Podcast: Honoring God in Singleness and Dating (Marshall Segal)

February 01, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Cultivating a Healthy Perspective of Singleness and Dating

In this episode, Marshall Segal discusses singleness and dating as a Christian. He shares some of his own story, including his struggle with contentment as a single person, how to deal with feelings of guilt and shame related to your past, and advice for discerning whether or not you and your significant other are ready to take that next big step and tie the knot.

Not Yet Married

Not Yet Married

Marshall Segal

This book will help single people make the most of their not-yet-married life, seeing it as a unique period of unmatched devotion to Christ and ministry to others, even while waiting for a spouse.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:25 - A Typical Dating Experience

Matt Tully
Marshall, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Marshall Segal
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Tell us a little bit about your own story. How long have you been married now?

Marshall Segal
We got married in 2015, so we just celebrated five years. Faye (my wife) and I had planned a trip to celebrate five years in April, but that got derailed like everyone else’s plans, so we celebrated at home.

Matt Tully
How long did you and Faye date before you guys got married?

Marshall Segal
We dated long-distance for almost two years. She grew up in Los Angeles, California and I’m originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, but I was living in Minneapolis at the time that we were dating. We met in 2012, started dating in May of 2013, and then got married in April of 2015.

Matt Tully
Did you do a lot of dating before you met Faye? Was that part of your own personal background?

Marshall Segal
Yes, it was a huge part of my background. I started dating really early, actually. I was in middle school when I had, what I would say, my first serious girlfriend. Then I had several throughout high school and on into college. It’s a big part of my story and something I write about in the book. There’s a lot of brokenness in the story, but either way, it was a really significant time in my life where I learned a lot about myself and about the Lord. Part of the reason for writing the book is because I just felt like the Lord had taught me so much through the peaks and valleys of the pursuit of marriage.

Matt Tully
As you think back on those years of dating—in junior high and high school—and you think about your own kids, is there an age that comes to mind right now that you would want your kids to wait until they started to experiment with dating?

Marshall Segal
My kids are young. I’ve only been married five years and my oldest just turned four-years-old, so I’m sure it’s one thing to answer that question right now and it will be another thing to answer that question at twelve- to fifteen-years-old. As my wife and I have talked about it, and I think I mention it in the book, we’ve talked about waiting to date until you can marry as the principle that we want to encourage. We’re not planning to put it as a law in our house, but that’s the kind of thing we want to encourage our son and daughter. That’s the kind of way we want them to think in terms of wisdom about dating. If you start dating at a time when you’re not really ready to marry financially, circumstantially, educationally, then you’re really setting yourself up (in the vast majority of cases) to experience a lot of temptation and frustration and heartache, honestly. So we hope to train up our children to think in terms of I want to start dating when I can actually marry.

Matt Tully
That seems like that’s a pretty counter-cultural message, even for most Christians today. Obviously, there’s probably a contingent of Christians who are fully on the no-dating bandwagon, but then it seems like the dominant thinking right now is, Yeah, it’s a fun thing to do. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a big deal. It’s not that harmful. But it seems like you think that dating is more serious than that?

Marshall Segal
I do think that is the dominant feeling—it’s not harmful, it’s fun, it actually prepares you for marriage in teaching you how to relate to the opposite sex. That’s just emphatically not my story, and not the story of anyone that I know. Anyone I know who dated seriously in high school—apart from a few exceptions where people do end up marrying the person that they dated in high school—in the vast majority of cases, it’s filled with regret, mistakes, and failures that didn’t have to happen. I think it’s absolutely healthy to develop good, robust friendships with the opposite sex; to build community where you’re getting to know young men and young women; learning to admire the qualities in the opposite sex that are worth admiring, especially their love for the Lord and their devotion to the lost and their willingness to serve in ministry in the local church. I want to cultivate an admiration and affection for the right kind of qualities over that time, but I don’t think dating is critical, especially in the teenage years. I don’t think it’s critical to preparing for marriage or to practicing for dating. If anything, I think it trains you to come in and out of relationships. It really is a training in the opposite of marriage in the vast majority of cases. Some people do it well, and they do it well with accountability in their home and in the church and in friendships. So again, we’re not going to make it a law in our house not to date, or say that anyone else should practice not dating as a law. But I do think the vast majority of dating in that time period ends up being more destructive than helpful or productive.

