in, with, by, and through it.

Adam and Eve lost access to God. They showed us the tragedy that occurs when we choose something over our love for our Heavenly Father. They were disconnected from Him and His holiness when they sinned against His Word. This was catastrophic for humanity on every level, but God did not leave us in this trouble state. He had a plan of redemption long before Adam and Eve came on the scene, and through His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, He saved us from sin and death. God is our Redeemer, Rescuer, Refuge, and Rewarder. He laid it all on the line to save us, and He did this because He wants to be with us, and He wants us to love through Him.

Jesus Christ has given us direct access to our Heavenly Father. Jesus died for the sins of the world, and God accepted his death on the cross as a sacrifice for all our sin. Jesus was innocent, and he died the most agonizing, brutal, and horrific death in order to restore our friendship with God. Romans 5:10-11(NLT) says, “10 For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son. 11 So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God.” This is an amazing passage! It ties together our rejoicing over our redemption to the kind of gratitude we should have in our relationship with God. This joy we should have over our friendship with God should shape and mold our days before they even begin.

The reality we’re now facing is that many single women are not living with joy, and they are not rejoicing about what it means to be friends with God. They are not intentional about their gratitude for the price God paid through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and in their hearts, there’s little trace of the depth, width, and breadth of love we should have for our Heavenly Father. Jesus Christ set us free from sin and shame. He died in our place, and paid the penalty required for all our wrongdoing, but many of our actions convey we lack both the enthusiasm and thankfulness for all God has done. Our prayers must shift so that this, more than any other thing, is the priority in our prayer-lives.

Through Jesus Christ, God has placed His Spirit within us. In the Old Testament, in Ezekiel 36:26(NLT), God prophesied through His prophet, “And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.” Because of the finished work of Jesus Christ, this is the kind of heart that we can have. By becoming born-again and accepting the gift of salvation that Christ offers, we receive God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ said in John 16:13 that the Spirit will guide us into all truth. He will tell us what he hears from Jesus Christ, and he will tell us about the future. Philippians 2:13 declares that the Spirit will work in us and give us the desire to do what pleases God.

So, we don’t have any excuses. God has made it possible for us to have the kind of heart He is looking for. He has given us the capacity to love Him in a way that delights Him, but as women, some of us are not interested in doing this. Jesus Christ is the gift that God has given to the world, and a whole life’s worth of thank-yous wouldn’t equal the gratitude we should express. We are just way too concerned with delighting in a man, and we’ve placed delighting in God in the back seat. That won’t do. We must pray that the Spirit will help us to change this.

The Spirit is the One who does all the Work, and God simply commands us to let him. We do this through prayer, meditation, and studying God’s Word. Our prayers should be more about our relationship with God than any other thing. We should desire Him so supremely that our entire being is a love song dedicated to His glory.

The gift that God has for us is received only when we acknowledge that the greatest gift we could receive has already been given. Everything we receive after salvation is a reward from honoring God with gratitude and obedience for the sacrifice of Christ. The love that was demonstrated towards us by God must be deep in our hearts. It must create a well in us that is overflowing to such a degree that our spouses are drenched in it. We must understand that we cannot be a wife ordained by God without understanding that the sacrifice Christ made is pure love. To be prepared for marriage, we must be a different kind of woman. We must understand that love indeed means sacrifice, and only then can we love our husbands with the same commitment and depth of love that Christ has for us. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“The Gift God Has for You”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2025. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Proverbs 19:3(NLT)
“People ruin their lives by their own foolishness and then are angry at the LORD.”

Everything that we do, think, and say has a consequence. Whether our actions are good or bad determines whether what we get back is a reward or a curse. Jesus Christ said in Luke 6:43-45(NLT), “43 A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. 44 A tree is identified by its fruit. Figs are never gathered from thornbushes, and grapes are not picked from bramble bushes. 45 A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.” There’s no escaping this truth. Everything that we do comes from what is in us. It comes from our hearts, and often the lessons that God teaches us are about what we need to get out of our hearts and what we need to put in them.

Our time as unmarried individuals is very special, but often we don’t view it that way. It’s special because it gives us time to grow in Christ and to learn the spiritual lessons that prepare us for married life. Most importantly, our time as singles can and should be used to deepen our relationship with God. As single people, we don’t have nearly as many distractions because we’re not obligated the way we would be if we were married. Time to devote and develop our prayer lives and cement our faith are the gifts we can give ourselves while we’re single. Many believers that are married fondly look back to the time they spent with Heavenly Father during their unmarried years. It was truly special to them because the intimacy they shared with God increased their faith tremendously.

