5 Step Dating Method for Men
I recently received an email from a guy in church asking for my help in developing more ways for the singles in our church to get to know each other and potentially develop dating relationships.
In replying to the email, I first reminded my this guy how most single twentysomething Christian men would be envious of his position: being part of a church that God has kindly “stocked” (ladies, don’t take offense, I use the term in good jest and in line with the metaphor you will see below) with a huge number of godly, beautiful, single and available women in their twenties. Second, I explained why I will not start a program to facilitate Christian dating. Third, I shared a simplified 5-Step approach for getting more young men to the altar. I’ll copy that part of the email below. You may want to share it with single men in your church.
Step 1. Keep it your first priority to walk tightly with Jesus, to be growing in godliness as a man. This includes having other godly men/friendships in your life. If you’re maturing in Christ, you know yourself pretty well, and you don’t think God has called you to singleness, move on to Step 2.
Step 2. Pray daily that God would bring into your life a godly woman who you can have a great marriage with, all the while working on THE BAIT (that’s you) that you’re putting on THE DATING FISHING HOOK.
Step 3. Meet a lady who is a Christian, who is breathing, who is over the age of 18, and who you feel some level of the hots for, then move on to Step 4.
Step 4. Step up and ask the lady out on a date, then see what happens. If things don’t go well (if you get rejected, etc.), re-evaluate Steps 1-3, especially examining the quality of THE BAIT (you), then get working on Step 3 again. If things go well (and if those who know you best and who you’re in community with also think things are going well), move on to Step 5.
Step 5. Buy a ring, get married, start making babies, and love your bride like Christ loved the church until death do you part.
A Sovereign and Personal God
I think you would benefit from reading chapter 9 of D.A. Carson’s, A Call to Spiritual Reformation: Priorities from Paul and His Prayers. Chapter 9, A Sovereign and Personal God, is the best short treatment I have read on the intersection of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility.
Time Wasting Efficiency
David Powlison on how he manages his time:
cultural ideal of tightly scheduled efficiency. For me, effective and
productive often operate in ways that seem quite “inefficient.” I’m
more “third-world” in my use of time: event-oriented and
person-oriented, rather than time-conscious and to-do-list-conscious. I
operate with an inner gyroscope tuned to whether or not any particular
experience or interaction is complete – not to how long it
takes or whether it fits the schedule. I’m attuned to whether or not
any particular thought is actually finished thinking, rather than
whether the product is done on time. So I tend to take the time it
takes to get something right—whether that “something” is the close
attentiveness of getting fully engaged in this conversation of
consequence, or how to craft this sentence and paragraph, or whether
I’m stopping and actually noticing the hawk flying overhead right now.
Read the whole piece.
Post-Literacy
The latest issue of World contains a good article by Janie B. Cheaney examining a few dynamics of the “post-literacy” culture we’re finding ourselves in.
From the article:
At the dawn of the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo pioneered a new type
of literature: the psychological memoir. His Confessions is the anatomy
of a human soul that lost, then found, its way. Perhaps for that very
reason it is incomprehensible to Professor Bertonneau’s students.
Subject to an educational system—and a parental style—that flatters
their esteem but neglects their souls, they don’t have the capacity for
honest soul-searching. Encouraged to be self-absorbed, they are
anything but self-aware.”
Read the whole thing.
Galaxies, Dinosaurs, Cigars, and God’s Sovereign Plan
“Every atom in the quadrillion-mile universe and every ‘chance’ event in its trillion-year history is deliberated and perfectly planned and controlled by God for the ultimate end of our good, our heavenly joy. Galaxies revolve and dinosaurs breed and rain falls and people fall in love and uncles smoke cheap cigars and people lose their jobs and we all die—all for our good, the finished product, God’s work of art, the kingdom of Heaven.” -Peter Kreeft
Growing Gospel
Great words from John Piper:
Here is a simple exhortation that I have been trying to implement in our family:
Seek to see and feel the gospel as bigger as years go by rather than smaller.
Our temptation is to think that the gospel is for beginners and then we
go on to greater things. But the real challenge is to see the gospel as
the greatest thing—and getting greater all the time.
The Gospel gets bigger when, in your heart,
- grace gets bigger;
- Christ gets greater;
- his death gets more wonderful;
- his resurrection gets more astonishing;
- the work of the Spirit gets mightier;
- the power of the gospel gets more pervasive;
- its global extent gets wider;
- your own sin gets uglier;
- the devil gets more evil;
- the gospel’s roots in eternity go deeper;
- its connections with everything in the Bible and in the world get stronger;
- and the magnitude of its celebration in eternity gets louder.
So keep this in mind: Never let the gospel get smaller in your heart.
Pray that it won’t. Read solid books on it. Sing about it. Tell someone about it who is ignorant or unsure about it.
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel….
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:
that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that
he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with
the Scriptures. (1 Corinthians 15:1-4)
Stuck in Stress
“The way you choose to cope with stress can change not only how you feel, but also how it transforms the brain. If you react passively or if there is simply no way out, stress can become damaging. Like most psychiatric issues [it's also a spiritual issue!], chronic stress results from the brain getting locked into the same pattern, typically one marked by pessimism, fear, and retreat.”
SPARK, p. 60
Living Psalmically
I’ve been changing things up.
Weeks ago I began to notice that my conversations with God had a “stuckness” to them. My prayer life had grown stale and stuck–always saying the same old things in the same old way. So, I decided to change my method.
For the past few weeks I’ve been praying through the Psalms.
This is how I do it:
Most mornings I use my Moleskine in praying through a psalm. Right now, the discipline of writing out my prayers is proving deeply helpful. I began with Psalm 1. Today I prayed through Psalm 20. I use black ink to write out the words of the psalm. As I write the words I pray them to God. When a certain stanza, verse, sentence, or word of the psalm especially grips me and triggers further prayer, I take my red pen and use it to write out/pour out further prayer to God in my own language. When I’m done, I move back to the black pen/psalm.
That’s it. That’s what I do.
It’s just a simple change of method in my prayer life, but this simple change of method is slowly changing how I live and relate to God. I’m living more psalmically than before.