Matt Tully
In your book you have this line that really stood out to me: “We love to be loved but aren’t completely sure we even know what love is.” Would you say that describes you in your teens and twenties?

Marshall Segal
Oh man, absolutely. I had a craving for that kind of love and I knew that from early on, but I didn’t really know what it was. I don’t think I had any clue what I was saying those first times I said “I love you.” I think it was more manipulation than anything. You’re trying to draw a response that gratifies your flesh and your desire to be admired and respected and desired. It was not coming from a healthy place of being solidified in the Lord, secure in him, and offering to lay my life down for somebody else. It was trying to have somebody come and serve my needs and my interests. Until you really immerse yourself in the gospel, in the Word, in healthy Christian friendships and fellowship, the world is going to teach you all kinds of messy definitions of love. We know “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us” (I John 4:10). So If we want to learn what love is, we look at how he loved us by sending his Son for the propitiation for our sin. We need to soak in the reality of that love long enough that our love in dating, and eventually in marriage, begins to look like that love and not the opposite of that love. And that takes time.

Matt Tully
As you mentioned, we’re always—and young people in particular—bombarded with messages from the world that purport to tell us what real love is and how to find meaning and significance in another person. We’re taught that message by the world from a young age. There’s also a critique from Christians within the church that would say the church is often too focused on marriage and married people, and there’s perhaps this idolization of the nuclear family—the perfect unit of a man and his wife and his kids—and maybe that can contribute to the desperate search for a relationship among some people. Do you think that’s a fair critique of the evangelical church, broadly?

Marshall Segal
It’s hard to critique the broader evangelical church—I’m slow to do that—but I’m sure that it’s true. I’m sure there are churches where marriage and family have been elevated to a height above where God intends them to be. I can imagine situations where singles feel left out, marginalized, and made to feel like junior varsity Christians in their church. I don’t think that’s right and I don’t think that’s how the Bible talks about singleness. I structured the book the way that I did—the topic of singleness in the first half of the book and then dating in the second half—I knew when I did that that a lot of people would buy the book and just skip the first half and start reading the second half. They wanted to read about dating, but I wanted to say really loudly and clearly that part of a healthy dating life is realizing the preciousness of singleness. The Bible exalts singleness; it doesn’t diminish singleness. It says this is a time for undivided devotion to the Lord, and there’s amazing potential in singleness. For me, in terms of getting that balance right, I’ve been thinking about Psalm 27:4: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” If marriage becomes your one thing—in a church, in a person, in a soul—it will ruin you for the presence of the Lord. It will ruin you for the beauty of the Lord. It will ruin you for prayer because marriage has become your god. Ironically, I found that if marriage becomes your one thing, you will end up ruining your marriage. A person who wants marriage more than anything is not prepared to be in a healthy marriage. Marriage is going to consume too much of their heart and desires. We need the Lord to be that one thing for us so that we can keep things in proportion. Marriage and family are good things to be desired. Before I was married I knew they were good things; the Lord says they are good things to desire. Now being married and having children, I can say emphatically they are good things to be desired. But, we don’t want them to rise above where God has them in Scripture and in our lives. We need him to be that one thing.

10:45 - The Danger of Idolizing Marriage or Singleness

Matt Tully
It makes me think of a story that you tell in the book about how you wrote a number of articles about singleness for Desiring God a couple of years before you actually got married. Then after you got married you would occasionally still see critical comments on those articles along the lines of, It’s always the married people who tell you to be satisfied in Jesus and encourage you to not idolize marriage. Obviously, these people didn’t realize that you had written those before you got married, but do you think there’s any truth in that? Do you think married people can be too quick to jump in and say, Hey, make sure you’re not idolizing this. Don’t be so focused on marriage, you single person!