James 1:12 tells us that God blesses those who patiently endure. Patience is a fruit of the Spirit, and it is a quality that every true disciple of Jesus Christ must have. Many women desiring marriage have not fully understood God’s requirement in this area. They are not patiently enduring the wait by using that time to grow stronger in their relationship with Him. Instead, many of them want to rush to marriage and have refused to study and meditate on the Word and spend quality time with Heavenly Father.

In 1Samuel 16:7(NLT), God told His prophet, Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The LORD doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” When it comes to meeting the man that God has ordained to walk with us through life and establishing a relationship with him, some of us want to rush the process to avoid spiritual growth. We think we’re ready, and we’re wondering why this blessing is delayed. We never think about the reality that God is looking at our hearts and that our failure to examine them is separating us from what we desire.

Our past relationships brought some deep-down stuff to the surface. We might have placed all the blame on the ex and absolved ourselves completely of any issues that came up, but not honestly dealing with an issue causes it to be on repeat. There were some things that came out of our mouths that provided a snapshot of what is in our hearts, and it was not a pretty picture. We’ve yet to deal with that, and it is hindering us from moving forward.

Our past indicates a tendency to rush into situations that aren’t for our good. We rushed into relationships with men without getting a greenlight from our Heavenly Father, and given the opportunity, we might do the same thing again. Rushing into anything or anyone is an indicator that we’re trusting our own abilities more than we trust in God’s wisdom and timing. That’s not good. Leaning on our own understanding is the foolishness that Proverbs 19:3 points to, so we should avoid this at all costs.

Before we walk down the aisle, we have to be prepared to handle the heft of what comes next, and the proof of that our good stewardship and spiritual strength is how we’ve handled and prioritized our relationship with God. When you make a mistake and realize it, this is not the time to run or blame, it’s the time to assess, reprioritize, and repent, because this prepares you for the compassion and patience marriage requires. It’s time to take a realistic look at the lessons of accountability, and make sure they are firmly in our grasp. We can’t rush past them, but we must seek the Lord for help to patiently confront any issue that keeps us from having a heart that is full of His love. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Don’t Rush”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2025. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Galatians 5:19-21(NLT)
“19 When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, 21 envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

The grace that God has given us is too amazing for words. Through the sacrifice and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, God has saved us, and He has empowered us through His Holy Spirit so we can live successfully within the earth. For years too many to count, He has been patient with our sinful indulgences and behavior, and although He is as patient and merciful as He ever was, something within this earthly realm has changed. The consequences of our actions are more severe, and we no longer have the time we once had to get things right with God.

For many of us, the desire to get married is still first and foremost in our hearts, but the path seems more challenging to find. This shouldn’t be surprising to us. 2Corinthians 4:4(NLT) says, “Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.” Our Heavenly Father has provided a wealth of knowledge about how satan operates in this verse. First, He tells us that satan is the god of this world. When we study God’s Word more closely, we will see that satan was given this position by us. Our sin put him there, because there’s a whole lot of sinning going on in the world, and sin transfers what God meant for us to satan.

One of the chief functions of darkness is to blind so that light cannot be seen. This is another piece of wisdom that 2Corinthians 4:4 conveys. If we do not believe in faith, we can be blinded from the treasures that faith reveals. Sadly, this is the condition of many people, more specifically, those that desire to be married.

We understand that the activity of evil in the earth has accelerated, perhaps more in our time than any other. The lives of many people are totally consumed by what is happening in the world, and they dedicate even less than an hour a week on the things of God. This is what blinds them. It’s what keeps their eyes from landing on the very thing that would lead them down the path of what they’re desiring.

Our Heavenly Father has given us free-will. We can do whatever we choose, but there is a consequence for every action. If actions are aligned with the Will of God, the consequence will be a reward. If actions are aligned with darkness, the consequence will be more darkness. The wrong actions, behaviors, confessions, and thoughts will corrupt our lives and cause everything to work against us. God commands us to steer clear of these things. 1Thessalonians 5:5(NLT) declares, “For you are all children of the light and of the day; we don’t belong to darkness and night.” We are children of God’s light, and it is our responsibility to keep our eyes focused on Him so we can see what He is doing in our lives.

