Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Will You Ever Find the One? | Questions You're Asking

Starting point is 00:00:05 Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're answering questions that you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So if you follow 10 Minute Bible Talks on Facebook, you can ask questions that you want us to answer or vote on questions that other people are asking. Today, we're going to try to answer a question that was posed to us on our Facebook page.

Starting point is 00:00:34 and that is, will you ever find the one? Now, how do I get these questions that make me out to be the bad guy, the anti-romantic? I know how I get them, and that is that Patrick assigns them to me. He's the one who divvies out the questions, and I think he sets me up to be hated by people. Because I would say this, if what you mean is, will I find the one, the one person who knows me, who meets my needs, who loves those things about me that drive everyone else crazy, the one person who really gets me, who doesn't demand too much from me, who challenges me in just the right way. If that's what we mean by the one, the one who will complete me, the one who will be my soulmate,

Starting point is 00:01:24 well, the answer is no, no, you won't find the one because the one doesn't exist. let's just think about this together for a little bit. If it were true that finding the right person was the key to a happy marriage, then we should be in a glorious age of marriage, because people have never had more opportunity to find Mr. or Mrs. Wright. I mean, think of all the dating apps that are available and how we can scroll through people and find out so much about them before we'd ever have to take the step to meet them.

Starting point is 00:01:58 We have more choices than ever. And yet anyone who's paying attention would say, We're not in a glorious age of marriage. Dating apps have not helped us develop long, strong, lasting marriages. Think about the television show The Bachelor, the Bachelorette, or all of its spinoffs. Here you have a man or a woman who gets to survey a field of prospective partners. They get to know people who are accomplished and smart and attractive. And you would think that if finding the right person were the key to a,

Starting point is 00:02:33 great marriage, then the bachelor and its spin-off shows would produce just that strong, healthy, lasting relationships. And yet, of course, they don't. What if finding the one is what's not the most important thing in marriage? What if we don't need to find our soulmate to have a great marriage? If you think about all the marriages in human history, most of them have been arranged marriages, marriages that were arranged by families. That's true even today for a lot of people in the world. Our conception of dating and falling in love and getting married is pretty new on the scene, at least historically speaking.

Starting point is 00:03:15 You know Aziz and Sari from the TV show Parks and Rec. He's an Indian actor. He's written a lot about relationships in American society. Now, he's not a Christian. His conclusions don't usually line up with biblical teaching. And yet, because he has one foot in the east and one foot in the west, he has a unique perspective on relationships, both how people in the east and people in the west do them. And he talks about how his parents had an arranged marriage and how it really fascinates him because he says that he's

Starting point is 00:03:50 indecisive about the most mundane things in life. And he couldn't imagine getting married the way his parents did. Now, when Ansari says that his parents had an arrangement, marriage, it doesn't mean that his mother was chosen for his father. The way he explains it is that Aziz's dad said to his parents, Aziz's grandparents, hey, it's time for me to get married. So what his parents did was they arranged meetings with three different families in the neighborhood. So Aziz Ansari's father, he sees the first girl that's presented to him and he thinks, well, she's a little too tall. And the second girl was a little too short. And then Ansari says, that's when my dad met my mom. He quickly deduced that she was the appropriate height. They talked for about 30 minutes,

Starting point is 00:04:44 and they decided they could probably work it out. A week later, they were married. And 35 years later, they are happily married. Ansari says they are much happier in their marriage than most people I know. So what do we take away from that? So what do we take away from this story about how Aziz Ansari's parents met and got married? And maybe one thing we can take away is that marriage is not really about finding the right person. Because you know what? There is no right person. Not if you mean a person who fulfills you and compliments you and makes you happy. I promise you, you're going to marry the right. wrong person. Everyone does. My wife and I, we've been married for 30 years, and the reality is that we have changed a lot over those three decades, whether it's jobs or kids or health or what city we

Starting point is 00:05:45 lived in. We change and adapt to the environment that we're in. So even if you found the one, that person would change, probably in ways that you would prefer them not to change. that's the whole point of vows, right? I mean, why do we take vows on our wedding day? Vows are needed because we all marry the wrong person. Vows do not say, I love you today. I'm committed to you today. Vows are saying, I love you tomorrow, and I love you three decades from now, and I am committed to you for the rest of our life. I know you're going to change. I know life is going to be hard. I know you are not the one. I know that in some sense, you are not going to be everything I needed and everything I wanted, but I'm committing myself to you, regardless of how the circumstances

Starting point is 00:06:43 play out. Unfortunately, there's so much in our media, so much on television or in the movies, so much on social media that tells us that we can find the right person. And if we can just find that right person, then we'll have the best relationship, our best life. Maybe we're married and the temptation is to look for another person because there's a better person out there for us to be in relationship with. And so we're on this constant search for the right person who will fulfill us. But that person does not exist. The point of marriage is not to find the right person that will make us complete. The point of marriage is to have a safe, loving, gracious relationship in which we can grow to be more like Jesus, humble, patient, sacrificial, servant-hearted. When we think that marriage is designed to make us happy,

Starting point is 00:07:48 we start searching for a person who will accomplish that for us. When we realize, though, that Jesus set up marriage for, among other things, in other words, this isn't the only thing marriage is about, but it is a big thing marriage is about, and that is to make us more like Jesus, then we realize that marriage is intended to show us our own sin and to teach us to be patient and gracious and loving and humble toward the sins of our spouse. God's goal in marriage is not to connect us to a perfect person that makes us continually happy.

Starting point is 00:08:30 God wants us to grow to be more like Jesus. And there's a deep happiness on the other side of that. Not the superficial happiness that comes from Hollywood, but a deep, lasting happiness that comes from Jesus. We're all tempted to search for the one, for the one person who will satisfy us, the one person who will make us happy. But when we think that's another human being, we are always going to be disappointed. We are going to put pressure on that person, on our spouse, to be something that they can never be for us, just like we can never be that for them. But the good news, is that there is one who can meet our needs.

Starting point is 00:09:17 There is one who will always exceed our expectations. There is one who will really satisfy us and bring us happiness. And that one is Jesus. When we find our happiness in Jesus, we don't need to demand that from our spouse. When we see that Jesus is the one who will meet our needs and satisfy our hearts, then we're free to love our spouse. with the same love that we received from God.

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Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Will You Ever Find the One? | Questions You're Asking

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