Marshall Segal
I think it’s a great question, and it’s an interesting phenomenon to live through as you’re teaching on various topics, through articles and through speaking, to have people respond that way. I think the dynamic works both ways, interestingly enough. I do think there are married people that don’t remember the unique trials and sorrows of singleness and maybe have started to diminish them in their own minds, thinking that married struggles and trials are tougher than singleness trials. I don’t think that’s a healthy way to think about it, and if you’re trying to give counsel into singleness and that’s how you think about it, you’re probably not going to be as helpful as you could be. Ironically, I think it works the other way too. I think single people can largely think of marriage as this greener pasture on the other side; and yet, sobering divorce rates tell you that marriage is not the greener pastures that many imagine that it would be. I think single people can imagine that married people generally have it great and single people have it hard. I think there’s a general principle here from Philippians 2: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:3–4). I think it can work both directions. The main burden I have in that discussion is to say yes, there will be married people that probably come and try to set you up with people and diminish the struggles of singleness and try to encourage you that this is actually a really great thing—that singleness is a gift that you need to steward. But don’t let that keep you from really good counsel from married people. I do think that we need (especially in singleness) counsel from those on the other side of marriage to help us understand this stage of our life. They’ve been through the stage—all of them—and whether it was a short time ago and they’ve been married for a couple of years, or it’s thirty or forty years, their perspective (and this is true on all kinds of issues in the church) will be extraordinarily helpful because it’s different. Most of our peers will probably be in the same stage of life that we are, but to actually get some wisdom from someone that’s further along or in a different stage can be really helpful. Ultimately, I just want to preserve our ability, mainly, to be able to share Scripture with one another. God’s voice—through whomever—is so important, so necessary, and so valuable. I have 2 Timothy 3 in mind: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). So single or married, or anywhere in between, I want to preserve the ability for a married person to come to you in your singleness —or for a single person to come to you in your marriage—and to be able to hold out what God says in his Word and for us to believe that these words are going to help us be complete. I think a lot of single people feel incomplete, insecure. Do you want to feel complete? Listen to the words of God. And if it’s a married person bringing them to you—great! If it’s a single person bringing it to you—great! I think we need both voices. So, it’s not at all to say that married people should be the only people to talk about singleness. I wrote some of those articles as a single man, so we need single voices as well—other people who are experiencing the same temptations, frustrations, and confusion. I think faithful voices in the same season are really valuable, and then I think faithful voices in other stages of life are really valuable too.

Matt Tully
You talk about coming to see those negative comments about your articles as a revelation about how we can all be so prone to “wield our pain to reject God’s good news for us.” That’s a heavy statement because it’s a real thing. A single person might be experiencing true pain because they really want to be married. And yet, you’re saying that it’s easy to wield that pain to then actually then reject God. What do you mean by that? Explain that a little bit more.

Marshall Segal
What I saw in the comments was people saying, Well, you’re married; you don’t understand the pain that I’m experiencing, so I’m not going to listen to you. I think if you make your shared experience of suffering the bar for which you will listen to somebody, you’re going to cut yourself off from all kinds of ways that God will speak to you. In fact, I would say most of the ways that God will speak to you. We all suffer in various ways with trials of various kinds. Often, even single people who are experiencing similar things will talk to each other and say, You don’t really understand what I’m going through. So we can’t make our suffering the bar of who we’re going to listen to for counsel. And really, what I’m trying to pull out a little bit more is just the difference between suffering with hope in God ultimately and self-pity. I think if we’re prone to self-pity, then we’re going to retreat into ourselves and say, No one understands me; no one can really speak to what I’m experiencing. I think Satan does that to isolate us. Self-pity is an isolating vice and it’s an indulgence. I know it because I experienced it over the years where I thought I was going to be married and I wasn’t. So I really just want to call people to say beware of self-pity in singleness because self-pity will isolate you from people. You already feel lonely. You already are asking, Where is my husband? Where is my wife? Where is my family? The self-pity that we feel there, strangely, can isolate us from others that God has put in our life. And God has said that the most important relationships in our life are not blood relationships. It’s not marriage; it’s not children; it’s people who hear and do the will of God. I just don’t want self-pity to rob us of the encouragement and the counsel and the exhortation and the rebuke that we desperately need in order to be faithful in our singleness.

