Preparing and Waiting, Part 2

-A few verses on purity:

1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
"Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass."

Romans 13:14
"But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts."

1 Peter 1:22
"Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart,"



Isaiah 50:7
" For the Lord GOD will help Me;
      Therefore I will not be disgraced;
      Therefore I have set My face like a flint,
      And I know that I will not be ashamed."

-One way to think of it is to not allow yourself to love someone before you have God's permission.  If you go around, falling in love with boys, you are allowing yourself to fall in love with another young lady's man.  We should have God's permission before we 'fall in love' with someone, because then we will know for sure that we are not falling in love with another woman's man.

-A beautiful set of verses which is a good thing for us to aim toward in our lives as single young women:

Isaiah 58:10-12
¹⁰ If you extend your soul to the hungry
      And satisfy the afflicted soul,
      Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,
      And your darkness shall be as the noonday.
       ¹¹ The LORD will guide you continually,
      And satisfy your soul in drought,
      And strengthen your bones;
      You shall be like a watered garden,
      And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.
       ¹² Those from among you
      Shall build the old waste places;
      You shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
      And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach,
      The Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.

-Our attitudes will create a climate or atmosphere in our future homes for our future husbands, and I think we can practice now on our families.  How we act impacts those around us.  If we are grouchy, our families will not feel very loved.

-We should practice doing some of the things that we are going to look for in a husband: being trustworthy, not telling lies, not spilling secrets, having a strong work ethic, saying what we mean, and doing what we say.  This one might be hard for some of us.  For example, I am saying all these things, hopefully encouraging some of my sisters in Christ, and yet I do not always even try to do these myself!  I do not want to be someone who just 'preaches', but some one who 'practices what they preach'.  This can be hard, because we don't always feel like working on it, or we forget about it.

-We need to find out what we believe, about both important things, and trivial things.  For example, do we know what exactly we believe about, say the doctrine of salvation?  Or something less important such as betting, or buying a lotto ticket - do we believe it to be okay, or wrong, and why?  Or is it even a big deal to us?  What exactly is the most important thing in our lives, and what do we not care about so much?  It would probably take a whole lifetime to figure out what we believe about everything, but it certainly is something to think about.

-I also listened to a tape a few weeks ago about preparing for courtship.  Obviously, we want to prepare ourselves for the possibility of courting and marrying someone someday.  These are practically just notes from listening to that:

Some of the points I got from it were that we need to 1) stay emotionally pure, 2) Learn to love the Lord with all our hearts (while we are single; to love our First Love), 3) Rest in God's love.

1) -we need to avoid mental attachments to people in our minds, or showing favoritism toward certain people
-we need to avoid going 'dating around' with people in our minds.
-10th commandment (I think they meant we need to not covet someone else's future husband)

2) 1 Corinthians 7:32 "But I want you to be without care. He who is unmarried cares for the things of the Lord—how he may please the Lord."

-We need to seek to be full and overflowing with God's love.
-We need to seek God's blessings on other relationships, like ones with our siblings.
-We need to seek to develop good habits now; seeking God in prayer.
-We need to seek to learn as much as we can from the Bible: God's commands, promises, and voice.

3) Genesis 2:18

God discovered the problem and he solved the problem.

Adam recognized the problem (Gen. 2:20), but he had to let God solve it (he couldn't).

We need to be content in our singleness, and do we really yield and trust God on the issue?  We are called to a period of singleness right now.

We need to seek to develop godly relationships with siblings

-The way we treat our siblings will be the way we treat our spouse and children.

-develop consistency, order, good habits


Hopefully this was encouraging to one of my dear sisters in Christ.