Purple- Picture Purple
How were relationships really designed?
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So we are in the final night of our series titled Purple. We had the Pre-Purple talk, we defined true relationships and last week we looked at the problem with purple.
This week we are going to talk about a Picture Perfect Purple.
Has anyone ever heard of the concept of “the one”?
That God has made one special person for everyone that you will one day find and marry and have a family with?
Well let me just tell you that I do not believe in “the one.” Here is why:
Because sin entered the world, selfishness and foolishness also entered the world. Meaning people began to seek their own desires rather than God’s and with God giving us the ability of Free Will to make our own decisions, bc we are dumb, we make wrong choices. We make choices contrary to God’s will.
So with our ability to make choices, and our corresponding ability to make wrong choices, at some point, somewhere in history, some two people would’ve picked the wrong “ones” creating a thousand year long domino effect of other people consequently being with the wrong “one.”
So what am I telling you? Looking for “the one” is a waste of time. What happens when we look for the one is we look for things we find pleasing to our flesh rather that what may ultimately be best for us.
We also tend to look at people and what they may need to fix for them to be what we need them to be, rather than ever looking at ourselves.
What I am telling you is that for this Perfect Purple, instead of looking for the one, work daily and diligently to make yourself “the one” for someone else.
So a popular phrase in Christian circles is “a Proverbs 31 woman.” That’s great, but what does it mean to be a Proverbs 31 woman? Rather than reading the passage and trying to interpret all the imagery, which some is directly related to being a wife/mother and thats just not where you are in life, I will tell you some of the characteristics that you ladies should be working towards and you young men should be looking for:
Trustworthy
Giving
Kind
Selfless
All of Proverbs 31 can be summarized into those 4. A wife and mother are always giving and selfless, and also under appreciated.
But trustworthy and kind are added to those two as well, and trustworthy was the first one listed in the proverb.
But the proverbs are not the only place we can find desirable traits of someone.
Look at 1 Peter 3. We see here that you should be respectful and pure in your conduct and also gentle.
But look at verse #4
“but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.”
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Your physical appearance and attributes aren’t what make you desirable, God didn’t choose you because you looked fine and you shouldn’t want some guy to choose you because of that reason too.
Make a guy know who you are fully, know your heart and know your God before you commit any future time to him.
What about the guys? Well Ephesians 5:25-28 covers that for us.
“Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.”
There’s a lot of allegory and truth intertwined in this passage, so here is the gist. Everyone has heard it preached, Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church. So the women now have an expectation for their man to be like who?
Jesus, well news flash no dude is ever gonna be anywhere near like Jesus, so YOU ARE GOING TO BE LET DOWN, DISAPPOINTED, AND HURT.
But this doesn’t excuse the man from chasing this. We as men are called to love our wives like Jesus. That is serving her selflessly and sacrificially. Giving up personal comforts and desires to present her to God holy.
Well what does that mean, it means that as men it is our job to not lead them to sin, we are to love them in a way that we present them to God without sin. Obviously they are sinners in need of grace just like we are, so it will never happen that we present them without sin, but if we were to be selfless and sacrificial like Jesus, maybe just maybe, we wouldn’t drive them to sin but to sanctification.
The beginning of Ephesians 5 says “be imitators of God.”
I could honestly just leave that as the message, if we were to imitate the character of God, relationships in our life would be darn near perfect.
So if there isn’t the one, how do I know who I am supposed to be with or not, how do I know if it is in God’s will.
Here is my stance on this, God honors those that honor Him. So if your relationship honors God, I believe He will honor that relationship. Thus on the flipside, if you are in a relationship full of sin of whatever flavor you want think of, then that isn’t in God’s will for you, bc God’s will isn’t sin.