17:36 - Is Singleness a Form of Punishment?

Matt Tully
I think I remember reading that you didn’t get married until you were close to thirty-years-old. Is that right?

Marshall Segal
Yes, twenty-nine.

Matt Tully
I think something that maybe many single people could wonder is if the lack of marriage is a punishment from God. Maybe as a result of some past mistakes or sins, God is holding those over them and that’s why he’s withholding marriage from them. Did you ever wrestle with that kind of thinking?

Marshall Segal
Absolutely. Deeply, really. Others had suffered in their teens and twenties far more than I did, but I would say for me personally, the darkest seasons of my life up until thirty were seasons of regret and shame and feeling punished by God because of mistakes, especially in my dating life. So, absolutely I’ve felt that, and it’s hard. Satan uses those moments to really drag you through the sin and shame that Christ died to rescue you from. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). So we have to fight that feeling of shame. If we are in Christ—if we are truly believing and we’re repentant and not giving into those same sins by running back to those wells of sexual immorality or dishonesty or whatever it was that we were indulging in—we can’t allow ourselves to wallow in condemnation because Christ spilled his blood for those sins. One of my favorite texts in all the Bible is Micah 7:8–9: “Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of the LORD because I have sinned against him.” So I think we’re meant to feel a holy, hopeful, righteous guilt over sin. We deserve the indignation of the Lord because we’ve sinned against him. But it says, “until he pleads my cause and executes judgement”—not against me—“for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication.” Those are the kinds of truths that we need to just soak in if we have this in our past and we’ve walked away from sin and we’re trying to live in the light. We don’t need to live in the sin, shame, mistakes, and failures of our past, but we need to live in light of what Christ has done. He came into the darkness; he was light to us. He pleaded our cause to himself before his throne, and he brought us out into the light where we’ll look upon his vindication. But, that being said, I do think that guilt and the trials of singleness, especially after failures in dating, can be a form of discipline. I think for myself—and I’m not going to speak into every relationship—but I think for myself, I do think God withheld marriage from me for years. I thought I would get married right out of college, so it’s almost a decade later that I finally got married. I do think God withheld marriage from me to discipline me. That’s hard for some people to hear, but I have a text like Hebrews 12:5–6 in my mind: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” So I look back on that season of life, and I look at the pain that I felt, and I believe that it was the Lord’s discipline—not punishment. And that’s a huge difference. If you just feel like you’re being punished by God, that is not the gospel. That is not what Jesus died for. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to hurt. It goes on in Hebrews 12 to say: “For the moment all discipline seems painful.” So if this loneliness feels painful, if this not finding a spouse feels painful, if you’re coming up against a wall over and over again in conversations, dates, or relationships, it could be the Lord’s discipline. “All discipline seems painful rather than pleasant. But later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:11). So I think if you lean into the Lord’s discipline—I’m not saying it doesn’t hurt; it says really clearly that it does hurt and that it’s painful—but I think it can be the discipline. So I look back on that season and I think that the Lord was disciplining me by withholding marriage. Not punishing me, but disciplining me. And I think there’s been a peaceful fruit of righteousness that has come on the other side of that discipline. That would be my prayer for those who feel that way—that you would walk through Micah 7:8–9, feel the vindication of the Lord in Christ, and that you would receive the Lord’s discipline because he disciplines every son or daughter that he loves.

Matt Tully
Yes, it’s a sign of his love. As a single person, I’m sure when you were going to church on a Sunday morning you would sometimes get the classic, I’m sure that God has someone for you; you just need to be patient. There’s someone out there for you! Do you say that kind of a thing to single people when you talk with them?

