5 Dating Tips

A lot of people think that happiness in relationships is

finding the right person. If I could find the right person,

with the right personality, with the right looks, with the

right gifts, I'd be happy, I'd be content, I'd be complete.

But until you are the right one, you can even

turn somebody who would have been a great partner for

you into the wrong one because you're not ready. Whenever

you enter in any relationship, you bring your own dysfunction

to that equation. And I think that the view that

we have of dating, based on all the shows that

we have out right now and all the different things

that culture presents, is that you have these two half

people who come together and make a whole person. But

if you're only half a person, when you come into

a marriage relationship, for instance, and you come together with

another half person, you're not going to complete each other.

There would be not a coming together, but a tearing apart.

It won't be like half a person half a person

come together and complete one another. It's like these two

half people are trying to get from each other a

complete one that you can really only get from Christ.

And so the more they try to pull out of

someone else, what only God can give them. The more

they're going to destroy the relationship, the more they're going

to be looking to that person to provide words or actions,

or even provide a sense of security that only God

can provide. Dating should be preparation for marriage, but the

way that we do it a lot of times in

our culture is more of a preparation for divorce. And

my feeling is that dating is very precarious, meaning dating

is dangerous because you're putting yourself in a position where emotionally,

in some cases, physically and even spiritually, you're connecting to

another person. But yet there's a certain amount of separation

that God commands that we're not to be joined together

until the point of marriage, both sexually our hearts to

one another. So the thing that makes dating so dangerous

is how do I get close to someone on that

level and maintain the right separation, And most people can't

do it. We kind of need to recalibrate ourselves and

see that although there can be benefits and blessings from dating,

usually the dangers outweigh the benefits, and so.

We have to proceed very cautiously. I don't want you

to hear this and say, well, I could never live

up to that. This isn't for me, this is for

some super Christian.

I'm just trying to give you a new way to

think about it that won't take this haphazardly, because I

would rather say this to you now as a warning

than for you to have to experience it in years to.

Come as a regret.

That way, people around you can help you begin to

process these things at a deeper level. But a lot

of times we build up all the wrong criteria as

being the most important and we get out of priority.

So we find to have some things that you have

as preferences, but don't let them do the priority.

Let the priority be for a woman.

How can I follow this man if he's not first

submitted to follow Christ?

Because realize that when you get into a.

Marriage with someone, you join with them. I wouldn't want

to date anybody that I wouldn't want to marry. Why

would you date the kind of person that you wouldn't

have any interest in marriage? Where is this ending? It's

not ending anywhere good. Therefore, I would say, you want

to date people not only with character. You definitely want

there to be some kind of chemistry. You want to

make sure that their background, and your background is not

so different that you're going to be torn by different values.

That doesn't mean that you can't marry or date someone

that's very different from.

You in certain personality ways.

What I would say is so important is that if

they're not the kind of person that I would want

to spend the rest of my life joined to, why

would I want to spend this crucial part of my

life joined to the Because they're going to lead me

off the path and ultimately put me in a wrong direction.

Is there a point to this relationship? I'm not saying

there never is, and I would say most of the time,

the motivation behind the relationship is a security or belonging,

or a sense of social status, or in the case

of males, a lie. Lot of times it can just

be a physical sex drive thing that we feel like

we're trying to meet a need outside of the context

of how God wants to meet it.

And that's the nature of sin.

It's meeting a God given desire, but it's meeting it

in a way outside of God's intended design.

I want to say that again a little bit differently.

Sin happens when I try to meet or fill a

God given desire outside of God's intended desire, And there's

no where this shows up more than in data and relationships.

The desire to bet with somebody, that's a good desire.

God said when he made Adam, it's not good for

man to be alone.

It's one of the first things that God said.

So it's a good desire to want to have someone

belong to someone. But if the devil can get you

so focused on trying to fulfill that desire outside of

its time, he can get you hooking up to the

wrong people in the wrong ways, at the wrong.

Level, at the wrong time, then he can get you

off course.

I'm just telling you that it's so much less complicated

the more that you put certain things off limits and

say we're going to build our lives in our relationship

on something that's much deeper than something that's just physical

and instinctive, Because so often we can build on all

of the wrong things in all of the wrong places.

So when you put a boundary up, you say we're

not going to build a relationship on this sexual, physical thing,

because that is important, but it's not most important. What's

most important is a connection that's deeper than that values

that we share ways that we communicate. You want to

know how to find the right person, set a value

on yourself where you're not playing hard to get, but

you actually are hard to get because you value what

God has put inside of you and you're not just

going to give it away cheaply. And I think that

a lot of times what happens when we enter a

relationship is we don't appropriately assess the value of the

relationship or of where God wants to take our lives.

And when you don't know the value of something, you

don't tend to protect it to the level that you should.

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