/karen/

Debunking the myth of “The One”

Wednesday, 02 June, 2004

There are those who believe that God has a specific someone in store for them—the right person they should marry—in short, “The One”. As you've probably guessed, if you've been reading this blog for a while, I'm not one of those people. Reading The Last Word on Guidance recently reconfirmed my view:

There is a strange heresy that has grown out of this rejection of God's power. It is known as God's “second best”. Some Christians are taught that if God wants them to follow a particular course of action (marry Druscilla or serve on the mission field of Bolivia) and they choose not to do it, then the are committed for the rest of their lives to God's “second best”. God had something better for them, but they missed out on it and so are required to settle for Plan B, so to speak. Many Christians today live in resentment, disappointment and guilt, believing that they have irrevocably missed out on God's perfect plan for them.

This view is a travesty of the biblical understanding of God. It contains numerous errors.

Firstly, there is a misunderstanding of sin and its consequences. The “second best” theory seems to assume that there are only relatively few decisions that might place us outside God's will. However, our wrong decisions are not limited to a few areas (like marriage and career). We choose to rebel against God in hundreds and thousands of ways throughout our lives. Does each of these mistakes take us further and further away from the perfect plan? By the end of our lives, are we somewhere up around the “10,000th best”?

Closely related to the first error, is the very selective nature of the decisions that can consign us to the “second best”. Things like marriage, career, answering the call to the mission field, and so on, seem to be viewed as very important maters of guidance, while the thousands of other decisions we make each week are somehow unimportant. As we shall see in a later chapter, this perception is false. The things we think are very important are often quite unimportant to God—and vice versa.

Most importantly, the “second best” hersey denies the power of God. According to this view, once I have chosen my course of action, God is powerless to redeem the situation. He cannot rewrite the script. In fact, he is no longer a God with plans; he is a God with hopes. He is unable to achieve his goals without my indispensable cooperation, and is dependent on me making the right choices. He becomes subject to the whims and follies of human sinfulness.

(pp. 49-51)

The non-Christian world has a lot to say about love and marriage. And some of it is quite helpful. Marriage and sex counsellors can provide real help for struggling couples in numerous ways.

However, much of what the world says about marriage—and especially its guidelines for choice of partner—is disastrous. We are taught from childhood that when we grow up we will meet that special “someone”, fall in love and get married. “And live happily ever after” used to be tacked onto the end of that sequence, but not any longer. These days it's more like: “And live happily for a couple of years at least until we tire of each other and get a divorce.”.

Physical appearance and attractiveness plays a large part in worldly partner choice, as does an elusive characteristic called “compatibility”. What “compatibility” is exactly, no-one seems to know. One thing is certain: we have no way of knowing whether we will still be “compatible” with our partner in ten, twenty or fifty years time. People change a lot in twenty years.

The Bible's emphasis on godliness, humility and love, cuts right across the world's wisdom. This makes wise decision-making in this area difficult, because we are often going against the attitudes and ideas that we have been raised on.

There is danger inherent in trying to make a wise choice of partner—the focus is always on the godliness of the other person. We scan the available pool of candidates, looking for that special someone. With the Bible's wisdom now on board, at least we are looking for a godly someone. But we are so busy looking at everyone else that we forget to look at ourselves.

One of the most important decisions we can make in preparation for marriage is to be godly ourselves. We need to ask: what sort of husband/wife would I make? We need to make a realistic comparison between ourselves and the model held up in Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3. How do we stack up? Rather than concentrating solely on our search for the perfect partner, we would do well to work on our lives, our own character and godliness. This will have a far greater impact on our future marriages than the discovery of MIss/Mr Right. If you want a long and successful marriage, start working on it now by becoming like Christ.

(pp. 143-145)

We need to remind ourselves that God is our great Father and Shepherd. He looks after us, and guides us according to his purposes in ways that we can sometimes only guess at. We can be assured that he is working “behind the scenes” for our good in our choice of marriage partner.

Indeed, there will comea time when we will know, for a certainty, that we have found the marriage partner that God has chosen for us. What is that time? The first morning of our honeymoon.

(p. 146)

Current:

Blinks:

Feeds

• Full posts
• Full posts and del.icio.us feed
• Excerpts only
• del.icio.us feed only
• All comments

Social media

• Flickr
• Last FM
• LibraryThing
• Listal
• Ravelry
• Twitter