Many of us are too focused on ourselves to be focused on God, and that’s a huge problem. It’s not about you. This is the simple truth. It is always and forever about Jesus Christ and how you live in, with, by, and through him. Colossians 3:3(NLT) tells us, “For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God.” When you gave your life to Christ, your life became hidden with him in God. The reality of this is that when anyone sees you, they shouldn’t see the old you, they should see Christ.

1Corinthians 6:12-13(NLT) says, “I am allowed to do anything”–but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything. 13 You say, “Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” (This is true, though someday God will do away with both of them.) But you can’t say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies.” There is no joy to be had in sinfulness. There is only pain, and that isn’t what our Heavenly Father wants for us. He tells us in Galatians 5:22-23 that the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When we walk in the Spirit, he will produce these in us, and our lives will be pleasing to God.

We must make up our minds that we will not be blinded by the enemy and separated from the blessings we desire most. The wrong choices and decisions can set us back, but the right choices and decision can set us up for all that our Heavenly Father has in store. In these last days, it is more important than ever to say “Yes” to God. We can’t simply say that we believe all things are possible through Him, we must show God that we are growing in faith by being humble to His voice and directions, because this is His Will. Don’t be like those that have been on this Christian journey for years but have believed so little in His power. Focus your energy on God through the Lord Jesus Christ, not on what you want, because it’s not about you. It’s about what God wants for your life. Miraculous things will happen when you surrender to that truth.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

“It’s Not About You”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2025. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Proverbs 19:14(ESV)
“House and wealth are inherited from fathers, but a prudent wife is from the Lord.”

In Old Testament times, wealth and possessions went from father to son. A daughter was not allowed to inherit her father’s wealth, so she did not receive an inheritance, only a dowry that she could bring into her new marriage. An inheritance meant a great deal to sons and gave them confidence that they could begin their own families with some degree of stable footing. Leaving an inheritance was the best that a biological father could do, but receiving it is no guarantee for a fulfilling and happy life with a wife. Proverbs 19:14 tells us that only God can give a man a wise, understanding, and sensible wife. For women, this is information we can’t afford to miss.

God is the One that causes the paths of two individuals to cross. He is the One who knows exactly what it will take to bless our lives. Although many of us think we know everything about who the right person is for us, we do not. In Jeremiah 17:10(NLT), Heavenly Father tells us, “But I, the LORD, search all hearts and examine secret motives. I give all people their due rewards, according to what their actions deserve.” When the disciples were praying about a replacement for Judas, Acts 1:24(NLT) says, “Then they all prayed, “O Lord, you know every heart. Show us which of these men you have chosen.” They understood that they could not make a decision with their own sense knowledge. They surrendered to God’s Will and needed to hear from Him because He, and He alone, knows the secret motives of every heart. We would do well to remember this so that we will seek God only when it comes to marrying the right one for our lives.

A prudent wife

A prudent wife is going to know what to do when the man or the children are ill. She’s perceptive, so she knows and recognizes signs when someone isn’t feeling well and needs medical attention. A prudent wife is not selfish because she knows that selfishness and bitterness ruin relationships. Giving and pouring into her family is always on her mind, and she always puts God first. A prudent wife prays all the time, and she recognizes that a persistent and quality prayer life keeps her relationship with God tight, and therefore, keeps her life blessed and in balance. She walks by the Spirit, and never gets ahead of his counsel. This is what makes her special.

A prudent woman understands that in order to be a prudent wife, she must divorce her single life and not try to hang on to her single days. This is a challenge for many modern women. We’re in love with our closet space, and never thought of making room for two as a sign that our faith and actions are working together. We never thought of learning to cook as a way of showing God we’re willing to make sacrifices for the good of our future marital union, so that if hubby can’t cook, at least we can make a banging omelet. As a prudent woman seeking marriage, you can’t just pray about what you desire, you’ve got to be thinking about what your husband might desire as well. Your life has to prove you’re confident that God will deliver on His promises. Your faith, actions, and confessions must all be on the same page.

An excellent wife
Proverbs 31:10(ESV) says, “An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.” At one time, the self esteem of a lot of women tanked because of baked-in societal norms of inequities and mistreatment. To compensate, there’s now an over exaggeration of a woman’s value and worth in some arenas. Society pushes for selfish indulgences, and there’s all this talk about queenship. A woman cannot make herself a queen, and this is something we would do well to learn very quickly. Only God can give us a crown, and He does not do that lightly.

