Where has waiting month after month and year after year for a man to come into your life gotten you? Are you angry with the world? Are you depressed when you wake up in the morning, or do you have joy in your heart regardless of whether you have someone with whom to share your life? None of the answers to these questions are right or wrong. But the reality for many of us is that we won’t feel as though we have a fulfilling life unless we have a spouse to share it with. So, the answers to these questions will let us know exactly what’s going on in our hearts. They will help us to be honest with ourselves, and most importantly, we can be honest with God and hopefully understand what He requires in our walk with Christ.
Psalm 84:11 says that God gives us grace and glory. It also tells us that He is not in the business of withholding our blessings. Many of us think this way, especially when it comes to crossing paths with a future spouse, but it’s not true. God loves us and He delights in making us happy. Our Heavenly Father is passionate about us getting to know Him, because getting to know Him better each day is the true source of our happiness and joy. Some of us do not see our relationships with God this way, and He would like us to change this. He wants us to build intimacy in the relationship we share with Him. James 4:8(NLT) teaches, “Come close to God, and God will come close to you.” He is not far from us, but our hearts are sometimes far from our Heavenly Father. He is inviting us to come close, and this should be our greatest ambition in life.
When our hearts are consumed with loneliness, and we have doubts about whether God is going to bless us to be wives, we might find it very challenging to draw as close to Heavenly Father as we should. Doubting God’s ability and willingness to bless us is a sin, and it greatly displeases Him. He has shown us how much He loves us by giving His only begotten Son to die on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. Our Heavenly Father didn’t allow Jesus Christ to stay in the grave. On the third day, God raised him from the dead. God has demonstrated His overwhelming and limitless power, and to see things move in a forward motion, our believing must be anchored in the reality of God’s resurrection power.
You might have heard some of your single friends say that it feels like there’s a drought of good men out there. You might have felt this way yourself. Whenever there seems to be a lack of any kind, we need to go to God’s Word and look at His promises. We need to trust what He says and not how things appear. When a drought occurred in Old Testament times, God always made provision for His people. He also commanded them to change the way they were thinking. Through their circumstances, He taught them to depend on Him and not on what their eyes saw or didn’t see. The same is true for us today. God’s standard in 2Corinthians 5:7 says that we must walk by faith and not by sight.
When it comes to marriage, there are two sets of realities we must contend with. The first is what we think we want and need, and the other is what God knows we need. Sometimes these two are very far apart, and this may be one of the reasons that we’re not seeing the kind of movement that we hoped to witness. Out of the two realities, which do you think will win? Will it be what we think we need or what God knows we need? Proverbs 19:21(NLT) answers this question for us. It says, “You can make many plans, but the LORD’s purpose will prevail.”
From the smallest to the greatest detail, every experience that we encounter in life will present us with an opportunity. We can use this opportunity to demonstrate our allegiance to God’s Word and Will, or we can use it to promote our own agendas. You and I reveal how much we truly love God and value Him by how we respond to our everyday encounters and experiences.
Everything in life is about our relationship with God. He’s not going to close the door on our desires, but our faith in our Heavenly Father must be true. Some of us are fearful about putting everything related to our desire to marry into the Father’s hands. We do a dance with it—we put it there, then we try to take it over again. We don’t fully surrender it with confidence in His timing and provision. We won’t just leave it there, instead, we feel like something in our lives is missing and that a spouse is the answer.
How long we have to wait on the blessing of marriage is far less important than how long it will take us to be fully persuaded in our faith in God. When He looks at our hearts, the Lord should see a mirror reflection of Himself. The spouse isn’t the answer, growing closer to God through Jesus Christ is the answer. Believing and trusting this truth is what God requires. If we’re unsure about it, all we need to do is ask Him. He’ll show us that He is well pleased when we make a greater commitment to grow in His Word and do the work He has called us to do.■
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.
“How Long Will You Have to Wait?”, written by Kim Times, edited by Fran Mack for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2022. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!