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Iaaieeeaaieeeaaieee Will Always Love You (As Long As You Meet My Expectations)

It's a Pleasure to Meet You, I'm Your Spouse

In the previous article, I explained that, when searching for the right person to marry, one faulty assumption is that having things in common (for example: musical tastes, athletic prowess, spontaneity, IBS) is nice, but not crucial. Rather, while these things can change, God's pick never will.

The second unbiblical assumption that I held was that getting to know someone would give me enough knowledge of them to proceed independently of God's input. I found, however, that this didn't make that much sense considering that God's intimate knowledge of each of his creatures is far more reliable than dating someone for a few months or a few years in order to get to know them. No amount of dating should ever assure us that we don't need the Creator's input.

Of course, dating or courting or whatever is not a bad thing in itself. My question is: What do you expect to accomplish through these means?

Have you ever wondered how marriages in the Old Testament could actually work? I mean, Abraham tells his servant to go get a wife for his son Isaac. When Rebecca was chosen, both she and Isaac just accepted it. They didn't date for a year and a half. They didn't see each other across the room and "just know." They didn't even fall in love first. They depended on their God, trusting that He would use their parents to provide a spouse.

The important thing to note here is the attitude of trust. I believe that our first priority in finding a husband or wife is trusting that God will lead us to him or her. This looks very different in various situations, just as distrust looks very different in various situations. (Just to be clear, I do not advocate a passive attitude that says, "I'm just going to lie around and wait for the right guy or girl to walk up to me and let me know that they're the one." For further thoughts, see below.)

There isn't a tidy formula (for example, Six Ways to Hook Up, Apostolic Style) that you can plug in to determine God's best, so I'm not going to give you one. There are provisions that God has made, however, that guide us toward his heart and mind.

Consulting the Author

First (and I know this sounds patronizingly obvious), read the Bible as if God reveals himself through it. The reason that I word it this way is that there are many Christians who are deciding what they want to believe and then going to God's word to back up their predetermined beliefs. In other words, they are shaping it, rather than letting it shape them. Having squeezed the Scriptures into my own theological boxes, I am quite familiar with this approach.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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In your opinion, what role should God (and the Bible) play in your love life?

Join the discussion!

By allowing the Scriptures to shape your thinking, your mind and your heart will move closer to God's. This is because, as human beings, we are very much affected by what we read, what we see, and what we listen to. This is not a bad thing at all. For example, when I was at college, my thoughts were consumed with the issues that my friends and I discussed. When I moved away and spent time with different people, the issues changed, as did my mental undertakings. Of course, I was influencing the conversations too, but my point is that your mind and heart are invested in those with whom you spend time, whether it's the biblical authors, your parents, your friends, Steve Urkel, Jar Jar Binks or other television/movie characters that make even the happiest people suicidal.

Holy Spirit 101

Another way to adopt God's mind is to spend time with his Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is God's presence with his people, then he's definitely going to have the best insight out there. And no, I'm not Charismatic or Pentecostal; nor am I Presbyterian, Baptist, or a Yankees fan. I just believe that the Holy Spirit is a kind of rabbi that we should spend time with in order to learn his ways and become like Him — kind of like Jesus Christ was to the disciples.

This, unfortunately, is a tall order for many of us who say that we are Christians, but act like we are deists. Deism says that the universe is like an ongoing argument that was started by someone who, after initiating the discussion, immediately walked away. God created the world, the deist asserts, but has never interfered with it since then.

Because there's such an enormous emphasis on the physical world in our culture, we have an extremely difficult time allowing God to break through into our world. In light of this, it is interesting to note that cultures around the world who are not burdened with deistic strains see the work of the Holy Spirit everywhere. They'll talk to Him, listen to Him, acknowledge his miraculous works, and generally treat Him like a real person. I know that many of these people have not taken Introduction to the Holy Spirit 101, but neither did those slackers Peter, James and John.

With that, I'd say that the best way to discover the Holy Spirit is to talk with Him (popularly termed "prayer"), read the Scriptures (a type of memoirs), and spend time with people who spend time with Him.

One more thing: remember that we weren't put here alone. Christians need other Christians to function properly, just like the body needs all its parts in order to operate correctly. So, seek out counsel from those who are trying to adopt God's heart and mind, too.

I'm Starting With the Man in the Mirror

Relationships are not supposed to be easy; that was never their purpose. (We'll explore this purpose in future articles.)

In our Western culture, relationships are abandoned so often because we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we are in control of them. When this delusion is exposed, however, we typically do not abandon our false perceptions of ourselves. Instead, we just move on to the next relationship, hoping that it will allow us more control than the last one.

If we seek to have a biblical view of ourselves, of other people, and of God, our expectations will shift from hoping that others become like us to hoping that God (through others) will make us more like Him.