IKDG PART III
Building a New Lifestyle

9. Starting with a clean slate
Five important steps for getting on track with God’s plan

1) Start with a clean slate.
2) Make your parents your teammates.
3) Establish clear guidelines.
4) Check to see who’s whispering in your ear.

I remember talking to a girl at my church who commented on how dissatisfied she felt after watching romantic movies. “It makes me wonder, ‘Why doesn’t that happen to me?’” she said.

Does anything in your life cause that kind of discontentment? If so, then maybe you need to consider cutting out some things. Maybe you need to stop reading romance novels and watching soap operas because they encourage ungodly longings within you. Perhaps you need to turn off the radio because much of today’s music exalts a false definition of love. You might need to tune out some of your favorite TV shows because they mock your beliefs about purity. Whatever tempts you toward discontentment or compromise, don’t put up with it. Tune it out. Turn it off.

5) Season your convictions with humility.

10. Just friends in a just-do-it world
Keys for keeping youor relationships with the opposite sex out of the “romantic zone”

Gentlemen, are you the kind of friend to the girls in your life that you will one day hear from their husbands, “Thank you for being a brother to my wife”?

1) Understand the difference between friendship and intimacy.
2) Be inclusive, not exclusive.
3) Make a priority of same-sex friendships.

Building strong friendships with other men in my church has helped me to grow in my love for God. We meet several times a month both for fun and for serious discussion. They know the areas in my life where I struggle with sin. They keep me accountable. They pray for me and encourage me in my faith. I do the same for them. Their friendship provides something that no girl – not even a wife – could. The same is true for women. Your friendships with other women will provide a unique form of encouragement and support that guy friends just can’t offer.

4) Seek opportunities to serve, not be entertained.

But when we shift our relationship orientation from entertainment to service, our friendships move from a focus on ourselves to a focus on the people we can serve. And here’s the incredible thing: In service we find true friendship. In service we can know our friends in a deeper way than ever before.

Produce before you consume; serve before you seek entertainment.

11. Guard your heart
How to fight the pollutants of lust, infatuation, and self-pity

Proverbs 4:23 tells us, “Above all else, guard your heart.”

INFATUATION

You’ve probably experienced it – the constant thoughts about someone who has caught your eye, the heart palpitations whenever that person walks by, the hours spent dreaming of a future with that special someone. It’s infatuation, and I know it well, having experienced it myself!

Many of us have a difficult time seeing infatuation as potentially harmful. But we need to examine it carefully, because when you realy think about it, infatuation can be a sinful response to attraction. Any time we allow someone to displace God as the focus of our affection, we’ve moved from innocent appreciation of someone’s beauty or personality to the dangerous realm of infatuation. Instead of making God the object of our longing, we wrongly direct these feelings toward another human. We become idolaters, bowing to someone other than God, hoping that this person will meet our needs and bring us to fulfillment.

God is righteously jealous for our hearts; after all, He created us and redeemed us. He wants us to focus our thoughts, longings, and desires on Him. He lovingly blesses us with human relationships, but He first calls us to find our heart’s delight in Him.

In addition to diverting our attention from God, infatuation can cause problems for us because it is most often founded on illusion. When infatuated with someone, we tend to build up that person in our imaginations as the perfect guy or girl. We think we’d be happy forever if that person would return our affections. Of course, we can only sustain our silly crush because we’ve substituted fantasy for all the information we lack about the person. As soon as we get to know that person’s true identity and discover that our “perfect” man or woman is human like everyone else, our dreams fade and we move on to a new crush.

To break out of this pattern of infatuation, we must reject the notion that a human relationship can ever completely fulfill us. When we find our hearts slipping into the fantasy world of infatuation, we should pray, “Lord, help me to appreciate this person without elevating him (or her) above You in my heart. Help me to remember that no human can ever take Your place in my life. You are my strength, my hope, my joy, and my ultimate reward. Bring me back to reality, God; ‘give me an undivided heart’” (Psalm 86:11).

My dad likes to say that when you let God be God you can let humans be human. When we place God in His rightful place in our lives, we don’t struggle so much when human relationships let us down. In direct contrast, when we make another human our idol, God can’t be our God.

LUST

The second poison that often threatens the purity of our hearts is lust. To lust is to crave something sexually that God has forbidden.

To fight lust in our lives, we have to detest it with the same intensity God does.

We should seek to completely remove lust from our minds. We should pray, “Create in me a pure heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10). Help me to be like Job, who made a covenant with his eyes not to look lustfully at others (Job 31:1). Forgive me for pampering lust in my life; help me to guard against it faithfully. May the “meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord” (Psalm 19:14).

When we evaluate our lives honestly enough to recognize our own lust and see the sorrow it causes God, we’ll want to destroy lust...before it destroys us.

SELF-PITY

The final pollutant of our hearts is self-pity. In a sense, self-pity is the worship of our circumstances. When we indulge in feeling sorry for ourselves, we turn our focus from God – His goodness, His justice, His ability to save in any circumstance. And as we turn away from God, we cut ourselves off from our only source of hope.

We can so easily allow self-pity to seep into our hearts. When we feel lonely or crave someone to love and be loved by, it seems we have every reason in the world to complain, to sulk angrily because we’ve received a bum deal.

But do we really have reason to complain when we consider the Cross? As I try to follow God’s plan for relationships and as a result forego short-term dating, I’m sometimes tempted to fall into a “martyr” mentality. “Oh, woe is me! Here I am, suffering for righteousness!” What foolishness! In my more objective moments, I imagine God’s response to my self-pity as similar to the message of a popular T-shirt: “Would you like some cheese with your whine?” Spending my time sighing over what I’ve given up doesn’t impress God; obeying Him with joy does.

Self-pity is a sinful response to feelings of loneliness. We don’t sin when we feel lonely or admit a desire for companionship, but we do sin when we use these feelings as an excuse to turn from God and exalt our own needs.

12. Redeeming the time
Making the most of your singleness


My mom uses the phrase ‘hustle while you wait” to express the same idea. If one of us children stands around, picking at food while she cooks dinner, Mom will snap, like a football coach to his players, “Don’t just stand there! Hustle while you wait!” That means set the table, put away groceries, or load the dishwasher; be productive during a lull in the action.

My mom has an intolerance for wasted time. I think god has the same intolerance. He has entrusted us with gifts and talents, and He expects us to guard and use them wisely. Will we give Him a return on His investment in us? Even though we don’t know the next step regarding our romantic relationships, we still have work to do. We have bad habits to get rid of, good habits to develop, and character to build. Let’s hustle!

Yes, we’ll still have a lot of questions – we may not know whom or when we’ll marry. But we must not allow what we can’t know to hinder us from acting on what we do know. And what do we know? We know that we have today to move with resolute energy toward maturity and Christlikeness, a calling of every Christian whether he or she will marry next week or ten years from now.

When we focus on “redeeming the time,” we’ll not only make the most of each moment; we’ll also prepare ourselves for the next season of our lives. Our faithfulness in small things today earns us the right to handle bigger responsibilities down the road.