Continued from last week
What About You?
The above examples of immaturity are best described as an epidemic afflicting millions today. What is your maturity level? Are you certain that you are growing in maturity—enough to properly handle dating, and possibly courtship, assuming you are of sufficient age and conversion?
Real maturity is absolutely essential to successful dating. This is true for two reasons. First, most people do not find it pleasant to date an immature person. If you are immature, and refuse to grow and develop in emotional and mental maturity and stability, the only people you will be able to date will be the same—immature and unstable.
Second, and more important, as you grow older and begin dating one-on-one, it is essential to have already achieved a certain maturity level before becoming serious. Love and the proper perspective of the relationship are impossible without it! A person must be mature enough to understand the implications of a serious relationship. A lifetime of marriage and commitment may be just over the horizon!
Again, take heed lest you fall! Analyze where, in your personality and character, you need to grow and develop. Work on these areas! Set goals and move forward. Go to God and ask Him to show you other areas in which you need to grow:
Can you make right decisions? Do you take responsibility? Can you handle setbacks? Are you able to cope with crises, or do you “fly off the handle”? Can you acknowledge your faults? Can you differentiate between infatuation and real love? Are you addicted to wrong television? Similarly, are you addicted to wrong entertainment and wrong music?
Also ask yourself: Are you striving to become more well-rounded—in interest and culture? Do you have a strong work ethic? Are you most often happy, rarely allowing things to “get you down”? Are you patient with others? Would others describe you as composed—in control of your emotions? Are you generally thought by family and friends to be a responsible individual?
While maturity is crucial to every aspect of adulthood, it is an especially vital building block for dating, courting and, ultimately, marriage! To enjoy a thriving, successful marriage, one must be spiritually, emotionally and intellectually mature! There are no exceptions. While some may seem physically and mentally able to enter a relationship, they are often unable to maintain one. They lack too many essential qualities so necessary to endure the ups and downs that every relationship experiences.
Other Aspects of Love and Dating
Maturity and conversion are the most fundamental building blocks of proper dating. Maturity is directly related to responsibility. As children become teenagers, they begin to ask the bigger questions of life: “What will I do for a living?”—“How will I support myself and my family?”—among others.
Marriage is a God-plane relationship and, as a direct precursor to marriage, dating should not be a simple, animalistic pursuit of pleasure. Yet sadly, many young people never take time to plan their future. Instead, one night of succumbing to lustful impulse can bring disaster crashing down on foolish, unsuspecting minds—an unwanted pregnancy forcing couples to begin preparing for a family without the benefit of foresight and the joy of planning.
In contrast, God began planning to expand His Family long before even creating the earth. Notice: “According as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption [“sonship”] of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of His will” (Eph. 1:4-5).
Be willing to shed society’s influence over you. Admit that you may need to unlearn almost everything you have absorbed, and replace it with sound biblical principles. Once armed with this new set of values, you can firmly rely on God to bless you with the best possible prospective mate.
If you seek counsel, exercise foresight, and are willing to wait, God’s way will reap far greater rewards than you can imagine!
THE PURPOSE OF DATING
Now that you have begun to unlearn the wrong way of thinking and understand how to build a solid foundation on God and His Way, you are ready to learn the right purpose of dating.
This chapter addresses why people date, coupling it with the practical realities that accompany this activity. If you ask several passersby on the street why people set dates to do things together, you will get a variety of responses. These might include: To have fun, get to know other people, have a girlfriend or boyfriend, have sex, peer pressure, find companionship, defeat loneliness, etc. Some of these reasons are fine, but obviously some are not!
