Roommates, Bad Dates And Great Mates: Dating Series

ROOMMATES, BAD DATES & GREAT MATES

Dating “. . .male and female He created them”

I’m glad that you have chosen to be with us today as we continue our series Roommates, Bad Dates and Great Mates. Go ahead and pull out your message notes. Last week we talked about marriage. This week, we are going to talk about dating. And as we begin, I want to be honest with you. I am very glad that I am now married because I was so bad at dating. I was really bad at dating. I think that one of the reasons that I was so bad was because I had a great fear of rejection. Every time that I wanted to ask someone out on a date, I would be paralyzed with fear. I would get so nervous because I was afraid that they would say “no”. Guys, you can back me up. It’s hard to ask a girl out on a date. And it’s maybe even harder because girls have such large repertoires of one liners to say “no” in a nice way. Right? True story, one of the lines is just the simple—I’m busy this weekend. True story, when I first asked my wife out on a date, her response was—well, I’m busy this weekend. My naive hope was that maybe she really is busy this weekend. So I said—well, what about the next weekend? And then her response was—well, I’m pretty much busy every weekend for the remainder of the year. I asked her out in January! She either just had a really busy 1994 or she really didn’t want to go out with me the first time I asked her. I don’t know. My second favorite line is, you ask someone out and they say—that’s sweet, but I would rather just remain friends, right? You might as well have a light flashing, because the translation of this is—I would rather have a root canal than go out with you. That’s the translation of what that is. Dating is hard and as you can see, I still have some emotional scars from my dating life. So it’s important that today as we talk about dating, we take a look at what the Bible says about what God’s design for our dating life is. Let me be straightforward and honest from the very beginning, the Bible doesn’t say a lot directly about dating. And the reason is, because people didn’t date back then as we do today. In fact, a lot of their marriages were arranged and they didn’t have the system of where you socialized, go out on dates, get engaged and get married. That is foreign to them. But don’t be discouraged because in the Bible, there is some very clear and some very important principles that we need to draw out and apply to our dating lives if we want to receive God’s best for our life. But here’s the key as we begin. This is the most important verse that we will read today, and it’s our memory verse for today. It’s at the top of your outline, let’s read it together. Proverbs 3:5. Let’s read it out loud together. It says, “Trust God from the bottom of your heart. Don’t try to figure out everything on your own.” That’s hard, isn’t it? Trusting God. Trusting God in any area is difficult, but trusting God, especially in the area of our dating relationships, is very hard. You see, we tend to want to force a relationship instead of waiting on God, because we don’t want to spend time along. We don’t want to be alone. Loneliness is the number one social disease in our city. We are terribly afraid of being alone. It’s our greatest fear. Sometimes, in our attempts to cure our loneliness, we make big mistakes by stepping outside of God’s will for our life and into a relationship that can be destructive or unhealthy for us. I received an email this week from a young woman in our church who reflected that most woman in New York City, especially Christians women, usually start out wanting God’s best for their life, wanting to stay within God’s will and looking for that Mr. Right in their life, but after a while, if they face frustration and get discouraged, they will usually step outside of God’s best for their life and into a relationship that could be destructive in order just to avoid being alone. And usually when you do that and you settle for second best, you lower your standards in order to keep from being alone, usually it leads to disaster in your relationship, in your dating life. So, how do we learn to trust God in this area of dating? Well, as we begin, let’s take a quick look at the three views of dating that are out there and let’s decide which view of dating we are going to buy into as we begin today. So here are the three views of dating.