2 Cents

PRINCIPLE #1 - Give Your Heart to God First

Again let me stress, these are general working principles, not rules without exceptions. Nowhere in the Bible does it come out and say explicitly that God will never allow you to date until you've first figured out how to have Him as #1 in your life. However what is explicit and emphasized to the extreme in Scripture is the fact that the most important thing you can do with your heart (and your life) is to turn it over to God.

If you have not fully given your heart to Jesus Christ your viewpoint on the rest of life is going to be skewed. You will undoubtedly seek a certain amount of satisfaction in dating that another person cannot give you. You can't fill a God-sized whole in your heart with another human being.

It might sound off-topic, but it's most certainly not. The most important, most crucial, and most beneficial thing you can do for your dating life and future marriage is to give your life fully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. When you do this and you seek to learn to become the man/woman of God the Bible calls you to be you will learn how to date the way God intended it and you will learn how to be a husband/wife the way God intended it. I believe the lack of attention to this important principle is an extremely high contributing factor to the divorce rate in America.

If God created marriage, created males and females, created human beings (created everything!) then it would make sense that a deviation from his plan for life would produce unhealthy results. But some of you will say, "I've seen perfectly healthy marriages and dating relationships between two non-Christians!" My answer to this objection is no relationship is perfectly healthy. When you put a sinner together with another sinner it never equals perfection. You just don't see the imperfections.

With Christ as your foundation you will be able to acknowledge the depths of sin you came from and then be able to forgive another when they sin against you. You will have intrinsic motivation to serve that other person even when you don't feel like it. You will understand that the covenant of marriage mirrors God's covenant with his people and God doesn't flippantly divorce his people whenever he's not in love with them anymore. And you will understand that since marriage mirrors God's covenant in this way adultery is the ultimate slap in the face to God and your spouse because the mirror image of adultery is idolatry.

So if you're single and reading this my suggestion would be to make it your #1 goal to fall in love with God before you fall in love with someone else. This will allow you to treat that person the way God intended when they finally come along. If you're dating and reading this don't take this to mean you need to end your relationship (but you may!). Rather seek to give your heart to God and make sure your significant other is doing the same.