We can’t have an over exaggerated sense of self-worth, because that will lead us to arrogance, and arrogance will kill any blessing that we’re hoping to receive. Many of us expect the man to automatically assume we’re a queen and treat us that way, when there’s not enough of the love of Christ in our hearts to make us royalty. It’s God who assigns worth and judges us faithful according to the standard He alone has set. An excellent wife knows this.

Many of us haven’t prayed to God to teach us to be an excellent wife. We’ve not prayed to be accelerated in spiritual preparation so that we can marry soon. We haven’t developed the maturity to hear what the Lord is saying, fix what He says to fix and hone what He says to hone, so that we’re ready to be presented with the man He sends. An excellent wife has delighted in being prepared by God through His Word and the Holy Spirit. She has her eyes open spiritually, and this makes her priceless.

Sometimes we make decisions and choices without being patient to hear from God. We still have more work to do to be the prudent and excellent wife that God wants us to be. The problem is that many of us don’t think so. We’re not interested in hearing what God says on the matter, so ultimately, we self-sabotage. We can avoid this. We don’t have to mess things up for ourselves when it comes to our significant relationship with the one God will send. He would not tell us to be prudent and excellent if it were not possible. Remember, you’re not trying to be a prudent and excellent wife for every man, only for the one that is right for you. Pray on that. Pray that the Lord continues to polish you so that you’re seen as the most precious jewel in the eyes of your beloved. Pray that you will be a prudent and excellent wife that comes from the Lord.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

“More Precious Than Jewels”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2025. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Joel 2:25-26(NLT)
“25 The LORD says, “I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts. It was I who sent this great destroying army against you. 26 Once again you will have all the food you want, and you will praise the LORD your God, who does these miracles for you. Never again will my people be disgraced.”

Whenever I read this verse, the first five words always stop me in my tracks. It reminds me that if God is giving us back what we’ve lost, we had to have lost it first. That’s not a good feeling. Then I read further, and God reassures us that He’s the One who does miracles for us, and He can make it so that we will never again be disgraced. That’s good news indeed! However, we can’t get to the second part if we overlook the first part of this verse. It’s the reality that God will restore what we’ve lost. Many of us are holding this promise in our hearts, as we should be, but as it relates to relationships, we may need to examine it more closely.

Some of us are looking for God to restore something we’ve never had. In this passage in the Book of Joel, God’s people had once enjoyed the bounty of His blessing, but they lost it. We, too, are enjoying God’s bounty, but not so much in the area of relationships with men. We’re praying for restoration, but for some of us, we’ve never experienced the kind of quality relationship with a man that God wants us to have. So, it was never taken from us; therefore, it isn’t something we can get back. This seems relatively obvious, but our thinking around it isn’t always in line with faith and believing. Some of us are asking God, “What happened to the blessing?” When the truth is the relationship that we’re wanting to get back wasn’t the blessing we thought it was. It did more harm than good.

We’ve seen others have wonderful relationships with their spouses, and even though we’ve been in relationships during our lives, we’ve never had a quality loving and lasting one for ourselves. We need to stop and think about that for a moment, because it really is time to leave the past behind.

Exodus 6:9(AMP) sheds a little light on the mindset of some people that have been traumatized by their past, and because of it they refuse to move forward. God told Moses to tell the people that He is the Great I Am, and that He would free them from oppression and rescue them from slavery, but they would not listen to God. This verse says, “Moses told this to the Israelites, but they did not listen to him because of their impatience and despondency, and because of their forced labor.” They were impatient, and instead of believing in the power and goodness of our Heavenly Father, they rebelled in their minds. They saw their oppression bigger than God, and this is an offense to Him.

The reality for many modern Christian women is that oppressive relationships with men is all they’ve ever known. We either chose the wrong man, or we didn’t know enough of God’s Word to walk in wisdom and maintain the relationship with faith, patience, and endurance. We didn’t know then, but we had certainly better make it a priority to know now. God is not in the business of restoring things that we have grown out of. He’s not going to pull old dead and worn out things from our past and bring them into the future. We shouldn’t want that for ourselves either.