Marshall Segal
I don’t. I heard it a lot in my twenties especially. I generally don’t think it’s helpful because I know that God does not promise marriage to every person. The reality right now is—at least in the church in America—that people are getting married later and later. And anecdotally in my own life, there are more and more people who want to be married and aren’t—into their thirties, some of them into their forties. So I’m sobered to that fact, and I would never say, Oh, I’m sure someone will come along. That’s not where I want to anchor their hope, ultimately. If someone is really struggling with wanting to be married and hasn’t been able to find the one yet, I don’t want to say, Take heart! God will send you the one. I don’t think that’s helpful, and I don’t want them to go home that night, or wake up in the morning, expecting that mercy. “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after”—I want them to hope in God. I have people in my life right now who I cannot say confidently that they will marry. They may live for another thirty or forty years and be single. But I can tell them that one day we’ll be gathered together at a wedding, and we will say together with a full heart—no regret, no bitterness—we will say, “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready” (Rev. 19:7). So ultimately, I want to do the best I can to anchor their hearts in the hope of heaven, in the hope of Christ, that in his presence there is fullness of joy, at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. I don’t want to anchor their hope in a thirty- or forty-year marriage in this life, which will be difficult and hard and beautiful and worth it. I don’t want to anchor their hope there; I want to anchor their hope higher than that.

25:01 - How Do I Know If I Found the One?

Matt Tully
Speak a little bit to the person who is in a dating relationship right now. I think one of the biggest questions that people who are dating can wrestle with is, How do I know if this is the one that God has for me? Is there any advice you would offer related to answering that kind of question?

Marshall Segal
That’s a great question, and it’s a common question. Our community group right now (which is our church’s small group) is just my wife and I and all single folks, who we love. But we’re wrestling through these kinds of questions still, five years later, when discipling young men and women through these kinds of questions, which are massive. It’s rarely perfectly clear. The Lord wouldn’t have it that way. He wants us to depend on him and to pray and to not expect that this is going to be easy or perfectly clear. He wants us to lean into him through the whole process.

Matt Tully
And yet, sometimes it seems like maybe because of the rom-coms that we’ve all seen, it seems like it should be clear; it should be a very obvious, natural, smooth kind of discovery. So when it’s not, it’s bewildering for us.

Marshall Segal
Exactly. Something I say in the book is that I do think we’ve grown to believe that compatibility is the great clarifier for marriage.

Matt Tully
I don’t even know what that means. What does it mean to be compatible? How do you assess that?

