Deciding whom you’ll marry is hugely important and will affect extensively the whole rest of your life and into eternity. Given the weight of this decision, it’s natural to want reassurance that you’re doing the right thing. Whether you’re looking for a burning bush or putting out fleeces, however, I’m concerned that your search for signs won’t give you the clarity you’re seeking.
Very often, we desire supernatural involvement that we forget to study and learn all the biblical principles and do the hard work of applying them.
Is it possible you, too, are seeking evidence of God’s will in places He does not command us to look (Matthew 12:38-41), while overlooking the one place He does — His Word?
Looking for and trusting in signs easily leads to confusion. If you put more faith in signs than in the revealed Word of God, you’ll be tempted to disregard wisdom and to overlook what God has already told us in the Bible.
God has already told us His will in His Word that is “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12).
Theologian Carl F. H. Henry marveled that “God forfeited His own personal privacy so that His creatures might know Him.”In so doing, 2 Peter 1:3 tells us, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.”
How do we gain knowledge of Him? By studying His Word: reading it daily, meditating on it, asking God to help you understand it, and hearing it preached faithfully by men of God.
Paul told Timothy that “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 competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
That certainly includes the good work of taking a wife, providing for her, conceiving children with her, bringing them up in the instruction of the Lord, and all else that is part of fruitful family life. So how do you know God’s will for marriage to this particular woman?
Discerning the answer to these questions and all future questions that will arise over the course of a marriage requires that you treasure God’s Word, study it, meditate on it, and obey it. Christ defeated Satan in the wilderness using God’s Word rightly.
He took up the sword of the Spirit and crushed the serpent. We are commanded to take up that same sword, the only offensive weapon in all the armor of God (Ephesians 6).
The only way we can wield it effectively, truly, is to know it and understand it. And to do that, we must give ourselves daily to the study of the Word.
Article by Candice Watters. Photo: Dynamic Wedding Photography.