God told His prophet, Habakkuk to write down the vision He had given Him. He said in Habakkuk 2:2(NKJV), “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.” God had given His prophet a vision, and it wasn’t just for the period they were living in during Old Testament times, it was for us as well. God told Habakkuk to write it down so that those of us living today could read it, gain faith from it, and run the race that God has set before us. You must have a vision of what God has in store for you. In other words, you can’t have the memories of your past dancing all over your thoughts and believing, keeping you stuck in the wilderness like the Israelites.

It’s not relationships with the men of your past that need to be restored. It’s your attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs about who you are in Christ and the blessings that God wants to give you; this is what needs to be upgraded. So often we allow the past to rule over us, but we’re different women today. Get it into your mind and heart that never again will God allow you to be disgraced. Pray that He will enlighten the eyes of your understanding about what is possible for you. Write the vision down and holdfast to it, because God is preparing you for a blessing that you will never lose.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Amplified Bble (AMP), Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, CA 90631. All rights reserved.

“What Happened to the Blessing?”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2025. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

“For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.”

Galatians 1:10(NKJV)

I was engaged to be married for three months and my fiancé was a born-again believer and loved the Lord. While we dated, I witnessed him pray, and he often spoke of his relationship with God. Because of this, I believed that he was a spiritually mature man, and I had confidence that we were both ready and destined to marry. I had prayed for years to meet the right man. This was extremely important to me, because in my past, I had hurtful and failed relationships with men that weren’t the right fit for my life. I felt that I had stalled in my quest to be married, and when I met my fiancé, I felt that I had met someone that made up for all the hiccups and mistakes of the past. I was wrong.

The disappointment of meeting someone, falling for them, and then they turn out to be the opposite of what you thought is not new to many women. You think you know him, but nothing prepares you for the negative behaviors that come out when he’s no longer concerned with impressing you. Not all men are like this, but when we’re not as close to God as He’d like us to be, we can fall for the one who mirrors the intimacy we’ve lost with God.

Heaven is our home because it is the place where our Creator lives. Heaven and all its host are continually and constantly responding to the goodness of God with faith and gratitude. The purpose of everything that goes on there is to give glory to God. Anyone or anything that is glorious deserves glory, and there is none more glorious than our Heavenly Father. The purpose of our lives on earth is to continually and constantly respond to God with faith and gratitude. This is life in the Spirit!

The salvation that God has given us through Jesus Christ is a gift from Him. We’re not ungrateful people who are too selfish and rude to say, “thank you”, we’re God’s kids! We’re the people He set apart to be His very own, and He commands us to behave like we know it and imitate Him in all that we do. In the light of His unspeakable gift to us, our lives are primed and ready to display excellence, because Christ is in us. We’re to exhibit divine character, like our Master Jesus. Romans 5:2 tells us that because of our faith, Christ has brought us to a place of highest and underserved privilege where we now actually share in God’s glory. Ephesians 1:3 declares that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing because of our union with Christ. He’s given us the gift of Holy Spirit to dwell within us and to help us live powerfully in Christ.

God has guarded us from being ineffective and barren, because He’s given us the knowledge of Christ and equipped us with everything that we need to live through him. With all the wealth He’s given, 2Peter 1:5-8(NLT) says, “In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone. 8 The more you grow like this, the more productive and useful you will be in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The blessings and goodness of God deserve a response from us, and just any ol response won’t do.

When it comes to the significant relationship we desire, many of us position our expectations ahead of our spiritual responsibility to God. When Adam and Eve fell from the position God had given them, they were disconnected from Him spiritually. They lost everything. The only way to be whole again is for the attachment and connection to God to be restored, and this is what Christ did for us. To bask in all that God has in store for our lives, our relationship with Him must be maintained by remembering the sacrifice of Christ and clinging to Him through a continual response of faith and gratitude.

The understanding of intimacy and connection to a man and the pursuit of it should never supersede our desire and pursuit of intimacy with God. If at any time it does, whether we’ve been dating the same guy for two years, we’re engaged, or even married, our failure to respond to the goodness of God will allow the devil the opening he seeks to destroy our unions. So that epic question, “am I trying to please man?” is one that draws a line in the sand about who exactly we’re honoring, worshiping, and adoring.