Marshall Segal
It’s hard to assess. It’s a combination of your sense of humor, things you like to do together, and all the things that you do on dates. But, you get into marriage and you realize really quickly that first of all, you don’t feel as compatible as you did when you were just going to the movies or going out to restaurants. Life is just hard, you’re undeniably different, and you’re both sinful. I’ve said over and over again that marriage is far less about compatibility than it is about commitment, about covenant. The vows you make on your wedding day have almost nothing to do with what you’ve experienced in your dating life—no matter how fun, affectionate, and romantic that felt. Those vows have almost nothing to do with what happened already in your dating relationship. They have everything to do with the future, which is just uncertain and uncontrollable. This person that you marry is going to go through all these changes over the next years or decades, and you can’t control that. All you can do is be faithful to the promises that you’ve made. So, it’s a massive and weighty question: Is this person that I’m dating the one that I should marry? I usually point to three factors to consider. One is just a subjective sense—do I really want to marry this person? That should be an easy one, in one sense; but it’s often more complicated if you actually talk to people that are in real relationships. There’s part of them that does, and there’s part of them that doesn’t. So I think that’s good to pull that apart with somebody else and really get into questions like, What are your motivations for being with this person or wanting to be married to this person? How much are those motivations rooted in your joy in God and your desire to make your life count for his glory and desire to win the lost and serve the church? Or is this rooted in something else that is more earthly and not heavenly? So, your own subjective sense is the first thing—do I really want this? Someone else can help you decide, I think, whether that’s a true desire or if you’re doing it for other reasons that please people in other ways. Second, confirmation from people who know you, love you, and are willing to tell you when you’re wrong. This gets left out. A lot of people in dating relationships get more and more isolated from their other relationships—their family and friends. They end up spending all of their time together, often isolated from everyone else. I think that’s so dangerous. This dating time, especially as it gets more serious, is a time to lean in all the more to the people who know you most, love you most, and are willing to tell you when you're wrong. A lot of people will just cheer you on and say, If you’re happy, and the other person seems happy, great! Go get married! That can be so harmful if there are really yellow or read flags in the relationship. So, I would say lean intentionally into those trusted relationships. Faye and I tried to do this even over long-distance. Whenever we traveled one way or the other to visit each other, we structured our schedule of those trips so that we could spend as much time as possible with the people in our lives that we trusted, on both sides, so that we could ask, What do you see here? Does this look healthy? Does this look like something that should turn into marriage? Or, are there concerns or questions that you have about our relationship or how we relate to one another? So, lean into people who know you best, love you most, and are willing to tell you when you’re wrong. You could have a deep desire to marry this person, and people in your life could say, Yeah, I think this is a great idea. We support you, and we want you to move forward, and then it doesn’t happen. The other person doesn’t feel the same way, the people in their life don’t think it’s a good idea, circumstantially things could happen that make this difficult or impossible. So I would say the last factor to consider is does God lovingly open or close the door for this relationship to continue and lead to marriage? God can do this a thousand different ways: through somebody who comes to you and says, Hey, I think you should go on a date with this person; it could be someone you meet from online dating; it could be someone you’ve known for decades; or you could date for a couple of years and it seems like it’s going really well, and then all of a sudden something happens that leads to you breaking up. I think it raises all kinds of questions like, Well, I want this, and people in my life think it’s a good idea; and yet, it’s not happening. God, are you against me? Why would it go this way? So I just want to create the category in people’s minds that you may want it, and people think it’s good, but God still may have other plans for you. Embrace that. Know that he knows you better than anyone. He promises to supply all of your needs according to his riches in mercy. He’s a loving Father. He’s not going to give you a scorpion when you ask for bread. He knows you best. Even if in the moment you think you know better, he knows better than you, and he wants to love you. So trust him that if this relationship doesn’t work out, then he’s got something else in mind. It doesn’t mean it’s another relationship, and it doesn’t mean a marriage. It just means that he knows what’s best for you, and he’s going to provide for you in some other way.

31:24 - Practical Dating Advice

Matt Tully
Can you speak again to the Christian who is dating? Maybe they’re in a new relationship, maybe it’s an old relationship—they’ve been together with this other person for a long time. What are three very practical pieces of advice that you wish you could give your past self if you had the chance?

Marshall Segal
I think the first one is one I’ve already touched on, and that’s to be more intentional about drawing other people in—something that a lot of people don’t think about because they’re so focused on what’s the chemistry between us and do we enjoy being together? Almost all of their dates are just the two of them. So, I just want to say lean into those who know you best, love you most, and are willing to tell you when you’re wrong. The second one is related to boundaries. I talked about it in my relationships, but just didn’t take it seriously enough. I would just say, as a relationship turns from, Hey, we’ve been on a couple of dates and gotten to know each other and it’s moving on to something more serious, that you have those boundary conversations early. How are we going to maintain sexual purity? First Thessalonians 4 makes it so clear: “For this is the will of God”—dating is a time where we’re trying to determine the will of God for ourselves—“your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thess. 4:3). That’s a wildly clear statement. So as I think about people who are serious about Jesus and are serious about marriage and in a dating relationship, we need to be serious about how we’re going to remain pure and honor the Lord. It says, “that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:4–5). So, us knowing God should make a difference in how we relate to each other, especially physically. So, I want to have those boundary conversations earlier in the relationship than most people have them. Don’t have them after you’ve fallen into some sin. Have them before. Say, I care about you enough, and I want to honor you as a sister in all purity. I hope the guy steps up in these relationships to have that conversation early and say, Can we talk about how we’re going to talk in our conversations? How much are we going to talk? What are we going to talk about? With touching, how are we going to maintain sexual purity? If we like each other and we stay together, we’re going to want to touch—that’s part of what God’s wired into the marriage covenant. So we should expect to experience those kinds of temptations and not be surprised by them when they come. But I think it means talking about it out loud with each other and with others—Here’s what we’re trying to practice in our relationship. Does this seem wise to you? Should we be doing more or less in various areas?