If your expectation for longevity, respect, unity and love in your relationship with a man is unmet by an intense commitment to God, the man will mirror this imbalance before you, no matter who he is. He will show you that your devotion is not ‘God first’, therefore it is imbalanced and without spiritual discernment. Relationships, more than any other circumstance of life, profoundly teach us that we are not in control. We cannot make the man love us and want to be with us. We should never be under the delusion that it’s our womanly charms or flesh that keeps him near. Only God’s love has the power to bind and keep us unified, and we must settle this in our minds and hearts.

God tells us in Proverbs 4:23 to guard our hearts because from them spring the issues of life. So, when a man begins to mirror the lack of intimacy in our relationship with God, and we then continue without response to our Heavenly Father, our expectations in our marriages and significant relationship can go unmet. The love of Christ is the foundation upon which our love for others will flourish and grow. So, we must obey the commandment of Christ in Mark 12:30 to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. When this is demonstrated in everything you do, the right man will join in communion with our commitment to honor God with all that you are, and he will mirror that honor for you and your union with him.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

“Am I Trying to Please Man?”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2024. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Society has taught us many things, and one of them is to expect results immediately. If it seems to us that a process is delayed, we use every available resource at our disposal to speed it up. Our modern society has almost no tolerance for the reality of patience, and if people don’t receive results quickly, impatience gets the best of them. That’s when we see the worst side of human behavior. We see attitudes that our Heavenly Father commands us not to have, the ones where we try to rush people and circumstances to give us what we want. Many of us make the mistake of trying to bring these ‘in a rush’ attitudes and behaviors into our prayers and expectations regarding marriage. We want results from Heavenly Father on the double, and we want to know exactly what we can do to speed things along.

Philippians 4:6(NLT) tell us, “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.” This verse conveys the action steps of believing and trusting God in a way that pleases Him. We’re not to worry, and many of us view this one as a tall order. With some of us, we are more committed to worrying than we are in having faith. A brother or sister in Christ can encourage us until the cows come home, but our minds are fixed on what we perceive as reality, and we will not allow ourselves to be encouraged in the strength and power of God. Instead, we worry about the things we’ve prayed to receive. We become increasingly anxious because we understand that the timing of the results isn’t under our control. Timing is a matter of waiting on God. It’s a crucial aspect of patience, and patience is a fruit our Heavenly Father requires us to produce.

Philippians 4:6 also tells us to pray about everything and tell God what we need. This part we’ve got on lock. We know how to pray and ask God for what we want, but the wait is the part that triggers all kinds of emotions and doubts. The wait is the part that trips us up. We’re begging the Father to tell us what we can do to take the fruition of our status-change off the waiting list. Well, He hasn’t kept this a secret from us, but it’s possible we haven’t been paying attention.

Examine yourself
There’s no doubt about it, God has already told us what to do in His Word, but sometimes we need a refresher course of the basics of faith. James 2:26(NLT) tells us, “Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works.” Faith is inactive without doing the Christ-like things that make it lively. We kinda forget this as we’re trying to amp up our believing.

2Corinthians 13:5-6 The Message (MSG) challenges us, “Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don’t drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it.” The rubber meets the road in this verse. The one thing that we do not want our Heavenly Father to tell us on judgment day is that we were too arrogant to test ourselves. We don’t want to hear Him say that we were coasting along, stuck in our own patterns and conditions, and we refused to learn more and do more for His Kingdom.

Too focused on the wrong groom
The marketplace is flooded with accurate teachings on God’s Word. We can research any subject covered in the Bible online and sharpen ourselves in the Word to such a degree that we could be leaps and bounds ahead of where we are. Many of us don’t do this. We’re missing the very Word that will profoundly connect us to our purpose. Yet we’re expecting God to bypass the fact that we refuse to take the test. We want Him to overlook the reality that we haven’t done anything about the test we keep failing.

Whether it’s our past or our present, some of us are so focused on a mortal man to bring us to the precipice of joy that the bliss over the return of the True Bridegroom is nowhere in our hearts. We have allowed our desire for marriage to get us caught up in the flesh. Even today, while we are praying and asking the Father to position us to meet the right man, our pasts echo the times that we compromised our love and allegiance for Christ with the wrong man repeatedly and never truly repented for it. This is not just about physical intimacy, but the many other ways we compromised as well. In past relationships, we did everything possible to spend quality time with the man but did nothing to spend quality time with Jesus. We took time off work sometimes to enjoy a day canoodling with the man but won’t read the Bible every day. Things like this reveal our heart towards God, and we can’t afford to dismiss it.