Matt Tully
My sense is that for anyone listening right now who is in a dating relationship, their first thought in hearing you offer that encouragement is, Yeah, but that would be so awkward to bring that up—especially if it’s earlier in the relationship like you’re suggesting—I can’t imagine saying something like that so directly. What would you say to that?

Marshall Segal
It is going to feel awkward. I think being radical about Christ and discipleship to him is going to feel awkward in a dating relationship at several moments. The way is wide that leads to destruction and the road is narrow that leads to life. So I just want to encourage those people that yes, it’s going to be a little awkward at first. But let me tell you how that conversation will feel a year later, or five years later. If you get married, how you’ll look back on that conversation, it will cultivate a kind of intimacy that you could not have cultivated any other way. Trust really is the fuel for intimacy in marriage. It’s not compatibility, it’s not flowers and chocolate, and even writing poems and saying the right thing. Ultimately, intimacy in marriage is fueled by trust. So, I want to say to that person: Ask yourself what’s going to build the most trust in this relationship over time. If early on I demonstrate a radical commitment to patience, purity, holiness, and to faithfulness to Christ—not having to talk about it every time, not having to bring it up every time, but just early on saying up front, This is important to me and I want to be careful with you as we walk down this road that we honor each other in the Lord, I just think that’s going to pay dividends whatever happens. If you get married, you’re going to look back with such appreciation and joy over the patience that you demonstrated there. And if you don’t get married and you end up marrying someone else, you’re going to look back with all the more appreciation that someone was willing to have that conversation with you, or that you were willing to step up and have that awkward conversation. I just think it’s the kind of thing that builds trust, which is the most valuable thing in a relationship, especially when you get into marriage. The third piece of practical advice has to do with pursuing clarity in your relationship. I talk about clarity in intimacy in dating relationships. I think a lot of people pursue intimacy and think that a certain level of intimacy is the clarity that they needed. I just want to say this: make dating a pursuit of clarity, not intimacy. I know that intimacy will come by spending time together, getting to know each other, and caring for each other. I know that you can’t avoid intimacy altogether, but I think you want to make it a pursuit of clarity. The single biggest factor in that clarity is does this person encourage my walk with Christ and my devotion to him, or not? I think we get along with a lot of people in dating, but does this person—spending time with them regularly, talking to them, giving my heart to them—does it encourage me to walk more closely with Christ and to make my life count for his glory, or is it kind of a distraction and I find myself making excuses for their lack of spiritual vitality or their lack of spiritual engagement? Anecdotally in my life, young Christian women are far more likely to be making excuses for a guy who’s not spiritually encouraging them in Christ and cultivating their devotion to the Lord because this woman wants to be married. I just want to say to them over and over again: No, don’t lower the bar of his spiritual vitality because when you get into marriage, nothing matters more than the answer to the question, Is this person helping me love Jesus? Is this person helping me prepare for heaven? Is this person helping me lay down my life in all the ways that Jesus asks me to for his glory? I want to make that the single biggest factor in pursuing clarity. Up front, you’re getting to know each other, and it’s not going to be dynamic and deep right away—it probably shouldn’t be—but just over time, am I spending time with this person because I want to be more like Jesus? Or, is it a distraction and a diversion from my spiritual life?

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January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

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