In so many instances, we’ve chosen the man over Jesus Christ, our beloved Bridegroom. Understand, it’s that one compromise against Christ—the One who rescued us from darkness, delivered us from evil, and brought us to new life—that puts us in the same category as Eve. For many women, this rebellion against Godliness is in their hearts today, and it is the thing that keeps the blessing of a husband at bay. In Colossians 1:13-14(NLT), God tells us, “13 For he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son, 14 who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins.”  Philippians 2:9-11(NLT) says that God has elevated Jesus Christ to the place of highest honor and “gave him the name above all other names, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Jesus Christ is our King! And we have not always behaved as if we know this. We must repent from our past behavior of not honoring him with our whole hearts and whole minds. Many of us chose to bow to the wrong man in the past, a man that was not the one God ordained. So, rather than bringing a mentality of impatience to the forefront or trying to rush a prayer through, we need to take care of a little housecleaning. We must make sure that this behavior of compromising our love for Jesus Christ is completely out of hearts. When it is, our Bridegroom, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, will find us with hearts that are ready to greet him when he returns. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright ©1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

“We Can’t Rush God”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2024. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

2Corinthians 4:9(NLT)
“We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed.”

This verse is a tremendous source of comfort for any person that is in a relationship or seeking one. All of us know individuals that have gotten knocked down emotionally by someone they loved. Many of have some personal experience with this. The man we loved abandoned us, left us bewildered and injured by heartache, with no meaningful explanation. This man simply couldn’t wrap his head and heart around the blessing that we represented. He missed out, and it’s not our fault, but knowing about his negligence doesn’t do much to ease the pain. When this hurt is still fresh, we can’t imagine getting over losing the person that we loved so much, but eventually we do. Once the Lord has healed our broken heart, we say to ourselves, “I don’t want to go through anything like that ever again in my life.” That’s a common response, but we must allow for the possibility that although that’s our proclamation, it doesn’t always stick.

Romans 5:1-5(NASB20) says, “1 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we celebrate in hope of the glory of God. 3 And not only [this,] but we also celebrate in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; 4 and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; 5 and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

Celebrating in the middle of tribulation is a spiritual practice that most of us have a challenging time grasping. God knows our frame, and in this passage, He tells us exactly why we can celebrate in tribulations. It’s because tribulations breed perseverance in our lives. Perseverance and endurance are required for God’s children, and through our life experience, God is teaching us to develop the same character and qualities as Jesus Christ. It’s our choice to make these changes. God will not force us.

If we have given our lives to Christ, then we must go to God’s Word, which tells us His expectations for our behavior, thoughts, and actions. 3John 1:11(NLT) says, “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. He who does good is of God, but he who does evil has not seen God.” Keeping this in mind, Ephesians 5:1(NLT) instructs, “Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children.” Imitating God is the goal of our existences. This is why perseverance and endurance are required for God’s children. He perseveres, and therefore, we must too. It’s not something any of us can negotiate a take it or leave it deal. We must have it because it proves our character as one belonging to God. Endurance and perseverance are the stickability that causes us to remain grounded in faith no matter what comes our way.

Sometimes, we fall for the wrong guy. That’s just the truth of it. Maybe we didn’t invite God into our choices. Maybe we leaped before checking in with Him, and maybe we jumped in heart first even after we heard from Him. Whatever the case, we must endure and do so with faith in our hearts.  No matter who you are, if you’ve ever truly loved a person, you made yourself vulnerable to them. They may not have handled your heart with the care that God requires, and it led to you experiencing pain, but after the swelling goes down, you’re still here. This lets you know that through Jesus Christ, you’re much stronger than you thought you were.

1Corinthians 13:7(NLT) tells us, “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.” Verse 8 tells us that love cannot fail but will last forever. This is who God is and it is who we are too because of our union with Christ. So, one of the lessons we must learn from our broken hearts is that love does not fail, even if we do. Because of the love of Christ, we have an unlimited capacity to love. We can fall and get back up again, even if it means we must be vulnerable. We can never allow one person to turn us sour on love. Instead, we must endure, learn from our mistakes, and celebrate the hope we have in Christ, because it will never disappoint us.■

New American Standard Bible (NASB)
New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Unlimited Capacity to Love”, written for findchristianman.wordpress.com. Copyright©2024. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.